A franchise sequel, an indie comedy and two of the best horror films of the year.

Alien: Romulus

I wouldn’t say I love the Alien franchise, but I do love the first two movies. Ridley Scott‘s 1979 Alien is an absolute masterpiece in atmosphere, suspense, and art direction. James Cameron‘s 1986 Aliens avoids the more-of-the-same feeling of sequels by rerouting genres from dread-inducing thriller to adrenaline-pumping action. It’s arguably better than the original, although I believe nothing beats Scott‘s original vision. After that, we got the mean-spirited and truly ugly to look at Alien 3. This sequel was borderline incoherent due to intense studio interference, so much so that its first-time director, the now-acclaimed David Fincher, famously disowned it. If you’re so inclined, you can watch a fascinating documentary titled Wreckage and Rage, detailing the film’s production featuring Fincher having a full-on breakdown.

After the backlash of Alien 3, the series lay dormant for five years until Amélie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and super creep Joss Whedon brought it back for the sporadically enjoyable but not very good Alien: Resurrection. Most people hate that one the most, but it’s way easier to get through than Alien 3. After that, a pair of awful Alien vs. Predator movies that nobody took seriously were made in the mid-2000s before Ridley Scott returned to the canvas to give us two prequels. The first and superior prequel, Prometheus, was an ambitious but convoluted origin story of the alien race that made the titular aliens, and the second prequel was an uneven and ultimately unsatisfying blend of Prometheus Part 2 and a generic action movie with a xenomorph.

Now we get Alien: Romulus, a sequel set between 1979’s Alien and 1986’s Aliens from Fede Álvarez, the Uruguayan filmmaker who brought us 2013’s Evil Dead and 2016’s Don’t Breathe. Early buzz was ecstatic, with those who loved it saying it ditched the crushing ambition of the Scott prequels for a lighter and more fun monster movie adventure. Still, detractors said the end product ended up feeling too generic while taking every opportunity to shamelessly waterboard you with nostalgia for two hours. My reaction ranges somewhere in between, with me ultimately leaning towards liking the film more than disliking it due to it being a very easy watch. There are numerous problems with Alien: Romulus, but there’s a lot to like here, too.

Essentially a dead teenager movie in space, albeit a fuck load more creative than your typical Jason X or Leprechaun 4 bullshit, Alien: Romulus opens with a bunch of disgruntled young workers on a Weyland-Yutani* mining planet. The air is disgusting, and older people are dying. Apparently, the human body wasn’t designed for hard labor on foreign planets. Who knew? Anyway, one of the young workers is an orphan named Rain Carradine (Civil War‘s Cailee Spaeny), who has lost all family known to her except her Android brother, Andy (an outstanding David Jonsson).

After getting her PTO denied in the most fucked up way possible, Rain is desperate and decides to accompany her ex-boyfriend, Tyler (Archie Renaux), on an illegal mission with his asshole friends to steal cryostasis chambers from a derelict spacecraft. This way, they can freeze themselves and fly to a party planet nine years away and out of Weyland-Yutani’s jurisdiction. You see, they want to freeze themselves so they don’t waste their twenties traveling. Or, you know, run out of food and die. However, once they reach the abandoned spacecraft, they quickly discover it’s a secret research facility cloning/harvesting face-hugger** aliens. Of course, the face-huggers get loose, and a bunch of the youngsters die from violent xenomorph*** attacks.

Visually, this is a good-looking picture with stellar production value, good cinematography, editing, and a couple of genuinely spectacular action set pieces. One in particular ranks among the most thrilling of the franchise. Besides the Android brother, the characters are mostly one-dimensional, uninteresting, and poorly inhabited by the actors. Cailee Spaeny does her best in a thankless role as our heroine, but we’re left not knowing much about her. The world-building Álvarez accomplishes in the first act is solid, but he abandons it for a more standard monster movie plot for the rest of the film. It’s mostly entertaining but not very imaginative. I say “mostly” entertaining because a twenty-minute chunk toward the middle is clunky and slow. The third act, which most Alien fans seem to have a problem with, doesn’t merit the controversy. It’s fucked up but not nearly as cruel and gross as the opening ten minutes of Alien 3. The most annoying aspect of Alien: Romulus is all the desperate references to the first two movies. Easily the most egregious occurrence is towards the end of the film, where one character states, “Get away from her…you bitch.” I almost left the theater when that happened. Holy crap.

