The Witches (2020)

 Score: 3.5 / 5

If there was any major filmmaker out there who decided a remake of The Witches should happen and who had the technical, deeply disturbing, and contagious sense of fun required for it, it would be Robert Zemeckis. His varied and always surprising filmography often marries the fantastic to the macabre, the uncanny to the fetishistic, and his control of the slim boundary between the delightful and terrifying plays out best on the largest screen in town. Unfortunately, his newest vision was released in October, just as people were ready to celebrate holidays and COVID-19 was keeping things too dangerous to venture outside, and so it premiered on the rather exclusive streaming service HBO Max. Thank goodness for free trials!

To briefly summarize the plot, for the unfamiliar: A young unnamed boy, orphaned, moves in with his grandmother and casually runs into a witch. She immediately believes him and tells him about a secret society of witches, wicked fiends who look normal apart from their gloves, wigs, and squared shoes; these accoutrements disguise their monstrous appearance. But once a witch discovers a child, the child is perpetually in danger, and so the boy and his grandmother leave home to hide out at a nearby hotel. But soon after the Grand High Witch shows up there to lead a conference, unveiling their plan to use a potion -- hidden in candy around the world -- to turn children into mice. Before he can warn anyone else, the boy is caught and mouse-ified and spends the rest of the film trying to stay alive and thwart the witches.

It's a cute enough premise, but as with all adaptations of Roald Dahl's work, it requires certain understandings going in, or else viewers may become hopelessly frustrated. The 1983 novel has been previously adapted to film, in 1990 by Nicolas Roeg, and it has yet to be fully satisfying as a story. After a clever and interesting setup, some chilling exposition, and an early centerpiece that is camp heaven, the story peters out into odd chases, bewildering chance encounters, unfulfilled intrigue, and ultimately an ending that is so deeply uncomfortable that each movie has attempted to change it, unsuccessfully each time. Add to it the hotly debated misogyny and racism claims against Dahl's work and the whole concept becomes generally unpleasant.

Which is, surely, why Zemeckis assembled a team of stars to create this new version, even if the reasons for doing so are difficult to determine. Co-written by Guillermo del Toro, whose work with dark fantasy seems remarkably fitting here (and let's all take a minute to thank Hollywood for keeping Tim Burton away from this project), this movie transplants the plot from '80s England/Norway to '60s Alabama and makes the boy and his grandmother Black. There's more than a hint that this may be partly inspired by Lovecraft Country and the general social trauma of the past four years, especially when the grandmother, Agatha (played by Octavia Spencer doing what she does best), takes her grandson, named Charlie here, to a nearby hotel. Its large white façade feel reminiscent of a plantation, and grandmother's assertion that "witches only prey on the poor" feels a little too on-the-nose in these surroundings. When the well-dressed women arrive at the hotel's private ballroom for their meeting of the International Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, shifting from suffragettes to pro-life Republicans to something not unlike Nazis, and discuss turning children into mice to be "sqvashed", the allusions pile up faster than you can keep count.

But there is no denying the sheer watchability and enjoyability of this movie, and I look forward to seeing it again. Anne Hathaway goes for broke here, with a balls-out performance that often feels like it's in a different movie altogether. Much like Angelica Huston in the previous film, Hathaway is clearly having fun camping up her performance and giving so much energy that even when her face splits into a shark-toothed Glasgow smile you see her more than the layers of effects; her thickly ambiguous and theatrical accent tosses in rolling Norse "r" sounds to honor the source, but more than once I wondered if her vaguely eastern European voice was inspired by our own current first lady. "Be best," I wanted her to purr in the moments she wasn't screaming with diabolic ecstasy. She is brilliant even when others are overshadowed (Stanley Tucci), underserved by the script (at least Spencer gets to sing and dance to the oldies), or simply in a movie they just don't belong in (Kristin Chenoweth, I love you, but why are you voicing this mouse like a Southern belle?).

As with many Zemeckis films, he's less interested here in engaging in any Big Ideas. He all but ignores the potentially anti-Semitic theme of blood libel, despite making the witches even more human and therefore more evil than in Roeg's version, sidelines sexist conception of the witches themselves, and barely verbalizes any of the racial tension on screen that he himself created for this picture. Rather, he prefers letting these many issues exist visually, running rampant but small like the mice through his story that is ultimately meant to be funny, thrilling, and scary. Rather like Dahl's prose, in fact. Frankly I don't have a problem with that in itself, but I'd have liked to see Zemeckis and del Toro dramatically rework the story to make some kind of point. Not that a point is necessary, but the similarity of this flick to Roeg's thirty years ago does give me some consternation. They could have restructured the basic plot into anything, and frankly they both have more than enough imagination to do it.

Freaky (2020)

 Score: 4.5 / 5

Christopher Landon nails another feature, this one a deliciously wicked follow-up to Happy Death Day. Instead of being trapped in the "Groundhog Day" of her untimely and brutal murder, this time Landon's heroine finds herself trapped in the body of her murderer. Built and billed as a sort of Freaky Friday homage, Freaky skillfully sidesteps its inherent pitfalls and ends up sticking the landing almost every beat of its 100-minute runtime. And it has a fabulous soundtrack.

