A horror movie with sex on its mind

  Remember the horror series Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma? The original starred Billy Preston, an actress who has vanished from public view. Obligatory sequels followed, establishing the Camp Miasma movies as a horror staple that wore out its welcome.

  Stop scanning your memory. There never was a Camp Miasma series, but director Jane Schoenbrun bases her movie -- Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma -- on a meta-conceit. An indie filmmaker, Hannah Einbinder's Kris wants to remake the original Camp Miasma movie, retooling it for contemporary audiences.

    To prepare, Kris travels to an abandoned camp where the movie's former star (Gillian Anderson) lives in isolation. Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow) makes movies that have garnered a following, partly because Schoenbrun's films deal with (wait, let me try to calculate the number of themes) movie madness, trans issues, pop culture, female eroticism, and campy asides, this time evidenced in the search for the perfect Jolly Rancher.

     The horror element of Schoenbrun's movie involves a character called Little Death that lives at the bottom of a lake near the abandoned camp, emerging occasionally to spear people to death or, in the case of Anderson's Billy, to deliver the world's best orgasm. 

    Little Death wears a box over his head that resembles a repurposed air vent that might have been salvaged from the bottom of the lake. His look is more last-gasp Halloween costume than one calculated for terror.

     The screenplay makes comparisons between Billy and Norma Desmond of Sunset Boulevard. Kris wants to convince Billy to appear in the remake. A studio wants a version that's more woke, less transphobic.

     Less a character than a collection of intellectualized tropes and inhibited sexuality, Kris makes an argument for the remake that sails over Billy's head. Billy understands that Kris' over-intellectualization masks the link fundamental between fear and desire that she's been avoiding.

      Transparent artifice from production designer Brandon Tonner-Connolly makes it clear that Camp Miasma, which includes a segment from the original movie, needn't be taken with Kris' cinematic seriousness.

     That's not to say that Schoenbrun doesn't indulge in gushing sprays of plasma as Billy slowly coaxes Kris into accepting her libidinous desires, no matter how strange they may seem to others. 

      Mostly a two-hander, the movie includes supporting performances from Jasmin Savoy Brown as Mari, Kris's bisexual partner, and Aren Buchholz as Thor, Mari's male lover.

      Appearing as a studio exec who's baffled when Kris calls him to pitch her latest version of Camp Miasma, Dylan Baker lands the movie’s funniest scene, a send-up of the mismatch between studio preoccupations and auteur ambitions.

      Wild and amusing as all of this may sound, Camp Miasma misses an essential horror ingredient: scares. Moreover, its amusements seem aimed at an audience that, like Kris, is fluent in the language of horror. It pays to know something about split diopters and how they’re used in horror films.

      Speaking with a southern accent, Anderson's Billy is more intent on liberating Kris's sexuality than on making another movie. Anderson's's vampy, campy performance constitutes the movie’s main attraction, enriched as it is by the humanity Anderson* conveys.

      Camp Miasma, which is less morose than I Saw the TV Glow, lives in its own world and seems aimed at those who want to be part of Schoenbrun's inside joking and gender explorations. Me? I kept waiting for the movie to break through its own self-involvement.

*Thanks to reader who pointed out name mistake. Now fixed.

Spectacle can't save 'Tron: Ares'

   

  Throughout the year, I have a fair number of movie conversations. I mention this because in more than 40 years of reviewing, no one in my admittedly limited circle has ever wondered why there weren't more sequels to Tron, the 1982 movie that was admired for its CGI innovation but fell short in most other ways. 

  Tron may have spawned its share of devotees. If so, I don't happen to know any of them.

   I begin my review of Tron: Ares, the third Tron installment, this way because I wondered why Disney had opted to give Tron another run. Had advances in CGI allowed for richer visual expression? Have current obsessions with AI spurred enthusiasm for a story in which virtual reality plays such a significant role?

    I don't know, but I do know how Tron: Ares, which I saw in IMAX, struck me. Mostly, it didn't. 

    Brimming with red-hued visuals and offering complex visualizations of The Grid (the movie's version of virtual reality), Tron: Ares builds a world that alternates between captivating and repetitive.

    As was the case with the first installment, story often feels less than compelling. Director Joachim Ronning sets up a simple conflict as two tech moguls (Greta Lee and Evan Peters) square off at a moment when science  has advanced to the point where virtual programs (seen in human form) can be transported into the real world. 

    A moral problem results. Lee's Eve Kim wants to use these AI creations to help humankind; Peters' Julian Dillinger aims to enhance the authoritarian power he craves by transporting state-of-the art warriors into his real-life world.

    Dillinger wins the race to bring virtual beings into reality, but with a catch. After 29 minutes, his creations collapse into piles of debris. Not to worry. Kim has an antidote. Using work initiated by her late sister, Kim discovers a code that can sustain the life of virtual beings indefinitely.

    The big twist, I suppose, involves a change of heart by Ares (Jared Leto), Dillinger's warrior in chief. Ares quickly (too quickly perhaps) begins to question his main directive, which requires him to capture Kim so that Dillinger can retrieve the desired code. Ares's unexpected flaw: benevolence.

      Lee gives Kim the requisite enthusiasm, but her performance is subordinated to the movie's ongoing light show. A mostly deadpan Leto adds flickers of wit to Ares's repertoire. At one point, Ares affirms his desire to become human by confessing that he prefers the synth-pop music of Depeche Mode to the classicism of Mozart.

      Action pounds and abounds. As the plot unfolds, spiffy light cycles race through city streets, trailing red beams that turn the movie into a showy spectacle, displays that seem more the point than the outcome of any of the movie's many chase sequences. A mood-setting Nine Inch Nails score pushes toward the final credits, which include a short epilogue.

      Among the supporting performances, Gillian Anderson registers as Elizabeth Dillinger, Julian's conscience-stricken mother.

     References to the first movie can be found, and, of course, Jeff Bridges reprises his role as Kevin Flynn, hero of the first edition. Bridges's late picture appearance made me wonder whether The Dude hadn't dropped in on a sci-fi epic. If only he had.

     Whether AI poses an imminent threat to humanity is a subject for others to consider. As for Tron: Ares: I seldom felt the one quality any movie, whether virtual or reality-based, should provide: involvement.

    

An eccentric detective at West Point

 

A great cast can't save The Pale Blue Eye, a gloomy melodramatic story about a detective (Christian Bale) who investigates the murder of a cadet who was hanged before his heart was cut from his chest. Adapting his screenplay from a novel by Louis Bayard, director Scott Cooper delivers a chilly drama that brings a historical figure -- Edgar Allan Poe -- into a plot weighted with secrets. Poe (Harry Melling) did attend West Point, but the story is pure fiction. Bale's Augustus Landor invites Poe to join him in trying to solve a crime that has the Academy on edge. In addition to Bale, the movie casts Gillian Anderson and Toby Jones as a husband and wife whose son (Harry Lawtey) also attends West Point. Their daughter (Lucy Boynton) catches Poe's eye. Charlotte Gainsbourg portrays a waitress at a local pub who carries on an affair with Bale's Augustus Landor. Yes, that's Robert Duvall as an expert on witchcraft whom Landor consults. Suggestions of the paranormal waft through the wintery depictions of West Point, where Timothy Spall takes a turn as the school's embattled superintendent. A moody depiction of 19th-century life turns Cooper's movie into a mystery that's a bore or perhaps "chore" is the better word. The gothic environment Cooper creates is credibly somber but the drama feels freeze-dried.