One Star Classics

Stare down a Baltimore tunnel for an hour without blinking, and you will conjure Peeping Tom, an urban legend who will, as they are wont to do, hunt down and kill you. Hey, it’s par the course, and great fodder for a found footage film.

Butterfly Kisses is in the strictest sense a movie within a movie within a movie, where the core film is a student project about Peeping Tom. The film about that film follows a director trying to prove both the legend and student film true, while the film you’re watching is trying to debunk that documentary. Get it? Great!

As only one person has ever managed to keep his eyes completely open for an hour (and five seconds – true fact), the students come up with a good conceit: they make the camera the eye and point it at the tunnel for an hour at midnight. When they review and enhance the footage the next morning, they see an apparition rise in the distance, staring at the camera. Good for the film (all three of them); bad for the students.

The director of the movie about the movie, Gavin, is the type of guy who never became the great director he always dreamed of becoming. Instead, he makes a living as a wedding photographer, chasing an elusive big break. Having found the students’ footage, he doubles down on making his documentary. That’s a bit of a curveball as far as a found footage film goes, and Butterfly Kisses should get credit for going meta.

Peeping Tom himself is creepy. The students keep seeing him in every clip they film, or, as it is, every time the camera blinks. And with every blink, Peeping Tom comes closer. Or is he? Or did the students fake the film? Or did Gavin?

The two stories slowly meld, maybe not in as clever of a way one would hope – this isn’t House of Leaves – but it’s still a fun watch. The meta sides are surprisingly clever, enough so that I won’t spoil one of the more creative twists.

Butterfly Kisses is eerie enough to be a worthwhile watch, and the dramaturgy gives the movie a fairly fresh twist. It might not be Hamlet – some of the more dramatic turns don’t really do a whole lot – but it’s fun. And that’s good enough for me.

The Trailer

Leave it to the Austrians to counter warm and fuzzy Christmas traditions with one of the most depraved characters in all of lore: Krampus. The part goat, part demon functions like a Bizarro Santa, who, in his kindest incarnation, punishes naughty children. Michael Dougherty, meanwhile, decided to go a whole lot darker with his eponymous movie.

Krampus is billed as a horror-comedy, which isn’t inaccurate but also can be misread as a parody, which it decidedly is not. Dougherty’s movie might feature plenty of Christmas Vacation styled laughs – and more about that in a bit – but the darker sides of the film are as demented as they come.

We follow the normal, yet dysfunctional Engel family – Engel being German for angel – who are hosting Christmas for their close relatives. The ornery aunt and the deadbeat brother-in-law with his bratty children. The type, when mixed together, becomes the recipe for a bad holiday.

Infighting and bullying soon get to the youngest Engel, Max, who, in a moment of anger, tears apart his letter to Santa Claus and throws it out the window. When the family wakes up the next day, a blizzard has engulfed the now strangely abandoned neighborhood.

No points for guessing who is behind this transformation.

The most notable part of Krampus, at least on the surface, is the cast’s caliber. Adam Scott and Toni Collette star, with a supporting cast which includes David Koechner (in place of Christmas Vacation’s Randy Quaid), Allison Tolman (you know her from the first season of Fargo), and Conchata Ferrell (who you call up when you want an angry, redhead aunt in your movie). The rest of the cast, while not as well known, keeps up well with the stars, and Krampus is, despite a somewhat hokey premise, decidedly an A-movie.

Dougherty, who both wrote and directed the film, could easily have fallen into the trap of taking it in a wink-of-the-eye, break-the-fourth-wall direction, but wisely kept it well-rounded. The funny parts are funny, the creepy parts are creepy, and while there is some crossover, it never feels forced.

One thing in particular that makes the eerie parts work is that you rarely see Krampus himself. Instead, the family is forced to barricade itself inside the Engel house while trying to keep the Bizarro Santa and his helpers out. There’s a tenseness to it, and when the daughter of the household disappears, the rest are forced to put their differences aside while dealing with the situation.

Further, what makes that storyline even more bizarre, is that a good chunk of the movie comes off as an homage to Christmas Vacation. I touched upon the characters above, but the dynamics, dialogue, and even the flow of the story follow the Chevy Chase classic closely. Krampus is darker, for sure, but that lends itself well to the core of Christmas Vacation’s charms.

Having a Christmas horror movie the whole family can enjoy might sound like an impossibility, but Krampus seems to be one nigh everyone can enjoy. The laughs and scares are well balanced, and the entertaining script is paired with some great visuals. The contrast between an ice-cold blue blizzard and a house warmed by an open fireplace is quite striking.

It’s a seasonal watch in the One Star Classics Household, as it should be in any self-respecting home. Pair it with Christmas Vacation, and you got a good evening going.

Bonus trivia!

Krampen Nacht is celebrated in many countries tonight. We are all about timely reviews around these parts!

The Trailer

The Collection picks up closely after where The Collector ended. Arkin, who was collected at the end of the last movie, manages to escape just in time to see The Collector capture his next victim, Elena. He jumps through a window, and when he wakes up in the hospital, the head of a private team in search of Elena solicits his help. Begrudgingly, Arkin accepts the offer.

