Scare Tactics (Reboot), on USA

Most Star Trek and Star Wars fans would love to jump into the movies they love, but you wouldn’t want to be a part of the action if you are a horror fan. Except, maybe you would, if you were a psycho-killer. Hopefully, participating (as the “prankster”) in horror-themed practical joke shows offer a harmless way of satisfying those impulses. Scare Tactics was the brand-name of horror reality TV, outliving most of its imitators. Since nobody has any better ideas, executive producer Jordan Peele and his Monkeypaw production company help reboot the franchise, but he does not host, when “Bedeviled,” the first new episode of Scare Tactics, premieres tonight on USA.

Peele was a solid host of his Twilight Zone reboot, so hopefully he is saving his hospitality cachet for something of similar cultural heft. Instead, we get “Flip,” a demonic horror-obsessed teen with a TV for a head. Flip feels like something a committee agreed on, so it won’t be shocking if a real host eventually replaces him. (Frankly, there are ought to be a dedication to original host Shannen Doherty, who passed away in July.)

Regardless, the first punking is quite cleverly executed. Two friends just “happened” to be passing by a chapel, where a mega-pregnant woman and her bridegroom are desperate to get married, but they have no witnesses, because all their invited guests were too scared to attend. It seems she is carrying Rosemary’s Baby, who will indeed become the Antichrist, if it is born out of wedlock.

There is plenty of gore and the old school stagecraft is impressive. However, some of the funniest lines sound like inspired ad-libs. Even the target laughs, despite the gross-out lunacy staged for his benefit.

Dev Patel’s Monkey Man

He is an underground fighter, whose masked persona is inspired by Hanuman. He encounters a woman named Sita in his quest for vengeance, but this is not the Ramayana. This is old school retribution at its most brutal. Some of the most powerful men in India are responsible for his mother’s death, so now they are going to pay in Dev Patel’s Monkey Man, which opens tomorrow in theaters.

We never really catch the “Kid’s” name, but he takes the alias of “Bobby” while working in the kitchen of the elite private club affiliated with his enemies. As a boy, he watched helplessly as the future police chief killed his mother, as part of an operation to clear their community off land coveted by a politically connected cult. Their (maybe not so vaguely) Modi-sounding nationalist party is on the verge of winning the election, but “Bobby” might not even be aware of politics. He is hatching a plan to make Chief Rana pay. Still, he cannot help noticed Sita, one of the club’s hostesses, whose soul has not been fully corrupted yet.

Bobby’s plan is not great, but he intends to compensate with the red-hot intensity of his rage. He might need a little more than that, but he might find it during a training montage. Sure, we have seen them before, but not with Zakiir Hussain keeping rhythm as the character appropriately known simply as the “Tabla Maestro,” which indeed he is.

Hussain, a member of John McLaughlin’s Shakti, has appeared in films before, but they have mostly been classy Merchant-Ivory productions, like Heat and Dust. In contrast, Monkey Man is about as bloody and seamy as a movie can possibly get. It is not for the squeamish. This is a straight-up payback thriller, but it is getting marketed for horror audiences, partly because it is produced by Jordan Peele and partly because it is so unapologetically violent.

Directing himself, Patel has sort of made a Mr. Hyde companion to his Dr. Jekyll-ish breakout film, Slumdog Millionaire. Bobby, or whoever he is, is another slum kid, but he has very different goals in life.

Curator’s Choice ‘22: Nope

Jordan Peele's latest film exists in an alternate reality where the Fry’s Electronic big box stores are still in business. Unfortunately, the California-based chain closed in February 2022, before filming even started. They blamed the pandemic, but it was really the lockdown that killed them. More chaos comes to California, specifically Hollywood ranch country, in Jordan Peele’s Nope, which screens during MoMI’s Curator’s Choice series.

