"Ready or Not: Here I Come"

Moments after surviving a bloodsport with her now very dead in-laws The Le Domas Family, blood-drenched bride Grace (Samara Weaving) awakens cuffed to a bed with her emergency contact, estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) pissed at her ridiculous story of demonic cults. Before they can bury the hatchet, however, both are kidnapped for a "double or nothing" game for a seat at the table which rules the world from the shadows. Now hunted across a golf course by the wealthiest families on Earth, the siblings must bury the hatchet... into the blue-blooded necks around them...

(Source: Film Yap substack)
This was a fucking excellent time.
There was never really a need for a sequel to the rip-roaring bloodbath of "Ready Or Not" and its tale of how the rich really are demonic, vile losers; but as far as unecessary sequels go this is the most fun I've had in years. The makers (the seemingly always great collective "Radio Silence", behind the first film and the absolutely magnificent "Abigail") double down on the humour and throwbacks to the original (corpse pit, explosions of blood, and primal screaming from the always-excellent Samara Weaving. Watch her in "Mayhem" and "Guns Akimbo"), with the added twist of a fun buddy-cop framing with the ever-excellent Kathryn Newton. By the way: having both her and Kevin Durand (here playing a coke fiend knife-maniac called "Bill Wilkinson", perfection) alongside Weaving means that the lovable folks at Radio Silence are starting to form their own stable of fun fiends, and I am all for it. I just want Dan Stevens in it...
The movie was fun, extremely enjoyable stuff: we get a blind fistfight in a wedding hall to "Total Eclipse of the Heart" ( a highlight of the movie, great stuff which had me howling with laughter), suitably ludicrous bloody gibs, swords and rocket launchers, Nestor Carbonell bumbling around with a sniper rifle, Sarah Michelle Gellar dressed like a member of the landed gentry as she cavorts with an excellent Shawn Hatosy and a handgun on a quadbike, and Elijah Wood weaselling his way through it all. It's great fun, and the stakes keep getting slipperier and slipperier as Wood's unnamed Lawyer rattles off more by-laws, clauses and demonic caveats the families must abide if they are not to explode into ludicrous gibs.
The makers could not have predicted the arrival of the Epstein Files, however.
So this film is a perfectly timed, snarling indictment of the vampiric upper classes: pathetic bickering losers who were born into privilege, revel in sadistic depravity, and would kill entire bloodlines for a grasp as more power, but couldn't be trusted to guide piss up a wall. It's immensely satisfying watching them squirm and die, and there is no more apt visual for the time we live in now than the wealthy scrabbling within a pit of the rotting corpses of their sacrifices for a token of power, whilst the very world they have created burns and dies around them...
It's fantastic fun. Great time.
Oh yeah, David Cronenberg is in this! Hell yes!

"The Substance" - Review

Workout star of a prime time show, and hottest thing on the planet, Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) has it all! But all good things must come to an end: she's 50 and, as made abundantly clear by her slithery boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid), there's no room for her in this industry now. Despondent and miserable, she finds her way back in: far from pulling a Mikey Saber, she instead uses "The Substance", to create a "newer", "hotter", "better" version of herself (Margaret Qualley), to ride high once again in that industry. All seems well, she has to follow a few rules and success seems given: Stabilize every day, swap every seven days, and remember that there is no she and her, only "Us". Fame, youth, beauty and more, are only an injection away...

Rightfully compared to David Cronenberg, I'd agree but not for the reasons people think when they immediately think Cronenberg: it has that almost asexual, clinical dissection of glamour and sex, that horniness and sleaze eyed up with an almost alien fascination and disgust which feels more akin to fascination than perversion. It's less titillating and more inquisitive and ponderous.
The whole movie is gorgeously shot, very French.
It has frequent wide angle lenses, immaculate colour design (the yellow coat and orange hallways are a particularly striking set of images), making for frequently bright, memorable imagery. There are a lot of wide angle and fish eye lenses, usually with an exquisitely ghoulish Dennis Quaid (playing his best Ray Liotta, RIP) far too close, adding disgust and discomfort effortlessly. And then the surgical, looming, disgusting gross body horror you came for is (whilst underplayed for a majority of the film, we'll get there...) neatly done, slow, effective, gross.
The sound design is the star of the show: I never want to hear a man eating shrimp ever again. Fucking gross There's a lot of food and consumption and devouring imagery and metaphors. The film descends into addiction, the biases and loaded decks and prejudices against women, the hypocrisy and vulgarity of the entertainment industry and society's double standards for women, and to this extent casting Demi Moore (giving one of her best performances in a lifetime) is an inspired piece of parody. She is great in this: her cookery scene is great fun, and encapsulates the movie well.
The final act is where you, I, and everyone with a semblance of understanding of horror movies, Cronenberg, body horror and pacing are expecting it to come together:
Oh boy it does that!

Deliciously gross, surprisingly rather "Society" inspired stuff (I kept humming the "Eton Boat Song" in my head, you'll see why...) comes alive in the finale: gross, bloody, manic, and a suitable slice of madness from what we have seen so far. It's not as unhinged as something like "Cuckoo", and is a more reserved, collected, orderly affair with something to say, but if you have the patience for it, and enjoy the Soska Sisters remake of "Rabid", I can recommend this.

"Crimes of the Future" - Review

In a not too distant bio-tech future, pain has disappeared, and surgery is the new sex. Performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and his assistant Caprice (Lea Seydoux) push the limits of art with live extractions of hitherto unknown organs grown and extraced from Tenser in front of a wanting, clamouring audience. We follow them as they meet strange technicians Router and Berst (Nadia Litz and Tanaya Beatty), a sweet-bar chewing stranger with an unusual idea for Tenser's next performance (Scott Speedman); a nervy doctor at the "National Organ Registry" (Don McKellar) and his strange, nervous, somewhat aroused assistant Timlin (Kristen Stewart), in a world where pain, pleasure, organic, synthetic and normal and strange blur together in a cocktail of weirdness...

I love David Cronenberg.
There are no rules, this is a meandering, odd, compellingly strange tale akin to his older stuff ("The Fly", "Rabid", "Videodrome") right down to the deliberately off-kilter acting to help us be desensitised to this painless world the characters live in. It's very much a mood piece, and plot and character growth (Hah!) come second. It's a movie where people will chat about the morality and philosophy of evolution and art and flesh. It's a movie where the plot only really comes into play in the 3rd act, though to be fair the ending is pretty fucking good.
A woman performs fellatio on a man's organs.
A man covers himself in ears.
Chairs help a person eat by moving you around for maximum digestion and pleasure.
Saul and Caprice fuck whilst cutting themselves.
It's "Crash" with a growling, Michael Wincott-esque Mortensen, and I love it. It's arthouse gore with no real rules or conventions or care for typical structures and pacings the audience are used to, it's just Cronenberg being Cronenberg and having stuff to say and explore. Yes, there's a lot of it, and yes he goes all over the place and yes it doesn't conform to traditional narrative too well.
But it's undeniably his film, and enjoyable to boot. I love it, especially if you hold it up as something of a contrast to the cookie-cutter production line swill pumped out by many studios.
Love it or hate it, it's got vision and creativity and ideas.