Ten Days of Terror!: The Addiction

Film: The Addiction
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

The Addiction is a film that I had heard of and been interested in for a number of reasons. Abel Ferrara is an interesting director, for starters, and when he delves into horror, the results are worth watching. I also like it when there is a very different take on a classic monster or myth. The Addiction is a vampire story, and interesting not because of that, but because it addresses the idea of vampirism as one of a sort of drug addiction.

Admittedly, that’s a natural place to go, and that in and of itself isn’t entirely unique. The idea that vampires are addicted to blood is, after all, a very obvious place to take the vampire story. The difference here is that our main character, Kathleen Conklin (Lili Taylor), is a doctoral candidate in philosophy. So, while we’ve seen vampires dealing with concepts of their lives being controlled in some way by addiction, but we have rarely had a protagonist who has the philosophical chops to really address the idea in anything more than a visceral and basic way.

Ten Days of Terror! Here We Go!

It’s that time of year again, and while I don’t post as much as I used to, I’m starting to post at least a little more regularly. Nothing, though, will stop me from posting a ton around Halloween, the true greatest holiday of the year, at least for some personal reasons. And so, once again, 40 posts in the next ten days, four posts per day.

Like the last couple of years, I’ve themed the days (at least I’ve themed nine of the ten. I don’t actually plan any of this out—it just works that I got nine groups of four, with a catch-all category at the end. Here’s what’s coming in the next 10 days:

Gun Fu-lish

Film: John Wick: Chapter 4
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

When, exactly, did action movies become things that took up an entire day to watch? Take a look at the John Wick saga, by way of example. The first movie came in at a tidy 101 minutes. The sequel barely cracked the two hour barrier at 122 minutes and the third crew a little longer at 133 minutes. And now we have John Wick: Chapter 4 that comes in at a brain-melting 169 minutes, a stone’s throw from a full three hours. Why? What’s the point of making this movie a solid 45 minutes longer than it needs to be to tell its story?

I’m going to go into this under the assumption that you have seen the first three chapters in the John Wick saga. By way of quick recap, John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is a former assassin who left the life to live a quiet life. This was cut short when his wife succumbed to cancer. A chance encounter after that brought him out of retirement and back into a thriving underworld of crime and assassins. A badly-considered murder or two later, and Wick is on the run from the entire criminal underworld. That’s where we are in this fourth installment. With the entire criminal establishment after him and a bounty on his head, John Wick attempts to survive, even if that means buying himself back into the underworld for a third time.

More (and Fewer) Brains

Film: Return of the Living Dead II
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Genre mash-ups aren’t easy to do, something that is evidenced by the fact that a lot of them are ultimately not very good. Certainly there are a number of exceptions to this idea, something that is evidenced by the fact that there are a lot of great ones. Return of the Living Dead is an example of a great horror/comedy, and one that genuinely affected the idea of zombie movies. The “zombies eat brains” trope comes from this movie, not from Romero. Unfortunately, the sequel is the opposite, starting with the uninteresting name of Return of the Living Dead II.

If you don’t remember (or never saw) the first movie, the basic conceit is that the original Night of the Living Dead was a real outbreak, but instead of destroying the zombies, thy were captured and contained. And, naturally, they were misplaced and shipped to a facility in Kentucky. Wanting to impress his new protégé, a worker in the facility releases a zombie and mayhem ensues. We’re going to essentially forget all of that here. Return of the Living Dead II is more or less an unconnected movie with the same basic name.

Invite Him--He's a Fungi

Film: Gaia
Format: Streaming video from Hulu on Fire!

One of the things I like about horror movies is that they reflect the time in which they are created. Go back to the 1950s, and a lot of the horror is science fiction-based and has hints of both atomic mutants and the threat of Cold War Russia. There’s a reason that Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the original) can be reasonably interpreted as both anti-communist and anti-McCarthyism. 9/11 caused a rise in American nationalism and led directly to movies like Hostel, where the evil was “out there” in non-American places that put us in danger. With the increasing threat of climate disaster looming, films like Gaia are absolutely where horror is going to go in the years to come.

Gaia starts with a pair of workers for the South African forestry service working on a survey. They are traveling by river, and Gabi (Monique Rockman) is operating a drone while her partner Winston (Anthony Oseyemi) paddles the canoe. The plot essentially begins when the drone gets knocked out—Gabi gets a glimpse of what looks like a mud-covered person knocking it out of the sky. Not wanting to leave electronic garbage in a forested area, Winston drops her ashore so she can track the drone and meet up with him later.

Stealing Fire

Film: Prometheus
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

I question the idea of prequels sometimes. They can make sense for those who want the backstory on something that they love, but they cause real problems with science fiction movies. That’s definitely the case with Prometheus, which is a prequel to Alien. It’s also a movie that came out several decades after the movie that follows it in the timeline, and this is an issue, beyond the obvious problem of things not matching up the way they should.

There is also the serious question of how to classify this movie. There are definite horror elements, and anything in the greater Alien universe is absolutely going to struggle getting away entirely from the horror designation. But Prometheus is only horror in parts. There are certainly elements of horror here, but not a lot of surprises. Anyone who knows Alien knows where we are going and can assume the fates of most of the people on board the ship after which the movie is named. And so, this becomes nothing more than a playing out of events to get us to setting up the chess board for Alien the way we need it set up.

What I've Caught Up With, September 2023

I've got about three more months of my life being completely out of control. I get a little of it back with the start of the new year. Until then, watching a movie or two whenever I get a moment seems to be what is keeping me sane--that and trying out new recipes. I caught up on a few movies in September and have also watched a couple of seasons of The Blacklist as well as the short follow-up season to Justified. More to come in October.