The Babysitter, Review by Case Wright

Posted on October 17, 2018 by casewright

The Babysitter, directed by McG- Lethal Weapon, Supernatural, Aim High, and Citizen Cane. Ok fine, the last one was a bit of a fib, but he’s had an amazing career known for shows that are action heavy, pop, and have a lot of humor. I did watch this one on the elliptical as a to refresh my memory, but I first watched it on a date night for a Netflix and Chill session. The Babysitter was so fun; it doesn’t take itself seriously, until it has to. Like Supernatural, the movie balances the horror with the character arcs to pull you into the story. By the end, you genuinely care about how these characters end up.

Horror is often treated as the stepchild of film because people are attracted by the low budget/high profit payoff potential and think anyone can do it: so wrong. In fact, there are times you have an immensely talented director, but he or she is not meant for this genre – see- https://unobtainium13.com/2018/10/01/all-the-boys-love-mandy-lane-aka-all-the-bland-love-blandy-lane-review-by-case-wright/

Also, writing horror can create masterpieces like 28 Days Later- https://unobtainium13.com/2016/10/24/28-days-later/ . Horror screenwriters can also create misery-inducing steaming piles of terribleness for me or for whomever will have the excruciating experience of having to review it- see- https://unobtainium13.com/2016/11/20/channel-zero-welcome-home-season-1-ep-6-alt-title-so-very-boring/ In The Babysitter, Brian Duffield (Quarantine and soon to be released Vivian Hasn’t Been Herself Lately) delivers a fun popping script with fast moving acts, clear arcs, humor, gore, and clever buildups and payoffs. I am looking forward to seeing the rest of his art and you should too! The Babysitter is not in the Oscar worthy category of The Shining, but it is still brilliant because it succeeds in doing what is most important – it entertains. You care about the protagonist and where he’s going and amazingly sometimes root a little for the villain because she is acted by the uber-talented Samara Weaving.

The film is basically Satanic Home Alone; in fact, they reference Home Alone in the film. Cole, the protagonist, is a bullied awkward 12 year old with a heart of gold and no self-confidence. Yes, I know that reads like a fairly common protagonist, but his nerdiness is so authentic and the dialogue is so real that you buy it. Trust me, I’ve never led you wrong before. Cole has a quasi-friend in the Girl Next Door- Melanie, but Cole’s true friend (seemingly) is Bee (Samara Weaving) his babysitter. She genuinely likes movies and nerdy things just like Cole and we learn she was also an awkward teen herself prior to meeting Cole.

Bee seems to be perfect, but she is a satanic worshipper who wants to sacrifice one nerd, harvest some of Cole’s blood, and read from I guess the Necronomicon to be granted a wish of her choosing from Satan. Then again, we all have our faults. We get to see and not be told how close Bee and Cole have become over the years. They love film and goofy dancing. Cole stays up past his bedtime to spy on his beloved Bee to see what she is up to after he purportedly asleep. Sadly, he watches Bee commit an over the top murder of a seduced nerd. The deaths in this film are Final Destination awesomepants! Watch The Babysitter just for the deaths alone! Bee has cohorts: Robbie Amell who is very good in this. He plays the murderous jock expertly and if you’re so inclined he’s shirtless A LOT with aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaabs. There’s also a lot of great humor with the somewhat bumbling satanic worshippers that are also out to get Cole and his sweet sweet AB Negative.

They need to harvest Cole’s blood to finish the evil wishing spell because he’s an obvious virgin, but he fights back. It’s not corny like Home Alone; he mostly gets lucky or barely survives by finding weapons along the way- No booby traps. The lack of traps and gags during the fight scenes keeps the story in the horror realm with the comedy sprinkled like a Mrs. Dash that doesn’t make you want to vomit.

There is a eventually a final battle between Bee and Cole. She offers to make him part of the wish and live with him forever. Now, I’m not saying he should’ve immediately taken her up on this offer. Maybe some negotiating would’ve been worthwhile, but really Cole…not even taking one beat to consider this pretty awesome offer. I think that would’ve been fun as an alternate ending, but without fighting the final battle, Cole would not have realized his story arc as a true hero. I have to admit if I were the 12 year old nerdy boy and Bee had made the same offer to me, I would have just been trying to figure out how many sock pairs I needed for our evil journey!

