Terrifier 3
Writer & Director ~ Damien Leone
2024, US
Stars ~ Lauren LaVera, David Howard Thornton, Antonella Rose
Part 3 like part 2. Probably what non-horror fans think horror is: over two hours of sadism and outrageous gore with a magic sword get-out clause. But this time with added Christmas bullshit.
Sting
Writer & Director ~ Kiah Roache-Turner
2023, Australia-US
Stars ~ Ryan Corr, Alyla Browne, Noni Hazlehurst, Jermaine Fowler
The trailers gave away too much instead of capturing the true mood, that of a likeable but unchallenging creature feature. With a whacky-adjacent credits opening, broadly drawn secondary characters living in the infested apartment block, the vibe is more ‘Troll’ or ‘Critters’ than the recent ‘Infested’. Yet the family trouble feels very contemporary, what with a bratcocious girl and her beleaguered, belittled artist stepdad. Both Alyla Browne and the film play Charlotte (!) as one of those kids that has grown up the end result of a particularly cloying promotion of self-determination, which thoroughly works for her in ‘Furiosa: a Mad Max saga’ but is more annoying here. Ryan Corr plays Ethan the stepdad as from a more earnest family drama. It’s their story, Sting the spider growing as a manifestation of Charlotte’s unruliness and underlying anger and of Ethan’s sense of the small world around him as constantly antagonistic.
It's a average domestic dysfunctional dramatics and all it takes in the spider invasion to put things right. There’s a lot of scuttling through surprisingly clean air ducts by both girl and spider but surprisingly little creepiness or scares. Rather, the scene stealer is grandma with the memory loss (Noni Hazlehurst), and the most achieved dark humoured moment belongs to her at the very beginning. There’s a comic book feel, some decent WETA effects, but ultimately feels undercooked.
It’s undemanding and underachieving, unpretentious and mostly just diverting.
Keep
Writer and Director ~ Lewis Rose
2023, UK, 23 mins
Starring ~ Phil Davis, Weyal Bariz
A few months ago, I got see my longterm pal’s Lewis Rose’s short film in Soho screening rooms. Now you too can watch ‘Keep’ on Disney+. Lewis has made a handful of shorts that have won awards at festivals, and the underlying theme is of different cultures and lifestyles coming together, but never at the expense of their respective cultures. Don’t be fooled by the bright, easy-going surface, for there is a fierce humanitarian core engaged with the troubled times. Watch and be charmed and a little provoked.
https://www.disneyplus.com/en-gb/browse/entity-2947767d-bf1a-4037-9e6c-c2debf5d2f9a
Smile 2
Writer & Director – Parker Finn
2024, USA
Stars ~ Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt, Lukas Gage
Parker Finn’s franchise ‘Smile’ is proving to be quite the empathic franchise. Whether you see its premise of psychological illness as an infectious demon as questionable or as a manifestation of an old misconception, there is no doubting that Naomi Scott’s performance has the fiercest compassion. Just recently, I heard some work colleagues opine that as a celebrity had been into drugs and whatever, their untimely death was somehow unsympathetic, and obviously this lacks nuance, consideration and kindness. As Skye Riley, Naomi Scott’s raw turn as a successful pop star who is filled with self-loathing – and therefore most susceptible to the smile demon – never once drops the ball into implying she is deserving, even at her worst. The film goes a long way to determining that the celebrity life isolates and brings out the worst in an individual. It is Scott’s performance that is central and elevates the sequel to higher merit, even as it contains several showstoppers.
There’s more confidence here with the bigger budget and a deliberate focus that the original. It comes with many memorable images: a traffic accident blood smear like a smile; and the relentlessly smiling fangirl at the signing; a face pulled into a distorted grin in a vanity mirror, to name just three. The opening scene had me engaged in a way that ‘Terrifier 3’ didn’t manage at all – a carefully choreographed long take will always grab my attention – and by the end I was wondering why so many were saying they hadn’t seen something along the lines of ‘The Substance’ ever before. It won’t top ‘The Substance’ but then ‘Smile 2’ has a more eloquent agenda and characters and is more a bowl of multi-coloured candy than day-glo jelly. MikeMcGranaghan finds ‘Smile 2’s last act laughable, but as I was reading it as viewing the mental collapse of a flawed character, as well as the contagion potentially spreading, I was left strangely moved.
‘Smile 2’ spins through small-time crookery, popstar biopic, music video and supernatural curse so that the jump scares aren’t just cheap tactics (one jump scare had the entire audience I was with vibrating with chuckles at being caught for thirty seconds afterwards). And of course, the world of fame is the domain of fake smiles, although arguably Finn doesn’t quite make the most of this. Where he does is with the creepiness of an approaching dance routine, where the audience is the prey.
Going from the grey hues of the opening to the candy pop colourscheme of an endlessly superficial pop-world to more nightmarish shadows of horror, Finn uses the unique ability of cinema to undermine reality until everything collapses in on itself. When the biggest enemy is your own self-hatred, there is little reprieve and no winning.
All to say ‘Smile 2’ is a fun downer, a A24 horror version of Brady Cobert’s ‘VoxLux’ with a foot in James Wan jump scares. But like it’s predecessor, there’s a properly tragic feel and a haunting aftertaste and that most troubling and that most underrated ingredient that makes up horror: unfairness.
