Faces of Death (2026) - My Take (Spoilers)

 

This was yet another Scream Unseen so it's not something I had any intention of wasting one of my movie slots on, even if I had ones left over. I only knew it existed because there was a trailer for it at the previous Scream Unseen.

The concept here is that someone is taking scenes from the actual, original "Faces of Death" released in 1978 (thank you Wikipedia), recreating them, and posting them on social media. Since the movie had various and sundry "scenes" they translate well to the short video format used on YouTube, TikTok, etc.

The original movie was mostly fake with real footage from other sources, sometimes recreated for effect (thank you Wikipedia). I was of an age when I remember when this came out and yeah, it was a rite of passage in some respects. Mostly it was people going "ew" and watching other things. It wasn't nearly as pervasive as some try to make it. Of course it had its fan base but what gross movie doesn't?

The main character is a woman who's job is to review reported content on a social media site. It's obviously meant to be TikTok but that's to be expected. It shows her going through various and sundry videos, approving or denying based on content. Per policy she lets the gross and violent stuff through but has to remove the ones dealing with sex education. No heavy handed writing there. Nope.

They show her taking blue pills she keeps in a baggie in her pocket. It turns out she's got anxiety because her sister was killed while the two of them were filming what they wanted to be a viral video. They were on train tracks and trying to film themselves in front of the train until the very last minute. She got away, her sister slipped on the gravel and was under the train when it passed. The main character is recognized by people as Train Girl.

I let that one go. She's not in any way distinctive physically so there's no reason why people would continue to recognize her because of the short attention span these videos have. Unless maybe she's living in the same area and people know here that way? Didn't seem like it but I can assume.

When she sees a second one of the videos in the same format she gets concerned and talks to her supervisor/friend about it. She's reminded that it isn't her job to make the call, she needs to follow the rules, and that she's signed an NDA so she can't talk about it outside work. I would think potential murder trumps an NDA but what do I know?

The videos are just fake enough to make you question them. That's done well. There's a consistency in using red tape over the eyes of mannequins used in the shooting and also in the scenery. They show the comments pouring in on the videos as people debate if it's real or not and how much they enjoy the content.

We see the killer early on. He works at for a cellular phone company and uses admin access to dig into how to find an influencer he's obsessed with. She's actually a pretty harmless one as influencers go. Per her own content she just wanted to show makeup tips and then things got popular so now she feels that she needs to keep her followers happy. The killer tracks her down and kidnaps her.

The main character uses her roommates laptop because she's on an internet break. She does this to try to track down the creator of the potential snuff content. Using techniques that don't really exist she makes progress but wants/needs the original uploads to look at metadata. Yes. They use the buzzwords. She coerces her boss/friend out of the office while he's working overtime and uses his computer to copy over all the videos. She's still taking those blue pills and the movie makes a point of her tossing the bag on the desk instead of putting it in her pocket like she's done every other freaking time it's shown.

Long story short(er). She gets fired for the pills and because she can't let this situation go. She buys a laptop so she can do her own research because her roommate told her she was getting too involved and wouldn't let her use his anymore. She continues.

The killer kidnaps someone from a TV news station and his son, who happened to be home at the wrong time. They show the holding cages in the killer's basement with the influencer and the father-son duo. The father gets pulled out and used for the next video being shot. Literally.

I can't remember how the main character figures out who the killer is and where he lives. She tries talking to the police and gets brushed off. The killer sets up a honeytrap and gets the information on the main character so he can use her, killing her roommate in the process. She decides to go in on her own. Predictably she's caught and put into the empty cage. She uses a convenient self defense lipstick knife her roommate had to escape and she's able to get the influencer free to go with her. They break out while the killer hunts them but go out into the fenced back yard that has undeveloped land behind it.

The influencer gets shot (obviously no one in the subdivision cares about the sound of a high power rifle being fired repeatedly) and dragged back. The main character stays back to get evidence and snags the convenient external hard drive labeled FOD. When she runs away she gets away. The hospital finds ketamine in her system from when he knocked her out, the nurse lectures her, and gives her a bottle of Narcan.

The killer has brought the influencer back into the house and puts on his meek and mild clothing and persona when the main character brings the police over to check things out. He was smart enough to make his own 911 call about being stalked and describing the main character. The police believe him, the calm meek guy who said he's being stalked, over the almost hysterical main character saying there's dead bodies and people chained up in his basement. He was even clever enough to turn up the music so it drown out the sound of the still alive influencer moaning in the kitchen.

I'll wrap this up.

The main character goes back to have this out with the killer. On the Uber ride over there she's huffing the Narcan. She gets there, he drugs her again, and she goes with it. When she's in the filming room she pops up and they fight. She stabs him with the lipstick knife she brought in until she can get to other weapons. There's the mandatory "hide from the killer" scene. There's the mandatory extreme horror scene. There's a mandatory wrestle on the floor covered in blood. There's the mandatory bad guy monologue on how he's giving the people what they want. Surprise, she's wearing a button camera and has all of it on the memory card. As he's lying there, bleeding and cursing, she uploads it to social media.

End of movie.

I will say the concepts weren't bad. Using an old discredited horror/slasher/fake documentary as his inspiration the killer uses people's fascination with extreme content to kill people and get accolades. The prevalence of social media in young people's lives fuels this kind of thing, which isn't really wrong. It's more a commentary on that than on the killing itself, even though he uses prominent social media people as his victims.

What was bad was the story wrapping those concepts. Disbelief had to be stretched to the breaking point when it was the race between the killer and the main character, then the battle between the main character and the killer. Putting his confession on social media was a "cherry on top" kind of thing, since that's where he put his crimes.

She had to go back because the hard drive she took was hit with a bullet during her escape. There are ways to recover data, you know. The police can do that. But that wouldn't have worked with the plot.

