I imagine that when you imagine a TV critic, you picture some hard-boiled, crusty, even heartless type. But I have always been a sensitive, delicate, please-leave-the-light-on sort of fellow.
So Halloween is a holiday I greet with mixed emotions. I am fine with its brighter expressions — candy, pumpkins, cute costumes on little children, “It’s Halloween” by the Shaggs, all that. But you can keep your haunted houses, the latest “It,” your “Scream” masks, your trouble-making teens using the cover of the holiday to terrorize a neighborhood. Even “The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror” I can find genuinely disquieting.
You will therefore find the following personal guide to Halloween viewing — some things specific to the day, some germane to the season, some featuring paranormal characters, some parodying monster movies — to be short on blood and guts (the kind worn outside the body) and long on comedy and cartoons. There is more than enough actual horror about.
More than anything, Halloween is an opportunity for me to once again steer you to the 2014 web comedy “Ghost Ghirls,” currently living its best afterlife on Vimeo. Created by stars Amanda Lund and Maria Blasucci, it comprises a dozen 10-minute episodes, which by some magic have the substance of full-blown sitcom episodes. As self-involved, childish, competitive ghost hunters-whisperers-busters, Lund and Blasucci visit various locations (a baseball field, a tax office, a middle school, a brothel, a recording studio) to help conflicted spirits move on into the light; the impeccable guest cast includes Jason Ritter, Jake Johnson, Natasha Leggero, Kumail Nanjiani, Colin Hanks, Larisa Oleynik, Paul F. Tompkins, Jason Schwartzman, Brett Gelman, Kate Micucci, Molly Shannon and, as a dead ’70s Southern-rock band fighting too much to finish their final song, Jack Black, Val Kilmer and Dave Grohl.
Helping spirits move on into the light also was the theme of the 2014 Tyler Labine comedy “Deadbeat” (Tubi), with a similarly impressive roster of guest stars. Labine was previously a regular on “Reaper” (stream on CWTV.com), in which Brett Harrison plays a slacker who, after his parents sold his soul to the devil (Ray Wise), sets to work as a kind of bounty hunter, returning the escaped damned to hell. Both these series are funny and charming and worth your attention.
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Filmed in suburban New Jersey, “The Adventures of Pete and Pete,” originally on Nickelodeon, was not only the most beautifully fashioned kids show of the 1990s but a series that argues well for the very existence of television. And yet you will have to go to the wilds of YouTube to find it. In the holiday episode “Halloweenie,” little Pete (Danny Tamberelli) is out to beat a 31-year-old record for trick-or-treating 374 houses in one Halloween night, dragging along Halloween-hating older brother Big Pete (Michael C. Maronna), while avoiding the vandalizing Pumpkin Eaters. Helpful neighbor Nona (Michelle Trachtenberg, who would go on to play little sister Dawn Summers on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) pitches in. (Iggy Pop, who plays her father in a cardigan and khakis, would go on to re-form the Stooges.)
“School Spirits” stars Peyton List, center, as Maddie, a murdered teen stuck in the afterlife who attempts to find her killer.
(Ed Araquel / Paramount+)
As to “Buffy” itself, vamps and demons and the occasional tragic death of a beloved character aside, the series, which debuted in 1997 and changed the nature of television teenage storytelling, is at heart a comedy, an extended metaphor for the ordinary horrors of high school. It produced several Halloween episodes, beginning with the much-loved Season 2 “Halloween” (Hulu, Disney+, Tubi), which finds enchanted Sunnydale residents becoming the characters they’re costumed as. (An idea used by “Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide,” now streaming on Paramount+, the greatest Nickelodeon kids show of the ’00s, for its own third-season Halloween episode.) The show’s legacy can be directly seen in such series as the recent, excellent “School Spirits” (Paramount+), in which a murdered teen, trapped in her high school among several generations of ghost students, attempts to find her killer, and Netflix’s “Dead Boy Detectives,” about a pair of teenage ghosts helping other specters to settle their unfinished business. (See “Ghost Ghirls,” above.)
