Shudder Saturday: Pet (2016)

For some reason, and I genuinely don't know why, I have owned Pet for years. I think it may have just been on sale for a cheap enough price that I bundled it with some other purchases, perhaps having heard some good word on it from horror movie fans. It never really appealed to me though, not as a viewing choice to put ahead of the many other films I have still to get to. I changed that this week, and I'm actually glad that I did. 

This is good stuff. It's more interesting and better than the last movie I saw from this director (Apartment 143 AKA Emergo). And maybe my willingness to now recommend it to others reflects those who once recommended it to me.

Dominic Monaghan plays Seth, a young man who works in an animal control facility. He's a bit strange and awkward, to put it mildly, and turns a chance encounter with a former high school crush (Holly, played by Ksenia Solo) into a time for some obsessive and stalkery behaviour. He's not exactly subtle with his attempts to encounter Holly, and seems to want to take her away from the world and keep her as his pet. There's a bit more to it though, as revealed when Seth discusses exactly what he has seen during his observations, and Holly admits to past traumatic events involving her on-off boyfriend, Eric (Nathan Parsons), and her friend, Claire (Jennette McCurdy).

Writer Jeremy Slater does not have the most inspiring filmography. You could charitably call it a bit of a mess, with his best work coming from his TV output, where he has worked on both The Exorcist and The Umbrella Academy. Pet is his best feature to date though, and it benefits from great plotting throughout that allows the characters to be shown as so much more as villain/victim or captor/captive. It's always clear that Seth is dangerous, but equally clear that Holly is the one person who would be most capable of shocking him back to some kind of sanity.

Carles Torrens directs everything without having to overdo the bloodshed or shocks. This isn't focused on torture or sadism, although those elements appear. It's a character study, with the two main characters facing up to what they each see reflected back at them from the other person. It would work in a number of different ways, but Torrens can be thankful that he also had some main cast members able to work so well with the material.

Monaghan is very good in his role, managing to seem creepy and dangerous even as he battles his own insecurities and nerves. Solo is excellent opposite him, trying to figure out the best way to react to the man who has her caged, and soon showing that their respective appearances don't necessarily represent their actual power dynamic. McCurdy is a welcome presence, although not around for very long, Parsons does just fine, and the other people to note are Da'Vone McDonald (playing a security guard named Nate) and Sean Blakemore (a detective who has to ask Seth a few questions as suspicions start to arise about someone who goes missing from his workplace).

Starting off like a hundred other movies you could list, Pet turns into something much smarter and darker than expected, thanks to Slater's screenplay and the work of everyone involved in getting everything onscreen. It's an impressive, and impressively nasty, little film that doesn't just go down the expected dark alleyways. I encourage everyone to give it a watch. 

8/10

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Walk Of Shame (2014)

Steven Brill isn't exactly a writer-director you may want to rely on for your comedy movie needs. He does, after all, have a filmography that includes Little Nicky, Mr. Deeds, Drillbit Taylor, and even a segment in Movie 43. I'm not saying that I dislike all of those films. I'm just saying that many other people dislike them. Despite how you feel about those films, Walk Of Shame still ends up being worth a watch thanks to the fact that it stars Elizabeth Banks.

Banks stars as Meghan Miles, a news reporter poised to get her dream job as an anchor. When it looks like she's lost the job, Meghan takes up an offer from her friends (Gillian Jacobs and Sarah Wright) to go out and drink lots, and LOTS, of alcohol. She ends up heading off with the cute barman (James Marsden) and they enjoy a magical night of shared booze, pizza and frolics. Waking up the next morning with a sore head, hazy memory of the events from the previous night, and a voicemail message informing her that she is now back in with a chance for the anchor job, Meghan has to get home and prepare to impress her potential new employers. Unfortunately, an incident with an aggressive cat leaves her outside with no phone, no car (it's been towed), and no knowledge of what button to buzz to wake up her new maybe-boyfriend. Things quickly go from bad to worse.

You may or may not already know that Walk Of Shame didn't do well, to put it mildly. Not well at all. It flopped hard. Which I think is a great shame. I am willing to concede that, once again, I may be the lone voice of dissent here, but this is a fun romp that wrings most of the comedy from putting the lovely Miss Banks into increasingly dire circumstances. Whether she's avoiding police who think that she's a prostitute, stuck in a crackhouse or trying to get a ride on a bus despite having no money for the fare, Banks is always a lot of fun. Jacobs, Wright and Marsden all do well as the people who end up trying to track our leading lady down, while Bill Burr and Ethan Suplee provide laughs as the police officers doing the same thing for very different reasons. Lawrence Gilliard Jr, Da'vone McDonald and Alphonso McAuley are enjoyable enough as Scrilla, Hulk and Pookie, the three main men in the crackhouse that Banks ends up in, and Kevin Nealon is a lot of fun in his small role, the traffic reporter who looks down on the action from a helicopter.

Brill doesn't do anything to set your world on fire. He keeps everything moving along, and peppers the whole thing with a selection of amusing characters and lines of dialogue. In short, he does what's required. I'm not going to spend a lot of time and energy extolling this as some kind of misunderstood modern classic. It's not. I'm just surprised that it fared quite as badly as it did. There were quite a few movies released in 2014 far more deserving of your ire than this one. Although I admit that maybe my love of Elizabeth Banks makes me slightly biased.

6/10

http://www.amazon.com/Walk-Shame-Blu-ray-DIGITAL-UltraViolet/dp/B00JQF7ZTE/ref=sr_1_1_twi_2_twi_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1420911341&sr=8-1&keywords=walk+of+shame