Just the Ticket #100: Hallows' Eve Is Here

Hey, Hallowed Readers! It's the night a tenth of you have all been waiting for; Halloween is here, and so is the one-hundredth issue of Just the Ticket! And because it's All Hallows' Eve, a special collection of Halloween-themed Critical Quickies are in order. But not particularly. Umm. Maybe if I start writing the reviews, I can come up with something more clever than that. So here goes:

October Gale--Patricia Clarkson (The East), Tim Roth (Funny Games), Scott Speedman (Underworld): Although the synopsis would lead one to believe this is one of those couple-trapped-in-a-storm-with-a-possible-killer thrillers, the only thing Halloween-related about October Gale is the month in its title. Clarkson was cast solely for her ability to look monotonously depressed, Speedman plays a mysterious man with a gunshot wound who provides Clarkson's widow doctor ample opportunity to be more monotonously depressed than she already is, and Tim Roth is underutilized as the man who shot him; a role that he could have given far more enthusiasm to, were he not trapped in a slow-moving storm of depression. There is some action involving the three characters, but not nearly enough to justify the shooting of the film, nor of either actor therein.
F

It Follows: The title is ominous. The cast is insignificant. The scares are singular (by which I mean there is only one). And the hype should not be believed. The "It" in question is a sexually transmitted shapeshifting stalker-ghost that--pardon me, but there is no better way I can think of to articulate this right now--fucks its victims to death. That's right. It finds you and has sex with you until all of your extremities bend in the wrong direction and you die with a cheesy Edvard Munch look on your face. By any measure, contracting an actual sexually transmitted disease would be more frightening and entertaining than expending any period of time on It Follows. Ergo, It sucks.
F

Maggie--Arnold Schwarzenegger (Predator), Abigail Breslin (Zombieland), Joely Richardson (Nip/Tuck): Just from Schwarzenegger's name on the cover, you'd think Maggie was about him going around with an AK-47 blowing the heads off of zombies. You'd be wrong, and your brain would not be considered a delicacy because it's too small and probably smells like burning hair from all of the short-circuiting it does. Maggie is barely about Schwarzenegger at all, or about fighting zombies, for that matter. The real focus of Maggie is on the most personal of zombie-movie cliches: How a father's relationship with his daughter (played by Schwarzenegger and Breslin, respectively and respectably) develops after she is turned. The usual, modern pace of bitten, turned, boom! is slowed and rendered boom-less here for dramatic effect, enhanced by Breslin's mature performance as the titular, self-aware zombie-to-be. Maggie turns the age-old question on its head, asking not what we should do when our loved ones become zombies, but what they would choose to do if they were able. And the resulting message is a powerful one.
A

The Lazarus Effect--Olivia Wilde (House), Mark Duplass (Safety Not Guaranteed), Evan Peters (American Horror Story): Think Lucy meets The Exorcist, but without the cool visuals or an exorcist. A scientist dies and is brought back to life by her co-workers, only to discover that the re-animation treatment (or perhaps something more sinister?) has given her psychic powers. Chaos and murder ensue from that point on. The usual questions about science gone too far, what happens to us after we die, whether we should do things just because we can, and the plethora of similar social analogues we see in zombie movies, are given their due address, albeit a token address. Mostly the film relies on repeated wake-up scares and revels in its own carnage. Perhaps worthy of a sequel, but not worthy of the thought it attempts to provoke on occasion.
C+

The Harvest--Natasha Calis (The Possession), Charlie Tahan (Wayward Pines), Samantha Morton (Minority Report), Michael Shannon (The Iceman): Another film that tries to re-use elements of films that have worked splendidly in the past. The new girl in town (Calis) develops a relationship with the boy next door (Tahan), but quickly runs afoul of the boy's overprotective mother (Morton) and enabling father (Shannon). What follows is equal parts Rear Window and Misery, with a little Autopsy thrown in just to make things interesting. As a whole, it's predictable but enjoyable, made more so by Morton's enthusiastic tribute to Kathy Bates. Go ahead and Harvest this one.
B+

Poltergeist--Sam Rockwell (The Green Mile), Jared Harris (Resident Evil: Apocalypse): Sam Raimi (Drag Me To Hell) should have directed this, not just produced it. Seeing his name attached, I expected more whimsy, disgust, and fear from Poltergeist than I got. The always sardonic Rockwell seems to care as little about his character's motivations for saving his daughter as he does about his own motivations for agreeing to be cast in the first place. Rockwell aside, the suspense was well built in Poltergeist, leading to some decent scares involving a tree and a pull-string clown. Harris had plenty of personality and the effects were cool enough, but overall, so what?
C

The Gift--Jason Bateman (Paul), Rebecca Hall (The Awakening), Joel Edgerton (The Thing): What starts as your basic passive-aggressive stalker/revenge thriller and has every possible cliche of the genre intruding in the viewer's headspace, but manages to take everything that one might expect in completely unexpected directions, building suspense at a faster-than-usual pace, even when the pace of the film itself seems to slow. A classic case of good versus evil eventually turns into a fresh case of evil versus crazy that keeps the pot boiling until the very last second. And I was actually scared more than once, so as smart as Maggie was, and even though The Gift is technically not a horror movie, I'm still going to call it the best horror movie I have seen in years.
A+

I hope you have enjoyed my own Gift to you this Hallowed Evening, and stay tuned for more Ticket Stubs and other Ticketverse insanity in the days to come. I'll be spending the majority of November trying to write something more challenging as I tackle National Novel Writing Month, so don't expect too much from me for the next thirty days.

Ticket-author,
out.