Appendage (2023)
I couldn’t tell whether this was a play on Frank Henenlotter’s classic Basket Case or just some really silly crap…and not in a good or fun way.
A young fashion designer, Hadley Robinson as Hannah, “gives birth” to an appendage that eventually grows and grows. We are pounded over the head with the fact that the “clone” is a manifestation of her feelings of self-doubt and inferiority. Wow. Psychobabble much?
Hannah eventually learns that she is not alone and there are other people plagued by their irritating appendages, which they are able to keep at bay.
Anna Zlokovic’s first feature film is rife with bland or unwatchable characters including Hannah herself and her cringe-worthy boss, Desmin Borges hamming it up far too much as Cristean.
Appendage is another in long line of relationship films, emotional studies masquerading as horror films.
Watch on: Hulu
Pet Sematary: Bloodlines
Us horror fans find ourselves caught in a current trend of remakes and prequels to popular horror properties. It should be no surprise that Stephen King and his works have been the subject of the Hollywood recycling efforts. Some have been quite good like It and The Boogeyman and others have been complete and utter disasters like Firestarter and Children of the Corn that deserve to be run over by Christine, chopped to bits by Jack Torrance and devoured by Cujo.
Pet Semetary: Bloodlines falls squarely in the middle of the pack. It doesn’t crap all over the legacies of the original King book or the 1983 movie by Mary Lambert (not the trash 2019 film vomited out by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer) and it takes care adding to the story’s mythos. It treads very lightly and respectfully.
Bloodlines delves into the past of Jud Crandall, the Creed family’s wise and faithful neighbour played by Fred Gwynne in Lambert’s film. The film explores what happened to the Timmy Baterman character discussed in the original novel and movie. Jackson White plays the younger, sixties Crandall and Natalie Alyn Lind is his wife, love of his life, Norma.
It is no surprise to us that when Bill Baterman (David Duchovny) buries his son Timmy in the Miꞌkmaq burial ground (“that sour ground”) that no good can come from that. Timmy Baterman, played with ghoulish glee by Jack Mulhern, is resurrected but as with anything buried in the Pet Sematary we learn that “dead is better”.
From there, Bloodlines launches into the familiar King trope of a group of friends vowing to stand against and protect the world from an ancient evil. The most interesting parts of the film are when we travel back in time for a quick glimpse into how the burial ground and the town of Ludlow came to be. Bloodlines also bends the Pet Sematary rules in that if you are killed by anything that’s been resurrected you become a murderous zombie yourself. Reviewing the original story and film, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but we can run with it.
The dilemma Bloodlines faces is that nothing is a secret if you have read King’s masterpiece or watched the previous films. We already know the origins of the monsters, what happens and why. So, there aren’t too many surprises or too many big scares either as writer and first-time director Lindsey Anderson Beer, treads a very predictable path without many detours besides the time-travel segment of the film.
Bloodlines is far better than the 2019 remake or the Pet Sematary Two sequel also directed by Lambert and starring Terminator Two’s Edward Furlong. As a prequel, Bloodlines fills in some of the blanks quite admirably although it is largely a forgettable film.
Watch on: Paramount+
Totally Killer (2023)
Totally Killer is another one of the those films that portrays the eighties as if they were the thirties or forties in mentality, attitude and tone, which to anyone who grew up during that time period is completely false. Although the story largely takes place in the eighties it does little to portray the era with any authenticity other than Back to the Future references, big hair and day-glow clothing.
Totally Killer’s slasher is the “Sweet Sixteen Killer” who murdered three high school teens back in 1987 while wearing a grinning, blonde-haired mask modelled after several teen icons of the time such as Kiefer Sutherland and Rob Lowe. The psychopath, with obvious anger issues, stabbed his victims 16 times, hence the nickname. The killer was never caught and never unmasked.
Thirty-five years later, the killer returns and Madman’s Kiernan Shipka (Jamie Hughes) is determined to solve the mystery. The plot device that disembowels our suspension of disbelief is that Jamie uses her friend’s “science project” time machine to travel back to the eighties. That reinforces Totally Killer’s ‘YA’, tween tone as that is clearly who the movie was produced and made for: those who have outgrown Scooby Doo but aren’t old enough for Friday The 13th or Scream’s level of brutality.
Kiernan Shipka’s Jamie Hughes is not really much of a bad ass she pretends to be. She is emotionally triggered very easily throughout her time in the eighties including participating in a game of dodge ball which hilariously low-key traumatizes her even though it did represent a rite of passage, of sorts, at the time for kids. She probably couldn’t handle lawn darts, Slip and Slide, cap guns or a game of British Bulldog either. Even though she is portrayed as a sympathetic character it is hard to get behind her as she is such a snowflake at times.
Totally Killer is like one of those goofy yet popular “Choose Life” Wham!-inspired eighties T-shirts. You just cannot take it seriously if you are over the age of 16.
Watch on: Amazon Prime.
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