Hatching (2022)

What’s going on in Finland?  Is everything ok there?  I’m asking because I just saw Hatching, one of the strangest horror films to come out this decade.

It’s about a seemingly perfect family who live in a beautiful, quiet neighbourhood. Surrounded by lush, green trees as far as the eye can see, with the odd bird flying around peacefully, it’s the epitome of tranquility. 

The mom is a vlogger constantly filming her kids and her husband with a selfie stick.  The dad is a nerdy architect.  The son, the youngest child, is his demanding, obnoxious clone.  And then, there’s the daughter.  Yeah, we have to talk about her.

A young teenager with a lot of problems, her life completely changes in an instant.  After a mysterious thump interrupts the making of the latest family video, she accidentally lets in a black crow who proceeds to fly around and cause a lot of damage. 

It’s eventually caught and given to the mom.  Now, because she presents herself as a cheery person, you would think she would take it outside and let it fly away.  Nope.  She snaps its neck and tells her daughter to dispose of it accordingly.

As always, the daughter does what she’s told.  But the bird ain’t dead.  And then it goes missing.  When the kid hears its cries for help deep in the woods, she does not nurse it back to health. Oh no.  She beats it repeatedly with a rock. Like mother, like daughter.

Then she spots the egg.  You should’ve left it in the woods, honey.

Over time, this damn thing grows and grows to the point where we know 1) this will not be an ordinary bird and 2) it will transition into something more sinister.  Indeed, as tears land on the outside part of the shell, out comes the hand.

Why is the daughter so upset?  Because her mom is having an open affair with a handyman who looks uncannily like Boris Becker.  After coming home from school, she catches him getting a little bit too handsy with her mom’s keester right there in the living room.  He’s only supposed to be putting back up the fallen chandelier.

The mom explains he’s her “special friend” but the dad is kept in the dark and she’d prefer it that way, young lady, so let’s keep this between us girls, eh?  She takes suspicious weekend trips to non-existent blogging seminars in order to cover her horny ass. Later, she confesses she’s in love. Her daughter’s fake smile belies a broken heart.

As it turns out, none of this is even necessary because the dad learns the truth anyway (it’s not clear how, actually) and because he’s such a wuss he has no objection whatsoever.  “Your mother is so strong-willed,” he tells his daughter.  And he admires her for going after what she wants.  What a cuck.

At one point, the mom takes the daughter to visit her side piece. Now I should mention the family lives quite comfortably. This guy lives in a giant dump.  The mom diplomatically calls it a “fixer-upper”.

While the daughter lays in bed with her dark secret, excessive moaning is heard in the background.  I’m amazed the husband wasn’t invited to watch.  He would’ve enjoyed it.

Let’s talk about the relationship between the two girls.  The daughter has only one friend, her new neighbour, a genuinely sweet kid with a dog she adores.  Both are gymnasts competing for a spot on their high school team.  The daughter sucks.  She rarely sticks the landing.  Her neighbour, however, can do this effortlessly.

The mom, a former figure skater whose career got derailed by a terrible injury (check out that big ass scar on her leg), demands perfection.  As she watches her fail and fail again during her dismount off the uneven bars, she keeps her after practice until her actual coach comes back hoping to lock up for the day.  She eventually gets it and they go home.

The mom also controls her weight.  Look at the scene where she sits down to eat with the side piece.  She is starving.  He’s amused by how fast she scarves down her treat.  But when she makes a mess, she gets worried.  He doesn’t care. He cheerfully makes a mess himself.

Later, when they’re outside, she tries to show him some moves.  She nails the cartwheel but not the aerial version despite numerous attempts.  Very upset, he consoles her, telling her, “It doesn’t matter.”  He even shows her that she’s better than him.  He can’t even do a normal cartwheel like she can.  It’s the first time anyone has fully accepted her, flaws and all.

The side piece has an adorable baby girl (his partner died giving birth to her) that the mom dotes on a little too much to the point where her actual kid feels jealous.  The monstrosity she unintentionally unearthed from the woods picks up on this and while she’s in the middle of that important competition, danger awaits.

A couple of fateful moments prevent calamity that we never expected to happen anyway, but the side piece who has already tolerated one such violent incident, which is incredible in its own right (the tolerance I mean, not the actual sequence), has reached his breaking point.

That leads to a truly demented bit where the mom screams out her frustration, thoroughly injures herself on her steering wheel, wipes her bloody nose in an undignified manner, turns to her daughter and blames her for ruining her happy indiscretion.  Jesus Christ, lady, buy a dildo already.