The Haywood family has handled horses for Hollywood productions for years, but OJ and Emerald’s late father Otis Sr. was the face of the business. Business has been off since he was fatally killed by debris mysteriously falling from the sky. Since then, his adult children have been forced to sell horses to Ricky “Jupe” Park, a former child actor, who now hosts a western-themed amusement park. They have also lost horses to apparent UFO abductions.

Emerald convinces O.J. documenting alien activity could reverse their precarious fortunes. Naturally, they drop by their convenient neighborhood Fry’s Electronic, where Angel Torres fixes them up with surveillance gear. After installing everything, he taps himself in too, because he wants to believe. Unfortunately, the supposed UFO always cuts electric power, but he sees enough to officially team-up with the Haywoods, joining with them to recruit acclaimed cinematographer Antlers Holst, who is famed for his ability to get any shot. Holst also happens to own his own hand-cranked IMAX camera, so he definitely has the right gear.

Peele spends a disproportionate amount of time on Park’s backstory, particularly when his chimpanzee co-star went nuts a killed the entire cast of his sitcom, leaving him as the sole survivor. It is a masterfully brutal and surreal flashback scene, but it clashes with the reserved emotional tone of the rest of the film. The metaphor also becomes heavy-handed, when Park’s sense of his own charmed life leads to spectacular tragedy. Nevertheless, it is some of Terry Notary’s most interesting simian work, since The Circle.

Many pie-in-the-sky interpretive theories have been applied to the sneaker seen balancing on its toe throughout the chimp’s rampage. You name it, someone thinks it symbolizes it. However, the truth is probably simpler (and sort of cooler). Peele produced the latest Twilight Zone reboot, which several times referred back to Rod Serling’s original series. Most likely it is an homage to the episode “A Penny for Your Thoughts,” in which otherworldly things happen while a dropped coin remains standing on its edge, where it landed.

Nevertheless, Nope, like Us, lends itself more to creative analysis than his over-hyped Get Out, which is a major reason why both are substantially superior films. Even though it looks like an alien abduction movie, Nope is indeed a horror film, which Get Out was not (it is a slightly fantastical thriller that is never really scary). When it fully reveals itself, there is an atmosphere of menace to Nope that is seriously creepy.

Hunters on Prime Video

In 1977, thriller fans were primed to look for fugitive National Socialists under every bed. Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil had been one of the biggest bestsellers of the previous year, following in the footsteps of Robert Ludlum’s Osterman Weekend and Frederick Forsythe’s Odessa File. Plus, in real life, Simon Wiesenthal’s heroic hunt for war criminals was reasonably well-reported. Meyer Offerman has recruited a team to do similar work, but their methods are more hardcore in the first season of Hunters, created by David Weil and executive produced by Jordan Peele, which premieres tomorrow on Prime Video.

Jonah Heidelbaum knew his grandmother Ruth survived a concentration camp, but she never talked about the Holocaust. Yet, he suspects her murder was somehow related to her status as a survivor, based on what he heard while cowering around the corner. Offerman definitely agrees.

Offerman met and fell in love with Heidelbaum’s grandmother while they were both held captive in the camps. Over time, their relationship became rather complicated, but she was still his primary researcher, who compiled the files and testimony that now supports the group’s Nazi-hunting. Naturally, Heidelbaum wants in, but the rest of the Hunters are skeptical, especially the not very merciful Sister Harriet. Martial arts expert Joe Torrance and the Pam Grier-inspired Roxy Jones are nearly as unwelcoming. However, Murray and Mindy Markowitz, an old married couple who happen to be crack weaponsmiths, and Lonnie Flash, a Jewish exploitation movie star (sort of a forerunner to the Hebrew Hammer) are more sympathetic.

Even before her murder, Offerman’s group detected signs of increased activity on behalf of the secretive Odessa-esque organization. Viewers know they have Biff Simpson, a highly placed mole in the State Department, who has convinced Jimmy Carter to lift trade sanctions on Latin America. Apparently, they have big plans that require a mystery import from the southern hemisphere.

