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Reviews
Bird Box: Barcelona (2023)
Fair spinoff to an understated cosmic horror gem
Arguably an unnecessary sequel - one could almost describe it as a Spanish-language remake of the original - but I enjoyed it alright: maybe not quite as much as the original, but better than most sequels to lower-budgeted genre films, and quite watchable for those who don't need an info-dump of unnecessary new lore, a spoonfeeding of easy answers, and non-stop action, explosions, car chases, blood and gore, and T&A.
Spoiler alert: you don't see any more of the monsters in this sequel than you did the original, whatever new details you get come from the points of view unreliable narrator type characters, and this movie expands on the lore from the original in only a couple interesting but low-key ways, namely by telling part of the story from the point of view of one of the cultists and expanding on the cults a little, presenting a little speculation from an amateur physicist to try to explain how the monsters work, and leaving us with what looks like a cliff-hanger ending for a third movie in the series that promises to mix things up a bit more than this sequel did. None of this is a bad thing: a chronic flaw of unnecessary sequels is that they tend to over-explain things that are better left to the imagination, and Netflix can be forgiven for laying a little groundwork for later films in the series to build from, but viewers who need a little more hand-holding and "lore" from their sequels are going to be frustrated by the relative lack of new "fluff" on display here.
A second complaint is likely to revolve around the thoughtful pacing, lack of noise and explosions and screaming, minimal gore, non-existent sex and nudity with few expletives, and a sparse use of special effects, a reliance on atmosphere and mystery rather than action, and relatively little dialogue: a portion of the movie audience is going to find this sort of thing "boring".
Similarly, a third complaint is likely to revolve around the cosmic horror genre this movie borrows from: most of the usual "tropes" and themes are here in one form or another - blurred lines between horror, science fiction, and dark fantasy, indescribable alien "gods" or "angels", cults of raving madmen roaming an apocalyptic landscape, and the like... fans of Lovecraft, Stephen King, and the like are going to recognize these elements pretty easily and will be more likely to enjoy this sort of thing, but the genre isn't for everyone, no doubt leaving "hard science fiction" fans, gore hounds and slasher fans, traditional gothic horror fans, serial-killer and true crime fans, and generic sword-and-sorcery fans alike a bit baffled and confused.
Those aren't necessarily flaws. If you can get over those hurdles, it's not a bad sequel at all, with a fairly even and decent story to it, just enough mystery, atmosphere, and tension to make it work, more than an adequate display of acting from a generally likeable cast, adequate (if minimal) special effects, competent filmography and direction, and pretty good production value for whatever was spent on the budget (one suspects it wasn't much, but the film made the most of what it had, and for me worked better than could be expected from a much more expensive Hollywood blockbuster sci-fi/horror film!)
As usual, I think the general reviews on this sort of movie tend to be a bit ridiculous: there's no way it's a 9 or 10 out of 10-star movie - I've seen plenty of excellent horror movies and this one isn't quite in the same league as the best, but it's definitely not a 1 or 2 star disaster, either (for comparison, anyone who thought this was a 1-star movie should watch 'Monster A-Go-Go', which was one of the worst movies I've ever seen, and I enjoy some terrible ones! It really puts this sort of movie into perspective....) I found it reasonably likeable for a "mediocre" flawed movie, and don't mind giving it a 6/10, compared to the 7 or 8/10-star original 'Bird Box' - it's the sort of horror movie I don't mind recommending to fans of offbeat indie cosmic horror stories, and no doubt something I'll come back to and watch again sometime.
Something in the Dirt (2022)
Fair low-budget sci-fi horror that sticks with me after it ended
Another low-budget, slow-burn, character-driven avant-garde sci-fi/horror movie from Benson & Moorhead, the creative team behind the (very similar) films 'Resolution' and 'The Endless'.
