Four movie reviews with SPOILERS.
Relic – When an old woman named Edna goes missing, her daughter Kay and granddaughter Sam visit her house to look for clues, and find everything covered in black mold. Edna reappears with no knowledge of ever having gone away, and acts in unpredictable ways, like giving Sam her ring and then accusing her of stealing it. The younger women manage to escape from Edna, but go back to tend to her, and Kay peels off her skin and lets her die. I wondered if that was a reference to some kind of folklore or mythology, but apparently it was supposed to represent her acceptance that Edna’s dementia had essentially made her someone different. It also turns out that Kay has a scar like the one she saw on her mother.
Hotline – This documentary from 2014 runs the gamut in terms of its titular topic, addressing everything from psychics to sex lines to suicide prevention. As such, it tends to jump around quite a bit, but there’s a general theme of how people have used hotlines to gain human connections, despite their usually impersonal nature. From the title, I was kind of more thinking of the hotlines from my childhood where you’d hear a recorded message and get an exorbitant phone bill (not that I ever called any of them), and those were mentioned, but the focus is more on ones where you talk to an actual person, even if they’re an actor.
Hellraiser (2022) – I feel that this remake tried to make the concept of a box that summons demons who torture people into something more complex, but didn’t entirely succeed. It’s a long movie, but it has a pretty small cast and not that much really happens. The plot centers around a recovering drug addict who’s led by a boyfriend she met in rehab to the puzzle box, and the Cenobites take her brother away. It’s eventually revealed that the whole thing is a setup by this one rich guy who had to sacrifice a certain number of people in order to be granted a request, which in his case was the typical pleasure that turned out not to be what he thought, but there are indications that the Cenobites can grant other requests as well. The puzzle doesn’t always remain as a box, but changes shape over time. It also has a knife on it, which seemed to be overkill to me; it doesn’t need to cut people to be sinister. I guess I appreciate that it tried to do something different, but I don’t think it really succeeded. I did find it interesting that the Pinhead character had a feminine voice, which is what Clive Barker said in the original story; but it’s weird that they’d include that one detail when it otherwise had very little to do with the source material. And it was kind of neat to see that the rich guy’s house incorporated some aspects of the box into its architecture.
The Vigil – Like Relic, this also involves an old widow with dementia, but otherwise it’s pretty different. It’s a very Jewish horror movie, about a guy named Yakov Ronen, who left the Hasidic community in Brooklyn after watching his brother die while escaping from some men on the street who were harassing him. He’s having trouble making money, and a guy from his old community offers to pay him for being a Shomer for the night, watching over the body of a Holocaust survivor who’d just died. While in the apartment, he’s haunted by strange visions and cryptic comments from the widow. He tries calling both his girlfriend and his therapist, but both conversations become bizarre. Yakov learns that the deceased was haunted by a Mazzik, a sort of demon that torments people. The idea that a Mazzik could be identified by its head being turned around backwards seems to be an invention of the movie, although it’s certainly the sort of thing that appears in a lot of stories about demons.
VoVatia 