KNOCK AT THE CABIN

KNOCK AT THE CABIN (2022). Writer/director: M. Night Shyamalan. 

Andrew (Ben Aldridge) and Eric (Jonathan Groff), a gay couple with a seven-year-old adopted daughter, Wen (Kristen Cui), are vacationing at a cabin in the woods when four strangers show up at their door and force their way in. These strangers include big, burly Leonard (Dave Bautista), black nurse Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), waitress Adriane (Abby Quinn), and felon Redmond (Rupert Grint). They tell the two fathers that the world with its seven billion inhabitants is about to end and that the only way to prevent this is for one of those two men to make the supreme sacrifice and kill the other. As they wait to make the decision, the other four violently end the life of one of their number one by one. News reports indicate that horrible things, including tidal waves, plagues, and airliners crashing by the dozens, are happening around the globe, but Andrew thinks the foursome knew about these occurrences in advance. And then Andrew remembers why Redmond looks familiar -- he was the very man who gay-bashed him in a bar and put him in the hospital over a decade before. Now even more suspicious of the whole story, Andrew tells Eric that they have been targeted by some homophobic nut cases, but Eric isn't so sure. 

Groff, Cui and Aldridge

Knock at the Cabin, based on the novel "The Cabin at the End of the World," is a typically twisty N. Night Shyamalan movie although this doesn't have the twist you might be hoping for. For most of its length the movie is totally absorbing, well-directed and very well-acted, and it keeps you in suspense as details are unveiled like peeling away at an onion. Are these four strangers utterly crazy, victimized by absurd conspiracy theories and massive misinformation, or is something fantastic and inexplicable actually occurring? Although the novel ends differently (based on a synopsis I've read), the movie is perhaps too literal, and in the long run doesn't make much sense. The film becomes lost in quasi-religious, metaphysical, pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook that poses more questions than it answers. I confess I'm never satisfied with these type of storylines and denouements, although others will undoubtedly feel differently. 

                             Bautista, Quinn, Amuka-Bird

Knock at the Cabin also stretches credulity in certain sequences (along with the very premise, of course). When the first of the foursome is murdered by the other three -- apparently this also must happen to prevent the apocalypse -- the two fathers have virtually no reaction. Why do these people who supposedly want to save the world allow a small child to be in the same room when this gruesome death occurs? And so on. At least the film gets points for diversity in its casting. Not only are the two main characters gay men, they are played by openly gay actors. Bravo to Shyamalan for that! -- although I admit I'm not crazy about certain aspects of the ending. The performances from the entire cast are on target, with a special nod to Bautista for a performance both sensitive and charismatic. 

Verdict: Quite arresting while you're watching it but it has no lasting resonance. **1/2. 

GEORGETOWN

Waltz, Redgrave, Bening

GEORGETOWN (2019). Director: Christoph Waltz. 

Ulrich Mott (Christoph Waltz), a hustler in Washington D.C., marries a much older woman, Elsa ( Vanessa Redgrave), a wealthy widow, socialite and author who lives in a beautiful Georgetown townhouse. One night Elsa is found dead, and Elsa's daughter, Amanda (Annette Bening), who wasn't crazy about Ulrich, waits until the autopsy report -- it was homicide -- before going ballistic. A series of flashbacks show how Ulrich met and wooed Elsa, his life of lies and delusions, his secret gay activities, and his forming a snooty non-governmental agency with Elsa's help so he can mingle with the movers and shakers of political society. But did he kill Elsa, and if he did will he get away with it?

Wedded bliss? Waltz with Redgrave

This engaging, totally absorbing, and very well-acted movie -- Redgrave is especially marvelous but everyone is wonderful -- is based on the true story of Albrecht Gero Muth and his wife Viola Drath. The highlights of the film include the operatic quarrels engaged in by husband and wife, especially when she catches him in bed with a man in their hotel room, and when she confronts him with the truth of what he's been doing for the past two years when he was supposedly being heroic in Iraq. Because Waltz was 65 when he made the film -- although he looks and plays younger -- it isn't clear what a huge age gap there was between the couple who met when Muth was only in his twenties and she was about 70. 

Verdict: Okay, hardly a B movie and not noir, but decidedly a kind of murder mystery with class. ***. 