Hunters is peppered with many amusing faux-grindhouse visual gags in the Tarantino-Machete tradition, but it still has a very incomplete understanding of the era it is trying to recreate. Sometimes it is small details, like a reference to Kramer vs. Kramer, which was released two years later (in 1979). However, some errors reflect a more fundamental cluelessness regarding the greater social trends of the era. For instance, in one scene, naïve Heidelbaum goes undercover as Young Republican canvasser, hoping to score a signature from a suspected war criminal in Huntville, Alabama. However, a YR would be almost unheard of in the solid democratic South of the 1970s. (Alabama voted squarely for Carter and the Huntsville district elected Dems until 2010.) Even more to the point, the rampant crime and fiscal collapse that defined Abe Beame’s mayoralty in New York are largely, if not entirely ignored.

Nevertheless, given the alarming increase in anti-Semitic violence, here and abroad, it is definitely satisfying to see some old school retribution. The shadowy conspirators and the German fugitives hiding in plain sight totally have it coming—and the Hunters frequently give it to them, in graphically poetic terms.

Jordan Peele’s Us

It always comes back to the 1980s, especially when the subject is horror movies. In this case, we start our yarn in 1986, but the influence of the Eighties will still be clearly evident when the tale picks up sometime roughly now. It starts by name-checking C.H.U.D., the original there-are-bad-things-below-our-streets-and-it’s-the-government’s-fault B-movie and ultimately shows up Hands Across America as the cultish, attention-seeking behavior it so obviously was. The doppelgangers will stock their entitled analogs in Jordan Peele’s Us, which releases today on DVD.

When she was a child, Adelaide Wilson gave her parents a bit of a scare when she wandered off along the Santa Cruz boardwalk, getting lost in a hall of mirrors. She returned ostensibly safe and sound, but to this day, she remains haunted by an encounter with her doppelganger. In the present day, Adelaide and Gabe Wilson are like the horror movie Huxtables. He proudly wears his Howard University sweatshirt, but his primary concern is keeping up with their well-heeled frienemies, the Tyler family. Then one fateful night, the Wilsons see four shadowy figures who look a lot like them standing ominously in their driveway, as you probably know from the trailer.

It is not a casual social call. The game is on, but it would be spoilery to reveal the revelations that will come out as the stressful night continues. Us lends itself to a fair number of class-conscious interpretations, but it represents a vast improvement over Peele’s wildly over-hyped Get Out, starting with the happy fact that it truly is a horror movie rather than a gimmicky thriller with an assortment of genre trappings.

In fact, the film is pretty intense. To Peele’s credit, he proves he can throw down the fear old school 80’s style. He also hints at the chaotic global picture in intriguing ways, without detracting from the micro-tension of the Wilsons’ ordeal (not unlike later installments of Romero’s Living Dead franchise). One cool thing about Us is the proliferation of internet debates regarding what really happened and the symbolic meaning of it all, whereas even for admirers of Get Out, it was all cut-and-dried up there on the screen.

When not working on Marvel/Star Wars/Disney properties, Lupita Nyong’o could become a new Jamie Lee Curtis based on her work in Us and the sweet zombie comedy Little Monsters.  As Adelaide Wilson, she has to imply some strange and complicated emotional responses we shouldn’t really get into, but she pulls it off quite assuredly. It is the sort of performance many viewers will want to re-watch with the benefit of hindsight.

Winston Duke nicely counterbalances Nyong’o as the more passive, easy-going Gabe. Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex are both terrific as pre-teen daughter Zora Wilson and her younger brother Jason, as well as their doppelgangers. However, Elisabeth Moss shamelessly steals her scenes as catty Kitty Tyler.

Us has no post-credit stinger, so it saves us that annoyance. Peele packs in a lot of weirdness, but it all has a role to play, so do not forget about the opening images. Most importantly, Us represents a major departure from Get Out, because it is actually scary. Recommended for horror fans, Us releases today on DVD and BluRay.