It's theoretically the "weakest" of these three films, with characters who seem to have been deliberately designed to have little lasting chemistry between them, even more ambiguous/enigmatic plot elements, theme and resolution than usual for the low-budget films made by this team, limits on what could be done due to ad-hoc filming through the unexpected COVID lockdowns, and some experimental documentary/found-footage elements that might not gel for many viewers, but somehow it managed to get under my skin anyway, and has rewarded my subsequent viewings.
The two main characters, an almost bankrupt slacker on a sex offender registry who feels like he has been suspended at the terminal velocity of free-fall for his entire life, and an equally broke and strangely cold and aloof recent divorcee who seems to lack any direction or meaning in his life, do not at first realize that a strange series of coincidences has led to their becoming new neighbors at just the right moment to witness a strange supernatural phenomenon, setting them in motion together at last on creating a documentary about it, which soon leads the two men down a series of endless rabbit-holes pursuing fringe scientific theories, weird occult conspiracy theories, and ultimately some explanation for who they are and why they even exist, leading up to the film's final, enigmatic plot twist.
Viewers familiar with Benson & Moorhead's previous films should probably know what to expect from the otherworldly aspects of the film: these are not really the main part of the movie, and the puzzle behind them will not be given any direct, clear solution for the audience, which will be free to come up with many of their own conclusions.
Instead, it's the interaction and development between the two main characters that is the main point and focus of these movies, and this is where the movie may get a little rocky for some fans: unlike 'Resolution', 'The Endless', 'Spring', and 'Synchronic', which all build up to character epiphanies and resolutions of the conflicts that fueled most of their interactions, 'Something in the Dirt' tries something a little different: we know from the other movies that Benson and Moorhead can portray characters with chemistry between them, but in this film the chemistry seems to have been deliberately crafted to be a bit "off" - something this creative team has mentioned in interviews about the film, but which is also directly called out by the main characters themselves in reference to the strange interactions between electromagnetism, gravity, sound, and other phenomena that seem to interact to produce the phenomena, but never really seem to connect in any meaningful way, leading ultimately to the two characters falling into an unresolved conflict and the movie's central mystery being left hanging in the ether with disastrous results.
And that brings me to other technical decisions in the film, most notably the found-footage/documentary aspect, which seems to have been a late addition in the film production as the film-makers assembled the film and imagined what the resulting documentary might look like. The result is maybe the most avant-garde aspect of the movie: it's mostly pretty clearly a traditional low-budget "guerilla" film of its kind in which we are omniscient viewers watching things unfold in the movie from outside, but found footage, reenactments, interviews, and other documentary elements from a very different style of movie are intercut with the more traditional movie, resulting in a strange, hybrid film-making approach that, on paper, shouldn't work, and again will probably not sit comfortably with most viewers.
Yet, this strange, conflicted film-making approach that imperfectly melds the detached, traditional storytelling approach with the more immersive documentary approach seems to work for me, in no small part because, whether intentionally or not, it seems to fit what Benson and Moorhead seem to have been trying to do with this movie: it's like two very different personalities and motives were making two very different sorts of films, and the result intersected imperfectly somewhere close to the truth, but not close enough to ever quite make sense of the mystery. Many viewers will, I think, recognize that something is "off" about the movie, without consciously realizing why it's "off", and how the strange creative choices work in the bigger scheme of the movie (and perhaps, sadly, many viewers will never really see a reason to try to work out the movie's bigger puzzle!)
These are unorthodox storytelling decisions which, I think, will leave a lot of viewers cold, but there seems to be a method to this madness, a logic that seems to work for me, at least, drawing me back into puzzle-solving mode again and again to try to figure out what it all meant, and why it ultimately failed to work out in-universe, and perhaps as a film - I think that any film that can get that far under my skin is doing something right, and ultimately I think 'Something in the Dirt" holds its own against the stronger and more popular movies made by Benson & Moorhead.
In the end, I rather like the film - maybe not quite as much as 'Resolution' or 'The Endless', but I can still appreciate it for exploring much the same territory as those two earlier films, but doing something quite a bit different and more experimental with the techniques and material that the creative team have already mastered in their earlier efforts.