This is also one of the increasingly popular non-endings that I'm seeing. Yes, the killer is seriously wounded and his confession is made public. But there's no conclusion. Just her sitting there covered in blood, laughing/crying that the upload finished and the comments start. Maybe they wanted to make the statement that the same public that adores you will turn on you in a heartbeat? I don't know.

The lipstick knife also bugs me. It's a pretty nice self-defense weapon. The top is real lipstick. Removed it's about an inch long curved blade. But it's not an attack weapon and wouldn't have caused near the damage they showed in the fight. It's like using a .22 gun for self-defense. It just pisses them off.

Project Hail Mary User Review Annoyances

 

Yes. I chose the annoyed guy meme as my cover image because he pretty much nails my expression when reading far too many user reviews of this movie. I read the reviews mostly to downvote people who bitch about things in the book that aren't in the movie, things in the movie that aren't in the book, and how the book and the movie are different in general.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

Have I made this clear enough yet? Because I can paste a hella lot more of that pair of sentences.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

One more for good measure.

Here's something people need to learn:

Adapt: to make suitable to requirements or conditions; adjust or modify fittingly.

The book and the movie are different mediums. The book needs to be ADAPTED to the medium of film. That doesn't mean copy-pasting the text into a screenplay. It would be much easier if that were the case. No. It means taking what's in the book and figuring out what the heck is going to play visually.

If you've read the book, which I do recommend, you'll find there's a crapton of science, a crapton of monologue, and a crapton of buildup to the mission itself. That buildup involves a crapton of people who make brief appearances. None of this is going to translate well into two and half hours of screen time.

I get it. People have opinions. That's why they write reviews. I'm perfectly fine with them writing them. I'm not perfectly fine with their opinions about how the book should have been adapted. None of them are screenwriters. None of them are directors. None of them have the slightest clue about how to adapt a novel to a screenplay. But darn it all if they present themselves as the high arbiters of what should be done.

I don't do that in my reviews. I think this is the only review I've done that even mentions the source material and even then I separated it out from the movie itself. That's because I understand that a book needs to be adapted to a movie.

There's people whining that they "dumbed down the science". If you've read an Andy Weir book you know you're going to be reading a science heavy book. A very science heavy book. It's easy to have your eyes glaze over at times as he goes through the science accurate processes needed to do what needs to be done. Imagine that on the big screen, taking up precious time. Do you really want to watch Grace incrementally increasing the percentage of nitrogen in the taumeba farms by 0.05% until they get to where they need to be? That's going from zero to over 3%. I'll let you do the math on how many iterations that is and how long it would be to show each one. The movie shows that he's doing it and then shows the labels on the breeder farm with percentages and success/fail. That's maybe two minutes of screentime but gets the entire concept across.

Then there's the outcry about the coma resistant gene being removed from the movie. Even Mr. Weir admitted it was a cheap way to deal with the plot progression. But it worked, in the book. There was no reason to put it in the movie because they handled the situation in another, more suitable for a movie way. Same result, different method.

I'm gonna keep going on some of these, let me tell you. Because I'm peeved and I have a blog.

The book has an entirely different time progression. It was years between when Grace was brought onto the project and the launch. Literally years. They had to build the ship and send it up in parts, to be assembled by people on the ISS. They had to do things like build the spin drive, which was not a done deal when it was shown in the book. Plus they didn't add the third side that was a squeegie for the dead astrophage for some reason but hey, seconds matter in a movie.

Grace did do EVA testing in the book. He tested various and sundry pieces of equipment and was versed in how things worked. Stratt had him involved in the project to the point where he was doing paperwork on the remaining things that could be brought onto the ship. It was stated that everyone on the project considered him Stratt's second in command. That's not something that happens in a few months, as the movie implied.

And then there's Rocky. Rocky did have a different "tone" in the book, no pun intended. Rocky was an experienced engineer and had his own wealth of wisdom. He was more somber, more focused, and at many times fed up with the far less somber and focused Grace. Although when science was on the line it was Grace who led the charge. When it was a more abstract problem Rocky was the one who could break it down, as engineers tend to do. They didn't take that all away from him but they certainly made him a less somber personality.

The ending difference really set some people off. Like, they got legitimately angry about the changes. They didn't see why those changes had to happen. They honestly did. In the book Rocky's planet has a much much higher gravity than Earth, and Grace suffers from living in it. He's arthritic, he's never really recovered from the nutrition deficiencies on the trip to Erid, and he's older. You simply can't do that with an attractive charismatic actor. It would be stupid. Instead they give Grace a home.

I will touch once and only once on the "meburger". No one in their right mind would have put cannibalism in this movie. Grace even says that's what it is but he's justified it as not really cannibalism because he's eating himself. If you haven't read the book, which I do recommend, his protein source is his own cloned muscle tissue, the process which the Eridians learned from the laptop and data he gave them. That bit of morbid humor stays in the book.

Another part of the ending that changed was the fate of Earth. In the book Rocky tells him that their scientists see that the sun is brighter. That's how Grace knows his message got back safely. It's a good line and says all that the scientist needs to hear. The movie, a more visual format, has the Earth team with the sample and his recordings. It closes the loop between him and Stratt. There's no closure like that in the book.

I will note something that I read online when people were debating the ending changes. By the time Grace finds out about the sun it's been at least twelve and probably a lot more years since it happened. We're never really told, or I don't remember, how long the trip from Tau Ceti to Erid took. Let's say twenty years. If Grace did decide to go back he would have been twenty years older, suffering from the gravity and nutritional effects, have to risk the coma again when he's less healthy, and there's a good chance everyone he knew would be dead. Staying on Erid isn't that difficult of a decision when those things are factored in. The movie has less time passing on Erid but still would send him home to an unknown world where he's generations behind whatever happened. His world is gone even if the planet survived.

Those are the bigger things that keep coming up in the user reviews, and that little one tossed in at the end that I like to think about. It's OK to like both the book and the movie for what they are. It's OK to like one but not the other. It's not OK to compare them and get whiny that they're different.

