Hush

Synopsis:

A deaf, mute female author lives alone in a fairly secluded house in the woods.  A man in a creepy mask shows up, kills her neighbor and terrorizes her.

My thoughts:
This seems like a pretty standard home invasion movie, but I gave it a shot because it was directed by Mike Flanagan.  I wasn’t overly fond of Absentia, but I loved Oculus so I was looking forward to what Flangan would bring to the table within the home invasion subgenre.  He did not disappoint.

Having a deaf, mute protagonist certainly allowed for a fresh take.  Some of the standard slasher moves went out the window here.  There is a scene where the killer takes his knife and scrapes it against the window.  That nails-on-chalkboard effect didn’t faze Maggie.  I like to think that the killer had a lot of other tricks up his sleeve that he wasn’t able to use here.  “I’ll start clanging some cans together outside…okay, okay.  Can’t use that.  What about knocking really loudly on the door…nope.  Nope nope nope.”

Maggie’s lack of hearing did put the killer at a bit of a disadvantage, although it’s really his own fault.  He saw a deaf woman living alone and assumed she would be an easy kill.  He toyed with her a little more than he should have.  In fact, at one point the killer is in the house with Maggie before she even knows he’s out there, and he doesn’t kill her.  He takes his opportunity to get into her head.  When he could have been using that opportunity to get into her head…WITH A KNIFE.  (I’m so sorry.)

Granted, we don’t really see his method outside of his approach with Maggie, so maybe this is just how he operates with people trapped in their houses, but I got the impression that he was so confident of being able to kill her easily that he wasn’t as careful as he usually would be.  “I can come in at any time,” he tells her early on.  But he doesn’t.  He taunts her.  He walks around the house, stalking her in plain sight.  He gives Maggie enough time to get over her initial shock and devise a plan.  Initially to stay secure and survive, then to escape, and ultimately to fight back.

This is a small movie.  If you count the brief FaceTime call with Maggie’s sister, there are only 5 people in the movie, but the majority of the movie involves Maggie and the killer.  At 81 minutes, it’s a short movie, but it’s such a small movie that it could easily have become boring in lesser hands.  On its face, this movie is simply, “Man walks around house while woman hides inside,” for roughly an hour.  But it never really dragged.  There were a number of tense moments, but it wasn’t always tense.  Even in those down moments, it was never boring.

By the way, the character of the killer is simply “Man” in the credits.  I love this.  It’s impossible to see things like that and not think of “?” (Frankenstein) or “The Shape” (Halloween).  There’s something about an unnamed character in a horror movie that makes me happy.
We also have no idea where the killer came from.  We don’t know how long he has been killing.  We don’t know why he chose to use a crossbow.  We don’t know anything about him, and I really don’t care.  I don’t need to know what led him to this point: all I need to know is that he wants to kill.

I had a few issues, but they’re nit-picky ones.  The killer wears a creepy mask in the beginning, but he gets rid of it 15 minutes in.  There’s a good reason for this, and the actor did a good job, but I wish we would have seen that mask for a little while longer.
During a call with her sister, Maggie says (well, signs) that she has “writer’s brain.”  Basically, when she writes, she looks at every situation and sees how it could possibly end.  Kind of like Choose Your Own Adventure.  Because of this, she has a hard time finishing her books, because she can’t stop writing alternate endings.  They play with this a bit towards the end of the movie, and it’s one of my favorite scenes.  I wish they would have done this a little more throughout the movie.  Perhaps more liberal use would lead to it not being as effective, but I would have liked to have seen this used a little more than it was.

In the end, those were minor issues that didn’t detract from the rest of the movie.  I really enjoyed it and I definitely see myself revisiting this one quite often. 

Rating: 4.5/5

Notable actors: Michael Trucco

Entrance

Description from Netflix:

After mysteriously losing her dog one evening, a Los Angeles barista questions her commitment to living in the city and decides to get out.  But when her going-away party takes an odd turn, she finds that the city just might not let her go so easily.

What I liked:

1. The acting was stellar.  I believe everyone involved had limited acting experience, yet they were all terrific.  For a slow movie to work, I have to feel invested in the characters, and it succeeded in doing that with some great acting.

Pictured: Acting 

2. The sense of paranoia and dread that slowly built throughout the movie.  There was one particular scene in which Suziey was walking down a road at night and was being followed by a car.  It was a long scene, but it was effective.  That was when the movie really seemed like it started to pick up.

3. The ending.  The last 20 minutes of this movie were terrific.  All of the paranoia and dread came to a head in terrifying and stressful fashion.  What had been a look inside the mind of a woman hitting a quarter-life crisis in a big city became a living, breathing nightmare for her and her friends.  This is when the movie turned from psychological thriller to slasher/home invasion.  The last 10 minutes or so is basically one unbroken shot, where the actress (Suziey Block) was actually tied up to make it more believable.  It's a tense and horrifying end to the movie, and the final scene is absolutely chilling. 

What I didn't like:

1. It opens extremely slowly.  Lots of scenes of Suziey going to work, talking to friends, and looking for her dog.  Short of the dog disappearing (which we don't even see), we're really just watching a girl go about her daily life, while getting ready to move.  It's really boring.  Beyond being really boring, it doesn't even seem like it's building towards anything for a long time.  It was about halfway through the movie before any tension started to build.  Which makes this movie feel an awful lot like Death Proof: lots of talking, not much happening.  It almost lost me in the first 20 minutes.  I'm glad I pushed through to the end, but, if I didn't know there was a good ending waiting for me, I probably would have hit stop before the 30 minute mark.