I want to make a special note here for the amazing performance of Samara Weaving. She played the heck out of this role. She could believably turn from evil to seductress to friend to good on a dime. With the right opportunities, Samara Weaving will be the next Nicole Kidman! Really!

Happy Horrorthon! Please check out my other stuff and tell your friends to read it as well!

Guilty Pleasure No. 39: Ghost Whisperer

Posted on October 1, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Once upon a time, there were two shows about women who could speak with the dead.

One show ran from 2005 to 2011. It starred a future Oscar winner and, over the course of its run, it was nominated for a bunch of Emmys. It may have never been a huge hit but it received decent ratings and, even more importantly, it was a critically acclaimed. The show claimed to be based on fact and it took a low-key, procedural approach to its stories.

The second show ran from 2005 to 2010 and it starred a multiple Golden Globe nominee and it was never nominated for any major Emmys. (The first season, however, did receive a Teen Choice nomination.) Like the first show, it was never exactly a big hit, though it did have a loyal audience. Whereas the first show was acclaimed by critics, the second show was routinely dismissed. If the first show was subdued and low-key, this second show took the exact opposite approach.

The first show was called Medium.

The second show was called Ghost Whisperer.

I watched both of them and I can tell you that both had their strengths and their weaknesses. Medium was, at time, genuinely creepy and Patricia Arquette gave an admirably serious performance. At the same time, the show was often so serious that it was a bit of a drag to watch. You may have believed that Arquette could talk to the dead but you never really bought into the idea that they would want to talk to her or anyone else on the show. In short, Medium was good but it wasn’t much fun.

Ghost Whisperer, on the other hand…

Listen, I’m not even going to pretend that Ghost Whisperer was a great show. It was a frequently silly and over-the-top show. Jennifer Love Hewitt played Melinda Gordon, who lived in Grandview, New York and who owned an antique shop called — I kid you not — Same As It Never Was Antiques. The dead would come to Melinda because they still had feelings that needed to be resolved on Earth before they could cross over into the afterlife. Sometimes the ghosts were in denial. Sometimes they were rude, violent, and scary. Sometimes they were just mildly quirky. But they always ended up happy that Melinda was able to find a way for them to move on. Over the course of five seasons, the show developed both the quirkiness of the town and the mythology behind the ghosts themselves. We learned about the Watchers and the Shadows and the Shinies and the Book of Changes. We also learned a bit about Melinda’s history. Season 3 ended with Melinda helping her deceased father go into the light and you better believe I cried.

If Medium was an often dour, somber, and deliberately frumpy show, Ghost Whisperer was bright, fun, and unapologetically glamorous. While poor Patricia Arquette always seemed to be carrying the entire weight of the world on her shoulders, Jennifer Love Hewitt always appeared to be having a blast playing Melinda. While she may not have been as good as an actress as Patricia Arquette, Jennifer Love Hewitt always brought just enough natural enthusiasm to the role that she could make even the most hackneyed of dialogue believable. When I looked over some of the reviews of Ghost Whisperer’s first season, the immediate thing that I noticed was that many of the critics (in particular, the male critics) were obsessed with pointing out that Jennifer Love Hewitt was continually dressed and filmed in such a way to emphasize her breasts, as if there’s some sort of crime in being proud of what you have. But for me, as someone who shares the struggle of trying to find cute clothes for big boobs, it was empowering that Melinda didn’t hide her body, her personality, or her beliefs. As played by Hewitt, Melinda was confident, outspoken, and unapologetic. Yes, she dressed a certain way. Yes, she looked a certain way. Yes, she believed that she could help ghosts cross over. And if anyone had a problem with it, so what? Melinda was a role model who never really got her due. If I ever find myself speaking to ghosts, I hope that I handle it half as well as Melinda did.

Ghost Whisperer ended in 2010 and Medium ended in 2011. Medium may have been nominated for more awards but guess which one I’ll always make a point to watch in syndication?

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Guilty Pleasure No. 37: Death Wish (dir by Eli Roth)

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Is it finally safe to honestly review Death Wish?