2026 is the year of "Project Hail Mary". People are going to be talking about it for a while because I don't see anything coming out this year that has the broad appeal of this one and has a good book behind it. It will be bouncing in and out of theaters during the year as well so people can go see it again on the big screen.

One last peeve then I'll stop.

There's an audiobook for this that people love. The first potential voice for Rocky in the movie is the voice actor from the audiobook, which I find amusing. But for the love of all that's holy do not tell people that they have to listen to it rather than read the book. Seriously. People are telling others to not read the book, listen to the audiobook. Not everyone wants to listen to books, you know. Some of them, including me, prefer the written word so we can put our own voices to the text. Recommend it all you like, but don't say one is better than the other. They can both be good, in their own ways.

One last last peeve and then I'll stop.

Because of the name there's a significant number of people who thought this was a religious movie or one that had religious overtones. It doesn't. The title doesn't refer to religion - it refers to an American football play. As soon as I see someone referencing Bible verses in their writeup I lose all respect for them and assume they don't know their ass from their elbow.

Hunting Matthew Nichols - My Take (Spoilers)

 

This was yet another Scream Unseen. There's been quite a few of them in a row. I can see why they've been doing this because the movies, quite frankly, need all the help they can get.

"Hunting Matthew Nichols" is a combination pseudo documentary, found footage, and cult movie. That means a lot of people speaking for the camera with title cards as to who they are, shaky camera work, and pure laziness.

Side note. I'm sick and tired of writers falling back on the satanic cult thing to wrap up a storyline. It's flat out lazy and the market has been flooded for a while. It feels like they can't quite figure out how to tie it all together so they slap a cult situation in and call it good. No. It is not good.

The premise here is that Tara is still looking for answers as to why her brother disappeared twenty three years earlier. Her brother's friend also disappeared with him but she really doesn't care about him. She's back in her remote hometown with a director and camera person. She also makes a big point of the fact that she's worn the necklace her brother gave her all those years. It's silver with a kind of viking/celtic design.

While she's there she interviews her own family, the family of the other kid, and the police investigator. These are mixed in with her going through the evidence box the police finally coughed up. Why that took twenty three years and a court order isn't really discussed. In the box is a bone totem along with video tapes, etc.

Oh. The movie also notes that the area has an unusually high number of unsolved missing persons cases.

What we get is Tara overacting about everything. The police investigator also gets her own overacted monologue. The other kid's father gets exposition but he keeps it lower key. We get a lot of talk talk talk. It's how we find out about a local legend where there's some sort of old settlement with a creepy guy who showed up once in a while then they all went missing.

The father of the other kid hands over an old journal that the boys supposedly found in the local history museum and seem to have taken because when Tara saw the footage of them finding it she went there and didn't find it. It has a pictorial version of that legend along with other stuff. Including, big surprise, what seems to be an incantation and ritual.

The found footage comes from tapes they find in the evidence box. Unusually we don't get to see much of it. We see the reactions to people watching it. Tara figures out the tape that was in the video camera found in a weird abandoned cabin the police decided was the last known location of the kids isn't in evidence. She has to get another court order for that.

The police investigator gets her monologue when Tara confronts her about the missing evidence. That's when the investigator says it was withheld for the public good and that she can't take Tara to the cabin (or give directions) because the city tore it down.

Tara does get the last tape and this is the most we see of the found footage. It's the standard horror stuff with scared people, voices off camera, and horror violence. Yeah. Given that Tara is adamant that they go to the site of the cabin.

The camera person quite wisely decides to nope out. The director has a brief internal struggle but does go. Off the two of them go into the woods with a map, some supplies, and hopefully an end to this rather drab and boring movie.

They get to the site. It's completely clear, as if there had never been a cabin. Being the careful people they are they set up their little pop tents in the clearing. Sigh.

Tara, being Tara, attempts to perform the ritual she found using her necklace, her blood, the bone totem, and what she found in the journal. It's a bust and they go to bed.

Except maybe not? Because they get woken up to find the cabin, right where it was before. Not that they know it was exact but hey, there's a cabin where there wasn't a cabin. So of course she goes in, in the middle of the night, after performing an unknown ritual. The director has an internal struggle then follows her in.

She's doing another ritual on the cabin floor and says she's in contact with her brother. This is where I kind of frown and wonder if it's a clue, a foreboding, or a mistake. She's using her necklace as the conduit and doing the "right for yes, left for no" form of contact. For every question where she says the answer is yes, the necklace is swinging left for her point of view. It's going to the right for the director (and camera) in front of her.

This is the only potentially interesting thing in the movie, in my opinion. Because it would have been a great way to forebode what's going to happen and how much she's caught up in her own needs. When she asks if she's speaking to her brother, it goes left from her point of view but she says it's proof it is him.

Anyway. Now we're into the cult thing. A door opens in the cabin and she's dragged into the darkness after she asks her brother to show himself. The director wisely beats feet out of there, dropping his camera in almost the exact place the evidence photos showed her brother's camera.

Tara does run out of the cabin saying she was wrong and it wasn't her brother. Duh. The director gets his foot caught in an old bear trap and kinda can't run much now. He blacks out (or something) and wakes up to see Tara standing naked in front of him, facing away and looking at a tree. He looks up to see other nekkid people with shiny eyes and decides that the bear trap ain't going to keep him there. She's got shiny eyes. He runs, leaving the camera. It shows a lot of people coming down from the tree and following him.

Credits roll.

A quick scene has the camera person running in the hospital and the director is in bed with bloody bandages around his face. He sits up and screams.

Now the movie is over.

Yeah. Not a lot I can say about this one. I guess we're supposed to think there's a cult out there that's taking people and they're living in the woods? There's something supernatural living in the deep woods? I dunno.

I do know that having Tara's obsession with finding out what happened to her brother just isn't that interesting. I found no compassion for her because she's a whiny, demanding bitch here. She shows up and disrupts people's lives for no good reason. She lies to the police investigator who told her to turn off the camera, she said she did, and the director is crouched outside the room with the camera on. Yeah, obsession. I get it. It still gets dull.

