Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar
What with last week’s ice storm and the continuing chaos of the pandemic and all that, I found the best way to help the economy was to rent some video-on-demand titles. It’s been a long time since you could go to the video store and rent a bunch of new releases in the physical sense, but if you’ve got an enduring chili recipe and a heart that occasionally seeks comfort in the ephemera of the past because the present is just too disheartening, you can find and approximate that Video Store Feeling in your own timespace.
All of the below are new releases that can be found via video on demand. As always, for more recommendations of what to stream while you’re at home, look back at past issues of the Scene: March 26, April 2, April 9, April 16, April 23, April 30, May 7, May 14, May 21, May 28, June 4, June 11, June 18, June 25, July 2, July 9, July 16, July 23, July 30, Aug. 6, Aug. 13, Aug. 20, Aug. 27, Sept. 3, Sept. 10, Sept. 17, Sept. 24, Oct. 1, Oct. 15, Oct. 29, Nov. 5, Nov. 11, Nov. 26, Dec. 3, Dec. 17, Jan. 6, Jan. 21, Jan. 28, Feb. 4, Feb. 11, Feb. 18.
The Vigil
Usually if I’m lighting the mango-coconut candle, it’s due to a very specific type of anxiety: political shenanigans, biochemical misalignment, a menacing snarl from the woods out back. But it also serves its purpose when something just gets too scary (and yes, the candle was lit on Jan. 6). And that’s what happened while I watched The Vigil, even just on a laptop with headphones. I delight in horror films, and whatever imaginative disruptions they can throw — but every once in a while, something drags a talon along the part of the hippocampus that controls the fear response, and you just have to resort to soothing sense memory. Hence, the candle.
Set around the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, The Vigil is about Yakov, who is learning to adapt to life outside of the Haredi. He’s making progress, but awkwardness abounds, and money is a problem. So when Reb Shulem seeks him out to fill in as a shomer for an evening, Yakov manages to get enough for the gig to cover his rent — problem solved. Now, being a shomer involves sitting with a corpse and saying prayers of protection throughout the night. It’s a meaningful tradition, and one that has existed during the development of Judaism throughout the millennia, protecting the body from desecration and spiritual interloping. But what happens if it’s more than a tradition, and what if there is something tangibly dangerous involved?
This film is theologically provocative, but not in a way you’ve seen before. It is deeply, deeply scary. And it also has perceptive things to say about the process of extricating oneself from fundamentalist religions and how to bridge into the secular world. It’s not often that we get horror films focused on Jewish traditions (see also 2015’s exceptional Tikkun), but this film hits like a ton of bricks. Like I said, I had to light the candle of soothing and centering. Buckle up.
Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar
Ideally, you’ll want to do your frozen-margarita prep before you even read this review. Those who were wondering how Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo would properly follow up the rightful phenomenon of their film Bridesmaids were first keyed in by the abstract, Madonna-scored trailer that surfaced back in late 2019/early 2020. The colors: bright; the mood: uncertain; the vibe: distinctive. And at its heart, a mystery. Those who have now seen the film itself and luxuriated beneath its tropical fronds can tell you that Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar is a surreal romp through 40-something decadence, breaking free from routines, potentially apocalyptic Florida adventure (both mosquito- and gator-related), the power of sexual liberation, the necessity of mythmaking and the enduring bonds of friendship. This film isn’t for everybody, but everybody could certainly find some joy within it. A lip-synching child, a Grace Jones deep cut and a Ryan Tedder parody addressed to beachside seagulls were the three steps by which this deeply strange film won me over completely. Wiig and Mumolo embody these characters with an infectious joy that powers through occasional dead-ends. (Like my beloved Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, this is daffy magic with the occasional momentum-shifting sandtrap.) Jamie Dornan displays a deft comic genius as a lovestruck henchman who just wants to be part of an official couple. The unintentional laughs he garnered in the Fifty Shades trilogy are nothing compared to how genuinely enjoyable and funny he is here, and he fits into the universe perfectly. Especially given the recent crazy weather, this is your emotional poolside margarita of a movie to watch with your friends and the lovers in your heart. (I’m at two viewings already.)
Willy’s Wonderland
Willy’s Wonderland
This is a weird film. I have no background with the Five Nights at Freddy’s media empire, so I’m not qualified to evaluate any similarities between that concept and this one — except to say that this film incorporates a satanic serial-killer cult of amateur children’s entertainers and features Nicolas Cage in a role wherein he does not speak. Rather, His Cageness shakes, struts, grunts and shrieks, and it’s unexpectedly awesome. The eight animatronic creatures that inhabit the family funspace of Willy’s Wonderland are all perfectly unsettling when the light is right, with senior menace Willy Weasel and the guidance-counselor-esque Cammy Chameleon representing the most potential damage to kids who might accidentally see this. National treasure Beth Grant is also along for the ride as the town of Hayesville’s sheriff with a secret. The teenish supporting cast doesn’t get a chance to make too much of an impression, but the design is exactly the right combination of inspired and hackneyed. Plus, Cage is better here than he was in Color Out of Space (a great film in which he didn’t really mesh all the way with the premise).
PG: Psycho Goreman
PG: Psycho Goreman
Nita-Josée Hanna is the young star of this film, and this may be the first time an actual young performer seems to have studied Mink Stole’s immortal portrayal of Taffy Davenport in John Waters’ Female Trouble. Little Mimi, the heroine of this film, is a difficult role to properly inhabit — petulant and conniving, but also perceptive and complex. And when she finds herself the possessor of an enchanted gem that allows her to command an extradimensional menace that she comes to name Psycho Goreman (“PG for short”), you can imagine how her life (and that of her family) turns upside-down. PG can eviscerate her enemies, transform her crush into a tentacled brain, and even play drums in her band! Of course, anytime you start messing around with cosmic forces, there’s going to be a grand confrontation with all sorts of monstrousness. (Personal fave: a mobile cauldron stuffed with skulls, viscera and ichor of all sorts that can spray myriad noxious fluids at its enemies.) At its best, PG: Psycho Goreman feels like a collision between the more anarchic strains of Canadian children’s television, the TV Guide description of E.T. (but not the actual movie), and one of those splatterific R-rated Italian fantasy epics from the early ’80s. It was made by members of Astron-6, the Canuck collective behind The Void and The Editor.
