WUH: Cobweb (2023)

Wake Up Heavy is a weirding Way media podcast. Welcome to Wake Up Heavy, the world's greatest horror movie podcast. On this episode, my weird dad and his friends will be talking about It's okay, it was just a battery. I heard it again. No more nightmares tonight, great champ day.

This is getting ridiculous. This is an old house. There's bound to be bumps in the night. Peter drew this. Yes, is he all right?

Peter has an overactive imagination. No more nightmares? That's right? You know. I wish I had someone I could talk to about the things that were happening in my house.

Mom, Mom, Peter. Sometimes you have to make hard decisions to protect your family. What is that the banging? You don't hear anything, Peter, You have a beautiful imagination. It's going to get you into trouble one day.

Hello and welcome to Wake Up Heavy. This is Mark Beagley, your host, and joining me once again is mister Chris stashw I'm the thing that comes for your kids when you're not paying attention. Oh spooky yeah. Or I'm gonna have to throw some effects on that disgusting double on Tendra, Maybe I oh yeah, man, I have to cut that out. Today we are talking about possibly two movies, depending on how long we go, but the original intent was to talk about twenty twenty threes.

Cobweb directed by Samuel I'm assuming it's bow Dan like Rodans and Seeds French, or Bowden if he's not, and written by Chris Thomas Devlin, well renowned for his twenty twenty two script for the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which we all love. That's on Netflix and you can go watch. Did we do an episode? I was just going to ask you that I think you ended up. Did you end up doing it with I did with Andy?

I think so. Yeah, Yeah, I couldn't make that one for some reason. It's probably because I didn't like it. Yeah, what a shame, you know what. I will say that Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie, all the sally hardest the stuff aside, it's fine, it is fine.

That scene on the bus is pretty good. But that scene on the bus literally just it makes every character are stupid for like five minutes. Like that's I know, but like a level of stupid that's really even hard to get behind. So, speaking of stupid characters, Cobweb Cobweb stars Lizzie Kaplan, one of my favorites, Anthony star Cleopatrick Coleman, and I'm forgetting the little boy's name. Woody Norman as Peter and Luke Busey as the bully.

They cannot not look like one another, right because I saw his name in the credits and then towards the end of the movie, I was like, if that's not the busy kid, I don't know who it is, Like, it took me a while to realize it, but he's got the teeth. He's got the busy teeth. It's the Gary Busey kid. Though, which is the crazy thing? That's not Jake Busey's son.

That's Gary Busey's son, I know. Which is the fucking insane part. Gary Busey had a son that's like ten. Yeah, Wow, couldn't find his a John I am dB. But they're supposed to be eight or nine because wood he is described as an eight year old kid, or he says he's eight in the movie.

Of course he's probably older in real life, but I'm sure not much older than ten. So anyway, yeah, kind of stunning. Yeah, this is a little bit off book for me because I don't do brand new movies all that often. But something caught my attention with this one back when I saw the trailer and the hubbub. But a lot of people were perplexed by the release date of this movie.

It came out the weekend of Barbenheimer, which didn't do this movie any service at all. Could only end one way, right, And it's very Halloween centric, which is weird. So you're four months out from Halloween, still in July, and lots of pumpkin imagery. Yeah, lots of pumpkins, lots of talk about Halloween. The movie opens with one week for Halloween as a title card and odd odd choice, which had a lot of people have brought up already.

Who knows. I don't know anything really about release dates. I know they can change. This was to maybe not compete with bigger horror movies in the fall. I guess are there are there big movies?

I guess there's like one big horror movie coming out this fall? Is that it? Is it? The fucking Exorcist movie? Yeah?

I don't even William Friedkin wasn't interested in seeing it, apparently, So the Dracula movie came out earlier as well, So you know, I don't know the last voyage of the Demiter. Did you see that one? Not yet? I planned to check it out because I like that guy's other movies. Horror movies just like came out this year, and I didn't see any of them, is what it felt like, like, I don't know.

Like last year, I felt like I was a little bit more connected with what was coming out, and this year because of most things now just going back to theaters as opposed to on streaming and in theaters, I was not going to go see this movie in theaters, let's just put it in that way. And I don't even know if it was showing near me. Frankly, I mean at the time when Barbie and Oppenheimer came out, like, who the fuck's going to go see this? Not commenting on the quality of the movie immediately, just those two movies were big enough draws that this was never going to get more than like a sparse amount of people maybe wandering in or the people who had, I guess heard of it. Look, I'm not connected to this, so correct me.

Let me know, clue me in. The last thing I'm connected to is horror. Twitter so horror Twitter and this movie. The relationship between them was amicable. If I saw mostly positive comments coming out, most people decrying the release time, like this would have done Gangbusters and late September, maybe even late August early October, because it has that very halloweeny feel, tons of pumpkins, pumpkin patch and the family's backyard, a million pumpkins in the classroom that he's in, but lots of Halloween imagery.

Who's to say how much better it would have done? Then, Most of what I saw was positive. There were a few naysayers, and I am like, you, I haven't really been keeping up. The reason we're doing this is because I've wanted to do something new. We've talked about that, oh some you know, a new horror thing.

Let's do it. And when I saw the trailer, I was like, Okay, I'm going to keep this sort of in the back of my head. And then I saw that Mike and Jay on Red Letter Media did their little spotlight episode on it, and I was like, Okay, they do this on new stuff that they like, and so I started watching it, and they don't usually do spoilers on that show. It because the movies they're talking about are new, but they started to get into spoiler territory, and I thought, I'm going to shut it off, now watch the movie and then come back to this. But what intrigued me was one thing that Jay said, and that was he compared it to the movie Parents, which I don't know if you've ever seen, directed by Bob Balaban, with Randy Quaid and Oh Gosh, who plays his wife.

It's a late eighties, eighty nine actually movie that I think I saw, probably first on video. I don't think I saw this in the theater. So it's Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt and it takes place in the fifties and this little kid suspects his parents of being cannibals because they're really weird, and he's this really introverted, weird kid, and Sandy Dennis plays I think a school counselor something that tries to help them. So there are some very loose connections to Cobweb with that movie. It sounds like something I'd rather watch than this.

It might have to become an episode because it's a pretty fucking great movie. It's pitch black comedy. It's pretty amazing. I watched it like five or so years ago and hadn't seen it in a very long time. And when I was watching, I was like, oh yeah, I used to rent this or catch it on cable whatever all the time and really liked it.

Here's the thing, So just the way you're describing that movie, and look, I like the red letter media guys. I think the red letter media guys fall into a camp of this is not a derision thing. But you know what I'm going to say, middle aged white dudes having opinions about movies. There are plenty of those out there. Red letter media, in my opinion, aren't the best video version of that, because they tend to stray away or at least stay away from getting embroiled and not controversies, but being you know, not woke, but getting into that aspect of it.

They tend to stay away from that, and they are still funny. The thing that I appreciate about them is the same thing that you do, which is they tend to bring up things that are better than what they're talking about, which isn't good and a bad thing. I mean, we sometimes do that on your show, You do that on my show. I could do it. I know Mike does it on his show, and then it just makes me want to watch that other thing and not talk about the thing that we're talking about, you know, having even not seen parents, but it has Randy Quaid in it.

I have no issue with any of the actors in this movie. I think the last time Lizzie Kaplan was in something was when we talked about fucking clover Field. Yeah, ninety nine percent sure. I am not someone who has seen the Boys, at least not enough to have an opinion on it. So Anthony Starr, I just know him from memes and gifts on the internet of being like a white supremacist superhero.

Right. This movie has a really weird, problematic story beat that feels like it really couldn't be addressed any other way than just YadA yachting in this movie, but in a black comedy, it feels like it would be mined for a lot of interesting commentary, which is, an eight year old kid kills his fucking parents. In this movie, he kills his parents and movie just goes YadA YadA. It's mind boggling. And I know that in the climax of the movie, they try to like put a pin in it and like maybe like put a button on it, and they bring it up, and it's like the fact that you bring it up and don't address it in a satisfying way almost would make me feel like you should just not have brought it up at all and just gloss over the fact, because this movie should have been more in the direction of a black comedy and less a like serious haunted house movie, because this is a haunted house movie, and that's why it should have been released in October.

Ultimately, it is a haunted house movie that becomes kind of a monster movie at the end, but it is a haunted house movie for the first hour and twenty or hour in ten minutes. Really, the point that he was making about the comparison to Parents was how this movie is told from the perspective of this eight year old boy, and the world that he lives in is really colored. That the dimensions of the house are way off. It's kind of like in which they also mentioned Malignant, You know how that house is gigantic on the inside, And I wanted this to be that maybe is also the problem. It kind of is in a way, it treads that line a little bit like Malignant, where something's off.

This house is way too big on the inside. That staircase that looks like it's going fifty feet up. I like those movies that employ a child's perspective, like in Toto the whole thing. You're getting his view of his parents. A lot of times, kids, depending on how they're brought up, view their parents as weird and off and strange.

