Salem's Lot (2024)

It's been 20 years since the last adaptation of Salem's Lot so I guess there's a chance that many people exploring the horror genre nowadays will be less familiar with the tale, first presented in a Stephen King novel that remains one of his best, before being turned into a traumatic TV movie directed by Tobe Hooper. There have also been other sojourns into, or near, the town, with A Return To Salem's Lot in the mid-1980s, and King himself expanding on the tale in separate short stories and as part of the threads winding through The Dark Tower book series. So I don't think it should ever be classed as something that cannot be revisited/reworked.

Lewis Pullman is our Ben Mears this time around, a writer who returns to the small town that he lived in for a time as a child. The town, and particularly one large house, has a certain pull to it. Ben forms a connection with Susan Norton (Makenzie Leigh) while he is back in town, and befriends a schoolteacher named Matt Burke (Bill Camp). It doesn't take long for these three to notice that something strange is happening around them, with town residents disappearing or acting very odd, as a powerful vampire decides to make Jerusalem's Lot the base for his attempt to turn the USA into his own little Fangtasia.

The second film directed by Gary Dauberman, who helped to make the Annabelle series such a success, and also worked on the screenplay for both chapters of It, the biggest problem with Salem's Lot is something I wouldn't normally tend to complain about. It's far too short. Considering both of the main previous attempts to film this story have clocked in at about the 3-hour mark, this solo movie needs far more than the 114-minute runtime it gets. That becomes very obvious when scenes seem to clash against one another, allowing no time for the proper development of the bigger picture of a town being infected and turned into a ghost town (but, obviously, the ghosts are all vampires).

There are good moments here, all of the actual vampire stuff is well-handled (it's often spooky and inventive, if never actually scary), and the way in which certain scenes are reworked is often surprisingly successful, especially in the change of setting for the big final battle. It's just a shame that the pacing never feels right for most of the runtime, with the exception of a few set-pieces in the second half that you just know the rest of the movie was planned around.

Pullman is decent in the lead role, although he doesn't shine as brightly as some other potential choices (Ben Mears has never been the most memorable King character though, despite the greatness of the story). Leigh is better, with the advantage of being able to comment on a town that she's lived in all her life. Both Bill Camp and Alfre Woodard (playing Dr. Cody) are excellent, feeling quite appropriately like more experienced peers helping the younger leads to deal with a very odd situation, and there are also enjoyable performances from John Benjamin Hickey (as Father Callahan), William Sadler (Sheriff Parker Gillespie), Pilou Asbæk (as Mr. Straker), and Spencer Treat Clark (superbly unnerving as the grave-digger, Mike Ryerson). The other person to mention is Jordan Preston Carter, playing young Mark Petrie with an expected mix of wisdom, anger, and terror. Carter is very good in the role, although a couple of the best moments involving his character are slightly mis-handled, again all to do with the pacing.

Maybe we'll see the full version of this one day, and I don't doubt that there was a lot of extra work done in the editing room here. It's almost like watching a series on a streaming service and accidentally hitting the "play next episode" option twice, leaving you with a gap that you piece together as the ongoing narrative continues. There's still enough to enjoy here, and it's certainly not as bad as many other remakes I could mention. The visuals and atmosphere both have moments of brilliance, but it's clear from the opening credits and very first scenes that this is a film with much more just beyond the edges of the screen that horror fans would love to see.

6/10

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Netflix And Chill: The Gray Man (2022)

As soon as I finished watching The Gray Man last night, I smiled. Because it's a film that is as easy to review as it was easy to throw together. I'm not saying that everything onscreen here is a piece of cake, not when it comes to the technical side of things, but it makes use of a cast with obvious talent to tell a story we've seen 100 times before. So I am going to say that the Russo brothers (Anthony and Joe) felt quite at ease while filming this. I'm sure it also helped that Joe Russo worked on the script with fellow MCU workers Chrisopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.

Ryan Gosling plays Six, a highly-skilled assassin/agent who was released from prison many years ago by Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) when the latter realised he could make great use of a killer with a strong moral compass. When his latest job doesn't go to plan, Six finds out that his most recent target was Four, another agent like himself, and he was being killed because he had dirt on the new person in charge (Carmichael, played by Regé-Jean Page). Six then becomes a wanted man, and Carmichael has no qualms about using the sociopathic Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans) to hunt him down. Lloyd won't care about collateral damage, despite the protestations of the woman who is supposed to help oversee this "off the books" op, Suzanne Brewer (Jessica Henwick). A young girl gets caught up in the whole scheme (Fitzroy's niece, Claire, played by Julia Butters), and Six ends up being given some valuable assistance by agent Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas). That covers pretty much everything, and actually gives you more than you need to know. This is an extended chase movie, and it's one that moves nicely from one set-piece to the next, making the 2+ hour runtime less noticeable than it otherwise would be.

Here are a selection of things I decided were most worthy of mentioning about The Gray Man.

1. Drones are a blight on the action movie landscape, and will do for them what smartphone cameras did for horror movies over the last decade or so. 

2. Ryan Gosling continues to be one of my favourite leading men, despite (or maybe because of) playing safely within his seemingly limited range.

3. Chris Evans also continues to be one of my favourite leading men, and we'll all be much better off if he gets to have more entertainingly villainous roles like this one. He's a man who really knows the value of delivering threats with a big smile and a twinkle in his eye.

4. Ana de Armas is a star, and I hope she continues to make hay while the sun shines. I also keep being reminded that there are a number of films from earlier in her career that I need to check out.