Ultimately, there’s not much more you can do with this franchise except explore the home planet of the Prometheus aliens responsible for creating the biological weapon that eventually mutated into the xenomorph/face-hugger. I want to see that movie, but in the meantime, I would be OK with a few more simple action movie plots with xenomorphs as the villains. For example, I want to see one where xenomorphs take over Nakatomi Plaza. Grade: B- (In Theaters)

*For those unaware, Weyland-Yutani is the evil fictional company in the Alien franchise that basically runs the universe and is trying to get their filthy hands on a xenomorph (alien) specimen. Weyland-Yutani is the real villain of the series.

**A face-hugger is a little scorpion-like creature that pops out of the alien egg and attaches to your face. It puts you in a coma and pumps oxygen into your body so it can impregnate you with a baby alien xenomorph that will claw its way out of your stomach and kill you.

***A xenomorph is an alien specimen birthed from a human chest cavity.

Cuckoo

Cuckoo is a go-for-broke weird and legitimately scary horror film. It’s also very funny and campy throughout. It’s what I hoped Longlegs would have been and was undoubtedly hyped up to be. Cuckoo is a bit of a godsend in a cinematic year where horror is thoroughly underwhelming and surprisingly generic. It’s not perfect, but it at least wants you to have fun with it.

At its heart, Cuckoo is a super R-rated Goosebumps episode about an angsty teenager, Gretchen (Euphoria‘s Hunter Schafer), who has to move to a stupid new town with her family. The stupid new town ends up being the Bavarian Alps, where the dad, Luis (Marton Csokas), and stepmother, Beth (Jessica Henwick), have been commissioned to build a new hotel by some German mogul (Dan Stevens), who is basically like German Donald Trump? Anyway, weird shit starts happening in the Alps involving people acting like deranged ghost zombies and brutally murdering each other. When our angsty teen heroine, Gretchen, begins to notice the weird occurrences, the German mogul gets really weird, and Gretchen becomes a target for the evil that plagues the Alps. Can Gretchen expose the evil of the Bavarian Alps and the sinister German mogul? Or will her parents not believe her?

Attempting to describe the vibe of Cuckoo, I’d say it’s an intoxicating mix of Twin Peaks and Kubrick‘s The Shining, with a little dab of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. It knows how to scare you but also knows you’re there to have a good time. While it certainly isn’t a seamless blend of traumatic plot revelations and quirky humor, the movie takes some big swings that are more often successful than not. Hunter Schafer is perfectly cast here as Gretchen, but the film ultimately belongs to the always-underrated Dan Stevens as the German hotel mogul. An extremely versatile British talent who excels at playing both harmless goofballs and sadistic assholes, Stevens manages to fuse these two archetypes into a wildly over-the-top villain you just can’t get enough of. He’s like that sweet honey butter they give you with the freshly baked biscuits at Texas Roadhouse; you just want to spread the dude on everything.

While the ending goes more than a little off the rails, much of Cuckoo is a unique and riveting experience. It’s undeniably weird and takes a bit to sync up with its odd rhythms, but once you do, it’s a real treat. Grade: B (In Theaters)

Thelma

I only know one person who despises this movie, but everyone else seems to adore it. I’m definitely in the latter camp. While I don’t think it’s quite the slam-dunk masterpiece many viewers do, it takes a familiar plot about a funny old person going on an adventure and breathes a lot of new life into it.

First-time filmmaker Josh Margolin‘s Thelma is a very familiar and Sundance-y indie comedy about a quirky grandma, Thelma, trying to figure out the internet. She’s played wonderfully by June Squibb of Nebraska and Hubie Halloween fame. Her 20-something grandson, Daniel (Fred Hechinger), is gladly helping her but also insists she wear her life-alert bracelet and be more cautious with everything. Stubborn as a mule but wanting to ease her grandson’s worries, she agrees. We immediately realize Thelma is a woman trying to beat the clock of aging and be as independent as she can while she can.

One day, she receives a scam call from a guy pretending to be Daniel, claiming he’s struck a pregnant woman in a hit-and-run accident and needs $10,000 to be bailed out of jail. The Daniel impostor instructs Thelma to mail the cash to his “lawyer,” and not wanting anything to happen to her grandson, she does. When the family, including Thelma’s daughter Gail (the great Parker Posey) and her husband, Alan (Clark Gregg), finally figure out that Daniel is fine, they go to the police. When Thelma can’t remember the address where she mailed the cash, the officer tells them that they probably won’t be able to retrieve the money without more information. Thelma’s family tells her to drop it, but she can’t. Thelma is getting that money back if it’s the last thing she does.