He doesn't appear to have any friends. He basically says as much to his teacher played by Cleopatrick Coleman, this divine, why don't you want to go out to recess? Don't you want to play with your friends? And he's kind of like, don't have any what she doesn't say, but she gets from his blank stare. And so sometimes when you go to other kids' houses and you see how normal their parents are, and you're like, oh shit, my parents are fucking weird.

He just thinks his parents are weird because they're weird. I gravitate towards those movies that exists in the world of a child. Like Phantasm feels like it was written by a thirteen year old. You know, the lead is a thirteen year old. It's got this weird, dreamlike quality.

To it. There's this Mexican film called Poison for the Fairies that's all from this girl's perspective, and she's crazy. You get everything from that viewpoint. With's some other ones they reflecting skin. I don't know if you've ever seen that kid about this age.

I think he's eight going on nine, so almost the exact same age as Peter in this and that world that he's in, the world that we see is basically how he views it. There's another one called Lama, a Child's Tale the Supernatural that has that weird quality of like you're old enough to get most stuff, but you're not getting everything, and so that's what kind of worked for me in this one, like I can sort of excuse some of the stuff that happens because he is an eight year old boy and doesn't know about much of the world outside of his house. It's kind of like kids that get home schooled with the ultra religious parents. They get out in the world at some point in their twenties and they're like, well, what the fuck is all this?

Yeah. Yeah. There's a couple more movies that came out recently that are like these, like from the perspective of a child, what's the one. It's a remake, It's got Naomi Harris in it, and she's like her face is wrapped up the whole time. Goodnight Mommy, Naomi Watts, Naomi Watts, Naomi Watts.

Yeah. Yeah. And then there's also the movie with the fucking Andre Smushietti movie, who's apparently goes by Andress Muccietti, not Andy Muccietti anymore. Unbeknownst to me, I just watched it actually with my daughter Mama. That was his first movie, actually a good movie, not like those IT movies.

And then the fucking Flash Movie that came out earlier this year, which if you haven't seen that Flash movie, you should go watch it for the CGI alone and go this is what counts for CGI in twenty twenty three. I'm with you. I like these. I mean, I guess you could even make a point that The House with the Clock in the Walls is another one of those movies scary stories. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean they're teenagers, but yeah yeah, some of those movies that we've mentioned do a better job of telling that story of a kid who is there's a goosebumps episode several Goosebumps episodes about this exact thing, like your parents may not be your parents anymore, or they're hiding something, or they're up to no good.

The problem with this is this movie for me is when the reveal happens, is the moment you're either on board with the movie or where you go eat. That's what this is. I wasn't firmly in either camp, but by the time the movie got to the climax, which is handled pretty poorly in a lot of the final scene of the movie or the final kind of monologue over the montage, it all fell apart. For me, what this movie is talking about is not spoilers, a spider, child in the walls. It's about generational trauma and how does one deal with generational trauma and what does the generational trauma imprint on you?

And how are you imprinting it on people in your life, and how are you handling it? Because ultimately it's about two parents who locked an ugly child in the basement and then in the walls. It's just like that episode of The Simpsons where Bart has a con joined twin that literally lives in the attic and it eats spiders and stuff. It's that I kind of wish it had been more than that, because if that's all this is, the setup feels better than the punchline. It gets too And that's the sad thing about this movie, frankly, is the moment of inflection when the door opens to the wall.

That moment really fell flat for me because they kept doing the whole we're not going to show you the monster, and at some point I was like, this movie has five minutes left, so you're not showing us the monster now because it doesn't look good. Is that what this is? That's part of it, I feel I feel like part of it is, like it doesn't look great either. But I just think I was disappointed by the last twenty minutes of this movie, but I enjoyed the first hour and ten. Thankfully it's only an hour and a half too, which I really appreciate.

By the way, an hour and a half movie like eighty eight minutes. Jesus give me more of these eighty eight minute movies. I'm good, I got I got things I gotta do today, folks, you know, like eighty five probably you know if you cut out the credit right. That was one of the more negative things that I saw was great. First two acts, third act shits the bed.

That's indie horror, right, like welcome to indie horror movies. And that's the thing. That's why I haven't done anything because looking for these new movies to do an episode on, and I'm like, it's not worth it because the ending just Peter's out. This one, I watched it twice, so I wanted to preview it at least to make sure, Okay, is there any point in even doing this. I had more of the feeling that you had, but I missed some stuff.

The fans were all going in the house, and I didn't have the subtitles on, so I missed a lot of the girl's dialogue. In the Wall. What happens is Peter's this lonely child that lives with his weird parents here scratching on his wall one night and get spooked, taps on the wall, it taps back, So we have that back and forth for a while where he's telling his parents, you know, there's thing in the walls, as typically happens, they pooh pooh it, and then Dad comes up with a solution that sort of makes sense. Oh there's rats, So let's go get the rat poison Chekhov's rat poison Boy. Then the thing in the wall starts talking to Peter and tells this story, and we get this throughout the rest of the what second act of the film, where pretty much Sarah explains that she is peter sister.

Their parents locked her in the basement for a while, then built a cage for her, and then how she's living behind the wall of their bedroom, behind this grandfather clock. So I missed a lot of that dialogue. I didn't catch the clock thing until I watched it the second time with my daughter. I was like, oh, okay, now I get why he's moving the clock and some of the other bits of dialogue that revolve around the missing girl. There's this story that his parents or his dad tells Peter to explain why he can't go trick or treating because a girl went missing before he was born from their neighborhood.

It comes out that Sarah says, oh, that was mom and dad, because she tried to help me. So we've got this sweet little voice coming out of the wall, and of course he feels badly for her and wants to help, and that kind of leads us to what you have already mentioned for the finale of the movie. So I'm going along with this, like, oh, okay, yeah, his parents are fucked up, man. I mean, if nothing else, they've locked this child in their walls. Right, you can understand it's a weird morality that this movie is playing at, right, because like, are the parents bad?

Well, that's the thing, that's the question at the end, Right, I feel like this movie isn't really interested in answering that question. Though in the other movie we might talk about the Boogeyman. It seems like it almost puts too much emphasis on it in a way, in a way of like this is the trauma and the grief, and this is how we process grief when I come back to the idea that this eight year old child is more or less conned into killing his own parents, Right, that's the thing, And that's hard to get around here, Like the movie's morality is really skewed, and I can for me, it didn't seem like it was really interested in answering a question. It just seemed like it was interested in posing the question, not really answering it.

I would have liked to have seen the parents be weirder, right, But Lizzie Kaplan starts to lose it more and more as the movie goes on. She's got that key chain on her belt, the janitor thing she pulls out to unlock the door. So you're going, okay, well, that's not that everything needs to be explained, because I didn't even catch that again until the second time I watch it. I'm like, oh the key chack. Yeah, she's got one of those janitor things.

Why what parent carries their keys on their belt like that to keep all the doors locked. She really doesn't lose it, lose it until she knows that Peter knows that there is a girl crawling in the crawl spaces of the house, but just having them do weird things throughout the movie, which goes back to parents the Bob Balaband film. This kid is seeing weird things, you know, and it escalates and escalates and escalates. Now, is what he's seen just that his parents are weird? Or have they done something awful?

Do they do awful things? That's the only way we're getting that is from Sarah in this Yes, our parents locked me up, they did this other thing you're next, But we don't see a lot of that. She directs him to the skeleton in their pumpkin patch. What would you think as an eight year old? And the pumpkin patch is one of those weird you know, the Halloween feel for this, it's like, why do they have a pumpkin patch?

And do they sell that? It looks cool? Man, That's why it does look cool, the cult of cool. That's why. I don't know why that's well because the dad once they realize that he's discovered the skeleton, which isn't explicitly stated in the film, but he's like, tomorrow, you're going to help me out in the garden.

So he's dug out the skeleton and then starts talking about the blight on the pumpkins and how we need to get rid of the bad ones so that the good ones can survive so we have a better crop. And I'm thinking, okay, is that one of the things that they do for work is sell pumpkins. There's an odd thing too, And I don't know that this really goes to the story or the plot or anything, but the first time I watched it, I was like, why does he have a mark on his chin? Was that explained that I missed it paying attention the second time. I think it's when his mom is confronting him about the drawing that he's doing in class that gets the teacher to come check on him.

She's talking to him and he looks up and he's got this red mark on his chin that eventually kind of bruises and kind of spider legs out on his chin, and I'm like, when the fuck did he get that? And then in the next scene he doesn't have it, and then he gets tripped by the bully in our Halloween the movie callback to tripping him and smashing his pumpkin. Also, the name of the school is a pretty dead the name. Yeah, we'll get to that in a second. He falls on his face and I'm like, okay, so they just re edited this and it got out of sync here, But why why was that re edited to where this conversation with his mom and the picture thing happens before he gets pushed down by Brian and the playground.