The result may not have been perfect, but, like 'Resolution' and 'The Endless', it was certainly not quite like anything I've ever seen before, I never felt like there was a dull moment in the film, and the story's central mysteries and themes seem to have stuck with me long after the end credits rolled, with each subsequent viewing revealing a little something new that I never noticed before, and I really couldn't ask for very much more than that out of a film like this.
Caught (2017)
A disturbing little sci-fi/horror that depends on viewer imagination
I don't really get the low reviews that this movie seems to be getting, it's a nice, disturbing little independent sci-fi/horror gem that trusts the audience to read between the lines and supply their own explanations and visuals for things that happen off-screen.
Sure, viewers who need to have things spoon-fed to them will find this frustrating, and I can imagine this movie's test screenings must have been a riot, but there are surely more viewers out there than this who don't mind letting their imaginations fill in the blanks? Or maybe not.
The story itself is fairly straightforward and doesn't do anything particularly complicated or avant-garde: a generally likeable family of journalists in a charming rural English home find more than they bargained for when unusual military activity on a nearby moor attract their attention, and in turn brings them to the attention of a pair of mysterious visitors, "Mr. And Mrs. Blair", who have obviously taken their names from a shop down the road, and struggle with normal day-to-day concepts and human interaction, and become increasingly more menacing as their interview runs on and devolves into a violent hostage situation.
These visitors, though dressed in white, are pretty clearly drawn from a UFO "men in black" template, and what they want is something they think the family has accidentally "caught" on camera while visiting the moor, though much of the conflict between the characters runs on a sort of language gap between the visitors and their victims, and the plot twists from there. The basic idea is pretty easy to follow, with the gist of the visitors' presumed role and motive in the movie explained pretty directly to one of the children by making a comparison to a school bully: "bad people did something wrong, and are afraid of getting caught."
Where some viewers are going to struggle is that where most movies will spell everything out by showing off the offending photograph or showing a flashback scene of what happened when the trouble was "caught", this movie chooses instead to just leave it to imagination, and really the precise nature of what was "caught" isn't really important - it's simply the "McGuffin' that brings the unsettling visitors into contact with our unfortunate family, and sets the movie's nightmare logic hostage situation in motion.
Over all, the movie for me got a lot of mileage out of its low budget: a fairly small set (maybe three or four rooms and an outdoor location or two, a fairly small cast, no CGI effects and a practical effects budget that is limited to some nicely-done but fairly no-frills makeup effects.
The movie's strongest point for me was the acting and storytelling, which supported the movie's suspense and horror really well - "Mrs. Blair" in particular manages to conjure more scares from a few unearthly sounds, strange poses, terrifying expressions, and weird outbursts of violence than most bigger-budget movies of this sort achieve with a huge special effects budget and actual monster effects; "Caught" resembles a typical exorcism movie in that respect, and gives many better exorcism films a good run for their money on the results. The lighting and camera angles also help enhance the off-kilter, nightmarish effect of the story - the results are pretty impressive, considering that the entire movie takes place in broad daylight in mostly well-lit interiors and an occasional exterior scene.
If I could point at a weak spot, it would be the ambient and incidental music: when the music works, it builds effective tension, and one scene in which an unearthly opera is played in-universe on a cassette player through a disturbing scene was especially notable for hitting its target, at least for me. However, the soundtrack was otherwise a bit too loud and obvious, failing to let the movie's unearthly and horrible situations speak for themselves... some of the best horror soundtracks run on on much more restrained and subtle and eerie stuff!
If fans of low-budget sci-fi horror are willing to forgive the movie those flaws - an overbearing soundtrack and a couple mysteries whose solutions are left to our imagination, and perhaps a slow-burn pacing that leads to an inevitable tut abrupt ending - then this movie could be an underappreciated gem of weird horror. The movie might otherwise lose gore-hounds, high-octane jump-scare addicts, and viewers who need every mystery tied up for them in a nice, obvious bow bypassing viewer imagination to be enjoyable.