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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Yule Love It: Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

When it was released in 1999, Eyes Wide Shut was, for many people, hard to simply review as a movie. This was, after all, the final film from director Stanley Kubrick. He had died just days after handing over his final (?) cut to the studio, the shooting schedule had gone way over schedule (to the point that it’s still recognised as having the lengthiest ongoing shooting schedule ever), and it placed THE Hollywood power couple of the time – Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman – in the centre of what seemed to be an erotic thriller.

In some ways, it’s still hard to simply review the movie. It still is the final film that Kubrick directed, it still has the legacy of that whirlwind of speculation and criticism that came about before anyone had seen the thing, and some said it contributed to the disintegration of the Cruise-Kidman marriage (they divorced in . . .  2001, which could be viewed as an amusing irony).

What's it all about though? Well, Cruise plays Dr. William Harford and Kidman plays his wife, Alice. They seem to be happy, successful people, yet Cruise is troubled when his wife confesses to him about a time when she was almost unfaithful. Having to head out to deal with a patient, still processing what he has been told, Harford finds himself drawn into a world of temptation, lust, and hedonism.

When it gets things right, Eyes Wide Shut is an interesting and frank look at how quickly adults can get themselves tied up in knots over sex, the chance to explore new sensations, and what can occur when wearing a cloak of anonymity compared to how we weigh things up when wearing our public persona. It shows how easily you can want to chase something, how a fire can start raging within from just one or two tiny sparks.

But when it gets things wrong, as it does here and there, it's a bit of a mess. The treatment of various female characters (mainly those played by Vinessa Shaw and Leelee Sobieski, but almost every female onscreen is dealt with in an unfairly harsh way while the men get off largely scot-free) is problematic, to say the least. Cruise and Kidman aren't doing their best work, although kudos to them for taking on these roles and placing themselves entirely in the hands of Kubrick. And then there's the music, which is so bad at times that it's hard to imagine Kubrick ever thought it good enough, especially when you consider his knack for picking the perfect audio choices to accompany his visuals over the years.

The lengthy runtime also doesn't help either, although there are very few scenes that I would want to see removed. Everything feeds into the main idea(s) being explored, even if a lot of it feels unnecessary. It's hard to keep track of the amount of time that's supposed to be passing onscreen, but I think that works well as a sign of the bewildered and overly-stimulated mindset of the main character.

This may not be the masterpiece that fans would have hoped would cap the end of a magnificent directorial career but it's another film aimed squarely at adults by a director who almost always picked his projects based on his own passion for the material. And it has a decent role for Sydney Pollack, a fever-dream atmosphere throughout, and ends a glorious career in cinema with the word "fuck".

7/10

Here's a great way to get most of Kubrick's movies in one set.
Americans may want to splash out on this option.

Hocus Pocus (1993)

It’s certainly worth remembering how much nostalgia can colour your view of things when you revisit a film like Hocus Pocus, a film that I was probably a bit too old to enjoy when it was initially released and most certainly too old to enjoy it nowadays, at the ripe old age of “I spent a lot of my teenage years wondering which of my mates could help me win a quest on Knightmare” years old.

This is a tale of three witches, the Sanderson sisters (played by Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker). They are your standard, evil witches. In an attempt to stay young forever, they need to drain life force from children. And that gets them in trouble. It gets them a death by hanging. Except death isn’t always the full stop for witches that it is for us mere mortals. Many years later, a young lad who is new in town (Max, played by Omri Katz) decides that it would be good to see what happens when a virgin lights the black flame candle. And what happens is exactly what is said to happen – the witches come back. And they have one night to gain immortality or be turned to dust by sunrise. It’s up to Max and Allison (played by Vinessa Shaw) to stop them, helped along the way by Dani (Thora Birch, playing the little sister to Max) and a talking cat (voiced by Jason Marsden).

There's fun to be had here, especially in any scene that has Midler front and centre, relishing every line that she delivers in her amusingly over the top portrayal, and Hocus Pocus is still one of those movies that I believe serves as a nice introductory "horror" for kids who like some spookiness in their viewing selections. If you can overlook the dated CGI, there's the talking cat to enjoy, an inept zombie, a lively spellbook, lots of fun confusion as the witches encounter the modern world, and a fun rendition of "I Put A Spell On You".

As well as all that, however, you also get the levels of annoying overacting that serve to remind you that this is a typical Disney movie. Not all live action Disney movies suffer from this, but most do. Katz, Shaw, and Birch are all okay in their roles, with Birch easier to excuse as the youngest of the three, but all have their moments. Midler and co. are easier to tolerate because of the characters they're playing. The worst of the offenders are Sean Murray, who plays a young man named Thackery, and Marsden as the voice to the cat (Thackery was transformed as part of a curse, both actors portray the same character), but Tobias Jelinek and Larry Bagby give pretty poor performances as a pair of local bullies, and Doug Jones is stuck with having to overplay things as he pursues the kids in zombie form.

The direction by Kenny Ortega is acceptable, I guess, but there are one or two great moments that show how much better this could have been, with just a little more thought and care for the style of the whole thing, and the script, by Mick Garris and Neil Cuthbert, ranks about the same. There are some very good lines, but also so many scenes that you know could have been filled with a lot more of them. This was a premise full of potential, and only some of it is realised.

There will be people who read this review and hate me, despite the fact that I don't hate the film. A lot of people still absolutely love it. I cannot bring myself to dislike it, despite it not holding up for me so much nowadays, but it's one I would only recommend to anyone wanting to introduce younger viewers to it. You'll still be able to enjoy it for yourself, but watching them enjoy it is an added bonus.

6/10

You can buy the movie on this shiny disc here.
Americans can buy it here.