MONSTER SUMMER is a teenage horror movie in the tradition of GOONIES. Noah is a young teenager living on Martha’s Vineyard with his mother, who runs a boarding house. Noah’s father was a journalist, but died. So, Noah wants to be a journalist. Noah’s friend, Ben, goes swimming with a teenager girl and gets attacked by someone under the water and turns into a zombie. Noah recruits two of his friends to investigate what’s happening. He eventually finds out that Old Man Carruthers, played by Mel Gibson, is a former police detective who left the force to search for the man who kidnapped his young son. With his help, Noah and his friends search for the perpetrator whom Noah thinks us a witch.

In many ways, MONSTER SUMMER is very clean with no overt sex and almost no foul language. There are also Christian symbols and allusions. However, the movie reveals frightening things about witches, especially their ability to appear as normal next-door neighbors. Also, the final showdown with the witch is extremely scary. Therefore, MOVIEGUIDE® recommends caution for younger teenagers.

(Pa, BB, CC, OO, L, V, M):

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

Mixed worldview with a moral ending as well as Christian symbols throughout with lots of focus on witches, who seem incredibly versatile and strong, but the good guys eventually win;

Foul Language:

Two obscenities;

Violence:

Lots of scary violence though not bloody where an offscreen witch sucks the souls out of young people, sometimes in the water, sometimes in the woods and sometimes beside an old station wagon, which leaves the people as zombies, eventually a showdown with the witch concludes with strong violence where the witch attacks a man and three teenagers, and a character is shot several times;

Sex:

No sex (some light kissing);

Nudity:

No nudity;

Alcohol Use:

No alcohol use;

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

No smoking or drugs; and,

Miscellaneous Immorality:

Man cracks frightening jokes, trespassing, lying, but all rebuked.

MONSTER SUMMER is a teenage horror movie in the tradition of GOONIES. The movie, which stars, Mel Gibson commends the search for truth and has good triumphs over evil, but the witch is very scary for many reasons, including its ability to appear as an ordinary person. So, the witch causes the viewer to be scared of everybody.

Noah is a young teenager living on Martha’s Vineyard with his mother, who runs a boarding house. Noah’s father was a journalist, but died, so Noah wants to be a journalist.

The movie opens with Noah being suspicious of Old Man Carruthers, whose son disappeared. Noah has written several articles about disappearing children, but the local editor doesn’t want bad news about Martha’s Vineyard. Noah’s friend, Ben, goes swimming with a teenager girl and gets attacked by someone under the water and turns into a zombie. Noah recruits two of his friends to investigate what’s happening. He eventually finds out that Gene Carruthers, played by Mel Gibson, is former police detective who left the force to search for the man who kidnapped his young son.

With Gene’s help, Noah and his friends search for the perpetrator whom Noah thinks us a witch. In fact, he thinks the witch is a woman who’s come to room in his mother’s house for the summer, but in an embarrassing reveal, this turns out to be false.

Eventually, other kids get taken and turned into zombies. Gene has mapped New England towns where other kids turned into zombies, and now only Noah can find out whodunnit. However, the witch is hot on Noah and his friends’ trail. The showdown between them is very scary. Who will survive?

In many ways, MONSTER SUMMER is very clean with no overt sex and almost no foul language. There are also Christian symbols and allusions. However, the movie reveals frightening things about witches, especially their ability to appear as normal next-door neighbors. Also, the final showdown is extremely scary.

This problem could have been alleviated with a little more humor and some judicious editing of the violent showdown. The jeopardy was strong enough that it didn’t need the prolonged showdown to hold the viewer’s attention. Furthermore, it would have been nice if there was more Christianity in the final showdown like the movie THE CONJURING.

Therefore, MOVIEGUIDE® advises caution for younger teenagers.

Joker: Folie à Deux, 2024.

Directed by Todd Phillips.
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Zazie Beetz, Steve Coogan, Harry Lawtey, Leigh Gill, Ken Leung, Jacob Lofland, Sharon Washington, Troy Fromin, and Bill Smitrovich.

SYNOPSIS:

While struggling with his dual identity, Arthur Fleck not only stumbles upon true love, but also finds the music that’s always been inside him.