The whole cult thing also doesn't do anything. It comes out of nowhere. There's absolutely no indication that there's anything going on, except the statement about disappearances. No one in the town seems to know there's anything hinkey in the woods all around them. Plus the guy in the hospital would not have blood soaked bandages. Hospitals frown on that kind of thing when the patient is admitted and under care.

So I'd say skip this one as I say to skip so many of the horror movies being released. I honestly don't know why there's a glut of them now and why they're so bad. Independent filmmakers are not spending their money wisely if this is what they're choosing to make.

Project Hail Mary - My Take, With Bonus Features! (Spoilers)

 

I waited to review this one and then got caught up with not being at the computer. I'm guessing that anyone reading this has either seen the movie, read a review, or both. So it's not like I'll be saying things other people haven't said. I'm adding a part at the bottom about the book, which I read after seeing the movie - the order I recommend. The movie review will NOT have references to what was in the book.

The Movie

The premise of the movie is that there's something taking energy from the sun and it's going to drop Earth's temperature into the "extinction event" levels. This is bad. Dr. Grace is a middle school science teacher after nuking his higher academic career by both writing a long paper about how water isn't necessary for all life forms and calling out his colleagues by name and with eloquent insults in the paper. Whoopsie. But he's one of those school teachers who's got the charisma to engage his students and an honest enthusiasm for science.

The movie uses the premise of Grace having to remember the past while he's in the present. He wakes up on a spaceship with little to no memory of what happened or even who he is. As he's figuring that out he's also figuring out what he's supposed to be doing. As a bad bonus the other two crew members died in the voyage so it's just him.

To cut the movie into two is easier for me than going back and forth. I can summarize the stuff that needs summarizing better that way.

The backstory is that Eva has the power and authority to do pretty much anything she thinks is necessary to find out what's happening and how to fix it. They're going to send a crewed ship to Tau Ceti because that star isn't infected even if it should be so they figure the answer is there. While that's getting set up they're finding all kinds of uses for the astrophage, including it being fuel for the ship. Grace had accidentally figured out how to make more of it (breed it) and they're doing that in great quantities.

Because of an accident both of the science officer astronauts are killed, which leaves Grace as the next candidate because Eva hedged her bets and had him involved in most aspects of the project. They don't have time to train anyone because the launch window is in three days. He doesn't want to go but he's drugged and sent anyway. As I said, she'd do what it takes.

Grace picks up memories as they apply to what's happening at the time. He's filling in the blanks, which also builds the story for the viewers. It doesn't distract as much as you might think but it is something where you have to realize it's not linear time for quite a few scenes. Plus there's some where the point of view may annoy but it's better storytelling.

He gets to do science when he makes contact with the alien ship. He's discovering the alien just as we are. Yes, I know that's how storytelling works but this is done in a way that takes us along the interesting and important steps.

The alien doesn't have vision and uses passive echolocation to "see". This creates a communication problem so there's time spent showing them learning how to talk to each other. Rocky says his tones, Grace has a transcoder and is making a dictionary. During that they converse and learn about each other and each other's worlds.

Rocky is alone too because the rest of the crew died on the way. Grace is the one to break the bad news that it was radiation that killed them and Rocky was saved because his quarters/area were protected by the astrophage fuel tanks. Turns out Rocky's people didn't know about space radiation. Turns out they're not very versed in a lot of sciences. Grace is so he's the lead of figuring out what's happening. Rocky gives the down to Erid (his planet, which I gleefully used instead of Earth in this idiom) advice when Grace is too far in the clouds to see the basics.

Rocky moves over to Grace's ship to use the science equipment. He has a hamster ball for himself and builds habitrails through the ship for him to use. There's some Odd Couple vibe going on and the entire cultural difference problem that gets explained as needed. This is where it turns into a buddy cop movie and it works for them.

One thing that's very important to Rocky is that Grace watches him sleep and he watches Grace sleep. It's a cultural thing. There was some initial miscommunication about what "sleep" was because Rocky was conflating it with dying and didn't want to lose Grace like he did his crew. That's when the "I watch you sleep" happens. Grace accepts that it just has to be that way.

Rocky finds out that Grace lied to him and isn't going home. He's going to send everything back on the little ships and die. Rocky finds this unacceptable and does the math to figure out he can provide enough astrophage for Grace to get home at the cost of him getting home a few years later. Grace accepts with much gratitude since he was very much not at peace with what was going to happen.

Science happens and they decide they need a sample from the planet that's feeding Tau Ceti. Off they go in Grace's ship. The science is that there's something on that planet that's keeping the sun in balance so it doesn't get cooler. The reason for that is on the planet, they hope. They do find that there's spots where there's concentrations of .. stuff. Science means getting a sample since that may be the answer.

This is one of the most powerful scenes in the film. You'll hear people calling it "the fishing scene". They get the ship as close to the planet as they can and drop a probe into one of the areas to gather up whatever they can. The scene is quite frankly beautiful. Everyone says that the theater they were in is dead silent during that scene and it was both times I saw it. It's freaking beautiful.

This also brings one of the most tension filled scenes into play when the ship goes into an uncontrolled spin and knocks Grace unconscious before he can correct it. Rocky breaks out of his ball into the ship's deadly atmosphere and drags Grace to the med bed. Grace wakes up and follows the trail of "blood" to where Rocky is curled up in his bedroom area. He moves slightly.

While Rocky is lying there Grace does the science stuff on what the probe brought back and uses science to create a version that will live in Venus's atmosphere. Since nothing is said it's assumed that unmodified taumeba will live in the planet by Rocky. 

Grace talks to Rocky during all this, which is the story exposition done well. And of course, Rocky wakes up. There's a heartfelt tearjerker here and Grace tells him that the collector worked, they got the predator they wanted, and he was able to use Rocky's breeder farms to make enough for both of them.