For some reason, it bothered me and I couldn't quite understand why it was changed. But yes, the school holden Field or the town olden Field, Baby, good Lord Haddenfield is the obvious go to, but then I was thinking, it's like hold In Caufield smushed together are protagonists from Catcher in the Rye and I'm like, well, I mean a kid that lives in his own world. I guess you could say for Catcher in the Rye, is the connection there if that's even intentional or not so. Lizzie Kaplan played the Kathy Bates character on Castle Rock right and did a good job. I didn't care that much for that second season, but she was a highlight.

I would watch a Misery remake with Lizzie Kaplan. She does have when she's The best scene in the movie for me is when she is on the phone with the teacher staring at the kid. While she is on the phone with the teacher, the intensity that she has, it's really hard to match it. And her eyes. I mean, we always talk about Aubrey Plaza and the way that she looks and what she can evoke with her eyes and kind of the t zone of her face.

Lizzie Caaplan is crazy eyes she does, but she can also do that like the stare down thing really well. I mentioned all this because he is the best part of this movie for me. It's kind of like miles ahead of anything else because Anthony Starr is given nothing to do, which is fine. Normally we're saying the female character has nothing to do, but it is a horror movie, which means, oh, they've remembered that there are female characters in these movies. Because that's female in horror.

It tends to go hand in hand, especially more recently. But Lizzie Caaplan's the best part of this movie, one hundred percent. She's so good. She is creepy, but then at the same time, it's like, was she actually creepy at all? That's what you keep coming back to, right, Yeah, because I have a hard time understanding what the morality of the movie is, because the movie clearly wants to have a conversation about the sins of the parents being visited upon the child and the child trying to make those things right, but to what end?

Movie? To what end? Because Lizziekaplan's character is the most well formed of the three main characters in the movie, more so than Peter. He feels like a psite for I'm just going to do whatever somebody else says, which is pretty much his whole character throughout the entire movie. Which could be his character.

He's easily manipulated, and Sarah, the girl in the wall, tells him, you've got to stand up for yourself against this bully. And what is he do? Pushes him down the stairs and just completely fucks up his leg and gets him to do all of these things for her because she's amplifying that our parents are bad, Our parents are bad. Missing a lot of that dialogue and some of the stuff that first time. I was more thrown off by that finale where you know, and we might as well get out there since we've spoiled it already.

But the rat poison comes back and they're eating dinner on Halloween night and Mom's made a soup and oh, this tastes funny and are different and I'm thinking, oh, one of them is going to say it tastes like cinnamon, because that's apparently what the rat poison that they have smells like. And then a second they did that, I was like, Okay, this is going to get ugly. Right then the reveal comes of Sarah out of the wall. That's where you kind of lose me. Is this a deformed girl or is this a monster?

Is it both? Because it acts like a monster. Yeah, does. But yet if it got out of the house, I guarantee that a cop could shoot it twice and it would be dead. Well, And that's the thing, is right, because it's a human being.

But is it? Are we dealing with the super This is what I have a problem with in the movie. Are we dealing with a girl that's disfigured, that has adapted to her living environment, or are we dealing with something that's supernatural, was supernatural from the get go, but can't apparently get out of the walls, or just one of those things which I hate and my daughter and I have discussed before that the thing that lives in the wall that's super strong, that can overpower. I mean, if you're living in the wall, you're probably nourished. Yeah, that's the problem I have with these stories is this thing is in the wall, and if it's not supernatural, that's why it couldn't bust out.

But if it is supernatural, it should have just been able to bust out this whole time. Putting it in the walls would never have been enough, right, right, So it's got to be a human. Then it moves and crawls like a spider, and can crawl on the walls. So it's developed this, But is that just because of where it lives that it's like almost more of an evolutionary thing. Where I've lived in the walls my whole life.

I can squeeze myself into small spaces and I walk like a crab or a spider or is it? And the reason I bring this up is because at the very end, when Miss Divine, who has shown up because of the phone call that Peter made to her earlier in the day, they get out of the house eventually, and then he gets pulled back in by Sarah and the door closes on its own. The door closes on its own, correct, So that's the one thing where I'm like, how did that happen? They're way down she has dragged him into the other part of the house and the door closes. Are you saying it's supernatural or not?

I assume because of the use of emetic rat poison that this is a grounded in reality thing. She stabs herself by accident. I don't know, maybe it's all realistic with everything but the spider, But to your point, fuck you then, movie, it's like the same thing I've talked about when we do Night Gallery on Midnight Viewing, which is a podcast you can find over a weirding Way Media along with this show. It's like, you're afraid to do the supernatural. If I had an opportunity to write a script like this, why the funk would I hold back on the supernatural stuff?

Like you have a spider monster coming out of the wall, why are you what get to it? Hop to it? Do something interesting with it? Don't just not make a decision at all. The whole thing with poisoning his parents, it's so like it's the movie.

It's fucking weird, is what it is. Dark, but it's also just strange the level of intensity that the movie has with what's going on with his parents. It never reaches that point with the way that they're treating him, that they that he kills them so horrifyingly. When he's grounded, you know, he gets put. That's another thing that I think would probably persuade him.

You know, they've got a hidden door behind the refrigerator that leads down to a pit basically right where they kept her at some point, possibly kept the girl that was kidnapped. Who's to say, I mean, I guess the thing is, like you have to assume that, like this was built and they built it. Well, definitely the pit, right, he's taking everything she says at face value. I don't know. The lead character in this movie is stupid.

Is also the problem. It's hard to like a character who's so gullible that he goes all the way as far as to murdering his own parents. That's how gullible this character is. That's why I say I would like them to seem weirder and more of a threat, maybe even more menacing to him. Yeah, I mean that's pretty gnarly to be locked down in the basement where there is a pit that's fifteen feet deep that has a stuffed animal in it with weird teeth.

That's pretty horrifying to an eight year old. You know, that's not going to be able to abstract this, right. I still think there could have been more menace from them. Yeah, they needed to be more obviously villains, because they are the villains of the piece until they're not, and the moment that they're not anymore, they have to be immediately shaded gray because yes, they locked her in the basement. But but that's the question like, did they make her that way or was she already that way?

Right? And that's again not a question that the movie's really interested in asking it. It kind of brings it up for a second and then goes, hey, you know something interesting worth talking about. We're not interested in that. Let's have a Jake Busey or Gary Busey's son get murdered instead.

That's the other question I have is why is she locked in there just because she's disfigured? Did they I mean, was it monstrous the second it came out? How right? But they said that she was like out for a while, and they made her disappear after a while, right, Like she didn't disappear the moment she was born. I may have missed that part.

Didn't they imprison her? Wasn't she the missing girl? No? That went missing on Halloween? Was her being put in the basement?

No? She the missing girl. Sarah imp tries to infer to him that his parents killed But isn't it her? Though? As my point right, I think what it is is she stumbled onto their house trick or treat in and neither got scared by Sarah or something like that, and Sarah killed her That's how I took it the second time I watched it.

Okay, got you, And that's maybe when she was locked away and the parents tried to cover it up by burying the girl's body in the garden. I took that as another fake out by her to implicate them as being horrible, horrible people. Right, they've killed this girl, they locked me up for years. You're next. That's basically the big threat here is that you're next, right once you reach a certain age, even though you could have been locked up this whole time.

And then, like you say, you know, Jake Carrybucy's kid, Bucy comes back with his cousins. That is fairly unnecessary, but gives us, I guess, our body count for the film. I wanted to ask you about that, because all of a sudden the movie, it gets a lot bigger for like twenty minutes, right, I felt like, to your point, it was just a crutch to have kills, because otherwise this movie has like no kills none. I'm not lamenting that any more than you are, is my point. But there are people that do watch these movies that go, where are the kills people dyeing?

Where is the goal or it's like, God, damn, is this all you want? Is this all you want? You know, is this all you want? Kind of becomes and this is what you get when that's all you want, which is a protracted, very slap dash done scene of kids getting killed, which ain't even interesting. It's the least exciting part of the movie because we know so little about what comes out of the door that we don't know what could or couldn't happen, And when what happens happens, it's like, Okay, they built up the reveal, and then the reveal just it's like, Oh, it's a girl that has that can crawl on the walls and has really long hair with spiders crawling in it.

Do they never give her a hair cut a barrel? I guess not. I guess that's how that works. I think that was one of the other things that people kind of decried was that bringing the four or five boys to the house du Sex body count baby ramps up unnecessarily. Yeah, you could have had a very creepy ending where she gets out and this stuff happens with the parents still alive.

Is he going to help her or is he going to help save his parents? And the mine shows up, and why the parents had to die and not be part of the climax is like beyond me. Well that's her revenge. Yeah, she could have taken revenge on them, and I think that would have been more interesting. Yeah, I guess the kid poisoning them is revenge.

