Movie Breakdown: Welcome To The Blumhouse (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
It’s Halloween Month! Meaning: horror, horror, horror and more horror. So, four frightening flicks from the reigning champs of big budget horror, Blumhouse, sounds like a delight.
Post-Screening Ramble:
I going to chalk up my solid shoulder shrug of a response to almost all four of the films in the Welcome To The Blumhouse quartet as my a product of a general meh-ness to the actual films combined with my own general expectation problem. See, I thought that Blumhouse – horror maestros that they are – were, in the month of October, going to release some good old-fashioned horror flicks. The films in Welcome To The Blumhouse are decidedly not that. They are instead a cobbled together slate of what I’m calling Hallmark Horror – low budget thrillers with just a taste of the supernatural or the strange to give Blumhouse the opportunity to slap “genre” on the promotional material. It’s a good move by Blumhouse to highlight a more diverse slate of directors for this project, but I don’t know if any of the films succeed within what I assume was a very limited budget. Overall, the Welcome To The Blumhouse experience wasn’t up my alley, but regardless, a few individual thoughts (in order of how much I enjoyed the films) on each movie.
EVIL EYE, d. Elan & Rajeev Dassani
Evil Eye was the most Hallmark Horror of the lot. A mother (Sarita Choudhury) worries that the wealthy tech-guy (Omar Maskati) her daughter (Sunita Mani) is dating is actually, somehow, the reincarnated spirit of an abusive, controlling boyfriend she dated in her youth. The entirety of the film is basically the daughter happily dating her new boyfriend while the mother, in India, frets over new developments that continue to point her towards the reincarnation theory. When it isn’t outright boring, it borders on treacly melodrama.
BLACK BOX, d. Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour
A definite step up from Evil Eye, but it’s still a pretty lackluster film. Nolan (Mamoudou Athie) is a single father, who after a terrible car accident that killed his wife, now struggles with remembering things. After some pushing he goes to a famous neuro-doctor (Phylicia Rashad) to partake in an experimental process involving hypnotism and virtual reality. Things, as you might expect, go badly. Black Box suffers in the pacing department. It has a few good twists and turns but the moments between them are long and arduous. I was stoked for Phylicia Rashad, but her performance is sort of all over the place. It is, relative to the other films in the series, visually attractive and in the midst of this badly lit jumble, that’s almost enough for me to recommend it. Almost.
THE LIE, d. Veena Sud
There is good reason why this is the first film of the Welcome To The Blumhouse series. Veena Sud is director of the American version of The Killing and The Lie has a polished, professional sheen the other films in the series don’t. It also features Peter Sarsgaard (in full Jeff Tweedy, deadbeat musician mode), Mireille Enos (who, with a limited script, is very good here) and Joey King (who is, well, Joey King). The basic premise is that a divorced couple’s daughter does something very bad and they have to come together to keep her out of the hands of the police. It’s the sort of slowly-toppling-house-of-cards film you’ve seen a million times, but Sud and the cast do a good job of keeping it tense, keeping it interesting, and dragging the audience along as they slowly turn the screws further and further. It still has a waft of after-school-special to it, but the gathered talent certainly helps to make it stand out above the rest of the films.
NOCTURNE, d. Zu Quirke
Nocturne is definitely not the best made of the films in this quartet, but it’s my favorite because it most satisfies the b-movie schlock I was looking for in these films. Twin sisters (Euphoria’s Sydney Sweeney and Madison Iseman) are dueling piano prodigies at an elite arts school. Sweeney’s Juliet is the quiet, under-dog who lives in her sister’s shadow until she finds the notebook of another former musical genius who recently threw herself from a practice room at the school. The journal, full of backwards writing and creepy images, slowly helps Juliet to overtake her sister. But at what cost? It’s kind of a cult movie, kind of a possession movie, kind of a “oh shit the Devil” movie and definitely a movie you want to crack jokes at while you watch Sydney Sweeney stare blankly into the evil yellow light of success (there actually is an evil yellow light of success in this film). It also has the only moment of true gore in all of these films and I cheered when the half-headed former student’s ghost apparition suddenly appeared. It’s not great – again pacing and narrative issues abound, and some of the story beats are just too dumb – but it’s fun. And maybe that doesn’t mean it’s good – because if it wasn’t quarantine, I don’t know if this film ever sees the light of day – but there was an energy to it, a fun sense of horror quirk. And in this collection, that is saying a lot.
One Last Thought:
I really wonder if these films were ever intended to see the light of day. Or if they were what Blumhouse had sitting on the shelf (Sydney Sweeney looks much younger than she does in Euphoria) when the quarantine arrived and, being Blumhouse, they threw on a coat of fresh paint and pushed them out into the universe when they knew people were running out of new things to watch. It’s not a terrible idea and hell, I spent six hours of my life shaking my head at them.
One More Last Thought:
John Laird, smart fellow that he is, made a good point today. Even if these films aren’t great it’s always good to see the big streamers play around in the horror sandbox. I always want more channels for horror and if this expands the audience a little bit, it’s all for the better.