One of the biggest problems with Hatching is the daughter.  The movie doesn’t see her as a villain but rather as an overwhelmed victim, someone with good intentions who doesn’t know what to do about the mess she’s made.

The problem with this is that she has dark thoughts that her adopted child instantly picks up on.  You could say she’s something of a problem solver.

Annoyed by your neighbour’s yapping dog while she’s trying to sleep? It’s already taken care of.  Can’t make the gym team because her new friend is better than her?  Time to follow her alone at night as she walks down an abandoned street.  Jealous of that baby?  Well, the daughter picks the right time to injure her wrist.  At least someone is spared.

As awkward as her relationship is with her own father, who’d rather be noodling on his brand new guitar anyway, it’s baffling to me why she doesn’t want her evil doppelganger to attack her mother, the sole source of her misery.  But then again, I didn’t think Mommie Dearest was evil enough, just selfish and thoughtless.

Perhaps, that was the point.  She’s a terrible stage mother but she does love her child.  She is sometimes affectionate, just not as much as she should be. And she believes in impossible standards to the point where “I can do better” becomes a disturbing mantra for her kid. Where’s the moment where the daughter finally stands up for herself?

That may explain, albeit unpersuasively, why she isn’t at all upset about her daughter’s secret, even though it cost her access to regular side cock.  After comforting her and admitting to her son he wasn’t imagining what he saw earlier in the movie, there’s a final confrontation.  I found it wholly unsatisfying.  And really, would the mom accept this substitution?  She’s out of her mind but not entirely. Right? No, I’m not right, obviously. Just ask the steering wheel.

Hatching is at times more gross than scary but ultimately, just too weird to accept.  Everybody knows how mama birds feed their offspring.  The daughter learns this firsthand and, um, yeah, it’s not a pleasant thing to watch.  And during the final act, the mom experiences ickiness of a different sort, one moment of which inspires a very bad laugh.

As dysfunctional as this family clearly is, despite the rosy image the mom tries to present at every opportunity online (they only seem to get along during video shoots and bedtime lullabies), when it comes to cover-ups, they are all on-board.  The nice neighbour never learns what happens to her dog. 

During her last vlog recording, the mom offers a series of half-hearted attempts at an update after her daughter gets injured in competition. As the false façade of her carefully cultivated family image fades over a succession of unused takes, even the mom can’t admit in public that failing is ok.  Authenticity will hurt her brand. A lack of it kills this movie.

Released last year by IFC Midnight, Hatching feels like a weaker patchwork of other movies without offering much originality of its own.  The weird bond between the daughter and her evil twin evokes memories of the anger babies in The Brood and the empathetic connection between Elliot and E.T minus much of the warmth.  (Like Gertie, the creature even gets dressed up like the daughter.) Notice how they feel each other’s pain. They are completely in sync which causes an internal conflict that I didn’t completely believe.

The daughter frequently scolds her adopted child when she acts violently (even though subconsciously she clearly approves) but would do anything to keep her alive, even at her own expense, most likely because the thing loves her more than her own mother.  It’s a Faustian bargain no one should feel compelled to make.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Saturday, October 28, 2023
7:45 p.m.

Scream VI

“It just felt right.”

Sam Loomis, the daughter of notorious Woodsboro murderer Billy Loomis, makes this confession to her latest shrink in an early scene from Scream VI.  Frustrated that she hadn’t been opening up about her own traumatic experiences a year ago over a series of fruitless one-on-one sessions, Henry Czerny instantly regrets his insistent prodding.

He wasn’t her first choice anyway.  But she doesn’t need therapy, she needs closure and she’s about to get it.

Once again played by Kim Kardashian doppelganger Melissa Barrera, admitting she enjoyed murdering her serial killer boyfriend in the previous Scream may still give her pause but those reticent feelings won’t last.  Now she has a chance to finish the job and finally move on.

A year after the events of the previous “requel” (a rebooted sequel, for the uninitiated), as the scene shifts from Woodsboro to New York following a necessary move six months earlier to further their education, Sam and her younger half-sister Tara (the innocent-looking Jenna Ortega), are once again not getting along.

In the previous Scream, Sam abandoned her sibling out of fear.  Now Tara feels she’s smothering her, constantly involving herself in her life to the point she no longer feels like a free-thinking individual.

