VOD Review: Bedeviled (2017)

"It might not have anything new to say, but it sure says it well."

Anyone who has a smart phone knows that installing new apps can be a dicey game sometimes. Bloatware, malware, huge drains on the battery, and hours wasted trying to get the high score on games like "Where Did Grandma Hide that Zucchini?" are all very real things, and can be terrifying in their own right.



So just imagine an app that loads a haunted virus on your phone that learns your deepest, darkest fears, and then uses them to scare you, and kill you to death.



That's what Bedeviled is all about.

Mr. Bedevil is a Siri-like app for the ages. It will make witty comments, turn on lights for you, and help you organize your life is a fun and efficient manner. It will also kill you, because it's haunted. I mean, doesn't the name kind of give you the impression that it's creepy right away? Why would you even install it when it randomly shows up on your phone? Ever hear of spyware?

YOU'RE CUTE, BABY, BUT YOU AIN'T VERY BRIGHT.

After young QT Nikki falls victim to Mr. Bedevil's haunted shenanigans, her friends are reeling, so much so, that they have to stop texting and tweeting for 5 minutes to grieve... which they have no idea how to do, because all they do is text and tweet, and they have no emotions.

HANGING WITH FRIENDS IN 2017 IS SO MUCH FUN.

They all receive invites to download Mr. Bedevil, which they do, because you should always install any app that mysteriously makes its way onto your phone without you actually downloading it. The app instantly starts messing with them, turning their deepest darkest fears into reality... which if it was truly evil, all it would need to do would be to cut them off from Internet connectivity for life, and watch them die slow, agonizing deaths.

IF ONLY HE WERE ALLOWED TO BROWSE REDDIT, HE'D STILL BE ALIVE.

One by one, the friends are killed off by Mr. Bedevil, and it becomes a race against time for those left to figure out how to uninstall him from their phones so that they can live, and live-stream the VMA's which are tomorrow night!



Scary smart phone stuff ensues.

LIKE SHE COULD EVEN HACK THE MATRIX!

Movies like Chain Letter (review HERE), Unfriended (review HERE), and #Horror (review HERE) have all tried to capitalize on the current state of teenagers and their tech-obsessions, but they sucked. Bedeviled isn't all that great either, but at least it's well-made, the cast is able enough, and it offers up an interesting villain in Mr. Bedevil, even if the story he's stuck in is silly at times.



Here's the problem with most Teen Terror flicks like this: everyone is model-level gorgeous; they all live in beautiful homes that make us wonder what do their parents do to afford all of that; and those same parents never seem to be around much as their kids are being terrorized and brutally killed. I also never understand how in these movies when someone dies, their closest friends mourn them for like a minute, and then it's back to laughter and normalcy, or they dive into some intense investigation. Real emotions don't work like that, at least not with human beings they don't.



I guess what I'm saying is that most of them exist to show some pretty people in scary situations, and there isn't much depth or realism to most of them. Just like Bedeviled.

THOSE DEAD EYES...

For an R-rated movie, there sure isn't very much gore to be found here.

BUT THERE IS A HAUNTED DANCE-OFF. THAT WAS COOL.

Again, an R-rating with no R-rated action.

YEAH, US TOO.

Bedeviled is a decent enough movie in its way. It's well-made, has an interesting villain, and it looks pretty. It's also overly-familiar, tame, and not very scary. If you can live with those drawbacks, then give it a go and enjoy the pretty sights.



I'm probably being generously giving it a C, but we actually didn't hate watching it. Rent with caution though.



C



Bedeviled is available on VOD now.

Bedeviled's eye candy game was on point though. There's no disputing that.

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Theatrical Review: Wind River (2017)

"It's movies like this that make us love movies."

Writer/Director Taylor Sheridan is best known to us for playing Deputy Hale on a little TV show that we loved called Sons of Anarchy.



