Smile 2

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.

From Beyond the Grave

FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

Director ~ Kevin Connor

Writers ~ Robin Clarke, Raymond Christodoulou, R. Chetwynd-Hayes

1974, UK

Stars ~ Peter Cushing, Ian Bannen, Ian Carmichael

What these Amicus films lack in budget they often make up for in a wonderfully dreary British Seventies’ backdrop and knowing performances. Here, the central antiques shop itself is a memorably cluttered set that looks left over from a Hammer period piece. Then there are also the Seventies hairstyles and old school uniforms and British Rail, underlit flats, indistinct working class kitchen-lounges and bland modern middle-class homes. All this in itself gives an exotic unselfconscious rendition of the era. Like most of the era’s horror, it features all the recognisable faces: Peter Cushing, Ian Ogilvy, David Warner, Lesley-Anne Down. Diana Dors, Donald Pleasance, et al. Although only the second entry really works up to a satisfying conclusion, each story has a central virtue.

The first – ‘The Gatecrasher’ – offers the unforgettable face rising into the misty haunted mirror: it’s an old image, but for those who like simple chills, it still works.

The second – ‘An Act of Kindness’ – Ian Bennan is a broken-down ex-serviceman becoming involved with a street match seller whose daughter works black magic: that this father and daughter are played by the Donald and Angela Pleasance should have tipped him off that no good will come of it. The dejected husband’s loveless home and latent seediness gives this an almost Pinteresque atmosphere, all blunt dialogue and unspoken menace.

The third episode – ‘The Elemental’ – benefits from Margaret Leighton’s vibrant performance as the clairvoyant Madame Orloff, but the humorous execution does little for such a limp finale.

The last story – ‘The Door’ – has Ian Ogilvy buying a door possessed by an evil Eighteenth century spirit trying for immortality. Although the characterisation is bland and the story straightforward, the blue room and its malevolent, dusty spirit remain striking. This certainly haunted me as a kid, giving me that bedrock fear of a malevolence from another time/dimension just a door away; all my life, I have remembered that initial fright of the man glaring up from the blue room on other side of the door.

As slices of horror of a certain vintage, there is much to enjoy here, not least a genuine feel of creepiness in a somewhat British down-at-heel everydayness. 

 

 

"Lawns of a Better Place" ~ a Buck Theorem album

 Lawns of a Better Place

a Buck Theorem album

Non-electronic: inspired more by folk and acoustic as well as the usual alternative and ambient. And Field Recordings. Started a long, long time ago (decades) when I first started to try and record etc.

So some of these started as 4-Track recordings. These people I knew but I now hardly remember lent me a 4-Track and then they disappeared and left it with me. I made very good use of it, recording the duos I was in. (There was the time my cat slept on it, pressed buttons and recorded over everything…) Then we were all digital. I think I gave it to a friend…

And then there was COVID, where I found that a year and a half was quite enough of being in my natural state of a hermit, thank you. “Lockdown in a Drowned House” is obviously about that time. As it happened, my first outing after lockdown was a gig where I was performing but my equipment wasn’t working. I didn’t care. I was happily amongst friends again, for I am as much a social animal as a hermit, it would seem.

“Buzz of the Lawn” features a recording of one of my lockdown walks through the park. I remember that was a great, Sunny English Summer where we mostly stayed indoors whilst others went defiantly bonkers.

I dabbled in a little horror here with “Witch Tree” and “In A Stone Asylum”. A little street corner doo-wop, a little beach harmonica.

“Dead Names on Chapel Walls” was inspired by the time when I was clearing out a chapel as I was a cleaner in what used to be an old Victorian school building. In the entrance, there were plaques of students that had died there, one at Snowden, if I remember correctly. Another on the cricket field when the ball hit his chest and knocked out his weak heart. If you want a glimpse of the place, watch ‘Monty Mython’s Meaning of Life’; I found slips of lyrics still in stacks of Bibles (“Oh Lord, please don’t roast me…”).

During lockdown, my only In Person contact was with Pete at the comic shop. I would go there and we would talk through our masks amongst the comics for ages. Here’s to you, Pete.