As it turns out, though, Tara really does need adult supervision. At a frat party early on, she’s picked up by a drunk bro and about to have sex which she supposedly wants but then there’s the suddenly arriving Sam armed with a taser. Considering what happens to the villains later on in the overlong finale, drunk bro gets off easy and not in the way he was hoping for, either.

Also protecting her are her friends from high school who also survived the events of the fifth Scream movie.  Unidentical twins Chad (Mason Gooding) and his deeply annoying lesbian sister Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) who wears arrogant, eye-rollingly unfunny T-shirts (“Strong Femme Lead”) and suffers from severe Jamie Kennedy Overexplaining Disorder (she’s the one who sets the rules and plants the seeds of paranoia that overcome everyone in the group).  She also has a cute and inevitably doomed Asian girlfriend Anika (Devyn Nekoda) who during the course of her impromptu diatribe dumbly asserts could be a suspect herself (“Never trust the love interest.”).

A franchise tradition is the opening kill where a fairly big name gets offed by what is usually the villain but in this case, it’s a supporting heel who gets the push. 

Samara Weaving thinks she’s on a Flirtr date but when the guy calls her to let her know he’s lost, she falls for the old can-you-tell-me-what-the-colour-of-the-restaurant-looks-like-so-you-can-come-outside-and-I’ll-lure-you-into-my-obvious-trap routine.

What’s really baffling is that she’s a college professor who teaches a course on slasher movies. She knows the clichés but like a dummy she still goes down that dark alley anyway.

The killer is a disgruntled student who not only wants revenge for getting a bad grade but like a lot of disturbingly impulsive people who have dark fantasies he wants to know what it’s actually like. Real murderers can easily relate to his report on this.  The dehumanization he describes with zero emotion is dead-on accurate.  It’s the only effective scare in the entire feature.  Sometimes words are more wounding than actual violence.

The student’s triumph of sorts is short-lived as he too will meet a grisly end.  But not before realizing that’s not his friend he’s bragging to over the phone.  Nope.  He’s in the fridge and not very chatty at all.

Two new characters join the cast as new friends who all attend Blackmore University, one instantly suspicious, the other quite funny (at least in one scene) and sexy.  Ethan (Jack Champion) is the incel who can’t get a date. (His roommate, Chad, is a terrible wingman.)  And Quinn is the polyamorous pal of Tara’s who has no trouble finding partners who don’t realize they’re disposable, one instance of which is funny as well.

Sam herself has a man on the down low in her apartment building nicknamed Cute Boy (because her friends think she just has an unrequited crush and not an ongoing full-on affair).  Despite finding someone far more suitable than her ex, she can’t quite escape her past.

A phony hate campaign launched on social media has turned the public against her.  Bizarrely, she’s blamed for the massacres in the previous movie, not her psychotic ex-boyfriend and his equally unhinged co-conspirator who are absurdly seen as innocent scapegoats. 

There’s the obligatory scene where she’s accosted by a hater out on the streets. It’s caught on tape and then selectively edited for broadcast in a news report where they conveniently exclude the part where she gets preemptively drenched in Cherry Coke provoking her angry response in the first place.

All the while, good ol’ Roger L. Jackson, the mysterious voice of Ghostface, once again taunts people over the phone as numerous characters wisely use him for cover because honestly, who is better at this than him?  He cuts sinister heel promos better than most pro wrestlers.

But we’ve seen this act so many times now it’s become disappointingly routine.  Just once I’d like to see someone not answer the phone and see what happens. Or maybe respond to him with the same voice.

Hayden Panettiere’s Kirby returns for the first time since Scream 4.  A young survivor of the 2011 movie, it’s hard to accept her as a young FBI agent (she’s no Jodie Foster) which the filmmakers ultimately use as a swerve to make it seem like she’s some shady motherfucker.  Nice hair, though.

In a bit of what I presume is deliberate foreshadowing, there’s a curious shot of her standing close to Quinn’s father (Dermot Mulroney who’s looking more and more like Mel Gibson), a cop investigating these recent murders.  Pay close attention to the lighting.  A smiling Kirby looks angelic as her face is clearly shown.  The cop is scowling with parts of his own face in shadow.  A little too obvious, fellas.

Also suspicious is the moment he comes out teary-eyed declaring that he’s now lost two young adult children to violence.  I mean how many more red flags do you need?

Yes, the movie tries to disguise this by making it seem like it’s impossible for him to be in two places at once.  But in a gimmick used by every previous movie except the third, there are accomplices.  And in the final half hour, they do that very tedious thing where they explain and explain and explain their long concealed motives to the very last word instead of just getting their revenge already.  This gives the heroes way too much time to fight back and get the win.

