THE CULT OF KIM NEWMAN
The critic and novelist selects the month’s weirdest home-ent releases
NEILL BLOMKAMP TURNS from satirical science-fiction to dour horror in Demonic , which lifts more than a few licks from Tarsem Singh’s too-strangeto-forget, too-clunky-to-work The Cell. Carly (Carly Pope), understandably estranged from her mass murderess mother (Nathalie Boltt), takes part in a science experiment involving a gimmicked-up shower-cap that enables a close relative to enter the broken mind of a coma patient. Carly appears in low-res pixel form in an evolving mental version of her childhood home (an interesting visual) and chats to her mother, who reveals she did terrible things because she was possessed by a demon who might be using this experimental programme to get back into the real world. After that, things get murkier and murkier — it’s a misfire from Blomkamp, but studded with odd, ambitious ideas and effects. Played more or less straight, it has one line (“They’re exorcists!”) which is laugh-out-loud funny in context.
Filip Jan Rymsza’s Mosquito State is what would happen if David Cronenberg were forced to remake The Big Short. In 2007, Wall Street data analyst Beau Knapp senses a disturbance in the financial force just as he’s bitten by a mosquito, and begins to transform from a shambling ape in a suit to a boil-covered visionary maniac. It’s not quite clear what the insectile body horror stuff has to do with the sub-prime mortgage crisis, but Knapp — a familiar bit-player seizing the opportunity of a rare lead role to go all-out — is bizarrely fascinating. It boasts luxuriously oppressive art direction of the kind that makes you glad you’re not rich enough to live in a concrete bunker overlooking Central Park.
Elle Callahan’s Witch Hunt is set in an alternate contemporary America where witches are still persecuted. An underground railroad exists to help wise women (who mostly have red hair as well as magic powers) escape puritanical witchfinders. Claire (Gideon Adlon) resents her mother (Elizabeth Mitchell) for letting witches hide in the walls of their home, but comes to see the justice of the cause. The premise has so much potential that this feels like a series pilot rather than a movie, with great, telling details — a children’s book called ‘Let’s Go On
A Witch Hunt’, a requirement that schoolgirls have ‘sinking certificates’ to prove they don’t float when ducked in a swimming pool — and strong performances, especially from Adlon (from the thematically similar The Craft: Legacy) and young witch Abigail Cowen. There’s a sweet, strange discussion of the ending of Thelma & Louise
— which, in this universe, might be happier (“Perhaps they can fly”).
Maria Bissell’s How To Deter A Robber is a holiday crime comedy with a slackerish vibe
— it threatens to get nasty, but never quite goes there. Teen Vanessa Marano and her seriously useless boyfriend Benjamin Papac are left in the care of her chilly, stern uncle (Chris Mulkey) after a Christmas disaster — Marano and Papac pass out drunk after a ouija session in a house across the way that’s been burgled around them. The burglars — shortfuse Sonny Valicenti, dim-bulb Abbie Cobb — come back, and turn out to be as incompetent at ripping people off as the residents are at protecting their houses. It doesn’t quite develop along the expected lines, but it’s easily darker than Home Alone while keeping this side of the pitch-black wryness of Fargo.