2026 at the movies, part 3
Of late, I managed to catch: Send Help, Iron Lung, Undertone and Pillion.
Send Help - enjoyed this one quite a bit. I tend to like Sam Raimi movies, and of all the Sam Raimi movies in the world, this was among the Sam Raimi-est. Over-the-top gore sequences, obnoxious characters, plot twists a tubeworm could see coming…I was in. I suppose it’s hypocritical of me to blast a movie like Primate, which for all intents and purposes is a Sam Raimi movie, and traffics/glories in some of the same stupidity. What can I say? I’m a hypocrite.
Iron Lung is a movie I more or less despised after the first 15 minutes. I was vaguely familiar with the video game it’s based on, though I don’t know how much of the game’s scenario (can you really call it a storyline?) is adapted into the movie. I got no real sense of character, and the plot seemed uninterested in yielding up anything too tantalizing with regards to the broader topic of all of the stars in the universe extinguishing (?) and whether or not there’s supposed to be a tie-in to that mystery on the planet or moon full of blood. That said, I caught a midnight showing, so it was already well past my bedtime, and maybe I just wasn’t as sharp as I needed to be to catch what the movie was offering. I also respect and admire trying to tell a story that only has one setting—that’s exceedingly difficult to do, and not something I could pull off any better.
Undertone has a somewhat similar situation—it’s like a producer told a filmmaker, “I can give you a bedroom and a living room for your setting. Now go write a movie.” In this case, I think the claustrophobic aspects work quite a bit better than they do in Iron Lung, which is wild considering the protagonist can leave the house whenever she wants (but doesn’t, of course, a classic haunted house trope that becomes quite eye-brow raising at the end). The most significant problem with the movie really is the writing in this case—much like Shelby Oaks, it’s just a bunch of plot elements taken from other horror movies made since about 2005, with a podcast added (a podcast that’s apparently always recorded at around 3AM, which leads to one of the film’s glaring errors, when a doctor calls the protagonist at that hour to tell her the results of a pregnancy test). But back to those stolen plot points for a moment. Dying, religion-obsessed mother? Check. Ancient Middle Eastern demon? Check. Said demon hiding out in a piece of recorded media, waiting for some unlucky bastard to press the play button? Check, check, check. Mix Sinister and The Babadook, add a dash of The Ring…you get the idea. I was intrigued/amused by the backward masked messages hanging out in classic children’s songs (“Lick up all the blood!”), which led me to think more about writing a story where Thomas Edison discovers that any recorded song somehow has a genuine, impossible, sinister message from the afterlife embedded in it if played backwards, making him question whether he should tell people or try to cancel the concept of the phonograph altogether. Edison really did believe he could make a voice recorder that could communicate with the dead, so I think it would work historically.
Which leads me to Pillion. I hadn’t read any reviews of this, but I’d heard it was supposed to be a BDSM-based gay romantic comedy. Regardless of how I came to that expectation, the reality couldn’t be further away. I have to think this movie is pretty controversial for its depressing take on a master/slave relationship. I know one person in such a relationship (heterosexual), and by all accounts it’s a positive experience that allows them to explore their psychological interests while strengthening their communication and bond as a couple. Pillion gives us a submissive guy who does seem to want that (and growing into the understanding of what he wants is the closest thing the story offers in terms of a character arc), but falls under the spell of dominant biker who seems to be using sadomasochism as a substitute for his fear of loving anyone. That’s a lot to mine in terms of character exploration, but the movie isn’t interested in doing it. In fact, there’s almost no conversation at all between the main characters. I don’t think the movie (apparently based on a book) is giving a convincing portrayal of most master/slave relationships, but then again I’m not sure it’s trying to do that. I’ve experienced BDSM in a few role playing scenarios and found some of it tantalizing, some of it utterly boring or too absurd to be erotic. Fetishes in general really fascinate me, and if I’m into someone, I’m willing to try just about anything once. But Pillion doesn’t make a relationship based on power exchange appealing.
I guess that would make it…unappillion. Okay, lousy pun. Who wants to punish me for it?