The Scream franchise has an ironic history. The original film had zero buzz going for it until it was actually released when it became a sleeper Christmas hit.  Scream 2 had the burden of expectation and the good fortune to live up to it.

But after Columbine, the franchise took a slight dive with the delayed and pointlessly rejigged number three.  (Has Jenny McCarthy ever starred in a good movie?)  An eleven-year gap before number four didn’t restore the quality.  And since the reboot last year, standards have slipped even further.

And yet, these films remain immensely popular.  They’re cheap to make, so cheap in fact that Neve Campbell was insulted by her low offer and didn’t return as Sydney (she’s only mentioned in passing a couple of times), and they always make money.  Scream VI is the most popular installment since number two but a far cry from its more influential successors.

One of the key points Mindy makes in her speech about the rules is how sequels need to subvert expectations in order to maintain an audience and keep a horror franchise relevant. 

As we know from countless other slasher movies, high body counts are inevitable.  But again, the movie overtips its hand by having one character declaring the main characters as the Core Four, a comment that initially invites collective derision, meaning while there will be lots of violence there will be less death this time around.

That in itself is misleading.  Another important character, notorious tabloid journo Gale Weathers (the returning Courtney Cox and her distractingly bad face lift) has her own personal encounter with one of the Ghostfaces, takes a number of stabby bumps but still maintains a “weak pulse”, a perfect metaphor for the state of this series.

Where do we go from here now that this two-part series has concluded?  I don’t care.  After Scream 2, there hasn’t been anything original about the follow-ups, just more recycling and relentless manipulation. Other than financial considerations, why carry on at all when it’s hurting the legacy?  How many times can you beat a dead horse?

It’s gotten to the point where we have a set-piece, an actual shrine in an abandoned theatre where artifacts from the franchise’s past are lovingly and carefully displayed in glass cases.  It’s an unintentional reminder that when you get it right the first couple of times, you should just leave it alone.

But this museum of sorts isn’t really for the public (you need a couple of key cards to even get in the place), it’s for the inspired (well, really, the depraved) to pick up the knife, put on the mask, conjure up Mr. Jackson and carry on the work. 

I’d rather they just burn it all to the ground.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, October 8, 2023
7:37 p.m.

The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)

Back in the day there really was a guy who performed exorcisms on behalf of the Vatican. His name really was Gabriele Amorth, a globetrotting Italian eccentric who was firmly committed to his work. And yeah, he did say “cuckoo” a lot.

Already the subject of a William Friedkin documentary, The Pope’s Exorcist is a heavily fictionalized account of just one small part of his long history.  Focusing primarily on a couple of cases from mid-1987, it’s yet another reminder that no exorcism movie will ever have as many long-lasting scares as the unforgettable ones forever tattooed on our brains from The Exorcist.

But there’s also another insurmountable problem.  The real Father Amorth was full of shit, constantly inflating the number of questionable exorcisms he supposedly performed depending on what year you asked him.  Originally just tens of thousands, after a while it became hundreds of thousands.  It’s just not believable.

The whole idea of a human being being possessed by a demon, a rebellious angel falling out of favour with God, was always Catholic nonsense, a bullshit reason to torture mentally disturbed individuals and make the useless Vatican look heroic.

To Amorth’s credit, though, he felt most of the “possessed” people he encountered simply needed immediate medical attention and not any spiritual absolution.  In the movie, he claims this accounts for 98% of his cases.  It’s that remaining 2% that made him a believer. So how does that add up to hundreds of thousands of possessions? There’s no way he met millions of troubled souls.

Russell Crowe, now in his Fat Brando period, plays Amorth as a mostly soft-spoken, supremely confident professional who scooters into a potentially dangerous situation and solves it in an instant like it was no threat at all.

As a warm-up for the main story that will preoccupy his attention for much of the film, he rides into a small Italian village to see a desperate family.  Their oldest child, a teenage son, is bedridden and acting weird. He’s got the Linda Blair eyes and a demonic voice. 

From the moment he smoothly strides in, Father Amorth is firmly in control. He knows exactly what to do.  He’s fortunate this particular demon is easy to destroy.  He does his usual routine of denying the kid is even possessed which pisses off his outmatched nemesis.  Amorth dares him to prove his power.  The demon foolishly takes the bait.  Poor piggy.