Co-writer/director Todd Phillips wants the last laugh with Joker: Folie à Deux. In some ways, it’s remarkable that something so anti-fan and experimental yet mainstream exists in a David Zaslav-run Warner Bros. world. None of this is the reason the movie is bad, mind you; that would be because, despite its initially intriguing, offputting nature that has no interest in being what anyone would expect from a Joker sequel, it is also crushingly boring and often feels like a 2+ coda to that film. The movie has a point to make, which could have simply been Todd Phillips making a statement online. Then again, perhaps it’s funnier to make people, especially fans, endure something so aggressively subversive and oppositional to what those fans believe. Either way, the film isn’t good.

Joker: Folie à Deux (penned by Todd Phillips and Scott Silver) is a courtroom drama that follows Arthur Fleck (a returning Joaquin Phoenix, once again unnerving and convincingly unstable) at Arkham Asylum whenever not on trial for his psychotic break and subsequent murders throughout the first film. Unsurprisingly, the guards (led by Brendan Gleeson) dish out inhumane treatment from time to time and reduce him to a source of cruel entertainment or personal gain. If they aren’t demanding to hear jokes, one of them is asking for an autograph under the impression it will be worth a hefty sum of money once he gets the death penalty.

Occasionally moved around the asylum, Arthur comes across a music room. He meets fellow inmate Lee (Lady Gaga), a disturbed individual who has developed an odd obsession with him and his actions. They quickly start falling for one another and planning a future that involves getting Arthur off trial, escaping, and building a mountain on the hills. At one point, Lee starts a fire because everyone working in this facility is incompetent (really, the movie makes everyone in New York City look incredibly irresponsible at their jobs), which leads to the two almost escaping while singing and dancing outside. It’s a sequence that plays like part of it might be inside Arthur’s head, but it is soon confirmed as full-on reality. So, too, is the scene where a guard lets Lee into Arthur’s bedroom at night.

Not only is there something wildly off and illogical about what’s happening here, but Arthur starts getting in touch with his musical side to express certain emotions. Most of these scenes depict Arthur retreating into his mind to sing and behave freely, especially when the courtroom pressure gets to be too much for him, but it mostly feels like a cheap tactic to get some Joker scenes in there alongside a scene or two of fantasy violence to be shoehorned into the marketing to muster up extremely misleading interest. Again, that’s not bad, but this movie is between interesting and boring across its entire running time.

Even with popstar sensation Lady Gaga in some of those musical sequences, the direction here is flat and makes no visually compelling use of real-life or fantasy surroundings. It’s one thing to make a Joker movie pointing and laughing at everyone who believes the character is some misunderstood symbol of good in the face of a selfish, greedy world looking down on the lower class, essentially making fun of Joker fans. That’s also one hell of a questionably cruel creative choice to make about a character who has been physically and sexually abused as a child, regardless of the murders he committed and cult following he amassed. It’s another thing to decide to make a musical that is a forgettable musical, aside from occasionally recognizing the lyrics from familiar songs. Fortunately, Hildur Guðnadóttir has crafted another brooding, unsettling score, trying and failing to do some heavy lifting from the rest of the lackluster narrative.

Speaking of Lee, this universe’s take on Harley Quinn, there isn’t much of a character here. She is infatuated with Arthur, but there’s never any sense of why since the screenplay spends most of its running time clouding whether or not this is a fresh interpretation of the character or something with slight familiarity with the source material. Is part of the joke here also casting Lady Gaga only to give her nothing memorable to do?

It truly is a baffling experience watching Joker: Folie à Deux, a movie certainly not made for fans but also seems to have been made for no one. By the time it tries to recreate some of the chaotic feel of the climactic first film, eventually taking a few admirable crazy swings, one can’t help shrugging one’s shoulders. It’s a film that wants to explore the extent of whether Joker is a second personality or an extension of Arthur, starting with a Looney Tunes-inspired cartoon to set up that concept but mostly slogs along aimlessly. It doesn’t know what to do with these ideas, characters, or subgenres. Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga are let down and left hanging in this mess.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist

 

By Steve Erickson

Pepe is an immense achievement: one of the most formally and politically radical narrative films to turn up on the international festival circuit in 2024.

Pepe, directed by Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias. At the 2024 New York Film Festival, screening on October 5, 6, and 9.

