‘Tis the season for big screams-on-screens action

As I write, it’s still mid-late October, which can only mean one thing: Christmas movies!! Sorry to say, that is not entirely a joke—arriving this coming week are several drastically early seasonal arrivals with unappetizing names like Christmas at the Kringles (comedy horror), The Holiday Hitman (comedy action), and A Very Merry Breakup (romcom). They’ll soon be crowded out by bigger enterprises in the same vein, so I guess you can’t blame them for trying to attract some attention before the annual deluge. However, in the interest of staying in the here-and-now, this week we are finally ready to celebrate Halloween in earnest. Which means of course finding the most obscure horror-ish titles. 

Needless to say, there are plenty of non-obscure ones available at theaters and via streaming outlets. We belatedly caught up with the year’s breakout indie horror hits, Backrooms and Obsession, and liked them both—in their very different ways, both significantly diverge from the jumpscare-riddled beaten track.

Several recent streaming releases have a similar appeal, in that they at least have some interesting ideas rather than just recycling familiar genre cliches. Jacob Lees Johnson’s I See the Demon finds musician Lucy (Alexis Zollicoffer) getting a surprise birthday party at the home she shares with boyfriend Ellis (Noah Kershisnik), with all their friends in attendance. But reality starts glitching—time rewinding, people disappearing, strangeness just out of sight—so Lucy increasingly wonders what is going on. Is this part of some game-changing celestial event? Are childhood traumas coming back to haunt her? More Twilight Zone than horror, really, this trickily constructed first feature is arguably more intriguing than satisfying, but it does not lack ambition.

Jordan Downey’s The Cycle also builds a mystery as a forensic anthropologist (Deborah Ann Woll)—i.e. she identifies corpses and what happened to them—is pulled into a case involving an apparent Pacific Northwest serial killer that may not even be human. One victim turns out to be her own long-lost father. The film has an atmospheric pull while it’s being a police procedural with macabre, possibly supernatural elements. When it turns into a flat-out monster movie, it becomes more ordinary, but this new addition to streamer Shudder’s roster remains worth a look.

Likewise finding monsters in the backcountry are the teens and tweens on a 1980s camping trip in The Weird Kidz, Zach Passero’s virtually home-made animated feature. Eight years in the making, it’s got a sensibility somewhere between Scooby-Doo, Daria and South Park. Pacing sometimes lags despite the presence of giant insects, human sacrifice, irresponsible firecracker use and more, but the sum effect is oddly endearing as well as funny. It hits VOD platforms Oct. 27. 

A trip to the country also proves fateful for aspiring young environmental scientist Russell (Daniel Doheny) in Breeder when, after his proposed research project is turned down elsewhere, he gets an out-of-the-blue offer of funding from a private source. Driving five hours to meet with miniature poodle breeder Patti (6’3” former bodybuilder Dot-Marie Jones), he finds her gated “ranch” compound is also home to five “daughters” who live in a household of strict discipline under this tyrannical matriarch. 

But that’s just the iceberg-tip of strangeness here, as it turns out the money promised will be forked over only if Russell participates in Patti’s own “experiment”—one involving eugenics, captivity, trafficking of genetically engineered infants, and quite possibly murder. Writer-director Alex Goyette’s film rather awkwardly shifts from a tone of macabre black comedy towards grimly serious terrain after a while. That doesn’t entirely work, despite some interesting narrative leaps at the end. Still, Breeder is compelling, offbeat and well-made enough to be worthwhile. It opens in limited theaters Wed/28.

Two more writer-directors making their mark in their genre will be visiting the Roxie coming days with recent works. On Halloween afternoon, Sacramento native Vivian Kerr will bring Seance, a 19th-century ghost tale that is, of all things, a more genre-angled spin on Strindberg’s 1888 play Creditors. Then on Wed/4 there’s “An Evening With Jane Schoenbrun,” in which the filmmaker who just released very meta slasher tribute Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma will present her prior I Saw the TV Glow, promote her first novel Public Access Afterworld, and be in onstage conversation with Jenni Olson. 

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If you prefer chills of a more international stripe, a new streaming release is prolific Indonesian genre specialist Joko Anwar’s Ghost in the Cell, in which an unjustly prosecuted journalist (Endy Arfian) finds himself in a prison where the guards are just as brutal as the warring convict factions. But it soon emerges that a third, supernatural force is doling out gruesome deaths to men on both sides. Heavy on both gore and comedy, not to mention kickboxing and dance sequences, it’s a movie that heads where you might least expect: Towards political allegory. Does it all hang together? Nope. But it is not dull. Nor is The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch, a B&W oldie from 1968 that ends the Japanese “Beautiful Nightmares” series at New People Sat/31. It takes a young girl from a Catholic orphanage and plunks her in a wealthy, creepy family home where the life-threatening weirdness is nonstop. 

On the artier end of things, arthouse platform OVID just added (on Wed/28) Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel, a 1979 Estonian film based on a novel by the Soviet Russian sci-fi authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who also provided source material for major titles by Tarkovsky, Sokurov, and Alexei German. This unclassifiable feature mixes elements of noirish thriller, horror, space fantasy, psychodrama, and more as a police inspector (Uldis Pucitis) is lured to a secluded mountain resort. When an avalanche cuts it off from the outside world, the residents’ eccentricities go into overdrive, with deaths and strange phenomena piling up. It’s a handsome curio designed more to provoke thought than deliver cheap thrills, providing one more reminder that a lot of interestingly oddball movies got made in the ’70s. 

For more overtly sci-fi entertainment, the Roxie’s “The Future According to Syd Mead” pays tribute to the late artist who started out in industrial design, but whose visual ideas seemed so far ahead of his time that eventually he was called by Hollywood. There, he provided key input on projects starting with 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. He went on to contribute to the original Blade Runner, Tron, Aliens, and more. The first has already played (in its “Final Cut” version), but others will screen sporadically through December 11, including two films that he was not involved in, but which he was a likely influence on: George Lucas’ chill white-on-white 1971 authoritarian nightmare THX 1138 (Sun/1), and Ngozi Onwurah’s 1995 Afrofuturist dystopia Welcome II the Terrordome (Dec. 6). The series runs simultaneous to “Syd Mead: Future Pastime,” an exhibit of his meticulously detailed paintings at the Transamerica Pyramid Annex Gallery (through Dec. 17). 

Those looking for intelligent new screen sci-fi might want to take a look at Orion, which after a brief theatrical run is available on VOD platforms next Tues/3. Trippy in a different way from director Jaco Bouwer’s prior Gaia (which we reviewed here), it opens with a bearded man of 30 or so (Drew Van Acker) waking in a bare chamber, with no idea why he’s here, how he got here, or indeed who he is. A voice over an intercom (erstwhile Brat Packer Andrew McCarthy as “Jim”) eventually invites the disoriented man he calls “Apollo” into a different room and commences a sort of passive-aggressive interrogation.

It would seem that our protagonist is the only survivor of a space shuttle that encountered some alien “life form.” His superiors keep prodding Apollo for intel, by turns threatening him (by suggesting he killed his fellow crew) and dangling carrots (like a spouse played by Debby Ryan). But the terms of the reality they represent keep changing. 

There is virtually no fantasy spectacle until the last lap. Orion’s screenplay, by Anne Withayathil, favors ideas over action, and enigma over horror. It takes place almost exclusively in just a couple rooms, yet it is not claustrophobic, let alone dull. It’s got a complex sound design (including Pierre-Henri Wicomb’s original score) deepening its mysteries. It’s not mind-blowing, but impressive nonetheless.

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