Meanwhile, a family from America arrives to their temporary new home, an ancient medieval castle in Spain.  Reeling from the horrific death of their patriarch, a MILF and her two kids arrive to oversee the reconstruction of their sole inheritance.  The goal is to sell it and move back home.  Apparently, the mom doesn’t work so they could really use the money.

The teenage daughter, who has excellent taste in music, is miserable.  Her younger brother hasn’t spoken since their father’s death.  He survived the accident.

As the Spanish crew continue their work, odd things start happening.  Unexplained noises, for instance.  And then, a couple of nosy Rosies on the payroll decide to investigate something peculiar, which the teenage daughter has also noticed.  A bad decision leads to the complete departure of the renovation team. 

Actually, maybe that impulsive act wasn’t so bad after all because in short order, the troubled boy gets possessed with all the expected consequences that follow.  (There’s even the obligatory scene where the kid gets an MRI and the doctors find nothing wrong with him.) And suddenly, Amorth is simultaneously summoned by this new demon and assigned by his boss, The Pope (Franco Nero in a rare babyface role), to look into the case.

The Vatican has a very good reason to solve this dilemma.  Old sins have been meticulously covered up here for centuries even though Amorth pulls a Hillary and offers a very convenient scapegoat for the evidence of crimes he uncovers.  In fact, he blames the devil for “everything” wrong the Catholic Church did since 1475.  Curiously, he doesn’t blame him for their cover-up.  He doesn’t seem to be too angry about it, either.

He has to do this all quietly because he’s in deep shit for the pig incident.  In a scene straight out of a cop movie, instead of a detective being reamed by his superior for breaking the laws to solve a case, it’s a doubting Cardinal Sullivan who demands answers.  Instead of urging him to relinquish his gun and badge, he simply orders him to quit.

That’s when Amorth uncharacteristically loses his temper and cuts a promo on Sullivan, reminding him that only The Pope can fire him.  He storms out on this panel of judges still being accosted by Sullivan who is too powerless to reel him back.

When you think about it, Sullivan is actually the reasonable one here.  Exorcisms are very much the product of “antiquated beliefs”, as he puts it.  So much in fact that the real-life Vatican doesn’t really comment on the practice which they’ve tried to downplay for a long time now.

But the movie insists on standing by Amorth and, in true buddy cop tradition, even gives him an inexperienced partner, a Spanish priest who was overseeing the now discontinued reconstruction of that castle in Castile. (Can’t believe he turned down that hot babe for the Vatican. What a loser.)

Upon meeting this possessed boy, Amorth’s old tricks of demon denial and bad jokes instantly backfire. This demon knows his name and his whole history including his never ending guilt over two key moments in his past.  Amorth immediately realizes this isn’t going to be a squash.  And if he is to prevail, it has to be a handicap match.

It’s pretty clear that The Pope’s Exorcist was made to launch a franchise very much like The Conjuring series which is also based on real-life frauds who thought they were helping people defeat the non-existent supernatural.

The real Gabriele Amorth travelled the world examining potential possession cases for 30 years before he retired in 2016.  The movie makes a big mistake revealing this in an on-screen quote right at the beginning, eliminating any possible suspense during the drawn-out finale.

I don’t know when Amorth went completely bald but Russell Crowe decided to go with the Hamlet-meets-Peter-Gabriel-during-his-wizard-period look instead probably to make him look more intense as if that’s even possible. 

Look, I’ve long been a great admirer of this Australian actor (who won the Oscar for the wrong role; it should’ve been for A Beautiful Mind not the overrated Gladiator) and while his Italian accent is credible, I can’t warm up to his softened portrayal of a notorious phony.  None of his jokes are funny, either.

The real Amorth had very dumb, insulting opinions.  He once described yoga as a “Satanic” practice and also proclaimed Hinduism a false religion because of its endorsement of reincarnation.  In other words, he was a nut no one should’ve taken seriously.

During the scene with the panel of Catholic scolds, in a moment that would delight Sheldon Cooper, the on-screen Amorth is offered a hot beverage which the Italian padre accepts but no sugar please, that’s the work of the devil.  How did he get so fat then?

The real Amorth died a few years ago at age 91.  He is still revered by those who believed he really did offer salvation to generations of real-life Linda Blairs.  He authored countless articles and dozens of books on his life with the church, two of which inspired the plot of this film.  He genuinely felt he was doing good, that he was slowly ridding the world of Satan’s vengeful minions.

He clearly overlooked the ones running the Vatican.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Saturday, October 7, 2023
2:30 a.m.