Bullied high schooler Millie (Kathryn Newton) performs as the ridiculous Blissfield Valley mascot during their homecoming football game. As she anxiously waits for her ride home afterward, she is attacked by the Blissfield Butcher -- a sort of suburban legend of a serial killer -- who killed four teens the night before. He stabs her with a knife from his previous crime scene, but before he can finish the job, he is chased off by Millie's older sister, a police officer. But the ancient dagger has magic properties, and by morning Millie realizes she is stuck in the Butcher's body. So, naturally, she goes to school.

Perhaps the funniest sequence in the film takes place within the school, as Millie (trapped in Vince Vaughn's body) wanders the halls looking for her best friends Nyla and Josh. Of course, their fight-and-flight response is riotously funny -- "You're black! I'm gay! We are so dead!" -- but Millie convinces them of the switcheroo just in time for them to confront the Butcher. Unfortunately, by this time, the killer has already killed two other people (both of whom are, interestingly, Millie's enemies) and has learned that in his innocent new body he is utterly free from suspicion in his crimes. He shrieks for help and then calmly turns toward new victims as the heroes flee the school guards.

With the Butcher becoming a mounting threat -- and the bodies piling up, casting more suspicion on Millie -- the three heroes have to research the dagger and how to reverse its effects while planning ways to stop the killer. And they have until midnight to complete the ritual. The clock is ticking, and the film never lags a single beat. But, as Landon masterfully does, the scares never overcome the heart of the story, and Millie learns valuable lessons about inner strength, dealing with her anxiety and awkwardness, and taking pride in being different and an outsider. It sounds trite when spelled out like this, but it's remarkably effective in this rollicking, violent comedy that rarely stops to ask for logic or explanations. It helps, too, that the two leading actors are doing some eye-popping, ballsy work (Vaughn hasn't shown this delicious side of himself before, except in Psycho and Brawl in Cell Block 99, and Newton makes a case for herself as a young and badass new action movie star) and are supported by enthusiastic secondary players, including Misha Osherovich, one of the few non-binary actors in such a prominent role in a mainstream movie.

Come Play (2020)

Score: 2.5 / 5

It's hard for me to feel jaded about any theatrical release this year, simply because I've missed going to the cinema so much. Come Play is one of those releases that, when not in a pandemic, I'd have been annoyed with and possibly even disliked. Not that there's really anything wrong with it formally, mind, nor is it ever less than absorbing during its 100-minute runtime. That's the magic of horror films for me, at least for the most part; I'd rather watch a slow, silly, or stupid horror movie than a comedy or romance any day because of pure adrenaline-fueled wonder at what might happen next. Plus, fear is a deliciously underappreciated sensation.

Young Oliver, a nonverbal autistic boy, primarily uses his smartphone to communicate with others, which has made him the victim of bullying by his classmates. His parents, both of whom are actually pretty darn good parents, are on the verge of splitting up. One night, Oliver opens a mysterious new app called "Misunderstood Monsters", which is apparently a digital picture book. Despite nightmarish drawings of a figure the book calls Larry -- the images seem inspired by Stephen Gammell's illustrations for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, if that helps you visualize something a child should absolutely not be seeing -- Oliver reads until he gets too spooked. Larry just wants a friend, the book says, and poor Oliver does too.

As it is, Come Play fits into a subgenre of horror preoccupied with the relationships of children to monstrosity: from James Whale's Frankenstein to The Babadook, the perennial dark fantasy of children being drawn to that which should terrify us. Could it be that they haven't learned to fear that which society hates? Could it be that they are uniquely susceptible to diabolic charms? A lack of answers helps the genre function in a culture that so worships youth and childhood as symbols of life and a future. This movie also belongs, in terms of adaptive form, to a sub-subgenre of flicks in recent years inspired by successful short films. This one, based on writer/director Jacob Chase's short "Larry", in many ways takes its cue from Andres Muschietti's Mama or David F. Sandberg's Lights Out. 

As in those, the best sequences are those in which the short is directly transposed into a centerpiece of the film. Here that means the father, working his lonely shift as a parking lot monitor, is surrounded by dark, open spaces in which shadows looks more scary than the void. However, I found the basic premise of this particular movie difficult to rationalize, as Larry increasingly tries to enter the real world, apparently able to move and manifest as a result of electrical devices and currents. If the movie were so interested in the monstrosity that is (or can be) the abuse of devices with black mirrors, I'm surprised that this flick was so determined to make Larry supernatural and corporeal. And then there's the bullying of Oliver, which makes up a significant part of the early plot but utterly vanishes by the halfway point.

Where this particular movie succeeds is in its masterful control of terror. This is a jumpscare factory, a veritable haunted house of boogeymen, lights flickering, doors and furniture moving on their own. A particularly, nastily effective scene involves Oliver and his bullying "friends" trapped in a sleepover together as they use their tablet to look for Larry in the house. By the time Larry indeed physically manifests in the house -- a la the Crooked Man from The Conjuring 2 -- we're suitably scared and ready for a showdown. And this one does not disappoint in terms of action and continued scares. Unfortunately, its logic begins to unravel in the final sequences, to the point that what should be an emotional climax felt cheap, cruel, and unearned to me.