But again the movie doesn't land that. It doesn't stick that landing because where the movie ends up going after she forgets for five seconds she has really long hair and is allowed to be pulled into the bit in the basement. I was just like, Wow, she's gonna forget she has long hair, right, Like that's where now this movie is now predicated on the villain is an idiot too. And the movie then goes, well, I'm gonna get out eventually and there will be nothing that you can do about it. But we know that that's not the case because you didn't get out on your own that whole time, right, Like, you didn't get out the whole time because you were locked in the fucking basement and then in the walls.

You never got out on your own. So now that you're locked up, why should we think that you're going to get out? But then it ties into what the movie's actually talking about, which is grief and trauma never goes away. It never goes away, but the movie wants to have the most ham fisted, fucking fake out ending possible. That's not really a fake out ending because it's literally just her describing what he thinks he's gonna see.

It's such a weird boy. I had a big issue with that, and my daughter and I talked about it afterwards, like, well, it's kind of really easy to get rid of you. One of any number of ways. I could pour gasoline down that pit, like this whole motherfucking house on fire, orsa bent down it like by and fill that fucking thing in. The cops come over.

I mean, sorry, kid, you're going to prison for murdering your parents, but shotgun down the whole baby, Like, there's five other bodies in the house that you killed. I'm calling the cops, you know, Miss Devine called the cops. What else are you going to do? You're not just gonna like abandon the house and no one's ever going to discover that there's a thing living down there, which is what the ending went for. The ending goes for that, and it's like, this is stupid I don't like to go outside of the film, but kind of had to with this, Like, this isn't a problem.

There's numerous ways to get rid of you and not have to worry about whether you're going to show up. If you were such a threat, you could have busted through the walls of an old wooden house. Because the Cleopatra Coleman character breaks through the walls with a fire pick in like two seconds. This monster can like pick people up off the ground and like rip their heads off with no problem. There are no stakes in this movie.

The moment you realize what's going on, and then when the movie wants you to pretend along with it that this character is a threat and that we should be afraid of this character. No, no, I'm not going to This character is not a threat, This is not malignant. Malignant felt like a threat, even though it's goo. The Malignant felt like a threat. This thing gets out, this thing gets shot, It's over the end, Goodbye, the Saint Friday the thirteenth, The Saint Michaels.

It's pretty fast, so yeah, one fast thing, though one the movie doesn't understand its own stakes. I feel like it's really where I'm coming at this movie from because it really should have just been a small story about a kid and his parents, and his parents being weird and trying to undo trauma and grief that his parents have been neglecting to deal with by locking a child in the walls, and you could still have him kill his parents, but I think it would have been more impactful if the movie had made it less clear the morality of his parents' movies for the Friday night crowd, and it feels like it's trying to be something else is really what it feels like. The one thing that I really liked was the nightmare sequence, even though you know it's a nightmare sequence because his little bear carpet next to his bed is spinning, but I just loved that visual of it.

I'm like, oh, clear, watch make sure you watch the scene because it's trippy. And then his dad's standing in the corner and the sound that his eyes are making, and the thing with Lizzie Caplan Runney I really enjoyed. I could have gone for more the best part of the movie, more of that spooky vibe because this guy, the director his show that's on Netflix, Mary Ann is creepy as all get out. I haven't finished it. I've started it on my own ones, and then I convinced my wife to start watching it with me, and we've got three episodes in and I think it was just kind of like too much for her because it's really, really, really creepy.

But I feel like I can't knock the movies setting and production design. I just can knock everything else because it never lives up to the quality of the production and the creature design is atrocious. It is. Yeah, it's a smile reject is what it is. Or did not like it at all, and I was like, I kind of get it.

The one shot also that I really really liked was him sitting on the stairs with those big, huge shadows of his parents. It reminded me of like Chris van Alsberg artwork or something CGI shadows, right, are they cgi? Are there CGI shadows? Right? I think they were just super bright spotlight shadows.

They looked so good they were almost cg I thought they were seeing. There's a couple more too. One time when his dad walks in the room, there's this really defined shadow and then there's one of her crawling as well. Yeah, just the spotlight on his wall where the scratches come from. That to me, that works.

There's not quite enough of that in this I have a feeling I was starting to think to myself, like, is this something that's going to creep back up into my head when fall kicks in to rewatch? I don't know. I enjoyed it much more of the second time I watched it, because I caught a lot of what I missed that didn't make sense the first time made it's the second time, and then I was like, oh, he got manipulated and all of that made sense as far as the morality of it goes, you know, that's where you can argue. But I missed some of those key things that she was saying to him through the wall because it's, you know, a girl talking through the wall. So I'm curious to see if this is something that my daughter brings up.

I mean, she may want to watch it again before Halloween. I don't know, but if it's something that we'll come back to. We didn't mention Deborah Wilson, but my god, Deborah Wilson's voice work as the creature. I'm a huge fan of Deborah Wilson because she was I mean, I'm one of those people that watch mad TV because I was the writ act at the right time. That surprised me.

I know she does a lot of voice acting, but I was like, hey, wait, I know her from something. Yeah, she's a fantastic voice actor, but yeah, she does a better job than that creature deserves in terms of the voice performance, because again, the design is exactly what you would think it is. I mean, it's nothing unique about it. The fact that she doesn't have four or eight eyes is maybe the more interesting part. You're gonna make a movie that's a vehicle for trauma and grief discussions.

I'm the Boogeyman is a better nice segue. Well, when there are scary things we don't understand, our minds try to fill in the blanks. Sometimes the best thing to do is to face it. So this light is going to be completely solid like it is right now, and gradually it's going to start flashing until it's totally dark, so you can see that there's nothing to be afraid of. Okay, see that's not so scary.

Is it just you, your sister and me doing Okay, sorry, it's okay, it's ok So it's just in your head. H m hmmm, Katy, there's something in my room. You'll believe me, don't you. There's no such thing as monsters. You need to grow up.

I'm serious, Sawyer. I need to be alone. You're both having these manifestations. What is this supposed to be? It's the thing that comes from your kids, or you're not paying attention, dag.

You have to listen to me. Okay, I'm listening, sweetheart. Let me handle In terms of having an actual discussion about it, I think it is a little ham fisted. We have talked about plenty of Stephen King's stuff for your show and my show, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that Stephen King's stuff is still being adapted for what the source material is. What they get out of it is pretty interesting.

I won't say it's the most exciting or unique idea. I've watched it three times and I enjoyed it all three times. I watched it and it's a PG thirteen movie, which was the most shocking part for me that I enjoyed it because PG thirteen horror movies tend to be like a cup of coffee, you get it in office like it's pretty watered down. For the most part. Yeah, I mean there's good ones out there.

I don't even normally pay attention to what ratings are these days. I didn't even know that this in my head, like, oh, this feels like a PG thirteen. I didn't look at the rating, and I didn't really think about it when we were watching the movie. But we watched this, My daughter and I watched this immediately after Cobweb, and I already kind of had in my head that these are similar stories because I know the story. I've read this story numerous times in the Night Shift collection.

Was curious as to how they were going to expand that world because it's a very small story. I mean, it's a bottle episode story. It's the David Beast Malchion thing. His part of this movie is basically it. He is the character in the story.

But he explained in detail what happens to his three kids, right, and then I thought, oh, okay, I get it. We're passing this on then to this guy, Chris Messina. Chris Messina, Yeah, just saw him in Sharp Objects of all things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like Chris Messina a lot. I do too.

I was like, wait a minute, what do we used to watch him in I asked my wife, She's like, he was on that MINDI Project show, and I was like, oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. But sharp Wall, Yeah, he's I love it when he pops up. I think he's in one of the seasons of the Center as well, Yes, the third season. Yeah, he's good. I like him.

We watched both seasons of Yellow Jackets, so I knew of the older daughter from that. I think my daughter said she's in something else too. And Sophie Thatcher, who, by the way, she is better than I think everybody but Lizzie Kaplan in Cobweb. She's really good. I like Sophie Thatcher a lot.

It's because of her eyes. She has some hyper expressive eyes, which is perfect for someone who's going to be in horror movies or working in genre phil I wouldn't be surprised if she continues to do these kinds of movies and becomes a more contemporary scream queen. She's really good, and this is the first thing I've seen her in. Yeah. I enjoyed her, much like I enjoy Lizzie Kaplan.

I don't know if I like one more than the other, but her in this comparis to Lizzie Kaplan and Colin and other things that she's been in. I was kind of expecting the little girl from Megan to be the younger sister. That's the feel I got from her. I think that girl's probably too old now, but that's in. She's in doctor sleep and putting and pillhouse and all that Mike Flanagan stuff.

To Violet McCraw, I think this was the girl from bird Box. Oh, okay, Vivian Lea Blair, she's good. I mean, child actors in movies these days, we're not six years ago, so it can't be Lulu Wilson unfortunately. I mean thinking of my daughter and I watched Becky and Wrath of Becky last weekend, so we like Lulu Wilson. I don't even know what that is.

Oh well, Becky is pretty great. The second one is okay, she's in both of those basically revenge tales from the perspective of a young kid. Oh Becky, the one with Kevin James, Yeah, yeah, a Nazi. Yeah, that movie was fun. I did see that.

