Shudder Saturday: We Need To Do Something (2021)

A family sheltering from a storm become inadvertently trapped in their bathroom in this strange and intriguing psychological horror. Well, I considered it strange and intriguing, and it has one of the few moments in recent history to give me proper goosebumps and a chill throughout my body, but I can see a lot of people just dismissing it as nonsensical and dull.

Pat Healy and Vinessa Shaw play the parents, the former with a drinking problem and the latter with a secret that maybe isn’t so secret. Sierra McCormick is Melissa, their teenage daughter, and John James Cronin is Bobby, the youngest family member. It doesn’t take long for tensions to rise when the family realise that they are trapped in their bathroom, and trapped alongside people they don’t necessarily like spending time with, despite their familial bonds. While the main part of the film doesn’t leave the bathroom, some flashbacks show us recent developments in the life of Melissa, tied to a strong connection she has made with a young woman named Amy (Lisette Olivera, billed as Lisette Alexis). It soon becomes clear that Melissa worries she may have somehow caused the situation her family is now in.

Written by Max Booth III, adapting his own novella into movie form, this is a film that makes use of the confined setting and small cast by slowly ratcheting up the tension, interspersing things with moments of madness, and allowing viewers to imagine what could be going on outwith those bathroom walls. Some people will hate the fact that we never really see anything, but others will appreciate the chance to unnerve themselves with just their own imagination, prompted by some very good sound cues.

Director Sean King O’Grady puts his faith in the material, as well as his cast, and doesn’t try to cover up any limitations with fancy tricks and flourishes. It doesn’t need any more, especially once we start to dig deeper into Melissa’s backstory. Making his fictional feature debut, after directing some shorts and a documentary previously, O’Grady impresses with an end result that manages to be streamlined and efficient without feeling cheap.

Cast-wise, Healy is always a welcome presence in genre fare, although the downward spiral of his character is a bit quicker that I would have liked, as well as lacking any real nuance. I blame the writing more than the performance, but this is far from Healy’s best work. Shaw fares better, helped by the fact that her character remembers to keep appearing calm and reassured, for the sake of her children, even as things go from bad to worse. Cronin gives a decent performance, a typical little brother, and McCormick does an excellent job in the lead role, being believable and watchable at all times. Alexis also does good work, and her character casts a long shadow over the proceedings, despite her limited screentime. There are one or two others in the cast, used very effectively, whether they get one scene or even just one line of dialogue.

I think there’s a lot to appreciate here. I would watch this again, and would maybe even be looking for different details in certain scenes, piecing together the seemingly-random plot elements that all point towards people also being trapped with their own guilt and/or pain, as opposed to just being trapped in a bathroom. Other people may not want to give it any more time and attention after their fist viewing, and I am sure some won’t even make it to the end. I hesitate to recommend it, but I also hope that people I know give it a try. If it works for you then it should REALLY work, but if it doesn’t . . . ah well, there are plenty more movies to check out. At least the runtime isn’t much more than an hour and a half.

8/10

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Prime Time: The Vast Of Night (2019)

If there's one way to damn The Vast Of Night with faint praise, it's by telling everyone that for a movie it makes one hell of a radio play. I'm not sure how much I really WANT to damn it with that sentence, but I know that it's true. This feels very much like something that was created for an audio format, and then had visuals layered over the top, with room left at about the 30-minute mark for an unnecessary, but impressive, tracking shot that should guarantee director Andrew Patterson some bigger gigs in his immediate future.

The story is a simple one, although it's framed as an episode from a TV show very similar to The Twilight Zone (and the featured radio station being WOTW is another unsubtle clue of where the influences are coming from). Fay Crocker (Sierra McCormick) is a switchboard operator who hears a strange noise, which she then passes along to local radio DJ Everett (Jake Horowitz). Everett talks about it on the air, leading to a phone call from someone who has past experience with the sound, in turn leading to someone else who knows even more about it. As our two leads investigate the matter further, most of the townsfolk are oblivious, all attending a local big basketball game.

The directorial debut from Patterson, and the first filmed script written by him and Craig W. Sanger, The Vast Of Night certainly has a lot to appreciate. The small-town Americana feel is perfect throughout, the cast do a decent job of rattling off dialogue that feels very much in line with 1950s sci-fi movies, and there's an ending that makes good use of every resource to reward patient viewers.