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Most network sitcoms have fielded a Halloween episode, but none more appropriately than “The Addams Family.” Creepy, kooky, mysterious, spooky, altogether ooky, they’re a peerlessly happy, hospitable family, ever welcoming to the straight-world figures who stumble into their eccentric manse. In the redundantly titled “Halloween With the Addams Family” (Freevee, YouTube) from 1964, escaping bank robbers, played by Don Rickles and Skip Homeier, are invited in as adult trick-or-treaters and made to celebrate in ways they don’t understand.
The sitcom, more than the Charles Addams cartoons that inspired it, provides the architecture upon which are built all subsequent Addams revivals and reimaginings, including, of course, “Wednesday,” the ongoing Netflix series that made an instant star of Jenna Ortega. While I absolutely recommend it, my heart lies with “Adult Wednesday Addams,” Melissa Hunter’s witty 2015 web series about the Addams daughter as a young woman making her way in the world — finding roommates, learning to drive, internet dating. You can find it on YouTube and at Hunter’s own website.
Oddly, the sitcom episode that most frightened me as a child — and still does, for all that it’s very funny — comes from “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” Not actually a Halloween episode, the 1963 “It May Look Like a Walnut” (streaming on Peacock, Prime, Filmrise and several other platforms) is a riff on “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” that finds Van Dyke’s Rob Petrie trapped in a science-fiction scenario in which walnut-loving aliens, led by a Danny Thomas look-alike, convert humans to their race, stealing their thumbs and sense of humor. Mary Tyler Moore emerging from the living room closet on an avalanche of nuts is the stuff of nightmares — and one of that series’ most replayed moments.
Given my predilections, it’s not surprising that there are a lot of cartoons on this list.
“It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” (Apple TV+) is the second-greatest Peanuts special, and the only other one I’d call required viewing. In its gorgeous, glorious evocation of autumn days and, especially, nights, its Vince Guaraldi score and Bill Melendez animation, it takes Schulz’s art somewhere new without betraying it; perhaps most important, Cathy Steinberg is back from “A Charlie Brown Christmas” as the voice of Sally Brown, the series’ secret star. (And you thought it was Snoopy.) Linus’ unique belief in the Great Pumpkin takes some heat off Charlie Brown, who nevertheless remains the victim of his friends, random neighbors and the universe. But that’s the “Peanuts” spirit, deep and troubling but endlessly relatable.
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“Toy Story of Terror” from 2013, originally produced at the corporate nexus of Disney, Pixar and ABC, offers a delightful meta take on horror tropes — rainy night, roadside motel, characters imprudently wandering off. With the hedgehog Pricklepants (Timothy Dalton) offering commentary the whole time, it’s “Scream” without the murders, but not without its own brand of tension. The supergroup big-screen cast (Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Rickles, Wallace Shawn, Kristen Schaal) are abetted by Kate McKinnon, Ken Marino and Carl Weathers, with Stephen Tobolowsky as the villain (a desk clerk, like Norman Bates). As a bonus, and in the spirit of Jamie Lee Curtis, it’s cowgirl Jessie (Cusack) who takes the lead here.
New this year is the special “SpongeBob SquarePants: Kreepaway Kamp” (Paramount+), in which practically the whole of Bikini Bottom is invited to a reunion at Kamp Koral, where a dark figure lurks and one by one the campers disappear — a moth-eaten premise immeasurably improved by its cast of cartoon sea creatures (and a squirrel). From 2019 comes “The Spooky Tale of Captain Underpants: Hack-a-ween” (Netflix), a delicious mix of animation, puppetry and photograph, in which elementary-school pranksters George and Harold fight a movement to cancel the holiday, with the help of their personal superhero, a hypnotized version of their principal and nemesis.
The Halloween special “SpongeBob Squarepants: Kreepaway Kamp” streams on Paramount+.
(Nickelodeon)
Some classic Halloween shorts can be found on Disney+ at most any season, and are worth your attention by virtue of being drawn and animated by hand — still the best way to make cartoons. In “Lonesome Ghosts” (first released on Christmas Eve 1937, of all days), Mickey, Goofy and Donald are unemployed ghostbusters called to a creaky old house by the bored specters themselves — derby-wearing, cigar-smoking — for their own slapstick entertainment. In “Trick or Treat,” from 1952, Donald pranks his nephews with firecrackers in their candy bags and dumps water on their heads; friendly Witch Hazel, passing by, helps them get revenge. Not on Disney+ but easy to find online is the 1933 Mickey Mouse short “The Mad Doctor,” in which Pluto is abducted by a scientist planning on putting the pup’s head on a chicken’s body. The black-and-white light and shadow effects are quite beautiful. Although Disney has become synonymous with a certain gentleness, these cartoons are sort of violent. (Though, as I like to say, it’s cartoon violence.)