Turns out that he's also one hell of a writer too, penning scripts for the excellent Sicario, and the even more excellent Hell or High Water, which was one of the best movies that we saw last year. He also directed a Horror flick called Vile back in 2011, so as far as we're concerned, he rocks.



Wind River marks the first time that he's directed something he's written, and it's maybe the best work he's done on any front.

Cody Lambert is an agent of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. His days consists of shooting wolves and tracking hungry mountain lions, which keeps him in a bit of a somber mood. The fact that his daughter died a few years earlier, which helped destroy his marriage, probably doesn't help much either. And the bleak, snowy surroundings...

LIONS DON'T MAKE SNOW ANGELS... DO THEY?

When he finds the barefoot body of a local girl out in the wild, things get even bleaker. The girl was best friends with his daughter, and so old wounds mix with new pain to make Cody even more quiet and somber than he normally is, which even for the backwoods of Wyoming, is way too much.

HE'S SEEN SOME SHIT.

With no one knowing the local terrain better than Cody, it falls to him to help a rookie FBI agent track the killer down and bring him (her, them?) to justice. It also falls to him, by way of a promise to the dead girl's father, to kill the son of a bitch when they find him, so you just know it's all going to end with bloodshed.

LOTS OF BLOODSHED.

Where we expected Wind River to be a Serial Killer flick, we instead got a murder mystery wrapped in an emotional blanket of social relevance and heartbreak, and we couldn't be happier about it.



This is a stark and desolate movie that gives us real characters acting in ways that didn't once make them feel like they were characters in a movie. That makes the emotional weight of everything that unfolds around them that much heavier, and as the intensity grows, which it does, we couldn't help but be on the edge of our seat not only wondering what they'd find, but what would happen to them in the process.



We loved the sub-plot with the lion, and the climactic scene at the end was crazy intense, giving us a perfect resolution.



Jeremy Renner turns in what I think is an Oscar-worthy performance as a quiet, broken man who is tasked with finding the killer of a young girl, and every step of his journey shows that he's as adept at his job as he is isolated from everything else in his life. He's a bad-ass, but he's also very human, which made his badassery play even better. He killed us in this one.



Equally as good, but in a different and lesser way, was Elizabeth Olsen as the rookie FBI agent sent to find the killer in the wilds of Wyoming. She's in over her head, but she goes full bore in her pursuit of the killer, especially once she is sucked in by the emotion of the case, and the people involved.



The two of them have great on-screen chemistry, and they both shine in this one. 

LIFE IN WYOMING IS TOUGH.

 She's way too hot to be an FBI agent.

COME ON!

The statistic about Native American women shown at the end is horrifying.



“While missing person statistics are compiled for every other demographic, none exist for Native American women.”



Taylor Sheridan had two attorneys spend three month's trying to compile statistics on the subject but to no avail, because "No one knows how many there are." Shame on us.

THEY DESERVE BETTER.

The violence in this movie isn't gratuitous at all, but it's there towards the end.

WHO WOULD DARE BLOODY THAT ANGEL'S CHEEK?

Aside from a quick shot of some underwear, this in not that kind of movie.

THERE'S NO TAWDRY SEX OR NUDITY IN THIS ONE, ONLY LOVE. SWEET, TRAGIC, FORBIDDEN LOVE.

This movie is filled with some truly fantastic dialogue. The speech that Jeremy Renner gives about pain was special.



Also, "You really didn't see it, did you?" and "He went out with a whimper."

"SAY THAT SHIT AGAIN, YOU HALF-ASSED JASON BOURNE!" WAS A GOOD ONE TOO.

Calling Wind River the best movie of 2017 is a bold claim, I know, but honestly, no other movie that we've seen so far this year has affected us quite like this one did.



Wind River is an excellent movie from start to finish. Its script is air-tight, it has cold and deary atmosphere to spare, and the cast is top-notch. It's one of the most engaging thrillers that we've seen in a long time, which is saying something given how sparse and quiet it is overall.