You may remember that this film, a remake of the 70s vigilante classic, came out last March and critics literally went insane attacking it. That it got negative reviews wasn’t necessarily a shock because the movie was directed by Eli Roth and he’s never been a favorite of mainstream critics. Still, it was hard not to be taken aback but just how enraged the majority of the critics appeared to be. Seriously, from the reviews, you would have thought that Death Wish was not just a bad movie but a crime against nature.

Of course, a lot of that was due to the timing of the film’s release. The film was released less than a month after the shootings at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. At the time the film first came out, the country was in the midst of a daily diet of anti-second amendment rallies and David Hogg. Many critics accused Death Wish of being a commercial for the NRA. Others branded the film as being right-wing propaganda. In fact, the criticism was so harsh that it was hard not to feel that the critics were essentially taking Death Wish far more seriously than it took itself.

If anything, Death Wish is a big, glossy, and rather silly movie. Bruce Willis stars as Dr. Paul Kersey. Paul is a peace-loving man. We know this because he refuses to get into a fight with a belligerent parent at a soccer game. He’s also an emergency room doctor, the type who pronounces a policeman dead and then rushes off to try to save the life of whoever shot him. No one in the movie suspects that Paul would ever become a vigilante but we know that there’s no way he can’t eventually end up walking the streets with a loaded gun because he’s played by Bruce Willis. When Paul backs down from the fight at the soccer game, Willis delivers his dialogue with so much self-loathing that we just know that, once Paul gets back home, he’s going to lock himself in the basement and start yelling at the walls, Stepfather-style.

Eventually, criminals break into Paul’s house and shoot both his wife (Elisabeth Shue) and his daughter (Camila Morrone). His wife dies. His daughter ends up in a coma. Paul spends a day or two in shock and then he promptly gets a gun and starts shooting criminals. Eventually, this brings him into conflict with the same criminals who attacked his family! Meanwhile, two detectives (Dean Norris and Kimberly Elise) look at all the dead bodies piling up around them and just shrug it off. At one crime scene, Norris is happy to grab a slice of pizza.

And really, that’s it. It sounds simple because it is simple. There is absolutely no narrative complexity to be found in Death Wish, which is why, in its own cheerfully crude way, the film totally works. In real life, of course, vigilante justice is not the solution and the death penalty is often unfairly applied but, from the moment the opening titles splash across the screen, Death Wish makes clear that it has no interest in real-life and, throughout its brisk running time, it literally seems to be ridiculing anyone in the audience who might be worried about the moral ramifications of a citizen gunning down a drug dealer.

Death Wish is a big extravagant comic book. It takes Paul one scene to go from being a meek doctor to being an expert marksman and, when Paul dispatches one criminal by dropping a car on him, Roth lays on the gore so thick that he almost seems to be daring us to take his film seriously. By that same token, Paul kills a lot of people but at least they’re all really, really bad. In fact, the criminals are so evil that you can’t help but suspect that Roth is poking a little bit of fun at the conventions of the vigilante genre. Even the fact that Willis wanders through the entire film with the same grim expression on his face feels like an inside joke between the director and his audience.

The critics were right when they called Death Wish a fantasy but they were wrong to frame that as somehow being a flaw. It’s a cartoonishly violent and deeply silly film and yet, at the same time it’s impossible not to cheer a little when Paul reveals that he’s been hiding a machine gun under his coffee table. It’s an effective film. Eli Roth delivers exactly what you would expect from a film about Bruce Willis killing criminals in Chicago. It may not be a great film but it works.

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A Flask of Fields: W.C. Fields in NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK (Universal 1941)

Posted on March 3, 2018 by gary loggins

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I’ve professed my love for W.C. Fields before on this blog , and NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK is undoubtedly my favorite Fields flick. This inspired piece of lunacy is The Great Man’s commentary on getting films made in Hollywood his way. In fact, Fields wanted to title the movie “The Great Man”, but Universal execs nixed the idea, instead using a line from POPPY, his stage and screen hit. The change caused Fields much consternation, quipping that the movie’s overlong title would be boiled down on movie marquees to “Fields – Sucker”!!