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Through its corporate owner Warner Bros., Max has a trove of golden-age Looney Tunes cartoons gathered into nonchronological “seasons,” where you can find at least a couple of monster-themed classics. Directed by Friz Freleng, “Hyde and Hare” (Season 20, Episode 2), from 1955, drops Bugs Bunny into a Jekyll-and-Hyde situation that includes an addiction metaphor and a Liberace joke. In “Hair-Raising Hare” (Season 11, Episode 6), Bugs is lured to the castle of an evil scientist — a neon sign flashes “Evil Scientist,” so you know — as lunch for his pet monster, the giant orange hairball in tennis shoes later known as Gossamer. You get some excellent fourth-wall-breaking and a finish that prefigures “Some Like It Hot.” And in “Scaredy Cat,” (Season 13, Episode 16), from 1948, also directed by Jones, Porky and Sylvester move into a house populated by murderous mice. Sylvester is panicked, Porky oblivious.
Of all classic cartoon characters, the most involved with the supernatural and the surreal was Fleischer Studios’ Betty Boop, whose jazzy adventures with spooks and demons can be easily found on YouTube. “Snow White,” from 1933 (voted the 19th greatest cartoon of all time in a 1994 survey of a thousand animators), features skeletons, a wicked witch who becomes a dragon and Betty’s pup pal, Bimbo, transformed into a ghost, rotoscoped over Cab Calloway singing “St. James Infirmary Blues.” In “Betty Boop’s Halloween Party,” also from 1933, a nasty gorilla interrupts Betty’s happy soiree, attended by a variety of woodland and jungle animals, and in “Red Hot Mama,” from 1934, Betty dreams herself in hell, where she dances with devils and anthropomorphic flames. When Satan tries to get fresh, she gives him the cold shoulder (literally, metaphorically).
And finally, neither TV series nor cartoon, is humorist Jean Shepherd‘s Oct. 31, 1972, broadcast of his nightly New York City radio show, preserved on YouTube. Shepherd, of course, is best known for a different holiday, as the author and voice of “A Christmas Story,” but he sinks his fangs deep into Halloween, with reminiscences, readings and meditations on the dark. Of everything listed here, this may be the most existentially disturbing, so listen with the lights on. Or don’t — but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
A still from ‘Valavaara’.
| Photo Credit: Morph Productions/YouTube
Moments before the intermission of Valavaara (meaning favouritism), the movie’s lead character, Kundesi (Vedic Kaushal), lets out a huge cry of desperation. The scene is a testament to debutant director Sutan Gowda’s control over the craft, as he ensures we are as anxious and stressed about the film’s central plot point as the little boy, Kundesi. We then see a subtle yet “mass” interval bang, as Kundesi breaks the fourth wall with a smile.
Just like the scene, Valavaara maintains a nice balance of tension and hope throughout its nearly two-hour runtime. Kundesi’s trouble arises when his cow goes missing. Without the cow, he can’t think of going back to his house to face his father, whom he hates and fears in equal measure.
Kundesi often wonders why his father (Malathesh HV) is disgusted with him. The little one’s disappointment grows manifold when he sees his father showering his younger brother, Kosudi, with unconditional love. Kundesi’s biggest respite is his mother, who means the world to him. The bonding reimagines Kannada cinema’s familiar trope of mother sentiment with several poignant moments.
One of the film’s strong suits is the comedy; the humour is drawn from hilarious situations and funny dialogue, mostly involving a carefree, aimless youngster, Yadhu (a charming Abhay), who often secretly meets his girlfriend to make love. Yadhu’s arc blends nicely with Kundesi’s pursuit of getting back the cow.
Storyline: A young boy’s quest to find a missing cow that ties into his familys struggles.
A heart-warming film, Valavaara reminds viewers how the Kannada big screen had missed the feeling of tenderness. The slow-growing friendship between Yadhu and Kundesi is fleshed out beautifully. The writing triumphs, as despite tonal shifts, we are never detached from the proceedings. Every plot point leads to Kundesi’s search for his cow, and every time he messes up, we sigh in disappointment.