Now that they have what their suns need there's the parting of the ways. It's sad. It's very sad. But they know it has to happen. For whatever reason Grace cuts the tube away instead of Rocky deconstructing it like he did last time (that bothers me) and they go their separate ways.

Grace gets woken up by a contamination alert. The breeder farm was made of metal that Rocky's people use to make pretty much everything. The taumeba are little fuckers and while Grace was adapting them to not die in nitrogen they were figuring out how to escape through the stuff. He flushes the ship and seals them in plastic bags, which they can't get through.

Then he has the realization that Rocky's ship is made of that metal and he's not a scientist so he has no idea what's going to happen nor can he fix the problem since the problem is his ship itself. Rocky is going to die alone in space. This is .. not good. Grace doesn't have the resources to both go back to Earth and to save Rocky.

In the end he sends the probes back to Earth with the taumeba, all their research, everything about Rocky, etc. He goes out and finds Rocky, luckily still alive but a few tense moments when we're not sure. I wouldn't have put it past them to make it too late and knowing that made the tension real. Rocky is alive and very concerned, because he knows something is wrong and because he knows Grace can't get home.

The movie ends with Grace on Erid in a bubble they built for him. Rocky is in a much better "suit" that lets him walk instead of roll. He tells Grace that the scientists have repaired and refitted his ship to get him back to Earth. Grace asks to think about it and Rocky says to think about it a long time. The movie ends with Grace going to a cave entrance where there's a bunch of stuff on his side, a clear wall, and a bunch of little Rocky creatures that are his students. They're energetic little buggers and he's teaching them science.

It's a tearjerker movie at times. They make you care about not just Grace and Rocky but the fates of their worlds.

There's people who say they made Rocky too "light" and used him for comedic relief, against an actor who's already doing comic relief. That shows they didn't read any of the nuances. Rocky is an engineer. Grace is a scientist. They're both voraciously interested in what the other one does. They're also two entirely different cultures learning about each other at the same time. That's going to cause a lot of the situations that they show. Failure to see all those things means these are people who look for the movies to spell everything out for them so they don't have to think for themselves. Yes. I'm dissing those people.

I was lucky enough to see it on real 70mm film IMAX the first time. The massive screen and beautifully balanced sound - sigh. We saw print 9 of 15. Yes. There's only 15 prints of the movie. It's about 12 miles long and weighs around 700 pounds. There's a certain warmth about film even if it was filmed digitally and transferred to physical film. During the quiet parts I could hear the projector. It's something. And the screen is freaking huge. I think I'm going to see it on IMAX again just because I'm lucky enough to be able to do so.

The second time I saw it was the local digital IMAX. It was still visually stunning. It was brighter and I could focus on details that were missed on the big screen because there was just so much to look at. The place where the cropped IMAX falls short are the space scenes. Those are the ones in the big aspect ratio. If you haven't seen it in real IMAX you won't notice what you're missing so don't fret.

I think this one is going up for a number of awards but the ones it should sweep are the technical ones. The visuals and cinematography are going to be hard to beat. There's so many practical effects that the CGI heavy movies will seem shallow in comparison. I don't think it will get any major awards for acting or writing.

The Book

If you've ever read an Andy Weir book you know you're reading a science book. Andy wants the science right and he's gonna write about it. That's why his books are as good as they are. They expect you to follow along instead of dumbing it down.

I'm going to focus on the things that were in the book but not in the movie. That's why I watched, then read. Not knowing what was excluded meant I got to take the movie as its own entity. That's important to me.

The book goes into a lot more detail about various and sundry scientists on Earth. They were reduced, eliminated, combined in the movie. It makes sense because the movie isn't about them. It's about the end result of what they did but who did it is irrelevant to the movie. That's why so much of the pre-mission stuff was removed. It didn't add to the story the movie was going to tell.

The book had one pseudo-science thing that was a plot device. There was a genetic component to who could be safely put into the induced coma. That limited the available people. Grace happened to be one of them but he wasn't told until he was being told he's going on the mission. Even Andy wasn't completely happy with that piece but it was something that needed to be done to cause the situation where they had limited options for replacements.

Grace didn't realize how much he was being groomed for the project until it was made very clear to him during one of the parties. They had to point out how he was present for almost all of the major meetings, involved in most of the science, etc. The primary captain had everyone's respect from the moment he was named (for reasons never stated) and he's the one who stood up and settled it by telling Grace he's the second in command of the project.

Another thing the book didn't carry into the movie was the intentional climate change ordered by Eva. They nuke Antarctica to get the methane that's in the ice released into the atmosphere. What makes this wrenching is that she uses the research of a well-known climatologist to be the one to plan and execute it. 

Grace's forced addition to the crew was much less dramatic in the book. Instead of him making a run for it, like the movie, he's in a cell then drugged. The captain had said he didn't want anyone who didn't volunteer which made Eva have to make a slight change to her plans and send Grace aboard in the coma, with the captain's objections something she won't have to deal with.

Another big thing that was changed was Rocky's planet Enid. In the book it's at 29 atmospheres and the gravity is insane. The ammonia-based atmosphere is touched on then left alone because once it was stated there wasn't much else to talk about. Rocky was bouncing around on Grace's ship because he was essentially under no gravity as far as he could tell.

Rocky had been at Tau Ceti, alone, for 46 years before Grace showed up. They did not give this number in the movie and that's good. People who find out from the book have a whole new sense of sadness for Rocky.

The book goes way into what Grace figures out and/or assumes about Rocky's physiology. Part of it is when they sleep, they're completely helpless. That's why someone watches them. They need someone to keep them safe. Now think about not having that for 46 years after everyone else on his ship died for reasons he didn't know. The movie touches on this with more of a food coma aspect which keeps it light(er) but the stuff in the book is dark.

Rocky doesn't impose himself on Grace in the book. They decide he should move over there because that's where the science is done and science is going to fix the problem. The changes to Grace's ship are discussed and he helps where he can. There's a respect there that they take out of the movie because it changes the entire texture of the relationship and it doesn't really change the story.

