For It Is Man's Number: denzel whitaker

Showing posts with label denzel whitaker. Show all posts

Saturday, 30 September 2023

Shudder Saturday: The Angry Black Girl And Her Monster (2023)

The feature debut of writer-director Bomani J. Story, The Angry Black Girl And Her Monster is a film best described as a modern take on the classic Frankenstein tale. That's not all it is though, far from it, and there are some elements here that take it further away from the tale we all know (and love). I'm not sure diverging from the inspiring source material is for the best, however, but I'll get back to that point soon enough.

Laya DeLeon Hayes is a smart young girl named Vicaria who happens to be obsessed with death. She sees it as a disease, which means it can be cured. Having lost both her mother and her brother in different circumstances, and seeing her father (Donald, played by Chad L. Coleman) struggle with drug addiction, Vicaria is determined to fight back at the presence that has overshadowed her life for many years. If she can bring back one person, her brother (Chris, played by Edem Atsu-Swanzy), then maybe she can help a lot of other people around her, people living in an area where death can snatch you away at any time, whether it's via disease, drugs, dangerous criminals, or the police.

While flawed, this is a film that gets a lot right. It's easy to see how Vicaria stays motivated, and easy to see why any scientific breakthrough could be even more immediately impactful to her, and those around her, than it would be to, for example, a privileged scientist who has spent many years motivated by his own ego. Vicaria has some brash confidence, shown in some early scenes that brilliantly show the disparity between herself and a teacher who won't engage in discussion with an exceptionally bright pupil, but there's always the feeling that she's not working to cover herself in any glory. It's an emotional thing, but also a practical one, considering the world she lives in.

Story takes the bones of the well-known genre tale and uses a great central character, and a setting far removed from how we usually see this thing done, to give it a fresh spin without making it feel as if it is working too hard to be "too cool for school". The middle section, where one or two elements are mixed in that seem to push the story more into the supernatural than the horror-tinged sci-fi of the central idea, might falter, but the beginning and end are both strong enough to make up for that. Taken on its own, a scene in which a young girl seems to speak with the voice of a very different personality is creepy and effective, but it doesn't work as part of the unfolding tale, and feels like a half-baked idea that Story couldn't bring himself to remove once he had the rest of the film comfortably locked down.

The cast are uniformly excellent, from Coleman to Denzel Whitaker, Reilly Brooke Stith to Keith Holliday, and Amani Summer to Beth Felice (who isn't in it long, but makes a very strong impression as the teacher who cannot deal with Vicaria in her classroom), but this film belongs to Hayes, who delivers the kind of performance so great that you immediately speculate on whatever good things should already be lying ahead of them. Perfectly portraying the drive and intelligence of her character, Hayes is also brilliant at showing someone constantly weighing up numerous scenarios that are equally infused by her head and her heart.

This is easily worth your time, and bodes well for the future of both the writer-director and the star. I appreciate the attempt to mix the old and new, even if it doesn't work so well in that middle section, and I think most open-minded horror fans will get something from this if they give it an hour and a half of their time.

7/10

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Wednesday, 5 July 2023

Prime Time: Follow Me (2020)

Writer-director Will Wernick may be a name familiar to you if you made the decision a few years ago to watch one of the other movies titled Escape Room, but not THE better Escape Room. Follow Me is, funnily enough, another movie based around an escape room experience. It’s worse than either of the aforementioned escape room movies though, which makes me think it is time for Wernick to stop crafting movies around that concept

Keegan Allen plays Cole, the kind of narcissistic social media “superstar” I loathe. He spends his time accepting various challenges, staging various pranks, and generally doing what social media people do. Hus latest adventure is going to be his best yet, thanks to a friend who has hooked him up with a Russian contact who will get them into the ultimate escape room experience. It isn’t long until things become much more dangerous than expected though, which leaves Cole and co. fighting to stay alive.

Follow Me is just bad, and it’s bad from start to finish. It isn’t incompetent. It isn’t too boring (well, depending on how patient you are once you guess where things are heading). It’s bad. The core idea already feels far too tired and overdone, the cast aren’t good enough to sell most of their scenes, and I get the sense that Wernick feels as if he is being smart and playful for most of the movie, despite it all being tiresomely predictable and dumb.

Although I didn’t like his character, Allen does okay in the lead role. I believed him anyway, which is more than I could say for a couple of the cast members playing his friends, and let’s not start on the many actors cast from the Stereotypical Russian Thug Casting Agency. The fact that I didn’t care about anyone, good or bad, meant that I didn’t care how things ended, although I did start to hope for the film to end in a way that would actually surprise me (which Jr didn’t manage).

I guess some people might enjoy this. If you are desperate enough for another thriller set in an escape room environment then this might just scratch that itch. The traps aren’t well-designed, there’s never any real tension, any attempted commentary on social media videos/audiences does not work, and the end credits just underline a sense of utter pointlessness.

Those who follow me for movie recommendations should avoid Follow Me. All the basic elements are in place, but nothing really clicks. Ironic, as the central character is all about the clicks.

3/10