Universal starlet Gloria Jean with “Uncle Bill”

The film’s plot (and I use that term as loosely as possible!) has Fields playing himself, delivering his latest script to Esoteric Pictures head Franklin Pangborn . The story he’s concocted may have the long-suffering Pangborn rolling his eyes, but it’ll have you the viewer rolling on the…

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The Cloverfield Paradox – Great Spoilers

Posted on February 4, 2018 by casewright

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It’s Superbowl Sunday!!! Better yet, it’s The Cloverfield Paradox on Netflix.

This movie is 1 part – Event Horizon, 1 Part – The Thing, and 1 Part – Boring.

We begin with a dying earth and pesky scientists have tried to create a free energy machine innnnnnnn spaaaaaaace. Sounds Legit.

There’s British people talking in traffic and I need closed captioning. The lady in traffic is apparently an astronaut and “Comm Officer”. However, I can’t understand anything she’s saying; so maybe, communications wasn’t the best fit?!

We’re on the space station and they’re trying to do some particle acceleratin’ …woohoo, but something is amiss. The story is really dragging.

Now, there’s nerds, foozball playing, and awkward conversation. Are we sure this is a Space Station and not the Google Campus? I do like that all peoples are represented and they’re all boring. It’s about time that we embraced that most people are boring and even some Netflix films.

They’re about to turn on their Shepherd Accelerator and …… they are making particles, energy, or s’mores? Then, the Shepherd overloads. I’m guessing they forgot to use a surge protector. They get control, but the earth is gone- must’ve left the Earth in their other solar system’s pants. They’re hurtling into empty space.

The crew is starting to act weird. The Russian- I’m going to call him Boris – is playing with his face a lot and we’re getting an Event Horizon vibe mostly because JJ Abrams decided to defile the memory of another one of my favorite films. The steel walls have screaming and they decide to open it….because sure. They reveal a woman fused to wires and the bulkhead who knows the Comm Officer’s name. It’s pretty gross. They try to do some ER work on her and she lives.

Meanwhile….Back on Earth. There’s explosions!!!

Back on the station…

The foozball is playing itself and things are disappearing: gyroscopes, worms, and my time. Boris has a worm creature in his head and it’s doing gross things to his eyeball. Boris starts talking to himself and the voices in his head ask him to make a 3d printed gun. Boris pulls the 3d printed gun on crewmates and dies with hundreds of worms shooting out of him.

The lady they found in the bulkhead – Mina – wakes up. She thinks that she was on the station the whole time. Mina accuses Schmidt of sabotage. For scientists, they are unimpressive. These dopes haven’t figured out that they’re in another dimension?! Did they get their PhDs from University of Phoenix?! They lock Schmidt up for sabotage and proceed to make bad choices.

Back on earth…. More explosions, but now there are screaming kids.

Back on the station: The ship’s Irish janitor is doing repairs and his arm gets detached. The ship let’s Schmidt out of the airlock and he’s being chased by the Irishman’s arm. The arm writes them a letter….really. It tells them to cut Boris’ corpse open. They find the gyroscope inside Boris. The comms come back and their current reality is pretty bad. They watch CNN and learn that they’ve traveled to Another Dimension …. Another Dimension … Don’t … you tell me to smile….Interplanetary. In this dimension, there’s World War III going on and everybody has goatees. They decide to turn on the Shepherd machine again and hopefully not attract a herd of sheep as well.

Back on earth, the Comm Officer’s husband has rescued a random kid and went to a bomb shelter.

Back on the Station: Tam figures out that condensation was messing with their calculations, but then she drowns….somehow. In the alternate dimension, Eva’s kids are alive. In the “Good Dimension” Eva apparently installed some bad track lighting and killed everyone, but in this “Evil Dimension” – they’re fine because she used lamps I suppose. Eva decides to go back to warn her twin not to use track lighting…..ever. I’ve noticed that they do A LOT of caulking in this movie to exciting music, but it’s still a guy caulking. There’s another malfunction and half the ship explodes.

The crew decides that they need to de-couple the broken part of the station, engendering a long scene of attempted space station repair. It was really slow AND they had this crazy 8-4pm window to do it. Then, the captain sacrifices himself to do it because why not?