To recap: set in the city.  Slow start.  Lots of talking about nothing in particular for long portions of time.  A killer that shows up near the end and starts hacking.

Holy crap.  It's Jason Takes Manhattan.

Voorheesed! 

Rating: 2.5/5

Let's break this down a little further:

First 60 minutes: 1/5

Last 25 minutes: 5/5

The Purge

Description from IMDB:

In the future, a wealthy family is held hostage for harboring the target of a murderous syndicate during the Purge, a 12-hour period in which any and all crime is legalized.

I think I'll go ahead and put a blanket SPOILER WARNING at the top here, since a lot of the problems I have with this get into spoiler territory.

First off, I'll say that I love the concept of this movie.  The idea of a world where all crime is legal for one night is a pretty fun idea to play around with.

However, I have a major issue with the idea behind that concept.  The idea is that unemployment rates and crime rates are down because people can go bonkers 12 hours a year.  There's no way it would work out that way.  If people want to kill/rob/vandalize, they won't wait all year for a 12 hour window to do it.  They'll just do it.

For example, look at the main invader, known only as The Polite Stranger.  He is obviously wealthy, and he mentions that he and his compatriots are well-educated.  He's also a psychopath.  It's foolish to assume that his bloodlust (and that of his Purge-buddies) will be sated for an entire year just because he kicked a couple drifters to death one night.  That's not how this works.

As was depicted, it looks as though the majority of people taking advantage of "Purge Night" were out there for killing.  Which makes sense.  Perhaps you're just a normal fella who wants to pee in public without being fined for it.  You're not going to risk that when there are rich kids with automatic weapons running around the neighborhood.  Which brings up this issue: those people with the urge to get into some petty crime for the evening won't be indulging that urge, as they don't want to be murdered.  Those people won't be purging themselves that evening, which means they'll probably indulge that urge at some other time and hope they don't get caught.

The deeper you find yourself digging, the less sense it all makes.

That's not to say this entire movie was terrible, nonsensical trash.  Because it wasn't.  There were quite a few really cool parts.  I loved the opening, where we see the violence of the Purge as shown by surveillance cameras.  It gave me context and scope for what was to come.  Even though most of this movie played out as a home invasion movie, it showed that this was just one incident among thousands (millions?).  It took a huge idea and pared it down to a single incident, while still giving us a taste of what the rest of America looked like.  It was a jarring way to start a movie, but it was extremely effective.  I'm hoping to see more of this in The Purge 2: Lost in Yonkers.

My favorite scene was the nonchalant way the next door neighbor was sharpening his machete a few hours before the start of the Purge.  Big fan of that guy.  I really wanted to follow him around for the evening and see what shenanigans he got himself into.

In the end, this was a claustrophobic home invasion movie.  In a movie with limited characters, a lot hinges on how I feel about the main characters.  And they were terrible here.  The acting wasn’t bad, but the characters were extremely unlikable and made some awful decisions.  I didn’t like a single one of them.  More than any of my other complaints, this is really what killed this movie for me.

Not terrible.  Not great.  A good concept, but not really anything interesting done with it.  It’s worth catching if you don’t have anything better to do for 80 minutes, but don’t rush out to watch this.

Rating: 2/5

You're Next

Description from Netflix:

When shy Erin joins her new boyfriend at a family reunion to commemorate his parents’ anniversary, the tense gathering is horrifically interrupted by a gang of masked invaders who brutalize the celebrants…until someone starts fighting back.

My thoughts:

Going to the dollar theater by yourself is always a ton of fun.  I highly recommend it.

I really liked this.  It had a cool 80s slasher vibe to it, due in no small part to the stellar synth soundtrack.  The soundtrack really set the mood for this movie.  The filmmakers also did a great job at using silence at times to ratchet up the tension. 

It would be easy to compare this to The Strangers, and I suppose there’s a bit of that in here, mainly because it’s a home invasion movie with masks.  But, as I pointed out above, it looks and feels more like an 80s slasher.  This really felt more like Friday the 13^th or Halloween than The Strangers.

But even that comparison isn’t overly accurate.  Erin was far more competent at fighting back than the majority of final girls in those movies.  Erin is a fighter.  She was raised as a survivalist.  She has no qualms with picking up a meat tenderizer and raining down holy hell on someone twice her size.  This movie won’t rank high on the list of best slashers ever, but Erin should rank pretty high on the list of all-time survivor girls.  She’s scrappy.  She’s nasty.  She’s resourceful.  And she’s responsible for one of the best kills I’ve seen in recent memory. 

Without getting too slap-sticky, this has a lot of really funny moments (provided the gruesome deaths of some main characters is something you find amusing, which I do).  It was never goofy, but there were quite a few laugh-out-loud funny moments.

One of those funny moments was seeing a man in a sheep mask walk around with a crossbow.  I’m not even sure it was supposed to be funny, but it killed me.

This was a really bloody slasher movie.  It earned its R rating.  And it had a terrific ending.  I’m already looking forward to watching it again.  It was a really fun time.

Also, Ti West is in this movie, and he gets killed off really early.  I could watch Ti West get killed a thousand times.  That’s how much I hated The Innkeepers. 

Rating: 5/5