I'm watching Malevolent (MaleVolent?) on Netflix right now. Because no Halloween is complete without at least one horror movie.
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I feel for a lot of that, what I get out of it is more about the ritual of the telling and the performance itself, rather than a desire to see something original or new. I'm not asking to be surprised, I'm just asking for it to not be done badly. And my standards are low.
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So back to MaleVolent (seriously, what's with the letter?) Angela is Troubled and quiet. She's more sincere then the others, but otherwise just quiet. Her brother is an ass and I just wonder if he'll be possessed before he dies horribly. His girlfriend is... there, I guess?
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And Camera Guy can be summed up with the line: "Why are you being so creepy?" "Because I'm a creep?" Don't be fooled, Camera Guy and Girlfriend are ghost chow. The story is about Angela, Brother, and the old lady who hired them to exorcise her house.
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Speaking of Old Lady, I like her. She takes no shit, and she has Brother pegged as a con man.
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Brother, for his part, is motivated to do the things that Angela is Not Comfortable With because he owes lots of money to a violent loan shark for what I'm assuming is a drug habit. Honestly, it's a more solid motive than I usually see, so I'm satisfied.
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Right from the beginning, Angela sees legit ghosts, but hams up not-real ghosts for the camera. Kinda like putting a fake horn on a real unicorn so people know what they're looking at, a la Peter S Beagle.
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They're pretty up front from the beginning that she sees ghosts all over the freakin' place, but doesn't want to admit it because that's how her very dead mother started down the road to deadsville.
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Also standard fare: person who sees ghosts is misdiagnosed, institutionalized, then driven to self-destruction because of their visions. Her daughter (it's almost always her daughter) refuses to pursue treatment or talk about it because of that.
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For the record, I really, truly, sincerely dislike this trope. It feeds the already extreme stigma surrounding mental health issues, discourages people getting help, and is just overdone and boring on all angles. Give me positive therapist interactions, please!
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Give me therapists who don't necessarily buy into ghosts being a thing, but offer their patients ways to deal with their "hallucinations". Give me doctors respecting that their patients don't want to take meds. Give me mental health issues unrelated to supernatural powers.
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Hell, give me therapists or doctors hearing a patient talk about being stalked by a ghost, and mistakenly believing that they're being stalked by a cruel and twisted living human, and trying to intervene in that capacity. THAT would be more interesting to me than gaslighting.
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The girlfriend from Del Toro's Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark played that really well-- she didn't believe, but she listened and supported the little girl and gave her a way to fight back against the "hallucinations" all the same. More of that, please.
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Old Lady just called out Brother on being a con artist, but she still wants to work with Angela. I REALLY like this old lady.
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That's the first time I've heard "His Horn Went Beep Beep Beep" used as a Creepy Slow Song, but I appreciate it, considering how the whole point of the song is it keeps going faster and faster and faster.
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Camera Guy gets hurt, and Asshole Brother refuses to get help because he doesn't want the job to get cancelled. And now they're... looking around while Camera Guy whimpers in pain? Why aren't they helping him?
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Now it's looking like she wasn't just the mother of a serial killer, but the serial killer herself. At the very least, she was abusive toward her foster daughters. So there's a twist for ya.
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Some really weird editing choices just now. Like, it's hard to keep track of the timing. There's visual shorthand that suggests time has passed, but we're told that only a few seconds/minutes have passed because Camera Guy still hasn't been treated for injuries?
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Also Girlfriend who was Just There is now gone, and I didn't even notice she'd disappeared until they brought it up.
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Finally they get the injured people into the car and try to get them out of the house. Took ya long enough.
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Random ... living? human murderer is now showing up and killing people en mass? Like, beating them to death with a shovel. It's a very unghostly way to kill somebody.
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...Not beating them to death? Just knocking them unconscious? Okay, then. Those people got bludgeoned awfully hard to not be dead right now,
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What exactly was your plan? Oh. It was stabbing. Okay. I like that plan. That is a good plan.
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Why are you trying to walk away from the house to get help? The house has a phone. Use that to call the cops.
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You know, they could have done something really cool with the whole "giving voice to the ones who have been silenced" thing. I wish they'd done more with that aspect of it.
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End of conversation
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