Review: POSSESSOR

Tasya comes out of her latest assignment in a state more wracked than usual. That's saying something. It's the near future or parallel now and she works as a corporate assassin guiding living people through a brain implant connection. Unusual brief, enter, kill, shoot self, pull out. Something about this one was awry. She used a blade instead of a gun and chose suicide by cop rather than self. The debriefing goes smoothly but she's haunted. Perhaps the job is getting to her and a little too deeply. She rushes into her next assignment, keeping a few quirks she's picked up to herself.

She possesses a young man whose girlfriend is the daughter of the boss of a data mining empire. It's an inheritance hit. She has to get Oliver to kill the boss and the girl so the malcontent can step in and be king. This takes prep. A lot of prep but she'll be getting shares in the company as well as a massive payday. Hiding her punchiness she gets into the puppet machine and away we go. What could go wrong?

Brandon Cronenberg's difficult second album sees him stepping only slightly from the brash debut Antiviral. While detractors will make noises demanding he show he can do a rom com with showtunes he presents himself with more confidence and concentration. While the pacing could do with a nip here and a tuck there the central motive is kept front and centre, delivering a solid stun in the closing moments. 

I, for one, enjoy how he's followed the basic push of Cronenberg senior's output. For one, I miss David C. making the kind of movies he used to. This and Antiviral are like a young David Cronenberg who has seen all of Cronenberg's movies, old and new, observed the patterns, refined the lumps and ramped up the darkness (there is some heavily wince-able violence on screen here as well as some surprising nudity and simulated sex). And then they still differ from Brandon's father's work. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch, in fact to read this entire film as a kind of examination of the influence of father over son. 

If the world held the justice it ought to Andrea Riseborough would be a name as revered as Meryl Streep and as well known as Nicole Kidman. Her tough performances allow her to take us through massive stress. Here that includes a strangely eye popping vulnerability. The other side of her play is Christopher Abbott as the possessed gives us a day-to-day stress of one living through a life that feels increasingly wrong. Oh, this is not a drill, what happens in the exploit happens for real. For my part, I'd take this over something like Inception if only for its insistence on the element of empathy, backstory information that doesn't take a seven kilometre walk to get to, and about an afternoon's less running time. Bran-don! Bran-don! Bran-don!

Review: FREAKY

Before we get to the credit sequence we get a title WEDNESDAY in white letters and THE 11th in blood red. A group of middle class American teens are playing while the parents are out. They mention the urban myth of a local killer before splitting up and meeting that very figure who dispatches the lot of them and takes the magic looking dagger in the display case. THURSDAY the 12th, young final girl Millie wakes, blows a kiss to the poster of the hunky pop star beside her bed and springs out to greet the day. Sister's a cop and mum drinks but there does seem a little warmth left from Dad's passing. Off to school where we see her swarmed by mean girls, exchange looks with her secret crush, exchange bitchiness with her teacher and take refuge in her friends, black girl, gay boy. Later, after humiliation as the football mascot of the unbelievably named Beavers football team, she farewells her friends, is pursued by the masked killer, taken to a football field which is also a Mayan pyramid where he plunges the magic dagger into her shoulder. But the moon has vanished behind a cloud and skews the lot of it. After a lightning bolt she's him and he's her. She wakes up in her room the next morning and it's Freaky Friday the 13th. Ok, the movie has already made that joke but it's still a good one.

So, he reaches a rapid understanding that his chosen profession of slasher is only helped by this switch as it grants him access that his big lunky Vince Vaughan body forbade. She wakes as him in an atrocity decorated broken down mill trapped in the kind of self disgust that her beauty might have kept at bay. You'll get the plot from here. I don't really need to spoil it but I don't spoil.

What you also get is one of Blumhouse's clever outings like Happy Death Day or The Purge. It's not Get Out but it's also not overreaching. This horror comedy which veers more toward fun than thrills does have a personal story of a girl with issues but it also keeps the pace up and the suspense mostly dialled high enough to convince. Thankfully, the script keeps the self-referential camp out of the dialogue (mostly, that is, but the line "You're black! I'm gay! We are so dead!" is funny in action as much as typed out) though I counted more than a handful of visual winks. Then again, by now after the '80s slashers, the '90s post modern parodies of them and the flat minded copies of older titles grew exhausting there's not much left in the let's have fun with callbacks barrel. This film plays like it says on the tin as a mix of body switch and slasher.