LAST CALL

 LAST CALL: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York. Elon Green. Celadon Books; 2021. 

This excellent book looks at a horrifying series of murders of gay men in the 1990's and unfolds almost like a suspense-thriller as the author delves into the lives of the victims, and finally the killer, a male nurse who lived on Staten Island. Although apparently not gay, Green did enough research and interviews to get a sense of the gay bar scene at the time, and views all of the murdered men with compassion; they are not simply dismissed as can happen in other true-crime volumes. Green also looks at the many people investigating the crimes, the extreme homophobia of the period (especially due to AIDS), and the calls for a more intense look at the killings by such as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and Anti-Violence Project. As the killer refused to do interviews with Green, we are not able to fully understand this monster, but can such people ever be fully understood?

Back in the day I frequented such bars as the Townhouse and the 5 Oaks, where some of the victims were regulars, and one of these poor men was a bar acquaintance that I saw virtually every time I went into the Oaks. I remember coming back from Boston and seeing this man's photo, along with the words serial killer in the paper, and was shocked. At first I thought the article was naming him as a killer, but it was worse -- he was the victim. None of the men who were killed deserved their fates. But at least their murderer was put away for life.

In the book the author wonders why these series of terrible murders have been virtually forgotten. I think the answer is that there have, unfortunately, been so many other serial killers since then who have captured the public's imagination. That the victims were gay men may also have played a part. Plus all the other things that have happened since the period captured in the tome. When you read books like this you realize that all of those movies about mad psychotics slaughtering people are in incredibly bad taste.

Verdict: Outstanding true crime story. ***1/2. 

ELEVATION Stephen King

ELEVATION. Stephen King. Scribner; 2018.

In this interesting if unremarkable novella by King -- a homage to Richard Matheson (to whom the book is dedicated) in general and his novel The Shrinking Man in particular -- hero Scott Carey (the name of the hero of Matheson's novel) discovers something very strange is happening to him. According to his scale he is losing weight rapidly, but his appearance isn't changing at all. His doctor is utterly baffled, but Carey is afraid that sooner or later his complete lack of mass -- despite what he looks like, a pot-bellied middle-aged man -- will send him soaring into the heavens. Carey's neighbors are a lesbian couple who are trying to run a restaurant in King's fictional Castle Rock but encountering difficulties due to prejudice. It's not just that they're a gay couple but that they're married. Carey makes it his business to help them, even though one of the women comes off like a stereotypical man-hater with a chip on her shoulder. In this testament to how friendship can overcome all barriers, the two women eventually become concerned friends of Carey's.

While the gay aspects of the book, however well-meaning (especially after King's nasty depiction of a gay male couple in Needful Things), are a bit awkward, his heart seems to be in the right place. The book is as well-written as anything by King, but some readers might be a little put off by the ending, which is somewhat moving but also a little comical and inexplicable. It's a good, fast read, but by no means a King classic.

Verdict: Worth an hour of your time if you don't expect too much. **3/4. 

TORSO

 

TORSO (1973/Italy). Director: Sergio Martino. 

While this Italian giallo film lacks the style, finesse and classy art direction of the best of Mario Bava and Dario Argento, it does manage to work up some suspense and chills in the final quarter. Young women are being stalked, murdered and dismembered in Rome. The suspects include a professor, a love-sick student, a handsome doctor, a co-ed's uncle, the "village idiot" and others. The heroine, Jane, (Suzy Kendall) retreats with three friends to a house in the country high atop a cliff, but finds she can not escape the killer. The movie begins inauspiciously and promises to be a pretty dull item, but it sustains interest until an excellent sequence when Jane hides from the maniac as he begins to dismember her friends. Later there is a very taut, chilling sequence when he goes through her room in search of her and nearly finds her. If the whole movie had been on the level of these tense scenes it really might have amounted to something. As it is, horror fans may find it worthwhile. The professor, Franz, is played by John Richardson, who co-starred with Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. (1967) and did little else of note. The script throws in a lesbian love-making scene for no apparent reason other than to presumably add some extra titillation. None of the killer's many victims, either male or female, ever seem to fight back. At one point he manages to dispatch three women (off-screen) at the same time! 

Verdict: Not great, but of interest to fans of psycho-shockers. **1/2.