I just forgot too. I thought it had a different name. I couldn't reside all of it. She's great, I honestly. I mean, if this movie had been made five years ago, it would have been her in it.

I mean, this movie was for all intents and purposes. It's kind of a shock that it exists. It got canceled at one point because it was part of the Disney Fox merger, and then it was brought back two years later, and then they were going to put it on streaming, but then they sent it to Stephen King, and he goes put that shit in the theater, and they did, and it made a fair amount of money for a movie that came out in theaters in June of twenty twenty three. See there's another one, another early book to movie, but this one is in Halloween. This is more what I expect from a Midsummer movie.

I only say that because it's a Stephen King property. I don't care if it's a lesser Stephen King. I don't care if it's from Nightshift, and nobody remembers a lot of things from Nightshift other than everything else they've already adapted, which is a lot. It's a Stephen King property. That's why I say that.

It's like, you know, he can come out whenever he wants any time of the year, right, as far as I'm concerned, And I think it has a lot of history, but a reputation as being one of the creepier stories from that collection. And that's a strong collection, I'm sure. I mean, I know because I've read his other writings about the writing of these things. A lot of it was just to sell to the men's magazines, to put food on the table. We're not talking high falutin literature, no, no, no.

Some of the stories in that collection are maybe lesser than others, but I just always remember it having an impression on me when I read it years ago as being one of the creepier definitely creepier than trucks, which becomes maximum overdrive or you know, some of the other ones that are more almost have a punchline ending. This is like creepy, creepy a dad telling stories about his three kids getting killed up until the point of them being killed or horrified by something that's living in their closet, which is a common terror of kids, right right. And I think that that is the success of this movie, to your point, is that it is trading in something that really doesn't have to do with Stephen King at all, the Boogeyman, this is not it.

This isn't Pennywise, isn't Children of the Corn. This is something is hiding in your closet. We all can understand that. The universality of it. Cobweb almost had it.

There is a universality of like the haunted house, the hidden thing, maybe not in your closet or in your walls or whatever, something that doesn't come out right except when it's dark and you're in bed alone and living in your head, you know, having these thoughts and right you're open to it. Cobweb and the Boogeyman are trading in that same thing of like the thing that you can't see at night is about to get you, but you hear it and it's whispering. Yeah, it can change voices and sounds like your dad or your mom. I know. And like, honestly, it is unfair to compare and contrast the two movies, but they came out in twenty twenty three, within a month of one another.

It is what it is. But I think at the same time, if you're talking about a movie that does a better job having a conversation about how grief can affect people and grief in this movie is the Boogeyman. I guess in Cobweb, it's generational trauma is the sister. I think it's done better here because we don't get a sense of what the thing actually is. It is just kind of a stand in.

Yes, it kills people. Yes, it is aggressive. When it talks to people, it's not trying to convince them to do things. It's just siren calling them, beckoning it to their doom, which works better as an idea when you're talking about grief, because again, like grief is faceless, generational trauma isn't. So in that respect, Cobweb is successful at opening that box.

I think this movie just does a better job at having a conversation with itself or with the audience of like, what does it look like when people actually can't deal with grief? Let's manifest it real as this pretty well designed creature on top of everything else. My daughter mentioned after watching both of them she definitely liked the creature and the Boogeyman better. The design alone. The short story doesn't really give up the ghost as to what it is.

It just says like and then it takes off his disguise. And he's the and it's like, okay, but what does that mean? They kind of have a lot of room to play with, But where they went is pretty interesting. I kind of want to touch on that whole grief thing because it seems like that's the two thousands. That's all we deal in these days is grief.

Everything you know, Hereditary is the big one. Baba Duke is awesome. It seems like everything has to go back to dead mom, dead wife, dead kid, deformed kid. Well, can we get away from that? Can it just be a creepy thing in the closet?

The Ritual that was about grief too, Yeah, I've loved that movie. Or Guilt that's more of maybe guilt and regret. Midsummer was also about grief. I mean, well, if this movie had been told from a certain perspective, it could have been grief and guilt. I mean, because it's told from the kid's perspective, there's less guilt.

But if the story had been told from the dad's perspective, right, that is the missed opportunity for me with this movie is this could have been a two hour movie and it really could have had more. The dad could have been more of the focus or more of a focus could have been with the dad, because I don't think the story necessarily needed to be Sophie Thatcher's story specifically, because it really is like, how does grief affect all three of these people? And we see it with the dad refusing to go to therapy and running out and not believing the daughter. There's a version of this movie that's two two and a half hours where you get to see more of what was going on. I'm not saying I needed it, but I like Chris Massina so much that I would have appreciated it.

It's kind of kind of what I'm getting at again, what like another eighty eight eighty five minute movie. Yeah you're in there and you're not complaining about that. Yeah no, No, can't complain about the get in and get or done attitude for sure. And what a year David Dasto Makian has been having. I know, I kept saying to Clear, I'm like, it's block, it's Polka dot man.

Yeah, I mean he's just showing up in everything. He's going to be in Dune. He's Yeah, he's been in tons of stuff over the last couple of years. He was in the ant Man movie too. I'm pretty sure God he was in the last voyage of the Debater as well.

Yeah, he's creepy looking, so it works for that opening where we take the original story. I was hoping we were going to get flashbacks of what was happening to his kids other than the kind of cold open, which was obviously one of his children getting taken by this creature. But I was sort of hoping to see portions of the other two events as well, because I think that could have really lent to the creepiness of the opening for the film. You're totally right. I feel like the movie gets going a little fast.

This movie, unlike Cobweb, this movie doesn't leave itself a lot of spin up time because I feel like it is assuming that you know the setup already, which is like, there's something that's haunting this family in the movie, kind of assuming you know the setup, it doesn't take a lot of time to let things build. And I'm with you, I could have used more of the family even pre like a flashback to pre the mom dying, or a flashback to the Billing's family, the David Dostelmackian characters family, like I could have used some of that just as set up for the movie. Like we've mentioned about the short story, the short story is so far removed from what the movie is. It's one scene in the movie, but it's not even the way the scene in the book.

When the story plays out, it doesn't feel like it wants to give itself time without the monster. It wants the monster ever present all the time, which I understand thematically and also from a you know, in terms of like for the Friday night crowd who this movie is made for. You want to keep their attention on the screen with things happening, which is why I think people have kind of said this movie feels a little workmanlike I can see, but there are also some some nice touches. There's a direct fucking reference to the shining at one point. Is it in this I guess it's a is no.

The shining reference was in Cobweb, where it was a little on the nose with the teacher hitting the wall with the pick. I was like, oh my god, we just seem to do that and everything least day. I know in Boogeyman it was the inverting of the camera. They used the yeah, when she goes to look under the bed, the under the bed scene, and we then my daughter and I start talking about Poultergeist and everything else. Then you know, uses that trick.

But that was a nice move, and I liked her little moon ball globe light that she used. They implemented that really well on a couple of scenes. I could have used her getting scared more in her bedroom alone. To be honest with you, I wanted more of that, Like you say, build up creepiness, not just let's figure this out real quickly. It felt like Sophie Thatcher whatever her character's name is.

I'm horrible with character names, gets to it too quickly. Yes, she believes her sister too quickly. It feels like I appreciate that though, because I am tired of like, well, yes, but at the same time, like this is almost the it's almost you didn't give it enough time. We don't need to see Uncle Ben die again with Spider Man, Like I don't need to see parents and siblings not believing people anymore. Oh yeah, the Boy who Cried Wolf.

Yeah, I don't need to see I needed a little bit more and this movie was like nope, just like you're right, it must be a monster, but also the way the narrative is kind of situated. You have the character that David Dastelmachi in plays comes to the therapist house, he kills himself, and she by that point already knows that there is something else because she's like, well, I heard them fighting. I heard somebody fighting with something else. That's what I mean. Yeah, that's not enough, it's not enough.

It's like she already believes that there's a monster before she even knows that her sister has seen a monster. But that's what I mean, is she's that scene of her when the police are there saying that bit about he was arguing with somebody. Right, it wasn't my dad or any That's the inference here is that it's not it wasn't any of us, But I heard something, right, you know, say, I don't think the sisters even piped up about now being scared yet or not. But it's too quick for them to all be on the same page, except for Dad, who takes till the end of the movie when they're in the basement and getting attacked by the thing to realize it. Like you said, I could have used some scares with him.

Yes, there's none. With him, we get the whole thing with Sophie Thatcher missing her mom, wearing her clothes and keeping her paint supplies and all that. You're going to get some scares, obviously from her point of view. In regard to the mom, Well he lost his wife. I mean, why not have him maybe wake up in the middle of the night and see that outline of his wife in that dress, as opposed to Sophie Thatcher seeing it and give them all for him.

It would just be this is my grief talking. I'm seeing Mom everywhere, which is why he ends up packing stuff up. It could be well, actually it was this creature doing it, but there's none of that. He could still dismiss it as since he's a therapist, this is how I'm processing through my grief. Well, that's what he does for her.