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Director Sutan Gowda’s economical storytelling ensures the film isn’t pulled down by melodrama. Valavaara has the spirit of a show-burner, but it never forgets to entertain and engage. The captivating cinematography by Balaraja Gowda and Manikanth Kadri’s moving score elevate the movie.
Some dialogues sound philosophical. The film also slightly overstays its welcome. These are minor shortcomings that can be easily ignored, for Valavaara has several moments that shine thanks to the commendable performances of the lead cast.This is a film that feels like a warm hug.
In “Vanished,” premiering Friday on MGM+, Kaley Cuoco plays Alice, an archaeologist, a fact she repeats whenever she’s asked about herself, without particularly seeming like one, apart from passing mentions of Byzantine caves and “one of the earliest examples of Christian worship” to make her sound professional. Sam Claflin plays Tom, who works for a charity organization dealing with Syrian refugees in Jordan; in a flashback we get to see them meet cute on a dusty Jordanian road, where he has a flat tire and no spare. Alice gives him a lift to camp; they banter and flirt after a fashion. He does something heroic within her sight.
They have been long-distance dating for four years, meeting up, as Alice describes it, “in hotels all over the world” where they “actually want to have sex with each other all the time.” Currently they are in Paris (in a $500-a-night joint — I looked it up). But Alice, now working in Albania, has been offered a job as an assistant professor of archaeology at Princeton, which would allow her to settle down with Tom in a school-provided apartment and “build a life that’s mine, not just uncovering other people’s.” After an uncomfortable moment, he signs on, saying, “I love you, Alice Monroe.”
Would you trust him? Despite the script’s insistence otherwise, Cuoco and Claflin have no more chemistry than figures on facing pages in a clothing catalog. Fortunately for the viewer, Tom disappears early from the action — ergo “Vanished.” The couple are traveling by train down to Arles, where another hotel awaits them, when Tom leaves the car to take a call and never returns; nor can he be found anywhere on the train.
This happily makes room for the more interesting Helene (multiple César Award winner Karin Viard), a helpful Frenchwoman who steps in as a translator when Alice attempts to get an officious conductor to open a door to a room he insists is for employees only, and rules are rules. (Is he just being, you know, French, or is something up?)
They meet again when Alice gets off the train not in Arles but Marseilles; after she has no more luck with police inspector Drax (Simon Abkarian), who insists a person isn’t missing until 48 hours have elapsed, than with the conductor, she’ll turn to Helene again, who has the advantage of being an investigative reporter. (She’s also been made diabetic, which has no effect on the action other than halting it now and again so she can give herself, rather dramatically, a quick shot of insulin. Like Drax begging off because he’s late meeting his wife for an Alain Delon double feature, it’s a tacked on bit of business meant to suggest character.) Together they’ll ferret out and follow clues, as Alice comes to realize that it takes more than the occasional gauzy romantic getaway to really know a person, and Helene gets closer to nailing a big story.
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Directed by Barnaby Thompson, whose credits are mostly in producing (“Wayne’s World,” “Spice World”), and written by his son, Preston — together they made the 2020 film “Pixie” — the series begins with a flash forward in which Alice flees for her life out an upper-story window, signifying action ahead. And indeed, there will be, leading to a climactic scene I don’t suppose was meant to make me laugh, but did, magnifying as it does one of the confrontational cliches of modern cinema. Many of the series’ notions and plot points (though not that particular one) may be found in the works of Alfred Hitchcock — who, you may remember, made a film called “The Lady Vanishes,” from a train yet — though they have been given new clothes to wear. But where Hitchcock never waited long to show you when a character wasn’t what they seemed, that information is held on here nearly to the end, with some added twists along the way to keep you confused.
Cuoco (unusually brunet here), has been good in many things, most notably her funny, winning turn as Penny across 12 seasons of “The Big Bang Theory” and more recently as the hallucinating alcoholic heroine of the “The Flight Attendant,” but she feels out of joint here. She’s not well served by the pedestrian direction and dialogue, but comes across as a person playing a person, rather than as the person she’s playing. Perhaps by virtue of their accents, the French actors feel more real; France, as usual, looks great.