And that's where it does get strong. When "Murder Barbie" acts in reaction to the rape culture around her it's not easy to tell why s/he is doing it except that the two forces of outward appearance and understanding of how it feels merge into a more visceral revulsion of the boy's entitlement and the violence that nurtures it. As Millie inside the Blissfield Butcher she exults in her newfound physical power to the point where the cruelty it allows disgusts her. The teen movie cliche scene of the newly madeover nerd girl making the boys go pop as she walks in slomo down the school hallway is charged with psychosis rather than attitude which does lend it a pleasant edge. There's a very interesting kiss and -- 

-- and I began to understand as I enjoyed that along with so much else about this that the lessons onscreen weren't preaching to me but a demographic I hadn't been in since the first Friday the 13th left me wide eyed and shaking in the cinema seat surrounded by friends on Schoolies' Week. So, it really didn't matter if I thought the gay is ok messaging met with my approval because there was no chance that it wouldn't. I immediately began to feel old and started shrinking in my seat. Except.

Except the best part of all of this stopped anything like that because I saw this movie IN A CINEMA! After almost an entire year in various degrees of lockdown, I bought a ticket online and fronted up and checked in and took my seat in a great big movie palace in central Melbourne (and Melbourne Central, just quietly) and with a choctop and a clear attention span. Early afternoon screening so the smaller audience was already scattered behind me. I turned off my phone and sat back, enjoying every last crappy ad and trailer and as the curtains widened for the feature and the lights went down I felt the same kind of smile that forces itself on to my face the moment the airliner soars to its ceiling and I am pushed back into the seat by the sheer force. So, yeah, the darker horror elements in this movie should have been darker and the warmth could have done with more comedy but this, this was fun. Again.

COMMEMORATION

The beach was less than a block away but ten stories down. I sipped a home mixed rum and cola and felt the knots of my exams ease as I looked across to the tower across the street. Rich people went about their evenings in their own cells and from this distance looked like a wall of tiny televisions. The light outside was a thick dark violet and sinking into black. Mark, whose family owned this flat, stirred some spaghetti in a pot as the sauce simmered and plopped beside it. We'd head out after dinner and go strolling along Broadbeach along with all the other schoolies. I really hoped that Kaye and Maree and their gang had made it down but there was time enough. For the moment I sipped, smiled at the tinkle of ice cubes and let it happen.

We caught up with the others the next day when Wayne and Chris came by. We'd all skipped breakfast and lunch was on the rise so we went to the biggest beer garden I've ever been in with tap beer served in kiosks like remote signal stations. Best steak and chips I'd ever eaten and the beer was cold with a tight bitterness I never taste anymore. What was on that night? Something. It could be a smooth start at a cafe before hitting the night beach for a bonfire. It could be a grey lit den of adolescence where a heavily tripping girl saluted everyone who came in, saying "welcome" in a voice twenty years more weary that she had a right to be. It could be anything. Repeat.

There was a killer on the loose who targeted couples in remote areas. He struck in that very corner of south east Queensland but for some reason he was still a news item, a grey pencil drawing of a man in a Balaclava, cartoon eyes gooping out from the newsprint. Because this is the way these things happen he was called The Balaclava Killer.

Mortality is  not on the menu when you're seventeen. You break and self repair. If you swim with Mako sharks you knew what you were getting into. And we were almost never not in a pack. And it was as a pack that we piled into the Norton Twin Cinemas (I'm making up that name as I only went there once and a long time ago) so see the new horror movie that you had to see. It sounded like Halloween but in the country but that sounded good. Tickets, choctops, a selection of informative shorts and then everything went black and it started. A title card came up with a date, my birthday, as it happens.

You know the deal kids, lust blades and terror. A slasher on the loose. The old timer who seems to have materialised from the walls howls about doom. Someone kills a snake (and it looks real). And the killin' a-starts big. From that point it's blood and screams. I can't remember whose hand it was gripped my wrist in the worst bits but I'm sure it wasn't Kaye or Bernadette. But no time to dream. The final girl, as she would come to be known in slasher knockoffs for the next twenty years, screamed and fled and at last turned, stood and fought. And then there's that ending. It was the most gore I'd ever seen in a movie (Halloween has almost none) and the big finish punched such a gasping thrill out of me I was hooked on the experience. Halloween had been at the drive in but it was nothing like being in this electrified well of survival. 

Nothing was open on the way back to the girls' unit on Mermaid Beach but there was plenty of flowing garbage in casks in the fridge. For the first time that week we thought of the Balaclava Killer. It was as though we had sunk into the first shimmering moments of a nightmare, the same nightmare, shared and pressing. We checked corners that we'd have to turn. Every footfall not our own was his. We were almost silent. Back at the unit we unwound with wine that only had to work. It did. Youhave never been that drunk.

Tomorrow, as I type this, it will be Friday the 13th. That's what I will be watching on its 40th anniversary.