Hello, neighbour: Some friendly folk from ‘Insidious: Out of the Further’.
INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER **1/2 (106 minutes) MA
It’s more of the same, more or less, with the – what number are we up to now? – sixth instalment in this hugely successful horror franchise.
Don’t misunderstand. What’s offered up here is a perfectly passable slice of franchise fodder with a decent clutch of jolt moments and some playful fright generation and clever scare tactics. Just don’t expect anything you’re not used to with this type of dimly lit creepfest.
This dalliance with the supernatural involves young mum Gemma (Amelia Eve) who is trying to protect her little daughter from the supernatural trauma she suffered as a child in her home.
Following the rubbery logic we typically have to swallow in stamped out franchise horror films, Gemma opts to raise her girl in the very same house where she ensured these horrors so – guess what? – the nasties from beyond return to deliver their quota of spooks.
And they do it well as Gemma discovers the “Further”, a netherworld consisting of crawlspaces and corridors and dry ice inhabited by evil spirits with bad teeth.
Fortunately, and in a neat value-add, Gemma is a dental hygienist, allowing writer/director Jacob Chase to work up some cool “ick” moments based on our collective aversion to cavities, dental drills and such like.
Based on characters created by Leigh Whannell and produced by James Wan, the Melbourne duo who unleashed the Saw franchise upon the world (God bless’em), the film is sufficiently proficient to ensure they’ll just keep pumping them into the multiplexes until one of them loses dough.
What helps sustain the longevity of so many horror shows such as Insidious is the favourable cost/return ratio. The budgets are typically low, so if the film hits the margins can be huge. It’s a killer business model. All they’ve gotta do is keep the fans happy.
Just one quibble. Though set in America, the film was made in Melbourne, including location street scenes.
If only filmmakers would stop doing this. Australian houses simply don’t look like American houses. It’s very annoying, though most audiences beyond our patch would neither notice nor care.
Just trying to help.
SPA WEEKEND *** (97 minutes) M
The latest in the post-Bridesmaids run of formulaic girls-behaving-badly films sees four childhood friends descend upon an innocent, luxurious coastal wellness retreat where they, of course, wreak havoc.
It was meant to be a quiet, soothing celebration for birthday girl Jane (Leslie Mann), Sophie (Anna Faris) and Coco (Michelle Bureau) and all is going well until wild card Mel (Isla Fisher) turns up, her unfiltered Aussie bluster disrupting their tranquility with chaos.
Formula stuff, this, yet wily writer/directing duo Scott Moor & Jon Lucas (Bad Moms) give us a sufficiently distinctive quartet to make us care just enough, each having a reasonably engaging, and sometimes surprising, back story.
As far as comic ensembles go, the four play off each other well, though there is a little too much yelling instead of laugh generation.
Oddly, the film is at its best when it’s not trying so hard to be funny. Each of the main players have solid character arcs. Especially satisfying is Coco and her I-love-you-but-I-can’t-stand-you relationship with her Adonisesque, way-out-of-her-league ex.
Slightly off-piste, the film does raise the on-going, increasingly vexing issue of why perfectly gorgeous women voluntarily distort their naturally beautiful visages with unnecessary face work?
Thanks to a poor decision, Anna Faris now looks like somebody has bopped her in the upper lip.
Why do beautiful women keep doing this to themselves?
THE LOVE THAT REMAINS *** (109 minutes) MA
Proving yet again how the strange and confounding can be oddly mesmerizing comes a deliberately oblique Icelandic family dramedy that refuses to follow convention.
Written and directed by the esteemed Hlynur Pálmason, who gave us the extraordinary 2022 art movie opus Godland, the film invites us to spend about a year with a family as mum and dad call it quits in a wind-blasted landscape perfect for her artworks that, nonetheless, have trouble securing a buyer.
Certainly one out of left field. Evocative cinematography, also by Pálmason.
TONY **1/2 (106 minutes) M
A trio of strong central performances buoy an otherwise so-so biopic dramatising the early phase of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain’s brilliant, ultimately tragic life and based on the first few chapters of his best-selling 2000 autobiography Kitchen Confidential.
As the young, hubristic Bourdain, Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) does a solid job portraying him as a handsome, ego-driven compulsive liar who, while in pursuit of a girl (Emilia Jones), surrenders his literary ambitions when he falls into a kitchen job in the beachy Provincetown restaurant of Chef (Antonio Banderas, the film’s cherry).
There, while learning the art and craft of dish washing and low-end cooking, he mixes it with Sal (Leo Woodall, so good in Tuner), a fellow labourer who loves to party hard, thus laying the groundwork for the vices that would later hammer Bourdain.
As Good as the central performances are, the film does run a little dry on account of it covering the pre-fame part of Bourdain’s life. One hopes this is an entree to a more eventful second film, though there’s nothing planned. The Provincetown location setting is very attractive.