“Bone Lake” inescapably recalls recent horror movies like “Companion” and “Together,” which are also driven by the anxiety experienced by men who fail to please women in the bedroom. And a recent comedy also mines these issues, the hilarious “Splitsville,” which of these movies actually most resembles “Bone Lake” in terms of plotting. Even the single setting in these pictures is the same across the board: some form of remote idyll that is above most of our pay grades. Something is in the air.
Please indulge me a touch of a think piece: These films are a reaction to our return to a “greed is good” ethos that is intensified by the illusion of sexy prosperity that we cultivate online. Money and style and sex get all mixed up, as they tend to, and a man’s diminished earning power in turn diminishes his erotic swagger. It’s no accident that most of the dudes in these movies are aspiring or failed artists, feeling cucked by better looking and wealthier friends.
“Bone Lake” is competently made and goes down easy, but people who go to the movies often are going feel that they’ve already seen it several times recently, a déjà vu that may spark irritation. This blend of bedroom farce and slasher movie is already a subgenre, in other words, and filmmakers looking to distinguish themselves are going to have to play much harder ball than the folks behind “Bone Lake” do.
Diego (Marco Pigossi) and Sage (Maddie Hasson) are a thirtyish couple who’ve been dating a few years and are reaching a plateau in their relationship. He’s an emasculated writer type and she’s earning all the money and phoning in their sex life. To juice things up, they rent an Airbnb that turns out to be a ludicrously luxurious mansion. Crashing the party are Will (Alex Rose) and Cin (Andra Nechita), who are inevitably hotter, more fun and more intoxicated with one another than our protagonists, casting Diego and Sage’s boringness in in even starker terms.
Director Mercedes Bryce Morgan and writer Joshua Friedlander are pretty good at capturing the embarrassment felt by fuddy-duddies when they meet people with a supernatural wealth of talent, confidence and attractiveness. But the characters are flimsy, and the plotting is as square as Diego and Sage’s bedroom antics. This is a thriller about sexual temptation, after all, in which no one succumbs to said temptation. The horror element is rote, sparked off by a twist that most folks will anticipate within the film’s first 20 minutes. Not bad, very forgettable, ideal for half-watching on a flight.
“Good Boy” is a single joke movie, but it’s a pretty good joke that cuts to the heart of the insecurities felt by animal people over their pets. Namely, the fear that we are failing our animals, missing some pivotal part of their lives that we presume would be more obvious to a more thoughtful person. My cat was sick this week, I get it.
Director Ben Leonberg’s dog, Indy, is the star here, playing the dog of a man, Todd (Shane Jensen), who is clearly going through some shit. He may be sick, or depressed, or possessed, or all of the above — it’s a while before Leonberg reveals his hand — and we experience all of Todd’s pain through Indy’s eyes. We barely see any human faces in “Good Boy,” they are remote figures who’re not entirely knowable yet capable of earning a fierce and loyal dog’s love. It’s a horror movie as YouTube animal porn, and you may be amazed by how well Leonberg brings off a potentially absurd concept.
Leonberg doesn’t let his wonderful dog do all the work for him. The photography and the mood here are cunningly accomplished, suggesting the cozy yet dangerous domiciles of early ‘80s fantasies, especially those in Spielberg land. Something is creeping into the remote country house where Todd and Indy go to retreat from Todd’s figurative demons. Perhaps they are literal demons, and effective sport is made of parsing shadows that may contain a figure or may simply be shadows.
Is it scary? Not really. Is it poignant? Yes. There’s a heartbreaking moment where Todd shoos Indy away. Todd, in agony, doesn’t know that his friend has been terrified and alone and waiting for him in this gothic house all day. That scene expertly stimulates an animal lover’s guilt receptors. But that empathy hems “Good Boy” in as well. You know that no guy who’s nice enough to build a cinematic monument to his dog is mean enough to make a movie that plays dirty and really gets under your skin. “Good Boy” is an unusually skillful stunt, but that’s all it is. Leonberg has potential though.
“V/H/S Halloween” reminds us that the “V/H/S” series has become the Little Engine That Could of horror franchises. Yes, each film is usually highly variable in quality, but every entry is good for a half dozen wild and irrational images. “V/H/S Halloween” is even better than all that. There’s not a dud to be found here, which is rarely true of even classic horror anthologies, and a few of the shorts reach into the realm of the uncanny.
The framing device, written and directed by Bryan M. Ferguson, purports to be footage of research conducted on a new diet soda sometime in the 1980s. In between the other stories, we get updates on the hideous things that happen to people who drink this soda, which manage to be consistently gross and hilarious. This segment is a riff on Larry Cohen’s 1980s-era horror comedy “The Stuff,” which it honors and surpasses. Cohen’s distinct brand of corporate satire runs all through “V/H/S Halloween.”
Casper Kelly’s short centers on the subterranean horrors wrought by an off-brand candy company, especially when people take more than one piece of “fun size” treats, while the Micheline Pitt-Norman & R.H. Norman film pivots ingeniously on Halloween decorations as a branding opportunity that might wreak more havoc than that associated with eyesores. These shorts suggest “The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horrors” taken to surprisingly hard-R extremes. Their brutality has a cheeky kick.
Meanwhile, Alex Ross Perry’s contribution, “Kidprint,” is authentically unnerving, a classic of the horror short form. It’s the early 1990s and a video and photography store films short videos of children as a mean of identification should they disappear. There is a serial murderer of children stalking the town, and Perry follows the video store’s dorky owner, Tim (Steve Gurewitz), as he films himself helping the children and subsequently discovering the secret of the killer.
Earlier this year, Perry released a three-hour documentary about video store culture, and a free-associational, docu-fiction hybrid about the band Pavement, which is to say that he is in a curatorial mode. That mode is weaponized in “Kidprint,” which suggests that our addiction to past tech cannot hide us from the horrors of modern surveillance and underground violence; in fact, the tech opens us up further to violation. “Kidprint” is a way station between the past and present, and Perry merges those cinephile concerns with a willingness to play very dirty. Think “Peeping Tom” meets “Terrifier.”
I hope that Perry makes a full-length horror movie; he could be the genre’s poet of the booby-trapped nostalgia that drives our longing for a past that never entirely existed. He has the empathy, because he shares that longing, as well as a critic’s distrustful precision and an artist’s knack for bringing the analogue era to life. He could be a poet of the nostalgia that drives, say, a series devoted to pretending that it’s made up of old videos, and that drives us to revisit our favorite sources of cinematic atrocity every Halloween.
“Bone Lake” and “Good Boy” are in theaters everywhere, while “V/H/S Halloween” is now streaming on Shudder.
