Watched a few bits recently…
The House That Jack Built - had basically given up on Lars Von Trier after shlepping to the cinema to watch Antichrist, but this popped up on my recommendations while the TV was away for work (she would NEVER watch a film like this) so I thought I’d give it a whirl. Should probably have stuck with my first instincts - this is even more edge-lordy than most LVT. Matt Damon’s Jack is a fairly dreary serial killer who kills a number of women in fairly unpleasant ways throughout the two and a half hour (!) runtime for no particular reason. That’s mostly it, interspersed with various chapter breaks of try hard imagery ranging from Nazism (obviously LVT has maxed out his recent coverage of his Hitler views) to LVT’s own previous works. The film actually has a fairly interesting finale, which makes it more frustrating that most of what has gone before is so tiresome. 3/10
Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween - me and the kids LOVE the first of these. Must have watched it 10 times at least. The sequel is…not as good tbh. Broadly a re-working of the first one, but with slightly less invention or interesting characters. Still good family fun however, although I can’t see myself revisiting over yet another rewatch of the original tbf. 6/10
Brightburn - marketing material for this really piqued my interest. Superhero horror is a most under-utilised genre. The set-up is pretty good, although annoyingly once the story is there it doesn’t seem to know where to go. That said, this is filmed in a nicely unsettling way and the gore is fairly inventive and surprisingly difficult to watch at times. Feels like a sequel could do more with the story/character (it also feels like it should fit into the Unbreakable/Split/Glass universe) but not sure if this will push enough people’s buttons to make that a possibility. 6/10
