Quite a Few Quick Films for the Weekend

"Night of the Living Deb"
starring: Maria Thayer, Ray Wise, Chris Marquette, Michael Cassady, Syd Wilder
directed by: Kyle Rankin

This review is a few weeks later. This is a Maine-based, Maine-made film that began as a Kickstarter campaign. I remember them filming in Portland last summer and after viewing it at the premier in Portland, at SPACE Gallery, I only wish I had taken the opportunity to at least been an extra in the film (since there was a call-out for them). This is just one of those fun, romantic-comedies with a spin, it includes zombies. It's main characters are played by veteran actors, yet rather unknowns in the business, but the way they interact with each other and play out the script is just fantastic. The girl that plays Deb, the title character, is Maria Thayer and she could potentially be seen as just another Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but there's just something else completely endearing about her, every time she is on screen and reciting the dialogue.

Here's the plot:
After a girl's night out, endearingly awkward (think Kimmy Schmidt) Deb wakes up in the apartment of the most attractive guy in Portland, Maine. She's thrilled, but she can't remember much of what got her there. Pretty boy, Ryan, only knows that it was a mistake and he ushers her out of his apartment and into a full scale zombie apocalypse. Now, a walk a shame becomes a fight for survival as this mismatched pair discovers that the only thing scarier than trusting someone with your life...is trusting them with your heart!
A great secondary character appearance by Ray Wise cannot be missed either.

You have to find this film when it actually makes its way onto streaming services, as the director made it clear that it won't really see life in a theatre. Too bad, because this is the kind of film that people would thoroughly enjoy seeing.

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"Zombeavers"
starring: Rachel Melvin, Cortney Palm, Lexi Atkins, Hutch Dano, Jake Weary, Peter Gilroy
written and directed by: Jordan Rubin (and Al Kaplan)

This film is everything you expect it to be (with low expectations, of course) just from reading the title. You know it won't be a great think-piece or piece of art for the ages. It's solely just a great waste of time.

We begin on a rural stretch of Indiana highway, where a couple of doofus truck drivers transporting hazardous medical waste plow into a deer and send one barrel of toxic green goo tumbling down an embankment, straight into the lair of some cute, fluffy beavers. Cut to: a trio of sorority sisters — brunette Zoe (Courtney Palm), blonde Jenn (Lexi Atkins) and redhead Mary (Rachel Melvin) — heading down the highway en route to a girls’ weekend at Mary’s lakeside cabin. This was to have been a couples’ retreat, until Zoe discovered that her boyfriend, Sam (ex-Disney Channel star Hutch Dano), was cheating on her and her friends jettisoned their own significant others in solidarity. That does not, however, stop said horny frat boys (including Sam) from turning up at the lake anyway and sweet-talking their way in.

There are so-bad-they’re-good schlock movies that endear themselves to the audience by virtue of their own shambling but heartfelt incompetence, and then there are movies like this one that wink and nod incessantly at the viewer to remind us that everything is bad, like, on purpose — which eventually becomes, like, a total drag. Still, “Zombeavers” is not a total wash, and seen at night, under the right combination of low expectations and controlled substances, it may even seem better than it really is.

I actually loved watching this, perhaps because it helped satisfy the teenage boy inside of me. It's a good time, for all that it is (and isn't). I couldn't really find much fault it in, because it's clearly paying homage to its wonderful predecessor like "Evil Dead" especially with the gags and oh so fake-ness of everything on the screen.
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"The Babadook"
starring: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman
written and directed by: Jennifer Kent

The important part of any horror movie is how it "gets" you and here, again, is another Australian horror film that knows exactly how to terrify the viewer, without the gore and more with the mystery of the unknown and the unseen. It's a psychological thriller, more than a horror film, per se. It's unclear if it's the child or the mother who has unleashed the scary monster who will inevitably terrorize them and their lives.

"If it's in a word, or it's in a look, you can't get rid of the Babadook," reads the weary Amelia to her frightened son, Samuel, from a book that has mysteriously appeared in the boy's bedroom (which would lead anyone to wonder, why the hell would you read something like this, especially to a kid, but such are the ways of horror films, smarter people acting stupid, even if it's briefly).

At the outset, we find single mom Amelia exhausted due to the sleeplessness of near-7-year-old Samuel, who fears monsters that he believes to be hiding in closets and under the bed. Samuel may not yet be a demon child, but he is unquestionably a problem child. In order to slay monsters, he has concocted a lethal dart thrower, which has caused his expulsion from school. Other children find him weird and unlikable, and Amelia, too, has a tendency to recoil from her son’s touch. Also, the ill-defined trauma of her husband’s sudden and violent death still haunts Amelia.