Unfortunately, there's also a few elements that work against it, although you wouldn't necessarily know that from the impressive amount of praise it has been getting over the past two or three weeks. First of all, the script feels padded out. The film may come in at just under the 90-minute mark, but it feels like something that should have only been an hour long. Secondly, it's far too derivative, both in terms of the root source of inspiration for it and also the many TV shows and movies that have since travelled through the same territory. It's also, as mentioned at the very start, more of an audio work than anything else. That tracking shot feels like something created when someone said "I like this, but WHY is it a movie?"

McCormick is very good in her role, the better of the two leads, and Horowitz is fine as the DJ, although he never seems quite as good or charismatic as he should be for his position. Gail Cronauer also does well in a small role, and Bruce Davis voices a caller who starts the leads off on their more in-depth investigation. A few other people crop up here and there, but nobody else stands out.

This is a solid little slice of sci-fi drama, and the quality throughout is all the more impressive as it is coming from someone with nothing else on his filmography. But it's nothing essential, and ultimately just an enjoyable distraction that feels like it should have been an episode of some TV show that may have done things slightly better.

5/10

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VFW (2019)

Joe Begos has, whether you like them or not, built up an interesting body of work, working within genre boundaries to create specific examples of movies that clearly influenced him. Almost Human got him a good amount of love from the start, The Mind's Eye is referred to by many people as a Scanners sequel that you never knew you wanted, but definitely deserved, and Bliss was a wild ride into the realm of vampirism. Now we have VFW, a siege movie that uses some great genre names in a scenario that is pure exploitation gold.

Society seems quite crumbly, to say the least. Lawlessness abounds, and the streets seem more perilous than ever, thanks to the overwhelming number of criminals and addicts taking over certain areas. The latest drug that the addicts want to get their hands on is known as Hype. None of this ever really affects the veterans who run and populate a small bar in the middle of a potentially dangerous area. Stephen Lang is the bar owner, and it is his birthday, and his main friends and patrons are played by George Wendt, David Patrick Kelly, William Sadler, Martin Kove, and Fred Williamson. They're about to be affected by the situation though, caught up in the middle of things when a young woman runs into the bar with a bag full of stolen hype and some violent baddies right at her back. A merciless dealer will do whatever it takes to get his product back, and he has a multitude of addicts ready to do his bidding in exchange for some free samples.

VFW is what I would best describe as a bruising beast of a film. Begos, working from a script by Max Brallier and Matthew McArdle (their first feature), is clearly in his element, the simple premise allowing him to showcase the cast and move things along at a cracking clip to throw viewers into some scenes of gleefully-depicted violence and bloody carnage. The first act sets everything up with wit and brevity: the camaraderie between the veteran soldiers (VFW stands for Veterans of Foreign Wars, in case you didn't know . . . I didn't), their welcoming of a young returning soldier (Sean, played by Tom Williamson), and the ruthlessness of the big baddie (Boz, played by Travis Hammer). And then comes the fighting. And the death. And the many pointy and heavy things being used to squish body parts. And that just keeps on going all the way up to the last scenes.

There are some times when the low lighting and quick editing of the violence makes this a bit harder to keep track of than I would have liked, but it also helps to keep everything feeling pleasingly down 'n' dirty. I really liked Bliss, but it's hard to see beyond the sheer visceral thrills and fun of this to rank it as anything other than the best thing that Begos has done to date.

A lot of that comes from the cast, no doubt. Every single one of the older tough guys gives the kind of performance that has you immediately wanting to revisit many past gems in their filmographies. Lang seems to have cornered the market over the past decade or so on elderly badasses (despite certain '80s action stars trying to show they can still deliver the kind of thrills they gave us decades ago), Williamson has never lost his cool, Sadler gets most of the best lines, and Kove, Wendt, and Kelly are great fun. Thankfully, the younger cast members aren't left hanging. Sierra McCormick is likably plucky as "Lizard", the woman who starts the ball rolling on the small war, and Williamson earns respect from his elders as he holds his own in the heat of the battle. On the other side, Hammer is a very entertaining villain, someone who won't be negotiated with and has complete confidence in the odds of his victory, and Dora Madison (who featured in Bliss, which also had Wendt in there, as well as Graham Skipper and Josh Ethier, who both have roles in this) is enjoyably badass in the role of Gutter, a character who could have easily crossed over into this movie world from the cinematic madness of Neil Marshall's Doomsday.

If you're a genre fan who also loves a good siege movie (and we can all name many classics off the top of our heads) then I really can't imagine you disliking VFW. The premise, the pacing, the cast, the improvised weaponry, the sheer level of badassery barely contained in each scene. (Rio) Bravo to Begos, and I look forward to whatever he gives us next.

9/10

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