For the week of February 24th, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is bringing Rian Johnson's Knives Out to Blu-ray. All you should know going into this delightful mystery is that it's Johnson's attempt to out-Agatha-Christie Agatha Christie. We have a fussy, Poirot-esque investigator (Daniel Craig's Benoit Blanc, who affects a Southern drawl the same way Poirot uses a mustache), a gruesome death (of Christopher Plummer's storied author), and a stacked cast (*deep breath* Toni Collette, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, Don Johnson, Katherine Langford, Riki Lindhome, Jaeden Martell, Edi Patterson, Noah Segan, Michael Shannon, Lakeith Stanfield, and M. Emmet Walsh) loaded with cops, victims, red herrings, and maybe even a murderer or two. This is semi-familiar territory for Johnson - his first film was the quirky neo-noir Brick - only done up with all the confidence he's gained from helming the first-or-second-best Star War, the greatest pop B-movie of the 2010's, and a handful of iconic Breaking Bad episodes. If Knives Out isn't the most enjoyable film he's made yet, then it's awfully close, and more than that, you need not know. Here's why: not only should you avoid Knives Out plot spoilers (and it hardly counts to say that a murder mystery hinges around a few twists), but you deserve to experience Johnson's larger game afresh. See, Johnson is such a witty genre deconstructionist; there's a moment in all his films where you get the shock of discovery from realizing what he's up to. In Brick, it's that he's moved a hardboiled noir to high school; Looper offers a version of The Terminator where Kyle Reese plays the title character. Even The Last Jedi shakes up the blockbuster franchise template in ways large and small - Johnson essentially gives us the space opera as bottle episode. And Knives Out allows him the opportunity to take a very specific type of mystery and spin it into fascinating new dimensions. In doing so, Johnson twist-proofs the movie (you can watch this one multiple times, folks). But more importantly, he's able to tease out themes that escape most shallow beach reads. For all its reveals and diabolical plotting, Knives Out layers in a level of sociopolitical commentary that aligns it more with, I kid you not, Parasite than with Murder on the Orient Express. You marvel at the construction of this one.
Attention, Nicolas Cage fans! I know you have a lot of options these days for viewing the Con Air star and dinosaur-head aficionado, and that's part of the problem: Cage has so thoroughly saturated the VOD market that the odd moment of performative inspiration (his speech about aging in Mom and Dad; his luridly florid Southern lunatic in Grand Isle) can't really compensate for all the A/V-club-level production values and listless plotting. But every so often, we get something that emerges fully formed - a movie that doesn't just satisfy dramatically but also reminds us why Cage stans regard him as one of the most electric performers in cinema history. In 2018, it was Panos Cosmatos' deranged fantasy-horror-romance Mandy, which tapped depths both savage and touching in its leading man. And in 2019, we got Color Out of Space, director Richard Stanley's triumphant return to the world of genre storytelling. You might have heard of Stanley. After a promising start (the cult favorites Dust Devil and Hardware), he got fired off the torturous production shoot that would become The Island of Dr. Moreau, and the resulting psychological devastation was so grave that Stanley largely retreated from the public eye. But Mandy producers Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah seduced Stanley back to fiction filmmaking with Color Out of Space, and the result is a singular, hypnotic freakout. Stanley starts with H.P. Lovecraft's short story of the same name: like the film, it tracks the escalating horror that erupts after a meteorite crash-lands in New England and begins emitting a disturbing, almost tangible light. But whereas Lovecraft sketches the alien menace with a kind of creeping suggestion (animals/people mysteriously disappear and then reappear as desiccated corpses), Stanley favors acid-tinged nightmare. Things start...changing after prolonged exposure to the color, and in horrifying ways that will please fans of, say, James Gunn's Slither or John Carpenter's The Thing. Maybe even more extreme than both - anyone familiar with Stanley's house style know that he'll go so much further than you expect him to, and in Color Out of Space, neither age, gender, or innocence prove effective bulwarks against horrific, brutal carnage. But it's Cage who seems more terrifying than any of the grisly effects. What he's doing here reminds me of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Even before the color starts affecting his character, we're suspicious of his ostensibly meek family man, so that when he ratchets up the crazy, it's both surprising and inevitable. And as with Mandy, Cage manages to ground the bizarro things he does in recognizable human behavior. There's a part of this performance that's a full-bore criticism of a certain U.S. President; there's another part that tries to bottle the fear young Cage felt around his own domineering father. It's the damndest thing: this movie and this man.
Randy Miller III's Blu-ray review called the film "a tough watch for all but the most seasoned gore hounds, anchored surprisingly well by the lead and supporting performances with steady, confident direction by Stanley (who is now reportedly slated to helm two upcoming Lovecraft adaptations). Differences from the source material are, quite appropriately, extensive but not without merit. Lovecraft's story was told from the surveyor's perspective in first person, with the nearby townspeople offering their own observations about the family's fate…Stanley's film invents the daughter Lavinia, a potentially driving factor for the main plot via her newfound interest in pagan rituals, and gives her the most screen time of any sibling. Many other subtle and sweeping changes are present, yet the roots of Lovecraft's original story seem intact with special attention paid to appropriately over-the-top visuals which represent a formless cosmic entity that basically demolishes every living thing in a five-mile radius. Color Out of Space would be decent enough without the extra bonus of Richard Stanley's comeback story, although I'll admit that the underdog element may have boosted my overall rating a half-star. But at the very least it's a welcome return to 1980s-style sci-fi horror that, save for the occasional car or mention of a wireless router, could probably have taken place four or five decades ago. It's certainly recommended for fans of the genre and director, with a small caveat that those with a narrow tolerance for body horror and unexplained plot elements may want to try before they buy."