Things escalate when Mister Babadook, an ominous children’s pop-up book, mysteriously appears in Samuel’s bedroom and warns against a dark and evil creature who cannot be gotten rid of once he’s been allowed in to one’s home. The image of the Babadook is primitive yet bone-rattling: a sturdy, all-black silhouette appears as if part scarecrow, part tombstone. Extended whiskers or claws attached above and below these talons seem sharper and sootier than Freddy Krueger’s mitts ever were; a top hat lends the image a perverse magisterial touch. He knocks three times: “Baba dook-dook-dook.” Despite tearing up the book and leaving it in the trash, Amelia finds it again in her son’s room pasted together and more threatening than before. Clearly, they’re being stalked – but by a storybook character?

Amelia grows more exasperated and sleep-deprived by the day. She resorts to tranquilizing her son so she can get some rest. But still, the Babadook knocks. Samuel keeps squalling about not wanting his mother to die, but is he issuing a threat or expressing genuine fear? 

Essie Davis delivers a brilliant performance, notching distinct levels of fatigue and disorientation that grow ever more nuanced. Her skillful display somewhat makes up for the uneven performance of the child actor Noah Wiseman.

This film's greatest depends on the actors portraying the mother and son, and they knock it out of the park. This is an incredible psychological thriller. One for the ages. Do yourself a favor and watch this film, in the dark, late at night. And try not to scare yourself.
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"Backwards"
starring: Sarah Megan Thomas, James Van Der Beek, Glenn Morshower, Margaret Colin, Wynn Everett, Alexandra Metz
written by: Sarah Megan Thomas
directed by: Ben Hickernell

You always have to be suspect when the star of a film is also the main producer of said film, because it makes you believe the only way they could have possibly gotten their film made was if the financed it themselves; and then, to put themselves in the lead role...suspect again. And I call foul, even though Sarah Megan Thomas is clearly making a valiant effort.

The story is old and played out. Semi-washed out pro sports figure finds a way to coach and mentor youngsters in her own sport of choice, the one she couldn't make it herself. You know, those who can't do, teach (or in this case, coach).

Under Ben Hickernell’s workmanlike direction, Thomas persuasively plays Abigail Brooks, who has devoted her life to training for Olympic rowing, but quits the U.S. team after her coach (Glenn Morshower) once again names her an alternate instead of placing her “in the boat.” Back home in Philly, and on the verge of 30, Abigail heeds advice from her workaholic mom (Margaret Colin) to get on with her life, and returns to Union Academy, her former high school, to work as rowing coach.
After a slightly rocky start, she reignites a romance with an old flame (James Van Der Beek), now the school’s athletic director, and brings out the best in two promising competitors (Alexandra Metz, Meredith Apfelbaum) whose oaring ability may take them all the way to a prestigious race in England. But just before they depart for the U.K., Abigail gets a call from her former coach.

Not much else needs to be said. It's a rather sad, waste of time and I watched it so you don't have to.
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"Traitors"
starring: Chaimae Ben Acha, Soufia Issami, Mourade Zeguendi, Driss Roukhe, Nadia Niazi, Morjana Alaoui
written and directed by: Sean Gullette

This was a surprisingly great movie, perhaps because I wasn't expecting too much from it. But, it was a truly engaging film, right from the start. It's about a singer in an all-girl punk band in Morocco, who says yes to a drug trafficking run with some hard, shady older men, in order to finance her band's studio time to record their album. The lead actress, Chaimae Ben Acha, is incredible in her role. She has charisma and a tomboyish attitude that are engaging every time she's on the screen. Malika (Acha) is a 25 year old girl who prefers jeans and hoodies to pretty dresses, sings in a punk rock band, and is heavily influenced by the Clash (in fact our introduction to her is a scene where her band, Traitors, is playing the same guitar riff from "I'm so bored with the U.S.A."

The plot’s set in motion by the girls’ need to drum up the money to rent a recording studio so they can produce a demo tape. Malika’s just been fired from her dreadfully boring call-center job and her conservative dad, a poor garage owner, can’t offer much help either. After a somewhat out-of-character attempt to swindle a tourist out of money, Malika finds herself between a rock and a hard place and is finally saved by a rich garage customer (Mourade Zeguendi) who offers her a well paid, one-off job as a chauffeur.

All she has to do is drive a fancy car into the mountains and drive it back past several roadblocks. There’s only a tiny little catch: The car doors are lined with drugs. The screenplay, written by the director, consists of two only loosely related halves set in the city and the countryside, and overall structure and coherence are not Gullette's forte. However, he's good with smaller details, such as the nifty way the possible dangers of the return trip are illustrated by giving Malika more experienced company on the way there who can explain what she should worry about and how she should act on the way back.

During their brief sojourn in the mountains, Malika strikes up a conversation with the initially standoffish Amal (Soufia Issami, from On the Edge), who’ll be the only one to accompany her back to Tangier. The relationship between the girls will quickly grow more important but isn’t developed sufficiently for all the events and changes of heart to be entirely credible, though Issami and Ben Acha do have good chemistry.