Eva orders that they turn on the shepherd. All looks well, but Mina steals the gun and starts shooting. She needs the “firing key” for some reason. Presumably, the Shepherd will create energy, but that really makes no sense because it doesn’t create energy as much as derivative B-Movies. Mina manages to kill Eva in the final scene Aliens style and it’s mildly entertaining.

Schmidt lives and they start the Shepherd again, but first she warns her evil twin not to use Track Lighting and to give the ball to Marshawn Lynch in the 2015 Super Bowl. They see earth again- the good earth and they have a stable power beam. Eva’s husband doesnt want them to come back because—-monsters. Then, as the escape pod enters the atmosphere, we see a monster. So, they unleashed monsters and NBC’s Whitney.

This was a great bad movie, which is what JJ Abrams can do in his sleep. I would watch this if I had the flu or was in a B-movie place.

An OMG Moment with The Ross Sisters

Posted on November 3, 2017 by gary loggins

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While laid up at home battling sciatic nerve pain (which is pretty damn painful!), I turned on TCM for relief, and started watching BROADWAY RHYTHM, a 1944 musical starring George Murphy, Gloria DeHaven, and Jimmy Dorsey, among others. The movie itself was no great shakes, but this scene featuring a trio known as the Ross Sisters singing and dancing to “Solid Potato Salad” grabbed my attention:

Holy pretzels, Batman! Who were these scat-singing, torso-bending ladies?? I did a little research and found out, because… well, because that’s what I do! Apparently, they were Betsy, Vicki, and Dixie Ross from West Texas, who performed under the stage names Aggie, Maggie, and Elvira. These show-biz kids were teens at the time, but already gaining steam for their acrobatic contortions and three-part harmonies. The sisters even performed before the King & Queen of England at the London Pallaidium in 1946. Imagine that!

Betsy…

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Familiar Faces #5: She’s Like A Rainbeaux!

Posted on September 1, 2017 by gary loggins

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I’ve got a confession to make: I’ve had an insane crush on 70’s exploitation queen Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith ever since I first saw her brighten the screen in Jack Hill’s 1974 THE SWINGING CHEERLEADERS. Never a big star by any stretch of the imagination, the delightful, delectable blonde graced us with her presence throughout the 70’s and 80’s, making even the tiniest of parts memorable. This girl was just soooo damn cute!

Cheryl Lynn Smith was born on June 6, 1955. A typical California girl with blonde hair and freckles, Cheryl used to hang out on the Sunset Strip, a fixture at all the rock clubs: The Whiskey A-Go-Go, The Roxy, The Rainbow. She allegedly got the nickname “Rainbeaux” from the owner of these venues, the legendary rock impresario Mario Maglieri. Cheryl was well-known in the LA rock scene, and later in life played drums in an incarnation of The Runaways featuring…

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Kicking Off A Trend: FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH (Warner Brothers 1972)

Posted on June 10, 2017 by gary loggins

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When FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH first hit the local multiplex back in the day, everybody in the neighborhood was kung-fu fighting, throwing chops and roundhouse kicks at each other, trying to be like star Lo Lieh. Bruce Lee’s movies hadn’t yet made it our way, but David Carradine’s KUNG FU was must-see TV for every adolescent boy (and some of the cooler girls). Pretty soon chop-sockey action spread all over the city’s theaters, but it was FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH that reached New Bedford, MA first, and has always held a special place in my heart.

Hong Kong action star Lo Lieh plays Chao Chih-Hao, who’s sent to Shen Chin-Pei’s school by his mentor to train further and defeat Ming Dun-Shun’s “gangsters” in a martial arts tournament. Chih-Hao rescues damsel in distress Yen Chu Hung from some bad guys along the way, and though she comes on to him, his heart belongs to his mentor’s…

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Guilty Pleasure No. 34: Healed by Grace (dir by David Weese)

Posted on May 26, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

(Hi! I’m currently in the process of cleaning out my DVR. I recorded 2012’s Healed By Grace off of channel 58 — that’s a local station down here in Dallas — on March 21st.)

Healed by Grace tells the story of two 19 year-old dancers who have the same last name, despite the fact that they aren’t related and can’t stand each other.