When Rocky breaks out of his ball to save Grace when the ship is spinning out of control it's a lot worse. Grace gets pretty seriously burned getting Rocky back into his area and then almost kills him by trying to help him. The movie shows a small scar on Grace's arm from that situation and doesn't do anything with the "almost killed Rocky by trying to help even though he had no idea what to do" thing.

The rest of the changes are in the ending of the story. Grace only knows that his sun is getting brighter because Rocky said the scientists told him. That gives the assumption that things aren't going to get worse on Earth but he has no idea how bad they got.

They do have a bubble dome for him on Erid but the insanely high gravity is still there and so is the pitch blackness around his bubble. He doesn't have that bright and airy seaside home like in the movie. He's got a yurt in the darkness. He's suffering from the high gravity and still has some residual effects from only having taumeba to eat after his food runs on on the trip to Enid. He had it rough since he made his choice.

And then there's the food thing. This one is something people have definite opinions on. Some say it should have been included, some don't. There's one source of protein Grace can eat on that planet and it's him. They took some samples and cloned his muscles. He calls them "meburgers" because he's literally eating his cloned self. He also says they're pretty good. It's a great scientific insert but so not in keeping with the movie.

Overall they took the darker aspects out of the book, in a lot of ways, and left them out of the movie. They simplified the science by skimming rather than delving. They used their time to show, not tell.

This is why they call it an adaptation. They took what would work in a visual medium with a fixed length of time and chose what they felt would make the best story, while keeping as true as possible to the source. The book and the movie are two different things and if you treat them that way you'll get a much wider story than if you only consume one or expect to have everything in one medium.

They Will Kill You - My Take (Spoilers)

 

I was interested in this one from the trailers and it was the Scream Unseen for the week so hey, I didn't have to use an extra slot to see it. Nice.

I'm kind of sad to say it's another formulaic campy horror movie. They tried, I think. They tried to add unique elements that would set it apart but nope, it didn't happen. The foreshadowing is pretty heavy from the start and they don't deviate.

The story is that Maria takes a job at a high end hotel(?) as a housekeeper. Her first night they, well, try to kill her. The backstory is that Maria and her younger sister Asia were abused by their father, Maria shot him in kind of self defense, served time, lost track of her little sister, and took the job through deception to get her back. To summarize that - big sister Maria is there to get little sister Asia back. I don't know exactly why she had to go to these measures to do it but hey, maybe because the staff lives on-site? Dunno. Sets up the location.

That first night they do indeed try to kill her. There was a warning written on the mirror by the maintenance guy (assumed) that showed up in the shower steam but was gone when she got out of the shower. Oddly enough when they do start coming through the walls (there's a convenient hole in the wall behind the small refrigerator in the room) she pulls a very large knife out of her bag and goes to town. They've got pig faces which turn out to be masks as they chastise each other because she escaped.

That's the setup. They're chasing her through the building.

But wait - these guys heal from everything. They're incapacitated for a bit, but then they're back. The extra bit of the story is that they're all immortal. There's an exposition spouting housekeeper with a fake Irish accent you can float bowling balls on telling her everything from the moment she walked in the door.

Speaking of that. She showed up at the place saying she's the new housekeeper, using the fake name. The housekeeper asks to see her ID, then shows her in. Her cell phone is taken as a matter of procedure. She's introduced to some of the guests/residents/whatever they are that are in the lobby. She's shown her room, seeing things like the breakroom as they go by. Then she's in for the night. My logical mind wondered if the real person had already done the whole HR thing of paperwork or if that's just ignored because they're going to kill her so no need to pay her, right?

Now the chase is on. She's going to try to find her sister while she's being hunted by the immortal people who want to kill her. There's many reviews that reference Tarantino because she's barefoot through the entire movie. It's not a "Die Hard" concept where there's problems with it. She just is. So someone had a fetish or they wanted to show something that escapes my grasp.

There's many a fight and would-be kill. There's a humorous aspect of one woman's head being blown off (she brought a double barrel short shotgun too) and her eyeball wandering around on its own reporting back. So lots and lots of blood and gore, even the classic beheading with the blood spraying to the ceiling. I told you they stuck to the camp horror formula.

She finds her little sister. A very minor detail from earlier in the movie comes back to show that her little sister has decided to join them rather than be killed. The minor detail is a pair of earrings shown earlier now worn by the little sister. The woman who's place big sister took was to be her sacrifice and entry into the immortal club. Whoopsie.

The little sister is all caught up on her big sister leaving her with the abusive dad. It's not like the big sister had much choice after being put in prison for trying, and failing, to kill the abusive dad when they were on the run but hey, had to have a reason why little sister is upset. This is now part of the interactions as they both run to try to get out. Again, not really tight writing.

Big sister gets caught. They bring her up to the top level where, gasp, there's an alter to Satan/some demon. Big big surprise since the original pan down the building at the beginning of the movie shows a red window in the attic with a pentagram. Not subtle at all.

The thing here is you write your name on the pig-head-on-a-stick, make your sacrifice, do some kind of soul pledge, and you're immortal. There's a ceremony where they bring the demon to inhabit said pig head. It's "alive" and kinda nasty. It's also covered in names. There's a rather nice fluorite terminated crystal hanging from its ear as a writing implement. The fact I noticed this tells you how much the rest of the movie kept my attention.

The next setup is that little sister goes forward, writes her name, then kills herself. That seems to be unprecedented because it sets up a major fight scene. Big sister conveniently and expertly slices off the piece of skin with her sister's name on it during the fight. There's the standard hooks hanging from chains, poles set into the floor, etc. for mayhem to occur. The demon is not happy about being stuck on the stick so the housekeeper jams the pig head on her own head so big sister is fighting the housekeeper with the pig head.

Sigh.

Big sister has a lighter and lights up the housekeeper (after she's impaled on one of those handy floor poles) which also burns the pig head. That burns the names which makes the immortals, currently in various states of impalement, mortal. All fall down.