See it on the big screen.



A+



Wind River is in theaters now.

The traumatized beauties of Wind River.

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Screener Review: The Ice Cream Truck (2017)

"That poster is awesome, but it's a bit misleading..."

*Thanks to the folks over at October Coast PR for the screener.



The poster for The Ice Cream Truck is all kinds of old school cool. Problem is, the movie itself doesn't deliver anywhere near the slasher-y goodness that the poster promises.



There's no way that I can discuss this movie without spoiling the whole thing, so in the sections below, I'm going to talk about the ending, and what it meant for the movie in general.



If you don't want the movie to be spoiled for you, forget our review and just check it out when you can.



You've been warned.

Mary and her family are moving back to her suburban hometown because they want the simple life. While fetching her morning paper, Mary notices a creepy ice cream truck driver waving at her from the street. Maybe he's delivering some "cool treats" to the lonely housewives of the neighborhood, or maybe he's plotting murder.

WHAT IS HIS END GAME?

Then, some shady looking guy shows up to deliver her furniture, and he gives her the once-over, noticing her wet boob, and walking in on her while she's changing. Maybe he's there to deliver her furniture, or maybe he's planning on giving her a good snuggle struggle instead.

A BUDDING ROMANCE?

The ice cream man starts killing off people in the neighborhood, Mary develops an inappropriate relationship with a local teenage boy, and we're not sure where the delivery guy went, because we were sure that he was going to stick around for some romance.



A suburban nightmare ensues.

I CAN'T BELIEVE THAT HE MISSED THE CONE, AND GOT THE STRAWBERRY SYRUP ALL OVER HIS SHIRT INSTEAD. SLOPPY WORK.

Right off the bat, Megan Freels' sophomore effort felt like an old school slasher flick to us with the way that the credits crawled up the screen to that sharp synth score, and we were sucked in. Deanna Russo made for a likable lead, and Emil Johnsen was suitably creepy as the ice cream truck driver. Jeff Daniel Phillips stole the show as the rapey furniture delivery guy. It was subtly amusing at times, and the kill scenes were decent.



But...



The main issue with the movie is that it plays out as a Horror flick, a commentary on suburban life, and a psychological drama all at once, and never really weaves those aspects together to make it feel coherent. It's well-made for a smaller Indie flick, and it's surely fun enough at times, but it tries to do too many things at once, and thus ends up being a bit of a muddled mess.



If you want to make a Horror flick, make a Horror flick. You can add all the subtext you want about how shady and annoying the suburbs are, and how lonely it can be for a woman to be thrust into a new situation alone, but dammit, deliver on the tension and blood-letting. If not, then drop the Horror bits and just make it a pure drama.



It's really the ending that killed it for me. I know that the movie is supposed to be a takedown of suburban life in general, along with being a profile of a woman and her psychological state, but the whole "it was all in her head" thing is the biggest cop-out there is, and aside from Haute Tension, it's annoying as hell to see a plot device like that negate an entire movie.



Had they played it straight-forward Horror-wise, and kept the subtext that fueled the film to a minimum, it would have been much better for it.

SHE OBVIOUSLY ISN'T A FAN OF BUTTER BRICKLE.

We get some ice cream scooper and knife violence, and some bloody moments throughout.

SHE SHOULD HAVE GONE WITH VANILLA.

There's a sex scene, but it's nothing overtly graphic.

NOT PROVOCATIVE ENOUGH.

The Ice Cream Truck isn't a bad movie, and in fact it's a rather enjoyable one for the most part, but it's also one that doesn't really feel like it knows what it wants to be... or maybe they shouldn't have sold it to us like it's a Horror movie, when it's clearly just the daydream of a bored suburban housewife.



Not bad, but frustrating.



C



The Ice Cream Truck hits limited theaters and VOD on August 18th.

I don't know how this is the first time we're seeing Deanna Russo in anything, but good lord does she ever have our attention now. 

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