5. The Russo brothers CAN shoot action well, but you wouldn't know that from some of the main sequences here. Some of the action is nicely shot, but far too much of it is too choppily edited, too busy with so many elements being thrown around onscreen, and too focused on showcasing the filming style over showcasing the physical work being done by the leads (or their stunt doubles).

You should manage to have fun with The Gray Man. A surprisingly witty script, one that plays to the strengths of the leads, helps enormously, and every main player already mentioned does well in their role. There's also time for some good work from Dhanush (playing an agent named Avik San) and the great Alfre Woodard. It's not very original, which isn't a big problem when it aims to just consistently entertain, but it also never really feels like the stakes are high. Six is an unstoppable machine, even if he manages to maintain that identity with a hell of a lot of help from Miranda, and the last few scenes underline this by being sorely predictable and anti-climactic.

I'd watch another film making use of these characters in this kind of situation, but everyone knows how easily pleased I can be. This was a decent bit of witty action, but it was nothing great. I'm just thankful that the Russo brothers at least cast the best people they could for the main roles.

6/10

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Bonus Review: Annabelle (2014)

A horror spin-off from The Conjuring, this is a film that shows just how easy it can be to put together a polished final product without it feeling too obviously designed for the masses, even though it IS. I didn't love The Conjuring, but I did enjoy aspects of it. Annabelle is absolutely on a par with that film, although I was perhaps a little more receptive to it because of going in with lower expectations. There are less scares here, but those that are here are executed as perfectly as you could wish them to be.

For those who didn't see The Conjuring, Annabelle was a periphary character/prop used to show just what the main characters - the Warrens - had to do in their battles against evil forces. The start of this movie reprises those moments from The Conjuring, before moving backwards in time to show viewers the origin of the malevolent power that came to be contained within the doll. Well, that's the rough idea. What happens, instead, is that the audience is given another modern horror movie that replaces ghosts with demons before hitting many similar beats to the grand horrors of the late 1970s. Annabelle Wallis and Ward Horton play the young couple, Mian and John, who end up with a doll in their home who appears to be far from lifeless, and it's not long until they start freaking out (understandably). A priest (Tony Amendola) may be able to help them out, but it all depends on just how powerful the evil is.

While not directly comparable to films such as The Omen, The Amityville Horror and The Sentinel, this is very much the territory that Annabelle traverses. The main characters are fairly mature adults, the potential ridiculousness of the whole thing is overlooked in favour of brow-furrowing and serious talk about real good and evil, and the glossiness of the whole thing still allows for moments of real darkness (literally, in the case of one nail-biting sequence).

Director John R. Leonetti certainly takes a more serious approach to the material than he did when directing The Butterfly Effect 2. It looks like his years of working as Director Of Photography for James Wan have paid off, and this is never more apparent than in those precisely-engineered jump scares. The script by Gary Dauberman may be weak, with fairly uninteresting characters and a surprising lack of focus, but it does enough to keep you interested in between the more memorable set-pieces.

Wallis, Horton and Amendola all do okay, but after the end credits roll it's only Annabelle who will linger in your mind. That's as it should be, obviously. It is, after all, "her" film. It's just a shame that none of the actual human characters stood out at all, although Alfre Woodard tries the hardest (playing Evelyn, a woman who becomes concerned for the couple as she sees what they're going through).

If I call the film competent then you may think I'm damning it with faint praise, but I don't mean to. It IS competent, which means that I tentatively recommend it to fans of mainstream horror movies like all of those mentioned above. As for the hardcore horror fans who sneer at anything made in America, with any kind of decent budget and studio backing, they can either give it a chance or not. They might just end up agreeing with me that it's . . . . . . competent.

6/10

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Grand Canyon (1991)

Directed by Lawrence Kasdan, who also co-wrote the screenplay with his wife Meg, Grand Canyon is a well-intentioned film that just doesn't really do anything. It allows one privileged white male character to help some black people, lets Steve Martin step away once more from his comedy schtick and shows a bunch of women who either need a man or a baby to be happy. Yes, it's THAT bad in places.

It's also quite good in different parts. The acting from all concerned - Martin, Kevin Kline, Danny Glover, Mary McDonnell, Mary-Louise Parker, Alfre Woodard, Tina Lifford, a very young Jeremy Sisto - is very good. Individual scenes are well done, especially a moment that sees Martin approached by a robber, but this is a movie that runs for two hours, and when I say runs I actually mean to say meanders.

What's the plot? Well, Kevin Kline and Mary McDonnell are a married, well-to-do white couple with some relationship problems. They have a son (Sisto) who is heading off to camp, which leads to the "empty nest" feeling for McDonnell. Kline decides to drive home one night through a slightly rough area in which he sticks out like a sore thumb. Thankfully, he's helped out of there in one piece by Danny Glover and the two strike up a bit of a friendship, one that allows Kline to make up for a multitude of sins by helping Glover and his family. Meanwhile, Steve Martin is a Hollywood producer who makes ultra-violent films until his own encounter with violence leads to an epiphany and Mary-Louise Parker gets herself all in a muddle after falling for the married Kline.

I enjoyed Grand Canyon when I first saw it about twenty years ago. I was a teenager and this is a simple, naive film. The fact that I enjoy it a lot less nowadays, having seen and experienced much more of the world, comes as no surprise. The fact that I still enjoy it in any way is the surprising part. I'm sure there are people who will feel almost insulted by the way the movie treats some, if not all, of its characters. It's the kind of movie written almost purely to assuage the collective guilt of white, middle class America.

Maybe that's why, as a white, middle class (*shudder* what have I become?) Brit, I don't hate it as much as I should.

6/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Grand-Canyon-DVD-Danny-Glover/dp/B00006420Z/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1374786050&sr=8-2&keywords=grand+canyon