He's like, well, she'll have him see it. Yeah, now it's it's actually really it's really frustrating because you can see those scenes the way that they would play out, because the movie has and does a good enough job at I've read kind of some of the reviews saying Rob Savage's work is workmanlike. I don't think it is, though, because like, there's a lot of decisions that are made in the scenes with the creature that are definitely being made by the director, Like the scene where the little girl is playing video games. By the way, they say don't leave her alone, but they leave her as alone a lot. Can I just say one thing, to turn on fucking lights in your house please?

They definitely didn't say it lives in the darkness. Why is she playing video games in the dark with the monsters in the dark? And I was like, fuck if I know, the simple reason is we've got to keep the movie going if they have all the lights on there and it can't come out. And I'm like, then don't set it up that they know. Ye don't tell them that.

Yeah. So it's almost like these characters are the inverse of the characters in Cobweb. These characters are all too smart, they know too much. In Cobweb, they were just like, let's lock our kid in the walls, like okay, sure, Like I'll never have anything bad in the long run. Han.

Here, it's like they're so smart that when they act dumb, it's like, wait, why are you dumb? Right? That was frustrating, very frustrating because I know that people are going to act dumb in a horror movie. But when you have explained that it lives in the dark, and you know that and you've tested it already, and even the little girl, I believe knows this at that point. Yes, why are you playing video games in a pitch black room?

Everything else is dark in this room. She has to know because she ends up going into the closet when Sophie Thatcher ends up getting back to the house and with the lights. Yeah, yeah, And I believe that Sophie Thatcher has met Lester Billing's wife at this point, and she explains, yeah, I think that's all correct chronologically. Oh, can we talk about the thing with his wife. I really didn't understand that she was still alive, Like it was not clear that like she was still alive.

That it was very weird when she just showed up. That part of the movie didn't work for me very well. With her in the house, It's like a different movie altogether. I didn't care for that. It got into what am I thinking of, you know, with the setting of the booby traps and which we get too later.

You know, that's sort of the culmination of this for her. Is she's still living in this house that's infested with whatever this creature leaves behind, all these traces of it kind of cobwebbing through the house and Catchet. I guess. I guess it can exist in multiple spaces or hop from one to the other because it's still there. But it's also it Sophie Thatcher's house, and I enjoy that she's investigating.

The wife agreed. I just think it could have been creepier, just like her alone catatonic in a house, not like not like Sally Hardisty from all Right. I was gonna say, Jamie Lee Curtis and Halloween, you know, the whole trauma thing going to this place and sitting it made Michael Myers a trauma monster, didn't they. I just realized that. Yeah, I talked about that on those Halloween episodes.

Yeah, that's the thing with this grief stuff and how it's that's the monster for every movie these days. It gets old, and man, it was old when the Baba Duke did it. It's fine, I guess, And what are you gonna do? I mean, it seems like that's we have to I'm done when make it relatable to people, to normal audiences. It can't just be a spooky monster, right, everybody has grief and trauma these days.

Apparently the days of this spooky monster are over. That was my least favorite part. Interact with his wife were like, yeah, functional, they use it as a fake out when she goes to the house to be like, oh, the monster, there's a picture and maybe it's the monster, and no, it's his wife. But yeah, it ultimately doesn't serve the plot. All it does is kind of undercut the monster because it feels like the monster is focusing on one person solely, and David Dastelmachian kind of put it onto this other family is an attempt to get rid of it, is what it felt like.

But then the monster killed him in the process. Anyways, why the monster didn't kill his wife is beyond me. Why the monster is I mean, the monster is on the Sophie Thatcher's family because of the mom just passing away. It's a grief monster that feeds off of your grief, and like Pennywise, it seasons the meat. They kind of say that, They say like it likes to scare you, which is great.

I appreciate that. I actually like that as a concept if not for the fact that it has already done it. And this is also a Stephen King, so you know, fine, I mean, it's a reoccurring thing, and it works here actually better than it doesn't it, because it never This does a better job in talking about generational trauma than it ever did, or like grief the Boogeyman story. Ultimately, if not for the fact that the therapist reveals himself to be the boogeyman in the story, there may not have been a boogeyman to begin with, because that guy blames the boogeyman for his kids dying. But the monster in the house literally could just be a family member who is abusing the rest of the family.

Right, But there's literally a monster. But there is literally a monster. That's the beauty of that short story. You know. It's like eleven pages long in my paperback version of the right book, probably shorter and hardcover.

There ain't much to it. Have you ever seen the Dollar Baby that was made of it back in the eighties, I have not. I watched it a couple of years ago, I think, when I was doing my Stephen King series. Frank Darrabant did one from Night Shift and they got released on video. There were two volumes of it, and I remember seeing them all the time at the video store.

Never rented them. I'm pretty sure they're all still on YouTube. It's pretty creepy. I think it's maybe maybe half an hour if that long, seven minutes, Yeah, yeah, it's check it out afterward. It's pretty good.

The Frank Darbant one is good too. It's been adapted since then as Dollar Babies by a lot of people because of its creepiness, and it's very it's a very simple bottle episode. Story just takes place in the doctor's office, therapist office basically. I mean you can have flashbacks obviously to what goes on in his house. I enjoyed it a lot.

I don't know if I enjoyed it more than Cobweb, but maybe I'm answering my own question here. But I do see us watching this again. The Boogeyman, Yeah, for sure. When spooky season. For one thing, I get on Stephen King Kicks all the time.

And it's a new Stephen King movie, and it's based on a one of his creepiest stories and directed well and acted very well, and a few minor complaints aside. I don't remember hearing all that much good stuff about this. I think the consensus middle of the road. Yeah, stereotypical trophy. I didn't really feel that way about it, maybe because I like the story so much.

It felt stereotypical and trophy of a certain kind of stereotypical and trophy that is more recent stereotypical and trophy than it is old, which is the grief monster movie. Those tropes are still fresh enough and new enough that I feel like I'm with you. I'm still interested in what can be mined from that. And Rob Savage does have some moments in this movie that are really interesting, like the moment when the sister, the younger sister takes off in the basement with the lights connected to her and it like slow mos on that shot. I mean, there's some really interesting shots in this movie.

I could see it not playing super excitedly for a certain audience, only because again they're like, well, were being bombarded with this kind of movie constantly anyways, and it's just another in a line of but I think it is more. I judged this more as a Stephen King movie and less as a grief monster movie. Yeah, it's a good Stephen King adaptation. The last thing that was Stephen King that came out was Mister Harrigan's Phone, which I did not see. I've watched it a couple times.

I watched it pretty shortly after it came out direct to Netflix, I believe dumped on Netflix, and then my daughter and I watched it. It's there's not a lot to it. It's pretty decent. And then Firestarter and Children of the Corn, and then pre twenty twenty it was Doctor Sleep. Yeah, Firestarter is not good.

That's what I have not seen the latest Children of the Corn yet. On the Little Leak. Gained to not watch it when we did our episode because it was out when we did our episode earlier in the year. Oh was it already Oh yeah, because it came out in like twenty twenty. We just chose not to because we heard how bad it was.

Okay, that makes and ends I don't even remember. Supposedly later this year, still being billed as twenty twenty three The Salem's Lot, Yeah, which you know, it's funny. The last voyage of the Dimitter or however you pronounce it is directed by the guy that was supposed to do the Long Walk and I guess that tanked at some point, but I was really interested in that. I don't know if you've ever read that Richard Backman's story. It's good how it would well, I mean, I can see how it would be made into an interesting movie.

But I like that guy's other movies. I like The Autopsy of Jane Doe. I like Scary Stories We Tell in the Dark. Wait, is that him? Yeah, James Vanderbilt or no, Andre's over Dell.

Yeah, he's the guy did Troll Hunter. Yeah, troll Hunter's pretty fun. But I really like Autopsy of Janeo and the and the Scary Stories movie. I mean, I'm sure with Halloween approaching, my daughter and I will be watching Scary Stories again sometime soon. So I was really looking forward to that, and I guess it just died.

Yeah, I'd like to see that adapted. Actually, it's a pretty fascinating story. And you didn't see the Lost Voyage right, not yet. I plan to watch it though, Okay, it sounds interesting. I mean I like that part of the book.

I liked that episode that they did on that BBC Dracula on the Boat that's essentially that part of the story. I mean look at Dracula. I mean, how many times has Dracula been into the ground? Like something new is much appreciated frankly, so that's kind of why I haven't rushed to watch it, because Dracula, honestly is not my favorite. I didn't see Renfield this year either, so I didn't either.

Yeah, there are so many Stephen King things in the pipeline. Billy Summers, a remake of Christine Elevation, fairy Tale, which was literally his book that came out last year. From a Buick eight, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Life of Chuck, The Little Green God of Agony, The Running Man again supposedly end Throttle. I think from a Buick eight has been done right. Wasn't that a TV show Christian Slater or something?

