31 Days to Scare ~ Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin

1
by 31 Days to Scare, Movie Review • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Facts:

Synopsis: A young woman’s search for her biological family leads her to an Amish community that is hiding some very dark secrets.

Stars: Emily Bader, Roland Buck III, Dan Lippert, Henry Ayres-Brown, Tom Nowicki

Director: William Eubank

Rated: R

Running Length: 98 minutes

TMMM Score: (6/10)

Review: Creatively, the Paranormal Activity franchise was at a dead end by the time the previous entry, The Ghost Dimension, was released all the way back in 2014.  With diminishing box office returns and scares that seemed standard, there was little the series hadn’t explored in its own mythology and audiences could almost set their watches by when things would finally start to get rolling.  The beauty of the first movie was the way it slowly reached its boiling point, leading to a finale that paid off.  However, after the same rug pull and trickery were repeated time and time again it wasn’t fulfilling anything but a 90-minute gap of your evening.

The series took a small step away from its origins in 2015 by releasing Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, taking the horror out of the suburbs and into the urban life of a Hispanic neighborhood but its cool reception brought producers quickly back to the familiar.  Now, they’ve gone even further by creating a standalone sequel, Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin and bypassing a theatrical release entirely, opting to send the screams to stream on Paramount+ in time for Halloween.  (Naturally, it was intended for the big screen but, y’know, COVID.)  The result is still a timewaster but a re-energized one that feels like a move in a good direction if this is the way the franchise wants to frighten us going forward.

Left at the doors of a hospital by her mother when she was just a baby, Margot (Emily Bader) has grown up longing to know her birth parents and find out why she was abandoned but has hit nothing but dead ends.  Now working as a documentary filmmaker with her boyfriend Chris (Roland Buck III) she’s met Samuel (Henry Ayres-Brown, Monsterland) after matching with him on 23 and Me.  A member of a small Amish community in upstate New York on his Rumspringa year, Samuel offers to take Margot, Chris, and local sound designer Dale (Dan Lippert) back home when he returns.  Knowing this is her opportunity to learn more about her roots and an opportunity to get footage for a potential documentary, they arrive in the dead of night to a snowy farm that practically screams “Welcome Death!”.

Over the next several days, Margot and her friends will experience the traditions of the community and eventually see some things they weren’t meant to.  Doors with huge locks on them will suddenly be opened and what’s behind them will be explored, hidden rooms will be entered and their contents become clues for Margot to the identity of her mother, suggesting that perhaps she might still be somewhere among the people gathered…or elsewhere on the grounds.  The creepy commune has practices that may remind audiences of Midsommar or other folk horror flicks that thrive under their isolated setting and the claustrophobia of both the insular location and found footage setting helps the film to keep the tension high even if the story feels a bit predictable.

The last film director William Eubank was responsible for was 2020’s Underwater, a highly underrated creature feature starring Kristen Stewart that I’m convinced will someday get the recognition it’s due.  On that film, Eubank showed attention to the small details in character traits which gives us more of a read on who those people were in a short amount of time.  The script from Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day) doesn’t flesh these Next of Kin folk out too much so Eubank has his work cut out for him but he’s cast the movie well with fresh faces and respectable stable of character actors playing elders in the group.  Journeyman actor Tom Nowicki (The Dark and the Wicked) is an especially good get as the leader of the society.

Coming it at a rather long 98 minutes, Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin follows tradition by lighting a flame early on with scare licks here and there and gradually increasing the frequency until boiling over for a prolonged finale that is a bit too chaotic.  It doesn’t skimp on the jerky camera movements (note: it’s not all found footage, some of it is filmed like an actual movie) or a nice dose of mayhem but there is such a thing as too much of a scary thing. Reaching a level that gets disorienting, I realized what a far cry it was from a rather humble beginning…and not just of this movie but of the first one that came out 2007. We’ve left that California thread behind (hopefully) and who knows what will be next, but there’s effort being made to resuscitate it by a team that obviously cares.

Movie Review ~ Army of Thieves

1
by Movie Review • Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

The Facts:

Synopsis: A mysterious woman recruits bank teller Ludwig Dieter to lead a group of aspiring thieves on a top-secret heist during the early stages of the zombie apocalypse.

