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.

His wish for love is granted, but ….

  Bear (Michael Johnston), who works at a store that sells musical instruments, has a major crush on Nikki (Inde Navarrette), a co-worker who seems to regard him only as a friend. Too timid to pursue a romantic  relationship, Bear stammers his way through attempts to express his feelings, even rehearsing them with another co-worker (Cooper Tomlinson). 

    When Nikki initiates the perfect moment for Bear to take their relationship to the next level, he blows it badly, partly because he’s off his already weak game. Upon arriving home from work that day, he found his beloved cat Sandy dead on the living room floor.

   Cat lovers beware, director Curry Baker will provide additional reasons for upset.

   The major plot point arrives when Bear finds himself in a novelty shop where he spots a 1980s collectible called One Wish Willow. The novelty costs $6.99 and promises to grant one wish when the buyer splits it in half. 

    Baker then dives headlong into the movie’s surreal premise. After missing an easy chance to declare his feelings to Nikki, Bear wishes for her to love him more than anyone else in the world.

     Of course, Bear’s wish comes true — with a vengeance that liberates Naverrette to give a performance bristling with fierce attachment, rage, jealousy, and ultimately, violence. 

    Baker gives the couple a period of happy communion, ably capturing the consuming excitement of love in its early stages. But as Nikki’s attachment to Bear deepens, her behavior begins the transition from peculiar to downright frightening.

    For his part, Bear begins to realize what we knew would happen: He has made a big mistake by not being careful about what he wished for.

     Bear voices his concern about Nikki's bizarre behavior, things like standing in a darkened corner of a bedroom and watching him sleep. Nikki immediately apologizes, showing flashes of the woman Bear so badly wanted. 

    When Nikki worms her way into what’s supposed to be a boys' night at Tomlinson’s character’s place, she delivers a demented monologue that mesmerizes and frightens her listeners, including another co-worker played by Megan Lawless as a character who seems to offer Bear an alternative to Nikki.

     Obsession, which includes effective jump scares and builds toward a seriously bloody finale, may not be the deepest hunk of horror, but Navarrette possesses the screen as she tries to do the same to poor, bumbling Bear, a guy whose wish becomes horrifyingly true.

    

    

'Weapons' fires one weird shot

 

   Part fairy tale, part horror movie, part social satire, and part expression of unbridled lunacy, Weapons stands as a weird hybrid that stakes out its own eerie turf.

   Writer/director Zach Cregger (Barbarians) begins as if he's making a hard-boiled, socially observant thriller revolving around the unexplained disappearance of 17 kids from the same third-grade class in a small Pennsylvania town. 

   The kids were pupils in the class of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), a teacher with an alcohol problem in her past. At a town meeting, one of the fathers (Josh Brolin's Archer Graff) accuses Gandy of complicity in what appears to be a bizarre crime. The parents are livid.

   We already know that at 2:17 a.m. on a Wednesday, the now-vanished kids ran out of  their homes, their arms spread out like wings of airplanes. Their flight was captured on home security cameras, fleeing youngsters who may have fallen under a malevolent spell.

   Rather than following a linear path, Cregger focuses on six characters caught up in the mysterious drama. He begins with Garner's Justine and follows with the stories of five additional characters, each elaborating different aspects of the story.

   But this isn't Rashomon, a Kurosawa classic about contrasting, often opposing renderings of the same story. Instead, Weapons reveals the emerging fury of the town's residents: a uniformed cop (Alden Ehrenreich), the school's principal (Benedict Wong), a drug-addled young man (Austin Abrams), and the only student in Justine's class who didn't vanish (Cary Christopher's Alex).

   Abrams, by the way, dishes out a classic helping of dopey, stoned behavior. I never expected to find that kind of character amusing again. I was wrong.

   The movie's six tales build toward a Grand Guignol of a finale, which Cregger presents with the same controlled precision that marks the rest of the movie.

  Horror fans needn't worry. Cregger includes enough gore to satisfy bloodthirsty horror appetites, but many of the scenes, particularly in the movie's second half, bristle with macabre humor, much of it attributable to Alex's visiting Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan as a strange woman whose presence is alternately funny and horrifying). 

   Not everything about Weapons makes sense, and a couple of jump scares seemed too cliched for a movie that's more original than most. But why complain? Weapons provides the kind of viewing experience that may  leave some saying, "Wow, that was one crazy movie," and mean it as a compliment.

A not-so-innocent children's book

It's interesting that two of the year's more intriguing movies involve elements of horror. Why not? We don't exactly live in times without terror.

Both movies, by the way, drew attention as part of The Film Society of Lincoln Center's 43-year-old New Directors/New Film series. I'm talking about A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and The Babadook, both films directed by women.

More about A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, which was directed by newcomer Ana Lily Amirpour, at a later date. Suffice it to say now that it's an Iranian vampire movie filmed in Los Angeles. I know, you're sick of vampires, but Amirpour's film, shot in black-and-white, is too eerily unnerving to dismiss.

This week, though, we'll turn attention to The Babadook, a movie that's beginning to make its way around the country after its debut on VOD.

Australian director Jennifer Kent accomplished what I'd begun to think was impossible: She's made a good horror movie; i.e., one that doesn't shortchange scary thrills, but is also rife with ambiguity and psychological subtext.

The Babadook involves a children's book about a strange figure named The Babadook. He wears a top hat, and almost always is seen in silhouette. He's scary, ominous and perhaps unstoppable. He's dread personified.

The story begins when the widowed Amelia (Essie Davis) reads this strange pop-up book to her six-year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman). It takes Amelia a while to realize that the book, which seems to have appeared from nowhere, isn't exactly a cuddly, bedtime tale.

From that point on, The Babadook begins to mix horror with parental frustration while raising troubling questions: Is Amelia losing her mind? Is Samuel a demon child? Is a real demon terrorizing both of them?

I won't say much more about the plot except to tell you that Amelia became a widow when her husband died in a car crash. He was driving her to the hospital to give birth to Samuel. How's that for a large can of psychological worms?

But here's the thing -- or at last a thing -- with which you'll have to come to grips. Samuel is an obnoxious, impossible kid. He's prone to tantrums. He's mildly precocious. And he's dangerously aggressive. At one point, he pushes a cousin out of a tree house.

So naturally, we sympathize with a mother who's at the end of her rope. But Kent shifts that focus after we begin to wonder whether Amelia is losing her grip.

Perhaps all the horror we're witnessing in Amelia's home -- lots of things that go bump in the night -- is a creation of her mind, flowing from her badly damaged psyche.

When it comes to creating tension and keeping us off balance, Kent is no slouch.

But here's where the movie distinguishes itself: Almost everything we see is anchored to the real exasperation of a single mother who's being pushed to limits that are carefully delineated in Davis's increasingly unhinged performance.

I suppose The Babadook can be classified as a haunted-house movie, but it's more than that. It will rattle you and also give you something to think about as it moves toward its provocative and psychologically intelligent conclusion.