Finally! The 2018 Saturn Award Nominations are here! These are my favorite awards because these are the movies I actually want to watch. I have watched some painfully boring movies this year, and not one of them is nominated for a Saturn Award…thank God. I love sci-fi and horror and thrillers and fantasy, so I celebrate the Saturn Awards as though they are the Oscars!
First on my list: Best Horror Film Release
47 Meters Down: I felt like I had seen this before. There have been a number of “trapped by sharks/wolves/whatever-animal-lives-here” movies in the past couple years. This one felt like…no big deal.
Annabelle: Creation: Surprisingly good! I liked The Conjuring…but did not like the original Annabelle movie. My main issue? The design of the doll. It was not cute enough for anyone to want to keep in the first place, let alone as it started acting oddly. Now the “actual” doll was a Raggedy Ann…and while it would have been a disaster for whatever toy company owns the rights, it would have made these movies even better! Who didn’t have a Raggedy Ann? Golden opportunity lost.
Anyway. Annabelle: Creation was really original in premise. It was convoluted…but what horror movie isn’t? Orphans being taken in by a doll maker that had lost a little girl…a forbidden room…a woman with a mysterious illness…the whole thing was very well done. As the scares started coming, it became less about watching for the doll, and more about the spirit of the orphans and their desperate circumstances.
Better Watch Out: There was the twist I never saw coming…but it came way too soon. After that it turned into my least favorite type of movie: terrorizing people just because you can. There are too many “home invasion” type movies. This one is barely special.
Get Out: Not a bad movie, but I found no humor in it. There were jokes, but they were to put us at ease. This movie definitely works as social commentary, and I found the premise clever. The demonizing of white suburbanites was entertaining and unique. There are great performances, a unique story…why don’t I like this more?
I think your life experiences affect how you react to this movie. I have come to understand that if you are black you look at this movie in a different way. I am not black. I went in looking for a funny horror movie, maybe along the lines of the old self-aware Scream movies, but better. This is definitely not that.
A multi-leveled movie like this deserves to be studied. I predict there will be theses written about it’s particular take on race relations. On the other hand, I have no desire to watch it again. Like I said, I wish I like it more.
It: I have ravenously read the book. I have worshipped the miniseries. I love Tim Curry and all his performances. Saying I had mixed feelings about this remake is putting it mildly. Now I feel that I can admit that I thought it was great.
Here’s the thing: I’ve always been partial to the children’s story versus the adults’ story. Children facing down evil has always been one of my favorite premises. The miniseries was led Jonathan Brandis, Seth Green, and Emily Perkins as some of the children. Their acting, in my opinion, was far superior to the adults, excluding Annette O’Toole, who I thought was great. Skipping all the adult stories made for a cohesive movie that leaves an automatic sequel plot, and I think it was the right choice.
The new group of children is led by Jaeden Lieberher, Sophia Lillis, and Finn Wolfhard. They were fantastic. I couldn’t get enough of watching them. All the while I was waiting to see if they followed through on the…ummm…sexual bit of the book, if you can call it that. If you’ve read the book, you know what I’m referring to. Anyway, I started looking up all their screen credits so I could watch them some more.
Pennywise. Well, I liked both versions, but during the miniseries it was Tim Curry under the make-up, and it colored my perception. Having an actor I had not seen before take on Pennywise was very effective. Bill Skarsgard was very menacing, as ordered, but obviously didn’t get to show a lot of range. He was less animated that Curry, and came off as more of a monster.
mother!: This one goes off the rails into absurdity very suddenly, and more than once! For most of the movie I was identifying very much with Jennifer Lawrence’s character. She didn’t want people in her space. Her husband seems to invite everyone in. Then everyone he invites in goes nuts. It was particularly effective for me, as people-being-mean-just-because-they-can gets me every time. I kind of hate it. It comes off as a kind of bullying, and I can’t stand to watch it. However, this goes too far. Yup. Too far.
THE VERDICT:
It. It is the only one on the list that I want to watch again. The performances by its young cast were spellbinding, the effects were seamless, and Pennywise was appropriately terrifying. Well done.
Image credit: static.koimoi.com
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