Mary Lambert's Pet Sematary Two - which Scream Factory is releasing - is similarly nutty in its depiction of dread horrors wreaked on unsuspecting families. Chances are, many of you have seen Lambert's 1989 Pet Sematary, which offers a reasonably faithful adaptation of Stephen King's source material (short version: there's a cursed pet cemetery near Bangor, Maine, and anything you bury in it comes back bad). That film was a sizable hit, so Paramount tasked Lambert with making a sequel, and what she came up with...doesn't have a whole lot to do with the original? Sure, the evil cemetery is still around, but while the previous film (and King's book) tracked the human cost of such a nightmare through one grieving family, Part 2 jumps all over the place to diminishing results. What starts as a wannabe Hollywood roman à clef (we begin, as any woodland Maine thriller should, with a movie star dying in an accidental electrocution on set) quickly morphs into a teen bully melodrama (Jared Rushton's entitled douche keeps picking on Edward Furlong and Jason McGuire's lonely outsiders), only to then veer into gory comedy once Clancy Brown's loathsome sheriff comes back from the dead as some kind of horny, bloodthirsty zombie. The finale offers some decent monster-movie fun before ending abruptly, and none of it feels like anyone behind or in front of the camera had any sense of how to balance all this nonsense (Anthony Edwards has it the worst - he's trying to play a human being in a film that has no time for nuance or subtlety). Pet Sematary Two is never boring, and I suppose that's something, but it also never approaches "good," and that's something worse, I'm afraid.
In his Blu-ray review, Brian Orndorf wrote that "is too silly to be considered cruel, but Lambert makes some questionable choices during the course of the film...The panic of the material seems to be missing, as nobody notices the strangeness of animals and humans returning to life with gaping wounds, treating obvious gore with bizarre casualness, leaving the movie low on urgency. There's violence to keep things going, and makeup effects are excellent, but Lambert often treats the production like a crummy Roger Corman endeavor, leaning into exploitative elements instead of rousing genre ones, skimping on terror to make a movie about teenage boys for teenage boys. The feature's light on emotion and creative care, extending to intrusive soundtrack cuts that don't fit the effort at all, while the score by Mark Governor is trying to sell a grim sense of feeling that Lambert is actively avoiding."
Finally, Criterion is offering a Blu-ray for the new restoration of Jennie Livingston's landmark documentary Paris Is Burning. It is astounding to me that this film, which outlines the customs and individuals central to the Oscar-like "Balls" that were so vital to 1980s drag culture, was a legitimate cult sensation. Not because it's bad - it might be a masterpiece, actually - but because Livingston's approach to her subjects defies easy explanation and conventional narrative structure. A more user-friendly movie might look at one such ball and heighten the drama of the winners and losers; Livingston (who's currently a consulting producer on FX's hit series Pose) instead adopts the approach of a sociologist. She structures her film around the complex codes of behavior surrounding these events - her preferred method is to flash a white-on-black title card with a subject (a term like "Voguing" or a person like the wonderfully named Willi Ninja) and then provide a few minutes of vérité-style discussion. The effect is not unlike a pointillist painting: together, all these vignettes tell a larger story, but we have to work a little bit to make these connections. And yet the film grossed almost eight times its modest budget ($500,000) and spawned a larger cultural moment. People like Joan Rivers were discussing drag balls on daytime television (in a nice touch, Criterion includes that particular episode of The Joan Rivers Show on the disc), and Madonna was so taken by the film that she co-opted its aesthetic for her career - not for nothing, but she worked with performers featured in Paris Is Burning while developing her 1990's classic "Vogue." You just don't expect something this daring and raw to experience that kind of mainstream acceptance. Even beyond its non-linear structure, Paris Is Burning is clear-eyed about the dangers facing the LGBTQ+ community during the late '80s. Many of the characters reference the impact of the AIDS crisis, and in the film's most harrowing vignette, drag icon Venus Xtravaganza discusses the perils of sex work, perils that would ultimately lead to her murder before the film's release. What I think people responded to (and still do!) is that Livingston foregrounds humanity above all else. Even if the drag world is alien to you, you can connect with the ways the film's participants use it as a way to foreground the most aspirational versions of themselves. Or how the baroque "Houses" filling this environment (House of Ninja. House of Xtravaganza. House of Saint-Laurent. There are many more) function less as cliques than as surrogate families for a whole generation of people who lost their own biological ones. Fundamentally, all we're after is acceptance. Paris Is Burning understands that truth explicitly.