The sisters get away and the skin doesn't have the little sister's name on it. At some point one of them changed it to the big sister's name. I think it was before the fighting really started. I dunno. The skin is still there and squirming in her hand as they leave the flaming remains of the building.

I'm tired of the Satanic premise so many of these movies use. It's getting tiring. It's lazy. They can't think up something so hey, let's make them devil worshipers. Woo! High fives all around the writing table. I can't complain too much because it's part of the formula.

If you like campy horror this won't disappoint. The lead actress is better than you'd expect and I hope she gets some better roles in her near future. No one else in the thing deserves more.

Slanted - My Take (Spoilers)

 

This was a Screen Unseen and I'd never seen a trailer for this. I was truly going in with no idea what this would be about but it was pretty obvious by the title and by the opening scene.

This is the story of a Chinese family and the daughter trying to fit into a not-really-that-wrong parody of America. The names of some of the stores were a freaking riot. The AR-15 Food Market got me.

They arrive in the town when Joan is eight years old and on her first day of school someone gives her the slant eyes insult. She has the Chinese lunch her mother packed for her mocked so she dumps it out.

Smash cut to her in high school. She trades lunches with her Desi friend so they're both happy. I'm not sure where mom works and dad works as a house cleaner. They both speak Chinese at home and very limited English where needed. Joan speaks perfect English.

The popular girls at school are the pale blondes. All of them. Even a chubby one. There's a single very popular one who the rest gravitate around. Joan has the longing looks for them and there's a hallway of fame for homecoming kings and queens, all the cleancut American guys and every single girl pale with long blonde hair.

She decides to run for homecoming queen, even with her Desi friend trying to talk her down. Things are going lackluster until her dad gets hurt at work and she has to fill in for cleaning. The popular girls see her and that's the end of her homecoming queen aspirations. She even tries dying her hair blonde herself but it's not a success so she's got a big patch of black roots and orange chunks.

Online she's been using filters that change her to be the white blonde she wants to be. Every time she does she gets a message from the company that makes them that she's a high percentage user, that she's important to them, etc. Then she gets a message that's a one hour limited offer to go to their office and after some debate she does. The storefront is an abandoned barber shop but the logo is on the window and going through the debris of the previous store she ends up in a bright and shiny lobby.

She's offered the chance to become what she wants to be - white. The doctor shows her video of the success stories. In fact he'll give her a freebie permanent hair color change. She walks out with nice blonde hair and the paperwork she needs a parent to sign because she's underage. It states very clearly, and the doctors says it as well, that the change is permanent.

She lies to her mother and says it's a form for a field trip and goes the next day to have the procedure done. The movie skips over any and all science for this process, and that makes it more believable. Joan of pure Chinese descent walks in, Joan of pure white descent walks out. There is now a different actress playing the character.

Her parents have no idea who she is and it takes persuading to get them to realize it is her. They're appalled at what she did and there's some touching dialogue later from her father about how he looked at her and saw his mother, etc. But that's not where this movie goes. They do go back to the clinic and tell the doctor they didn't agree to it and change it back. He points it that it's permanent and shows them the door.

She takes on a new name at the school and starts over. The popular girls take to her and THE popular girl pulls her into her orbit. She's got what she's wanted - she gets white privilege and she fits in. Her Desi friend is also appalled and asks if she thinks she's ugly. Valid question. During this time she's had a few patches of skin flake and peel off.

Her skin starts to sag and show some of her original skin tone. When she goes back to the clinic there's now a huge line and she's told she can see the doctor far out in the future. They give her some cream and tape to deal with the problem until then.

She gets nominated for homecoming queen by the top girl herself, who's going to be too busy shooting a TV show to do it herself. During this time there's more slippage. She runs into the bathroom and is followed by the top girl. Unexpectedly she helps with the tape to hide the damage and tells her that her original face will fight the change for a while. Well then.

She's invited to dinner at the top girl's house to find out both her and her father had the procedure, her mother chose not to and isn't in their lives anymore. The house is completely white and beige, a not very subtle showing for the situation.

When she gets home Joan sees more of her skin slipping and flaking. She starts pulling and digging. There's piles of what are meant to be bloody skin on the makeup table as she looks for her old face. It ends with her holding her hand over her new face and half of her old face showing.

This isn't subtle and it's not meant to be. However it's also poorly written and too long. Others have said it could have been, and should have been, a Twilight Zone episode. I really have to wonder how hard up the studios are for non-comic book movies when I see a lot of what's been on the big screen. The concept here is good. The execution is bad.

The funny thing is I don't see this as ever being shown in my city. This is so not the audience for this movie.

Undertone - My Take (Spoilers)

I stay away from online trailers and reviews before seeing a movie. I like the trailers in the theater and that's how I decide what I'm probably going to see. This one intrigued me and I couldn't avoid a blurb that said it was actually scary. That sold me.

The movie is about a pair of podcasters who do a show about the paranormal. Evy is the sceptic, Justin (voice only) is the believer. Yup. Got a Scully and Mulder thing going on here without the sexual tension aspect. It seems to be popular enough because they get fan mail and have been doing it for a while. Justin is in London so that means they record it at 3am her time.

During pre-show talk Justin brings up a different situation where someone who seems to be an influencer did something that because viral where a bunch of people cut off their ears and mailed them to her before killing themselves. Evy brings up the site to mess with him and it's a disturbing image of a screaming woman on a red background with a sound playing. She leaves it up long enough for him to yell at her to stop.

Evy lives with her mother and is her mother's caretaker. Her mom is end of life. She's tucked away in her bedroom, under smooth sheets and blankets. She's just lying there, breathing. The house is full of religious trappings and I do mean full of them. Lots of pictures, crucifixes, candles, statues, etc. They're in pretty much every shot in the movie.

Justin gets an email with ten audio clips from a random letter email address and some cryptic words. Being who they are they decide to play them and discuss.