Pepe sounds like a Netflix docuseries: a chronicle of the stranger-than-fiction fate of a hippo once owned by Pablo Escobar. Thankfully, Dominican director Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias’ approach is infinitely more adventurous. This is an immense achievement: one of the most formally and politically radical narrative films to turn up on the international festival circuit in 2024. De Los Santos Arias uses the trials and tribulations of Pepe — granted the power of speech in a voice-over delivered in several languages — as an illustration of colonialism. The hippo’s parents were stolen from Namibia and brought to the Americas. But Pepe also works at face value as an exploration of animal rights. It delves into the consciousness of beasts — and the danger of humans misunderstanding it.

The very first shot of Pepe is a white frame. Visually, the only variation we see comes from damage to the film stock; the sound of a helicopter pilot calling out to a Corporal Gonzales intrudes upon the image’s blankness. Then, the hippo introduces himself. Named Pepe, he’s confused that he has been resurrected as a ghost. Caged in Pablo Escobar’s private zoo in his Hacienda Napoles estate, he escaped to the surrounding river (as did most of the other animals) following the drug lord’s 1993 death. What follows is not a straightforward, linear narrative, but a story that takes vast leaps in time and space. A group of German tourists are seen on safari in Namibia. The director De Los follows people and animals down the Magdalena river for brief intervals, moving on to another one after a few minutes. Rejected by Escobar’s menagerie, Pepe is forced to live on his own. One section details the rocky relationship of fisherman Candelario (Jorge Puntillon Garcia), who encounters the hippo while working, and his wife Bethania (Sor Maria Rios). These scenes are the ones where Pepe comes closest to conventional characters and storytelling, but they make up a small portion of the film.

De Los Santos Arias’ style is accomplished and eclectic,to say the least. He’s fond of stationary long shots. Often, the camera position, floated in a river, suggests a hippo-eyed-view, looking quizzically at people. Drones are used for distant, overhead views. On the one hand, the cinematography can be breathtakingly pretty,but Pepe never lets one forget the animal’s feelings of loss –and the military squad that is out to kill him. The calm of an aerial shot of Escobar’s mansion and its surrounding streets, as we watch cars slowly pass, is broken by pilots’ chatter. De Los Santos Arias lets these images play out, moving the camera further back, till he cuts to white. The film’s view of nature leans towards ‘objective’ abstraction; lush shots of the river are stripped of narrative intent. Genuine documentary footage is integrated with staged scenes.

Along with its fascinating visuals, Pepe is a film about language. The hippo speaks to us as a ghost, unable to understand his ability to talk. (Four actors, each speaking a different tongue, represent his voice.) I’ve often wondered: what do animals make of the symbolic value humans place on them? Could they understand it? Would goats be baffled by their association with witchcraft and the devil? Pepe muses on these and other issues. At one point, he gazes at his own representation: he glimpses a cartoon about his life that is being shown playing on a living room TV.

Does all that sound like it could be overly didactic? Pepe might have gone that way. A few scenes are close to being lectures in post-colonial theory. The film works so well because it focuses on the threatening drama of the present moment. Pepe speaks about his own experience and the way he’s perceived: “in their story, I became a monster, an Other that scared everyone.” Brought to the Americas, he’s seen as important only insofar as his story intersects with that of humans (especially one as infamous as Pablo Escobar.) In the end, he’s perceived as a danger, with has some basis in fact, given that his presence endangered local fishermen. Pepe is never seen as a being with a life that matters for its own sake.

Pepe has yet to be acquired by a U.S. distributor. (De Los Santos Arias’ previous film, Cocote, did receive a brief release here in 2018.) American audiences will encounter difficulties with this film: they’ve grown wary of subtitles, let alone the degree of experimentation Pepe embraces with a vengeance. But grappling with its eccentricities  is well worth the effort. De Los Santos Arias described his earlier feature, 2015’s Santa Teresa & Historias, as “an anarchic rebellion of multiple narratives, colors and formats…in a drive towards permanent revolution.” Pepe continues that fierce critical critique with a rare combo of formal beauty and political astuteness.

---

Steve Erickson writes about film and music for Gay City News, Slant Magazine, the Nashville Scene, Trouser Press, and other outlets. He also produces electronic music under the tag callinamagician. His latest album, Bells and Whistles, was released in January 2024, and is available to stream here.