You know me, girls. I love horror movies, which means I will see any bit of trash that comes along. The genre is really going down the tubes, hons, because, in this, the 50th Anniversary year of "Rosemary's Baby," the genre has been reduced to a series of franchises, all of whom are connected to one another in some way, and those of us devoted or delusional enough to watch them are supposed to understand all this. Like we care????????
Darlings, it is more difficult to figure out than Proust! And not nearly as rewarding. Give me a well plotted narrative with a beginning, middle and end. Now, today, that would be called innovation! It used to be called normal.
Veteran character actress Lin Shaye I had hoped would give the kind of riveting performance that Judith Roberts gave as Mary Shaw, in "Dead Silence," directed by James Wan, who produced this mess! Lin plays ghost hunter and psychic Elise Rainer, and all she really gets to do is a series of repetitive shots looking horror struck. OK, an actress has to work, but give her something to do! Thank God for the scene in the diner, where she runs into these two girls who turn out be her nieces, daughters of her estranged brother, Christian, played by Bruce Davison!!!!!!!!!! Can you imagine? Is this the best script he has been offered? Brucie, baby, you need to get a new agent, hair style, or something!!!!!!!!!! And Barbara Hershey--can you believe she and Bruce did "Last Summer????????"--turns up here, but she hasn't had a good script since "Black Swan!!!!!!!!!!!!"
The real insidiousness of the movie is that audiences have to sit through it. If I wasn't such a genre devotee, and David so afflicted with cabin fever he was willing to sit through this junk, we might have walked out. Only people who need a reason to sit someplace will watch this!!
Like the kids in back at our screening, who were stoned out of their minds!
Hey, maybe they were the sanest ones in the place!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Fear not re Barbara Hershey: she's moved on from cinema to become TV's resident Grand Guignol Diva.
ReplyDeleteShe's been absolutely priceless these past seven seasons as the (in flashbacks) sociopathic abusive mother of the girl who grew up to be The Evil Queen of Once Upon A Time. One of the most incisive tv series ever made, using the ruse of a fairy-tale setting to spend seven years ruthlessly exposing how the sins of parents destroy and distort their children. Her character in Black Swan is nothing compared to Cora, The Millers Daughter.
Having recently wrapped up that character (in an improbably moving, incredibly redemptive story arc(, Hershey was free to join the current, apparently final season of The X Files. She plays one Erika Price, the distaff rival to the shows iconic Cigarette Smoking Man. Both of them want to destroy the world by releasing a lethal alien virus, while plotting to make sure the other is not among the survivors. It takes one hell of a screen presence not to be overshadowed by the larger-than-life CSM, but Hershey holds her own.
ReplyDeleteHooray for Barbara Hershey!
I have to see her, as this Cora,
the Miller's Daughter. I loved
her in "Black Swan."
She is in this film very little.
In fact, David was the one who spotted her.