One television show and two movies this time, all with SPOILERS.
Cursed Films – This is a Shudder production that’s had two seasons so far. Each episode talks about a movie that has a reputation of being cursed, due to bad stuff happening on set or to the people involved. Usually, someone will talk about the supposed curses, then someone else will point out that something is bound to go wrong on a big, complicated production, especially when there’s dangerous stuff involved. I will say that, when they discussed the deaths on The Crow and Twilight Zone: The Movie, I couldn’t help but think they were taking unnecessary risks in the first place. Why do you need to use a real gun when making a movie, loaded or not? I did think it was weird that John Landis directed the “Thriller” video later in the same year that Twilight Zone came out. I knew most of the stuff they discussed about The Wizard of Oz (one of the few they discussed that wasn’t part of the horror genre), but John Fricke was in it, and I’ve met him. Also in that episode was Gregg Turkington in his On Cinema persona, claiming that only some prints of the movie include the hanging man. The idea that the actors playing the Munchkins were all rowdy drunks came from a joke Judy Garland made while probably high on something herself, and was the subject for a movie that the director now regrets. With the Soviet film Stalker, a lot of the cast and crew got cancer because they were filming in an area with a lot of radioactive waste, which they didn’t know at the time. I did learn some stuff from the series, and the theme music is pretty cool.
The Gift – There are several movies with that title, and I’m not entirely sure why it’s the name for this one, but it’s the 2015 film with Jason Bateman. His character Simon and his wife Robyn, who have moved out to a huge house in the suburbs and are trying to have a baby, run into his old classmate Gordon. He tries to befriend the couple, but in a way that’s kind of unsettling, especially when he invites them to a dinner party at a house he broke into. But it turns out that there’s a lot of history between Simon and Gordon she didn’t know about, that Simon used to bully Gordon, and made up a story about his having sex in a car with an older man, which was devastating for him. And Simon is still doing the same kind of thing, lying about a competitor’s conduct in order to make a sale. Gaslighting, especially by men toward their wives, seems like such a common theme in movies I’ve seen recently, although that’s probably a reflection of how common it is in real life. It’s interesting that the director, Joel Edgerton, also played Gordon.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – A woman in a small town whose daughter was raped and killed is angry at what she sees as an inadequate response by the local police, so she rents three billboards just outside of town to call them out. The thing is, the police chief explains to her that they’ve done pretty much everything they could, and the DNA didn’t match anyone else’s they had on file. While I’m sure the police really are lax on a lot of stuff, in this particular case, it didn’t seem like there was much else they could do. The chief seems to be presented as the most reasonable character in the film, and he’s more sympathetic because he has terminal cancer. At the same time, the movie seems to make a point of the aggrieved mother being callous, rude, and unrealistic. But she was also abused by her ex-husband, and is physically threatened by townspeople who support the police chief. Really, it seems like every character has done really terrible things, but has also had horrible things done to them, which doesn’t make them seem balanced so much as it makes everyone in town come across as miserable. I’ve seen reviews saying that it plays on stereotypes of rural areas, and while that might not have been the intention, it kind of comes across that way.
VoVatia 