Both everything and nothing happens in “Filipiñana,” the cutting, confident, and ultimately formally captivating feature debut from writer-director Rafael Manuel. The everything in question is the way structures of power are both maintained and reintrenched at a golf and country club outside Manila, Philippines, that serves as a synecdoche for the country itself. The nothing is the way everyone else just keeps going through the motions despite the continual sense that something is profoundly out of balance.
One feeds the other as collective inaction allows for the inertia of a quietly sinister status quo to continue unrestrained in each beautiful yet haunting visual the film brings to life. This ensures that when action against this status quo is taken, no matter how small it may be, the ripple effects shake you out of the reverie in which it seems most of the other characters remain trapped.
Playing out almost as one grim extended fever dream over the course of a single stiflingly hot day, the film accompanies the 17-year-old girl Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto) on a seemingly insignificant journey to return a golf club. She’s meant to give it to the president of the club where she works, but her journey takes on a far more slippery significance just as she realizes she can’t continue down the same path she has been on until now.
There are some other characters making their way through the purgatory-esque golf course, such as a rich industrialist and his niece, who is returning from America, as well as Isabel’s fellow workers who serve as effective contrasts to the absurdly wealthy club members. They all embody the contradictions and cruelties of their little world, with the visiting young expat proving to be most critical to revealing how easily supposed values can be compromised on. However, the film primarily hinges on the actions of Isabel as she begins to subtly disrupt the natural order of the club.
She’s a character of few words whose actions are no less critical as she increasingly takes more and more quietly radical action. She seems driven by an unspoken yet powerful desire for something more for herself than merely setting up the tees for wealthy men. There is a grounding, deeply emotional care to how Manuel observes Isabel as she attempts to make sense of what exactly is going on in her world and how she can make it a better one.
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Beautifully shot by cinematographer Xenia Patricia, who also worked on last year’s spectacular “Zodiac Killer Project,” “Filipiñana” frequently consists of largely static tableaus that are so perfectly, poetically rendered that they almost resemble paintings. Be it when a figure is standing alone in the tall grass looking down at the world with a slightly tormented expression, or the fantastic final shot that lingers for several unbroken minutes, Manuel takes his time in letting everything unfold before you. Life moves at a different, more intentionally laborious pace in his film just as the specter of death seems to increasingly be lurking just out of frame.
Though the film has drawn comparisons to Michael Haneke and David Lynch, Manuel also cites the late, great Jacques Tati, and it’d be easy to make the case for “Filipiñana” as the more reserved, mirror image of Tati’s classic “Playtime” in how it holds the rhythms of modern life up to the light. One other comparison that felt most relevant was the sublime recent “Universal Language,” both in the similarly wonderful way it was shot and in how it shifted into being a reflection on home and memory in his final act.
“Filipiñana” ends up being much more about displacement where the ongoing yet unseen violence has become just another part of the operations of the club. In one unexpectedly affecting monologue near the end, it makes explicit that the workers keeping things moving at the club are those who have been removed from their lives and histories. Just like the uprooted pine trees that keep getting brought in after the one before them died, life seems perpetually out of reach in this place.
It’s all part of the artificiality of the club that makes it feel like a simulacrum of life. We only begin to see reality for ourselves closer to the end, with Manuel pointedly holding us at a distance just as Isabel begins to get closer to seeing the cracks forming in this faux, oddly frightening world. That she is not always certain about what exactly is amiss only makes it that much more disquieting.
The way this unfolds will likely test the patience of those not accustomed to what can be broadly called “slow cinema,” but it was on a second watch that I found myself utterly and completely riveted by the deliberate, devastating way “Filipiñana” unfolded. It’s a film of restrained, yet no less shattering, unease that, for all the artificial beauty that exists in the club, also invites you to look closer and ponder what ugliness lies beneath that all have grown accustomed to.
It holds a potent, petrifying and poetic power that culminates in a breaking of the poisonous spell that, until this moment, had held the entire film in its grasp. In these flooring final moments, it movingly ponders what it means to take a leap of courage and swim upstream against the casually cruel waters everyone else is swimming in. Everything and nothing has changed in the world of the film, though it remains a work of art that may change those watching it just as Isabel herself does in the end.