Maybe I'm thinking of a different story. No, that's not for eight too, No no, no, no, no, mister Mercedes, no nope. All these Stephen King books based off of fucking cars. I'm almost positive he was in. I know we talked about Stephen King a lot.

You and I have talked about a fair amount of Stephen King's stuff. When's it gonna end? Well, I'm not saying I don't want anymore. But what I'm saying is something more akin to like, are you telling me that there are no other horror writers than anybody could fucking adapt? Because you know it's the joke.

I mean, I go to half price books and in the horror section there are two authors and they both have K's in their names, and those are the only books that you can get for the most part, Koons and King, and they're more or less back to back. And it feels the same way for horror movie adaptations because of how well known Stephen King is, that's all we ever get well, and you're going to get a pretty decent story out of it. I mean really, but unless it's fire Starter. It was Dolan's Cadillac that Christian Slater was in, So another car, another, another, another car thing. It's pretty bad.

So yeah, dig deep when I get on Stephen King kicks. Sometimes sure, I'm like, I haven't seen this one yet, Like twenty fourteen's Mercy, based on the short story Grandma. That one's pretty bad, which was also adapted into a fucking episode of the twilight Zone from nineteen eighty five, which was written by Harlan Ellison. That one's with Coral Kid from Walking Dead. Oh god, God, I'm not very good.

Stephen King. For as long as I've been alive, for as long as you've been watching movies and reading has been a big part of pop culture, and there was a time and a place where there were no horror authors to adapt that people were interested in other than the classics, which is why we got Frankenstein, Aculum and The Invisible Man, because again, that's H. G. Wells, that's Mary Shelley and Bramston, right, But now it's just Stephen King all the time. He's a breadth of content.

I get it. Don't say Joe will please, No, no, no, no, I was gonna say the guy that Joe Kevin at the End of the Woods or whatever the hell. Yeah, so you got him a couple books out. I slive Barker, but he's too gay and sexy for mainstream Hollywood, baby well or if nothing else, a little too weird. Yeah.

I still love that Midnight Meat Train was turned into a movie, and that they kept the title the Stephen King thing. Once he passes away at some point, we'll reach the end twenty or thirty years after that, because you still have a lot of unadapted things, a lot. Even Nightshift has almost been adapted completely, but that has not stopped them from doing several I mean again, you mentioned the Boogeyman already existed as a dollar baby. The fact that there wasn't another Boogeyman movie before this is somewhat surprising, and a lot of those, honestly could stand for a redo. The Mangler, Graveyard Shift, Yeah, God, was it lawnmower Man?

I mean lawnmower Man? Well, yeah, that's from Night Shift, right, that could be done. Well, actually, no, it's a pretty it's pretty anachronistic, unfortunately. Well, and there's not much to that story. That's one of those we're really just a big fat guy chewing up your lawn.

Doesn't make for a movie. Yeah no, yeah. That was the interesting thing, like I kind of got out earlier, is I was curious as to how they were going to expand on this, because that's what has to be done with these, especially these early stories. Oh yeah, or the short stories even like we talked about on that episode, Trucks is a very simple story. Children of the Corn again, very simple.

They add a lot to it. I like what they did with this with the passing on. But I still could have done with more of the original story. I could have done with more of the Billings stuff, yea, even some more scares in this, even some more early scares where they're all getting visited by this thing at one point or another. That's how Sophie Thatcher comes around to it is that she now sees it in her room at night.

The dad has an instance of seeing it, you know, maybe not all at the same time, but kind of build up to it a little bit more. And it's clearly interested in feeding on the dad because when they come upon it in the basement, it's feeding on the dad. They stop it from feeding on the dad. So it would stand to reason that it bothering the dad should have been something because again it kills Lester Billings. It's heavily implied.

He doesn't commit suicide, I would say, and the monster killed him again. I feel like there's more of a movie here that isn't one, and more of that movie I would have appreciated. I would have been interested to see some more scares, because the scares are well done, and grief affects everybody in a family, especially when it's the mob because, like you said, it was his wife too. It feels like a big missed opportunity. But I think for me, I enjoyed most of where this movie went.

I will say, so we haven't talked about it. The way the movie plays out, they kind of kill the monster, they light it on fire, the house burns down. There's no Michael Myers breathing. But I digress. We go to the next scene and they're back in the therapist office and we're kind of seeing the payoff of the dad is finally in therapy.

Let me get to hear kind of this. I would say it's a little saccharin, but I think it's well earned, him talking about how, you know, he tried, but we're going to keep trying and we'll keep doing better. And they're having this group session that's kind of been talked about throughout the movie, and then they leave and the daughter gets called back into the office, and I'm sitting here thinking to myself, Okay, movie here you go, Like this is the point in in any horror movie where the movie either is elevating itself just that little bit more or is going to slip and fall school and just like slips right down the fucking stairs right when you're at the top step. And I think the way they handled the stinger in this movie is really interesting because it leaves a moment of ambiguity as to whether or not the things still around.

I think it still is, obviously, but I think the way that they handle it is so smart though, because at the end of this story, it's not really the end of the Boogeyman's story so much is the end of the Harper family story, which opens it up if they want to go somewhere else, because what better place for a grief monster to live than in the closet of a therapist, right. I think it's partly full circle back to the story itself. That story ends in the therapist's office with right him leaving. I think, if I'm not saying I haven't read it in a while, I think Billings leaves and then gets called back in, and then that's when the therapist. He goes to the lobby and there's no receptionist, and the monster comes out essentially behind him into the lobby.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a little callback I think to the original story as well, and I was like, oh no, don't do this. If she fucking sees that thing in that closet, I'm going to be really angry. And then Lisa gay Hamilton shows up in a spot where it doesn't seem like she should be and did you need something? And I'm like, okay, they want to do set up a sequel, fine, but I just don't want to see it again.

I don't want to see it again. I'm gonna say it's not still there and go against what you're saying. Well, I mean, ultimately it doesn't matter, right, Grief is always there, whether or not we want to acknowledge it. That is ultimately what the movie is getting at. I think the thing that would lead me to believe it's still there is the fact that Lisa Gay Hamilton acts so surprised when she's back in there.

It said, hey, can you come back in for a second. Obviously she didn't call her in, right, but maybe so fast just tear and stuff. Right. But to be fair, I mean, I don't think the movie suffers either way. And I think that's because it's done the same way, well up until one last final moment.

It's done the same way Nightmare on Elm Street is done, where it's like, oh it might be there, it might not be. Here is the top of the car with Freddy Krueger's colors on it, and Mom getting pulled into the window. Well, that's maybe the step too far. I mean, Sophie, Thatcher doesn't get dragged into the closet. This movie has a little bit more of an upbeat ending, which the story doesn't have.

I think it earns the upbeat ending, and there's nothing wrong with a horror movie having an upbeat ending. That everything has to be doom and gloom. I don't mind it at all. If black long fingers had wrapped around that door, I would have been really angry. And I would have been really really angry if she had gotten sucked into the closet by it, agreed, I would not have been happy with that.

I'm with you. I'm okay with the ambiguity, and it reminded me a lot. Frankly, the transition between the credits and the end of the movie reminded me a lot of the Fright Night remake, where they were using a cover of ninety nine problems. All of a sudden they just start playing Burning Love by Elvis over the da which I thought it was funny. I laughed.

I was like, I'm like, is that just because they set it on fire and were using this? Okay? Yeah, I thought it was pretty funny. I got a good chuckle out of it. You know that Cobweb went the more Halloween esque route with playing in an old timey right, mister Sandman or something, right.

I just thought it was funny. Okay, I got a good chuckle out of it. I mean I just have that one because I was confused for a minute. I'm like, what the hell? I think it just goes to reinforce the upbeat ending of the movie, you know, sure, yeah, like yourself, I have a problem with movies that have these stinger endings where we essentially wasted ninety nine minutes to see the last minute where the character is, you know, summarily.

I mean like Texas Chain Saw twenty twenty two is a pretty good example. Yeah. I just watched something else too that the same way, like fuck you movie. Yeah, it's cheap, and it always feels like, oh what are you set in the fucking trap on a bait on the trap again? For another you know, thirty dollars of my money to go see it on a Friday night with somebody else, Like that's what it feels like, just trying to set a hook for me to come back as someone who likes to watch a movie that's just a movie and nothing else.

I don't mind when the movie just ends. And this movie, I mean, even if it does leave the door open, no pun intended, I think it closes the door on the story of that family, which if they want to do a sequel, like I'd watch another sequel about a grief monster fucking with another family, but I don't have any interest in seeing their story then go through it again. Yeah. Yeah. The thing with Cobweb where it ended where it's like, well, I could come visit you.

It's like that same thing of like it's always there in the background. I feel like Boogeyman actually made good on that still being a threat Cobwebs just like no, you're not shut up, shut ups, you're on the fucking cage in the ground, Like come on. I agree, But I think unfortunately what executives take from these things is like, oh, we need Sophie Thatcher back, right. That was the success of this and the monster I think is a big success point. It is unlike most things I've seen and the usage of those arms sticking out of the mouth reminded me of the thing from Ritual a lot.

