Ten Days of Terror!: Haunted Mansion

Film: Haunted Mansion
Format: Streaming video from Disney Plus on Fire!

There are a few people in the movie business I have hitched my metaphorical wagon to, and sometimes that’s going to get me in trouble. So far, I haven’t been terribly hurt by Guillermo del Toro or Greta Gerwig. However, Haunted Mansion has put a little damper on my dedication to seeing anything featuring LaKeith Stanfield. Don’t get me wrong; I will probably still watch anything I find that has him in it, but the reality of this film has shaken me a little.

The truth isn’t that Haunted Mansion is a bad movie; it’s just not a very good one, and much of the problem comes from the fact that it’s incredibly predictable. And, even worse than that, the predictability happens because there are certain parameters set up where we as the audience know what the bad guy needs to be victorious, the characters in the movie know what the bad guy has to do to be victorious, and we watch the characters knowingly do the thing that the bad guy needs them to do for him to be victorious. Imagine a business rival telling you that they could destroy your business if they had access to your files, and you responding by handing them your laptop. That’s Haunted Mansion.

Ten Days of Terror!: Bad Hair

Films: Bad Hair
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on various players

It feels strange for me, as one of the whitest people I know, to offer a lot of commentary on a film like Bad Hair. On the surface, this is a B-movie that in another universe would have been called Killer Weave rather than being the natural second film on a double bill with Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair. It very much is a movie about a killer hair weave, and so it does have that sort of B-movie credibility (or lack thereof). But at the same time, Bad Hair has some social commentary that, for the whitest of white people and someone who rolled a lot of 7s when it came to privilege, is both surprising and obvious. In fact, some of it is so obvious that I can’t believe I didn’t twig to it already.

We start in the 1970s, where we are introduced to young Anna Bludso (Zaira Kelley in this opening scene and then Elle Lorraine for the rest of the film), whose cousin Linda (Corinne Massiah, then Chante Adams) is relaxing Anna’s hair. But something goes wrong and Anna gtes burned by the lye relaxer and is left with a permanent scar on the back of her head.