Stars: Matthias Schweighöfer, Nathalie Emmanuel, Ruby O. Fee, Stuart Martin, Guz Khan, Jonathan Cohen, Noémie Nakai

Director: Matthias Schweighöfer

Rated: NR

Running Length: 127 minutes

TMMM Score: (7/10)

Review:  Stop right there, dear reader.  We cannot proceed any further into this review of the new Netflix film Army of Thieves, a prequel/spinoff to director Zack Snyder’s May release Army of the Dead without entering the danger zone of spoiler territory.  Only go forth if you don’t mind knowing some small details about the earlier film which factor into this, even though seeing Army of the Dead isn’t a requirement to enjoy this slippery little nugget of a heist film.  You sure you’re ready?  For real and true?  Ok…here we go.

I, for one, was super surprised to see this movie come through the pipeline for production so soon after the release of the well-received original film that it has spun-off from.  True, the pandemic did delay the release of Army of the Dead (AOD from now on) so it was in the can for a time before it began streaming but from the sound of it Snyder and his team had the percolations of expanding their original idea into something larger while working on that first film.  It’s also true that AOD was itself its own semi adjacent spinoff from Snyder’s 2004 reimaging/remake of George A. Romero 1978 zombie classic Dawn of the Dead, so Army of Thieves (AOT) is just widening that world-build further.  It’s still in its infancy but if AOT is any indication of what’s to come, Snyder’s zombieverse might just have found a fun little niche in a genre that had been growing low on energy for some time.

So now we get to the obvious.  AOT is all about Ludwig Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer) the charismatic safecracker that was one of the crew brought in by Dave Bautista’s character in AOD to help break into an impenetrable safe and haul out mounds of cash.  As far as we know, Dieter gave his life for the cause (hey, it’s the movies…anything can happen unless we see a body decomposing, right?) so watching AOT to begin with is a bit of a strange beast.  We know how the story is going to end for Dieter so why invest an additional two hours into an origin story that links up with a movie we’ve already seen?  It’s not like a Marvel film where we go back and see how Spider Man got his senses or Thor got his hammer.  In fact, with the zombie apocalypse beginning to swell in the background in the latter half of this film, knowing that quite a lot of these characters will be goners almost balances some of the joy/excitement created (and it does!) with some melancholy.

I wouldn’t have exactly called Dieter a breakout character from AOD, but I would say that Schweighöfer made a memorable impression, something that I was reminded of as AOT starts featuring the actor as Dieter laying out the history of famous safe maker and his four masterworks.  Creatively inspired by Wagner’s The Ring Cycle, these were notoriously impossible mini-fortresses to break into and the designer himself used one as his tomb.  We already know that the last and most impressive features heavily into AOD, so AOT focuses on Dieter’s recruitment by international criminal Gwendoline (Nathalie Emmanuel, F9: The Fast Saga) to rob the other three scattered throughout Europe.  With help from muscle Brad Cage (Stuart Martin), getaway driver Rolph (Guz Khan) and tech expert Korina (Ruby O. Fee), this merry band of thieves must learn to trust one another and avoid capture by determined officer Delacroix (Jonathan Cohen). 

It was refreshing to see this spinoff to a film that was packed to the skulls with zombies be relatively walking dead-less and instead take on the qualities of a heist film in the vein of Oceans 11 or The Italian Job.   It’s a little more by-the-numbers than either of those films and misses some of the clever spark which gave the productions a leg up but it’s definitely not lacking in good will or energy to please.  Schweighöfer pulls double duty playing the lead and directing the film, demonstrating easy balance of those two pivotal roles without letting either slide.  I could have done with some trimming of several sequences where Dieter is attempting to open a safe and we see the inner workings of the mechanism, the gears moving and tumblers falling into place.  Once is interesting to establish but after minutes have gone by it just looks like a Windows 98 screensaver. 

If AOT winds up feeling conventional in structure (it’s a bank heist movie, don’t ask it to be something more) the viewer can appreciate that it was carried off with some style.  Hans Zimmer and Steve Mazzaro’s score adds a nice zip and Bernhard Jasper’s cinematography is commendable for giving us the coverage we need to understand what’s going on while stoking our desire for international travel.  There’s a new film set after AOD, Planet of the Dead, that has been announced and Schweighöfer is in the cast so perhaps this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Dieter and that’s OK by me.  There’s enough interest created in Snyder’s first expansion of his zombieverse to make me want to see more.