You know. It's interesting though, when she figures out the drawing of it, I'm like, oh shit, it's Sarah. It's the spider monster again. You know, you've got these things on all fours. That was another similarity between the two, and I'm like, oh my god.

Yeah. I will say the most effective visual that they do in this movie is the usage of the creature's eyes. Yeah, something about that just works. That is very James one. That reminded me a lot of the Nun.

We didn't even tell the mon two is out right now, What the way are we talking about this? We should be talking about the Nun too. We left that out of the whole Conjuring Universe episode on purpose. Yeah. Boy, I've heard it's better than the first one.

That's what I've heard too. That's where I think some of those scares come from, is the Conjuring thing, where it's like the out of focus scare has become very popular thanks to James Juan and I haven't seen the Newest Insidious, but I'm sure the Newan City is directed by Patrick Wilson does things like that because he grew up on the horror sets of James Juan. But harkens back to Hereditary two where both of these movies have plays on things from Hereditary the creeping along the ceiling thing happens in Cobweb, and then the outline of the mother and this is like Tony Colette seeing the outline of her mother and Hereditary and which I don't mind because I like that as well, like, oh, is that just a dress over there or is that her?

Are those two eyes or are they reflections off of some smoke detector? Yeah, right, electron equipment or something, and they're used to good effect. I like the I thing a lot. This movie had a lot of jump scares in it, and you'll notice we're not complaining about them. They're rather well done.

It's a payoff jump scare though, right a horror movie. The jump scares are two action movies. What like set pieces are like that's a moment that they're getting you to a thing, one specific thing that they want you to see. Rob Savage and Eli Borne, the cinematographer really have a good I mean again, like they're seeing this whole workmanlike thing. I don't agree with that.

I think this movie has a fair amount of style to it. Yeah, I agree. Is it the most stylish horror movie I've ever seen? No, but it doesn't need to be like that shot looking under the bed. There's a few instances of that where we're using the camera effectively, and I wouldn't call it necessarily workmanlike hither No.

Maybe it's because people are used to him doing the found footage thing. I guess, yeah, because he's primarily done dash cam and host host Yeah, both found footage, right, this is a straight narrative. I don't know if that's maybe the disconnect for people the anecdotal story of them sending the movie to Stephen King and him going this needs to be put out in theaters. He's right. This movie hit and found its audience pretty easily.

This is a well done Friday night monster movie. The trailers, I couldn't tell you the difference between this movie the Slenderman movie, The Empty Man. A lot of those something things of like something in a house, tormenting a community, or even that was that Stephen King thing that came out on like HBO Max The Outsider. Yeah, kids disappearing kids getting killed something menacing kids. This movie for me didn't stand out until you told me, like, oh, can you find these?

And I was like sure. When I download a'most like that sounds interesting. And I think the Stephen King connection is probably what sets it apart, is because it is based off of a Stephen King story and none of those other things are they're based off of, you know, Slenderman or other disparate things. Stephen King being Stephen King does bring ten to twenty to thirty percent more something to the project than it just being I'm not saying Cobweb is like this, but Cobweb, which is ostensibly an original idea. This movie made a lot of money good and I'm glad that movies can still be made like this and make money in theaters, which is a good thing.

There needs to be a place for Friday night movies that you can take your date two or you can go to with your friends and have a PG thirteen horror experience. It's a PG thirteen movie that I forgot is PG thirteen and there is one F bomb and it's used to good effect. I feel like she lights the thing on fire, fuck you like it's good it's good. It's used well. If you're gonna put it in your movie, put it right at the climax when the character finally gets one over on the monster.

And it isn't really a story that needs to be R rated, what other than graphic violence, which isn't necessary because it's really about being scared as opposed to this is a thing that just kills everybody. Right, It's not a slasher film. It's stalking you. It wants to make you scared. It's based in psychological horror.

The idea of a boogeyman. I saw one of the reviews on IMDb pretty decent but stupid name, and I'm like, okay, do you know that? I mean, obviously they could have called it something else. Stephen King. Titles get changed, share some of them Overdrive for example.

You know, probably wouldn't have done as well as trucks. Do you have any concept is to what this is based on? Why would you change the name? Yeah, the Boogeyman is something that exists to make kids do good behavior. It's what you're warned will happen if you are bad.

We're not sure why this does what it does. I mean, the movie has this monologue what it is, right, the movie has the monologue of Rita, the David dos Malkin's character, his wife. You know, I think it's as old as time, and I think it's been around forever. So that's the screenwriters telling us that's where they're going with this, because ninety nine percent of the time when they say something like that, that's what they're getting at, which is fine. I mean, this is again trafficking in Freddy Krueger, it's trafficking and it Yeah, it's dream monsters, dream demons, something that exists to torment children more or less specifically, they did the movie the disservice by not having the adults be part of it, because the adults were already part of it.

Yeah, the ubiquitousness of the Boogeyman should not be a stumbling, blocked, dear enjoyment of this movie. It should be the universality of what the Boogeyman is. It's different than Pennywise. The Boogeyman is amorphous for all of us. They put a face to it here, but that's not going to be what I imagine my Boogeyman looks like any more than yours or anybody else's.

And that's the thing. I don't know. That seems like an odd complaint to me. The no kills would be a more understood complaint, I feel like, which is fine for me. I don't see the necessity of that in a story that's about psychological Stephen King is telling stories about characters, not necessarily the kills there within go look at most Stephen king things, right, most of his things aren't a gorefest.

I'm glad we watched some new horror. I don't watch enough new horror, primarily because I feel like every time I watch a new horror movie, the first two acts are good, in the third act falls apart. Well, I'm exactly the same. I haven't found anything to talk about. That's what I mentioned way back when, like, let's find some new horror to discuss, and I would watch some and just be like, no, I don't feel like sitting for two hours and talking about this one just fine to watch.

I'm not going to sit for two hours and talk about it. I mean, last year we did oh my god, we did those Netflix like streaming horror movies, and I had you helped me out and pick some of them, even the ones that were like good, were still like it wasn't that good? And that's the think. It's like, what's weird is how low the bar is set for these streaming movies, almost by their own accord, Like it seems like they're not interested in really telling a story. They're interested in just getting you to watch the movie the first two thirds of it, because like things heard and seen.

Oh my god, that's what I think of when I think of streaming horror now. It's like that is the example that I base everything else against, because like, who the fuck made this movie? And who is this movie even for? Yeah, it's been a lot of missus and very few hits for me lately, so not that I've seen everything. Kind of pay attention to what's getting talked about and wait for it to pop up somewhere and yeah, I mean you never know.

Well, was the biggest horror movie this year? Was it The Boogeyman? No, It's Evil Dead Rise? Probably Yeah, And that was on my list, Like, Okay, this could be an episode. I was like, yeah, I haven't seen it yet.

Have you seen it? Yeah, it's all right. I like the twenty thirteen reboot better, way better? Any who to cry? Modern horror for ever here.

Maybe we'll find something else between now and Halloween to do as well. The game to watch anything like, I mean, even if it's not great, it's hard for me to muster the energy to talk about not so great stuff for a couple of hours. That's fair, that's fair. But to be fair, the likelihood of something being so amazing is pretty yeah. Unfortunately, Well, when you're not trying to find a decent horror movie to talk about, what's happening over at the culture Cast.

I'm looking for decent movies to talk now, just talking about movies, you know. So it's September right now, So talking about movies that Father Malone programs. So doing some sketch comedies, Kentucky Friend movies, stuff like that. Yeah, the Groove Tube. That's one I still haven't seen.

I need to see that one. Sure, I mean you find the better parts on YouTube. I think that's Sketch comedies are like anthology TV shows. It's like, well, you don't have to watch all of it. You just watch like this, this and this, and you're good.

That's what you can find me doing as talking about movies and other things over at weirdingwaymedia dot com. What about you, Mark, Well, you can find me and my two shows over on weirdingwaymedia dot com as well, this one and CambridgeMA Sean, which will be back in October after a little break this month. I am currently, just so people know, remastering all of my old episodes up until twenty twenty, just to get a little better sound on them from what I was originally doing when I was first learning all this. So you may notice old episodes pop up for some random reason, and that is why, because I'm trying to fix the sound on them, maybe adding some of those culture cast episodes as well that Chris and I did that I didn't get so I'm going to talk to him about that after this.

So you may see some of those, like the Stephen King one that we've mentioned a few times on here, pop up in my feed. We did a lot of those for a while together. Yeah, just realize the other day that I didn't grab all of them. So there's a few that I feel like would make sense to put up, especially a Stephen King one after today. So other than that, yeah, check out where neweymedia dot com.

There's a ton of different shows on there, and you'll definitely find something that you like listening to. So until then, have a great day and don't forget anything can happen when you wake up heavy