The movie does suspense well. They stay away from the tropes and there isn't a single jump scare in the whole thing even though they set it up to think there will be. They do have images in the background as needed and they're indistinct enough to make them creepier than if they were shown. The sound was incredibly done where it's mixing the sound from the clips to the sound in the house. Cinematography had framing so well done it was both unnoticed and right in your face. Technically I'd like to say this film should be up for minor to mid-level awards.

As they listen to the clips things get progressively unhinged in what they're listening to. What went from simple proof that the woman talks in her sleep turns into more and more unexplained things. Evy also starts experiencing unexplained things that involve her and her mother.

The plot settles onto demonic possession and a relatively obscure demon who has a problem with babies, causing miscarriages, stillbirths, and mothers doing unspeakable things to their babies. Just before that starts being involved Evy finds out she's pregnant.

This is where the oddness happens from a viewer standpoint. She calls her doctor to schedule a pregnancy test instead of going to the dollar store and getting a test. The doctor calls back just before they start a 3am taping to tell her she's six weeks pregnant. Then the next clip they listen to has a baby crying.

Evy keeps finding things out of place. A statue shows up on her mother's bedside table and shows up again after she put it in a drawer. A painting over her mother's bed is askew. She finds her mother out of bed after she's gone out for an evening/night even though mom is in an end of life coma. We see her mother move in the background when something odd is happening to Evy.

The reason I bring up the sound is that it's so well mixed. When they're listening to banging on the walls in a clip the sound is on the right side of the theater. Then there's an occasional one on the left before going back to the right. It's a way to try to figure out if it's all in the clip or if there's stuff happening in the house. Evy notices something's wrong but doesn't know what.

The audio clips start Justin down the path of old nursery rhymes, what they meant, and that there may be hidden meanings if played backwards. Yup. The classic "play them backwards for the real meaning" thing. She doesn't hear anything in them, he does. Considering the movie opens with her singing a nursery rhyme to her mother it ties in well.

There's the obligatory flickering lights that Evy does not wisely unplug, given that she's living in an older house and flickering lights tend to be a sign of A Bad Think Happening with the Electricity. That bothered me as a bit of a lack of real world impact. Lights do turn off and on at crucial moments, like during a clip when something is said. It's overall building the suspense.

Evy is doodling with crayons. She took them out of the drawer in her mother's nightstand when she put the statue in there the first time and you can see a kind of disturbing drawing in black and red crayon. Her doodles are getting more elaborate as time progresses.

Jeremy doesn't want to listen to the last two clips. He's tried to answer the email but the address was deleted. He's done research and found out that the name of the aforementioned demon is in the email address (backwards) and that they are hearing it more and more in the clips. The voice of reason is overridden and they seem to have a regular live broadcast when people call in.

The callers are all about the people in the clips. The first caller says they're from the same city Evy lives in, brings up how the house was full of drawings of dead children on the walls, and they were both dead at the bottom of the stairs. The next caller seems to be trying to warn them not to listen to any more of the clips but static cuts him off. The next one describes a horrific child murder but doesn't have any useful details like when or where. The last caller is talking about how she's a horrible mother and sounds like she's going to drown her child.

The two of them work hard to convince her not to do it. Evy kind of breaks here and says she killed her mother but it's more of her not praying with her than an active role. This is where the movie breaks down.

The sound is loud enough that it's difficult to hear the various things happening at the end. The visuals are chaotic enough that it's difficult to see important things but they do show just enough of some of them, I will say that. With those two mixed up it's tough to follow the last few minutes.

Evy's house is going nuts. The TV has the image from that viral thing and she can't turn it off. It turns out it isn't even plugged in. The light bulbs are popping all over the house. As she turns you can see black and red crayon drawings over all the walls. The table where she sat while recording her podcast is covered in drawings, especially one that's multiple pages. There's flashes of faces in plastic bags. When she goes up to check on her mother the bed is empty, neatly made, and the statue she kept moving is in the middle. The last thing we get to see is her mother walking towards her from the bathroom behind her. The last thing we hear are screams and thumps.

And this is where it ends.

We get no closure. This is the same thing that happened with "Iron Lung". All buildup, no payoff. Leaving the ending to the audience's imagination is a cop out to me. I did not spend all that time getting invested in the movie only for them to pull the rug out from under me at the end.

There's a lot of different interpretations of the ending on the internet. Go figure. I'm going to get past my dislike for the concept to give some thoughts on it myself.

The audio clips seemed to match Evy's descent into whatever the heck she descended into. They paired up with events in her home and in her own life. There's an interesting bit early on where there's an off-camera voice telling her how to tell when her mother is finally dying. One reviewer noted that the signs the voice gave actually happened at the beginning of the movie and all the scenes with her mother were either in her head or the demonic entity animating her - take your pick.

The last scenes we have are the house in total disarray and not at all what we'd seen until that point. The laptop is buried under papers when the last time she was "normal" she was using it. The kitchen has the table and chairs on the ceiling rather than the floor. The walls, which were fine until now, were now covered in those drawings. There was .. something smeared on the kitchen counters. Someone mentioned there was a creepy baby or doll on top of the refrigerator. All the cabinet doors are open. The only tidy space was her mother's room.

So yeah. Go with whatever ending you want since they weren't strong enough to give us one on their own. I still consider that lazy writing. They spent all that time doing a great job building suspense and then lost it when they ended the movie on ambiguity.

If you like suspense, go ahead and see it. That's well done indeed. If you want a full movie with an ending, you may want to skip it. I will admit to tensing up as things progressed because they were so well into building suspense without releasing it in things like jump scares and big plot drops. It wasn't interesting enough for me to go to see it again and find all the key points where the audio clips may have meshed with what was going on with Evy.

We never do know what happens to Jeremy, if anything. He sounds distressed but it's so late in the movie there's no way to tell if it's really him or in her head. So we don't get closure with him either. Another annoyance for me.