THE CULT OF KIM NEWMAN
The critic and novelist on this month’s weirdest home-entertainment picks
The Slumber Party Massacre films (1982-’90) are a unique slasher franchise in that all three were directed and written by an all-female team — a tradition upheld by Slumber Party Massacre , a reboot from director Danishka Esterhazy (this month’s cult hero) and writer Suzanne Keilly (Leprechaun Returns). It sticks to well-worn conventions at the outset as a bubblehead posse virtually beg for trouble by heading out to a cabin by the lake where a driller-killer once rampaged. Then it pulls a hilarious reversal and takes off in wildly different directions. The funniest idea is treating frat guys the way most horror films treat women — down to lingering shower scenes and squeaking uselessness in the face of danger.
Ivan Kavanagh’s Son travels several well-worn roads, reasonably well. Single mother Laura (Andi Matichak) and her son David (Luke David Blumm) live quietly, trying to suppress traumatic memories of a Satanic cult/paedophile ring. In the film’s eeriest image, Laura opens her son’s door one night and finds his bedroom full of ordinary-looking, silent people… who vanish by the time a cop (Emile Hirsch) shows up. When David starts acting on vampirishcannibalesque cravings, Laura has to go on the run with him. The monster-son business is affecting, though some plot nuts and bolts don’t quite fit together.
Sarah Pirozek’s #Like updates that Hard Candy/prisoners abduct-an-abuser premise for the era of social media, as determined teenager Rosie (Sarah Rich) sets out to find and punish the internet perv who groomed and slut-shamed her sister into suicide. She lures a likely suspect (Marc Menchaca) into a bomb-shelter and sets out to wreak vigilante justice — but, in the process, has doubts about his degree of guilt and mulls over her own complicity in the tragedy. Menchaca (a Chris Mulkey for the 2020s, also creepy in monster drama No One Gets Out Alive) and Rich are excellent, and Pirozek has a feel for smalltown backbiting. Nice to see Jeff Wincott, direct-to-video action man of the 1990s, as an unhelpful cop.
It’d be hard to come up with a more generic actionhero character name than ‘Jake Hunter’. And as played by bearded, averagely charismatic hard-bloke Paul Sloan, Jake is Reacher and Rambo scrambled together but on the cheap in Every Last One Of Them . He’s out for revenge on gangsters he holds responsible for his estranged daughter’s death, but is upstaged by quality bad-hat brother-and-sister act Jake Weber and Taryn Manning. Richard Dreyfuss pops in for an unlikely cameo as the ‘Colonel Trautman’ stand-in, possibly because the filmmakers promised him a helicopter ride.
Castle Falls , directed by Dolph Lundgren, offers undemanding blue-collar action with a decent (and literal) ticking-clock suspense device. In the 90 minutes before demolition charges are due to go off and reduce a decommissioned hospital to smoking rubble, a prison guard (Lundgren) who needs cash to pay for his daughter’s operation, a down-onhis-luck MMA fighter (Scott Adkins) and a ruthless criminal kingpin (Scott Hunter) search for and fight over bags of cash stashed in the building. Given the premise, you can foresee most story beats, but the stars are on form (being slightly less invincible than usual helps) and you get your fill of spin-kicks, falls from upper storeys and dolts firing off machine-guns around high explosives.