This is when the indie Sundance comedy about the quirky old lady becomes a mock action thriller, a la Die Hard, or a Jason Statham movie. It works because it’s kind of a unique angle, but it also serves as a parody of most of those dumb action movies. There’s a chase sequence between two motorized scooters, wild gunplay, and an ending confrontation that’s so satisfying and pretty badass. While the film’s obligatory dramatic inward reflection moments don’t break new ground, they’re universal and honest enough to not seem trite. The movie also never sidelines its protagonist, allowing Squibb to act her heart out. This is, far and away, the veteran actress’ finest screen role. The supporting cast is also solid, with Hechinger, Posey, and Gregg each getting a few good bits as Thelma’s concerned family. Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree, is terrific as Thelma’s old friend turned action movie sidekick. This may be his best screen performance.

This is a very well-done, small-scale indie comedy with good performances. It may feel a tad forced at times, but it hits such highs that it’s fairly forgivable. Grade: B+ (VOD rental)

Oddity

In a supremely disappointing year for horror cinema, Oddity is the best-crafted and most satisfying offering, with Cuckoo not far behind. Oddity isn’t an instant classic or something I’d slap on a list of the 21st century’s best horror films, but it’s extremely effective at sustaining a constant mood of dread. It also genuinely frightened me, unlike any movie I’ve seen recently.

Set in rural Ireland, the story begins with a woman, Dani (Carolyn Bracken), renovating an old castle-looking country home. I’ve heard from my buddy who compulsively watches home renovation shows that restoring these old-timey castle mansions can be a real pain in the ass, mostly because sealing windows and doors is nearly impossible. Anyway, Dani clearly has her work cut out for her, and her husband, Ted (Gwilym Lee) isn’t much help. He’s the chief psychiatrist at the local insane asylum and very much married to his work. In the opening scene, Dani is home alone at night and goes outside to her car to retrieve something. She promptly returns, shuts her front door, and immediately hears a knock. Opening the Judas window, those old-timey sliding peepholes that you no doubt saw in Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings, she sees a long-haired man with a creepy glass eye. He’s frantic and warns her that someone has snuck into her house and that she must let him in. Not believing the man, she refuses to open the door but he insists someone is in there. We hear rustling from inside the house and now Dani believes it. But who is this guy? As the tension mounts we suddenly cut to the opening title card.

After the title card, we jump ahead one year. We learn that Dani was brutally murdered with a hammer that night. We also learn that the man at the door was one of her husband’s former patients, Olin Boole (Tadhg Murphy), who shortly after being convicted of Dani’s murder, was mysteriously snuffed out in his cell. But did Olin really kill Dani? Her twin sister, Darcy (also Carolyn Bracken) doesn’t seem to think so. She’s a blind and clairvoyant oddity shop owner, who unexpectedly travels to the castle one night to try and commune with her dead sister. When she arrives, she has to put up with Dr. Ted and his awful new girlfriend, Yana (Caroline Menton), a cold-hearted pharmaceutical sales rep. From there, Oddity gets really creepy as the night closes in and some truly eerie stuff begins to happen.

Irish writer/director Damian McCarthy is a real maestro at creating a suffocating, tense atmosphere, utilized here in long, dark corridors complete with faint rustling sounds in the background. Is someone there behind the darkness? Is someone going to jump out?? Is this fucking place really haunted??? The whole movie feels like there’s a jump scare on the horizon so when it actually does happen, it hits hard. McCarthy succeeds at completely absorbing us into the vibe of the film. We’re right there with the blind Darcy, albeit much more terrified than she seems to be. One thing young filmmaker McCarthy achieves that most veteran directors can’t is playing the audience like a fiddle. We’re completely under his thumb, cowering under his mercy. Although everything in Oddity doesn’t quite come together, McCarthy definitely has a masterpiece in him somewhere down the line.

The acting is excellent across the board, with Carolyn Bracken, in a double role, and Gwilym Lee as Dr. Ted really standing out. The only aspect of Oddity preventing it from being truly great is just how basic the central mystery ends up being. I figured out what happened less than halfway through the picture, and I imagine some of you readers will come to the same conclusion even sooner. Don’t worry, even if you’re quick to solve the basic mystery, Oddity is still a compelling watch from beginning to end. It’s scary and engaging, and unlike most horror films, is filled with well-rounded, three-dimensional characters that plausibly react to situations. It also announces an interesting and powerful new force in the world of horror – filmmaker Damian McCarthy. Can’t wait to see what he does next. Grade: B (VOD rental)