The Collection is as different from The Collector, as The Purge: Anarchy is from The Purge. In both franchises, the first entries are set in single-family houses providing claustrophobic chases. Similarly, here as in Anarchy, a group of mercenaries is let out into large areas, in movies that are a whole lot more action-packed than their predecessors.

The Collection mainly takes place in The Collector’s lair (Argento Hotel, in a nice nod), though it takes quite a flimsy explanation to justify how Arkin can find it. It’s also a complete unknown how he knows the interiors of the hotel perfectly.

But who needs logic? It is clear that Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan decided to double-down on The Collector’s B-movie pedigree, and with The Collection, they go all out. It’s not that the first entry was self-serious, but The Collection almost makes it seem that way.

The Collector’s slasher gore was too much for my liking, and while the violence is more than present in The Collection, it is way over the top, and hard to take seriously. That is by design, and it works. Take the nightclub massacre that kicks off the movie. Here we see a whole dance floor plowed down by an impossibly intricate (and impossible to miss) trap. It’s ridiculous, and that’s fine. It seems fitting,

As we get into the hotel, the cat and mice game is again the center of the story, but the vast maze of corridors changes the rules entirely. Too, having a group of protagonists with automatic weapons changes the game, as do the many brain-washed victims that attack like zombies.

The Collector was a straightforward slasher; The Collection is an action slasher.

And as an action slasher, it succeeds, even more so than the first one succeeded in being a slasher. The Collection is an unapologetic race of gun-fire and over-the-top traps. The Collection might be schlock, but/and it’s proud of it.

I would have a hard time recommending The Collector to anyone who wasn’t interested in the slasher genre, but The Collection should hit home for anyone who likes the later Purge movies. In no way do you need to have seen the first movie to enjoy The Collection. It never falls apart under any lore as the Saw franchise did.

And more is coming, with the unfortunately titled The Coll3cted currently filming. It’ll be interesting to see which way they will take it, but as it stands, I wouldn’t mind a further exploration of the slasher genre’s action facets.

Bonus review fact!

This review is posted on Black Friday, in honor of The Collection’s promotional line: The Real Black Friday Starts November 30th.

More collecting!

Read the review of The Collector!

The Trailer

As far as being a burglar, Arkin has a pretty good gig going. He’s a contractor during the daytime, with full entry to case potential victims’ houses. Planning a job is as easy as jotting down anything he sees and hears. Who would want to make a movie about a straightforward robbery, though? Not director Marcus Dunstan, and when he throws what seemingly is a second robber into the mix, The Collector turns more into Saw than a heist film.

It soon turns out that the second entrant is not a robber – I mean, what movie do you think you’re watching? – but rather a crazed collector who has booby-trapped the house, where he… It’s not entirely clear to me how well he has thought this out. He could probably collect the one person he wanted from the house – his modus operandi – and call it good, instead of setting up literally dozens of traps for a cat and mice game.

Either way, Arkin gets thrown into the chase after he breaks into a remote house, and without a way out, and a young girl to save, the game between him and The Collector gets going.

The Collector has more than just a passing similarity to Saw. The script was intended for a Saw prequel, and it was written by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, the duo behind entry four through seven of that franchise. In other words, the ones which were not exactly lauded.

Luckily, The Collector holds its own pretty well, and it doesn’t come off as a full-on Saw clone. It might not be a logical movie, but there is a tense current running through it. The film is slickly shot by Dunstan, and some of the overhead tracking shots are particularly effective at moving the cat and mice chase forward.

Juan Fernández doesn’t have a whole lot of material to work with as The Collector himself, but he makes the most of it. During the few scenes where he isn’t doing trap-y stuff, he manages to portray a character that has severe social issues, with more than a few psychotic tendencies. Sure, that’s the case with nigh any slasher antagonist, but Fernández gives the faceless killer a little more personality.

Anti-protagonist Arkin is well portrayed by Josh Stewart. He makes the burglar feel sympathetic, showing almost a Robin Hood-style quality. Again, that’s not earth-shattering in the grand scheme of movie-making, but it adds a good je ne sais quoi to a protagonist that could have been as bland as what we saw in Saw IV through Saw: The Final Chapter. (Which more logically should’ve been called Saw: The Final Chapter?.)

The Collector is a good little slasher, though it still falls in many of the genre’s trappings. I do get that the tense chase is reliant on violence, but I’ll be honest: in my old age, I tend to look away during the more gruesome parts. I mean, I can appreciate the cleverness of some of the traps and all, but I don’t feel the need to see the results of them. It is possible to make a slasher without the gore, as proven by Happy Death Day.

That is what it is. I can live with the gruesomeness as long as it provides a means to an end, and the non-violent parts of The Collector are more than serviceable. The ninety minutes pass quickly.

I was close to not watching The Collector because of Melton and Dunstan’s previous works, but I am glad I could get past it. The Collector is a surprisingly interesting entry in the slasher genre.

More collecting!

Read the review of The Collection!

The Trailer