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Reviews
Midnight in the Switchgrass (2021)
Not Sure Why They Bothered
Sometimes you watch a movie and you come away from it wondering why the people involved ever thought it was worth their time committing it to film. This is one of those movies.
Bruce Willis, as as his way nowadays, churns out a few meaningless lines presumably just so they can claim the movie stars Bruce Willis. Honestly don't know what the point of his character was and based on the way he phones it in, neither does Bruce.
The plot is fairly standard fare but it's quite impressive that they managed to make a desperate search for a serial killer actually dull.
The director has an annoying habit of cutting in flashback scenes of things that have already happened in the movie that make no sense, presumably because they'd run out of actual script.
Anyway, wooden acting, desperately poor dialogue and an ending that made me hope that they all killed one another as punishment for putting me through an hour and a half of this. Two stars rather than one for the young actor playing the little girl. She seemed nice.
Midwinter of the Spirit (2015)
Not so Merrily
This was frustrating. I've read a few of Phil Rickman's books, including a couple of the Merrily Watkins stories so I was predisposed to like this ITV version.
There were lots of good things (creepy atmos,scary looking spirit, David Threlfall) but for me these were all outweighed by just how pathetic the lead character was. Don't get me wrong - I'm all for having a flawed lead character but there's a fine line between 'flawed' and 'utterly useless' and Anna Maxwell Martin's inappropriately named Merrily lands the wrong side of that line. Rubbish as a mother, evidently a poor wife, an unconvincing clergy, pill-popping, fag-smoking, heavy drinking car crash of a character, she blunders through each episode making a mess of every situation she finds herself in.
I'm not suggesting she should be an ecclesiastical Jack Reacher but I just can't stay interested in a character with so few redeeming features. Shame.
Suspiria (1977)
Nope, Still Don't Get It
I've tried, really I have. That's the third or fourth Argento movie I've watched and I understand this one is generally regarded as his finest work but I just don't get the hype.
I get the fact that it's full of lush primary colours and I get the fact that the score is load and full-on and I even get all the reviewers on here describing it as some sort of 'feast for the senses' that concentrates more on atmosphere than actual horror. But (and it's a John Candy-sized but) the film, just like all the other Argento efforts I've watched, just leaves me cold.
Key question for a scary movie - is it scary? Nope. The director has a few good moments (making an airport sliding door intimidating - that's clever) but they're so interspersed with long periods of blandness that they can't maintain any effect. Even the death scenes - not scary. The blind pianist being mauled by his own dog? Laughable. I know special effects in 1977 weren't exactly Avatar standard but surely they could have shelled out a few extra quid for a fake dog's head that actually looked vaguely like a dog's head? Very little plot - no problem with that - but what little there was got mangled by an atrocious language track.
Not to say that this is a movie entirely without merit. The settings and colours are great to look at, Jessica Harper was good and the cook/housekeeper was suitably menacing. In the end though, this might be Argento's best work but that still doesn't make it particularly good.