Riley Adams (Natalie Weese) is an extremely sweet, sincere, and good-natured person, her only flaw being that she’s regularly running late and she doesn’t appear to be a very good driver. Riley is also a committed Christian, the type who gives a college presentation on the historical probability of the Great Flood. “Bible thumber,” one student says. “Cute bible thumper,’ another replies. Riley’s father is constantly telling her to pray for everyone, even the people who she doesn’t necessarily like.

And then there’s Aleah Adams (April Oberlin), who is rude and self-centered and who like totally rocks. Of course, the film doesn’t acknowledge that she totally rocks, at least not at first. In fact, I think that we’re supposed to dislike her because she’s always talking about how much better she is than Riley and, when they compete at a regional dance competition, Aleah is not a gracious winner. When Riley congratulates her, Aleah says that she knew she would win and then taunts Riley over the fact that her father couldn’t come to see her dance…

But here’s the thing. We get to see both Riley and Aleah dance. Riley is a boring dancer, with lots of technique but very little passion. Aleah is a much more wild and creative dancer. Riley dances to dull piano music. Aleah dances to EDM. Riley is St. Photini while Aleah is Salome. And while neither one of them is really that good (despite the number of times that we’re told that they are the best dancers in the country), Aleah is still a hundred times better than Riley. And, look, I get what the film was going for. When their coach asks them how they’re feeling after rehearsal, Aleah says that she knows she’s going to win while Riley says that she feels she did well but she could do better. I understand. We’re supposed to love Riley for being humble and resent Aleah for being full of herself and blah blah blah.

But, honestly, modesty is overrated. If you know you’re good, why shouldn’t you admit it? Speaking from my own personal experience, confidence is often mistaken for arrogance, in much the same way that determination is often mistaken for being self-centered. To be truly good at anything, you have to know that you’re good. Where’s the shame in admitting what you know to be true?

In other words, I related to Aleah, which probably indicates that I’m not audience that this movie was made for. (Admittedly, Aleah should not have spilled her drinking water on the floor right before Riley started dancing but we all make mistakes.)

Anyway, long story short — Riley gets involved in a horrific traffic accident, spends a few weeks in a coma, and suffers slight brain damage. Riley is determined to dance again but it becomes obvious that she never will. However, she finds a new love: horses. And, when it turns out that Aleah is related to the stablehand that Riley now has a crush on, the two rivals become friends…

In the past, I probably would have been totally snarky about this movie and, while I was watching it, I will admit to rolling my eyes a little. This is a low-budget and, in many ways, amateurish movie, specifically made for the faith-based market. This was especially obvious in the dance scenes. Riley is such an overwhelmingly upbeat character that I found myself getting annoyed with her.

And yet…

The movie’s just so positive! Normally, I scoff at movies that are too positive in the their outlook but, considering the overwhelming negativity of the world today, it was kind of nice to spend two hours watching a movie that didn’t have a single dark thought in its head. It was a break, so to speak, from the usual morbidity of my cinematic diet. It’s a sweet movie and, compared to most faith-based movies, remarkably unpreachy. Nobody was condemned to Hell. The Antichrist never showed up. No unbelievers were punished. Refreshingly, there were no anti-Catholic conspiracy theories. Instead, this was a nice movie about a girl and her horse and what’s wrong with that?

Previous Guilty Pleasures

My Reason to Watch WILSON (20th Century Fox 1944)

Posted on March 29, 2017 by gary loggins

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Normally I wouldn’t watch something like WILSON, producer Darryl F. Zanuck ‘s 1944 biographical box office flop about the 28th President of the United States. It didn’t sound like my cup of tea. But when I turned TCM on last night, there was Ben Mankiewicz introducing the film, so I decided I’d watch a little. I ended up watching the whole thing, and while it’s not very exciting, I did get engrossed in the movie, but not for the story.

The film itself follows the life and career of Woodrow Wilson, and his rise from President of Princeton University to Governor of New Jersey to U.S. President. How much is truth and how much fiction, I couldn’t tell you. I can tell you that character actor Alexander Knox is a dead ringer for Wilson, and pretty much carries the film with his statesmanlike manner. Ruth Nelson plays first wife Ellen, who dies a…

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