By Erik Piepenburg
Out this week, a period possession movie starring Sarah Paulson, a chef-driven supernatural thriller starring Ariana DeBose and more.
‘Hold Your Breath’
A mother braves the elements, and evil, in this busy but hackneyed feature debut from directors Karrie Crouse and Will Joines.
Sarah Paulson plays Margaret, a loving mother trying to shield her two daughters, Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins), from sinister entities that she suspects lurk outside their isolated Dust Bowl home. Among them is a mysterious drifter (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) with questionable healing powers.
Crouse’s script hurls horror conventions against the wall — possession, survival, eco-disaster, home invasion, folk horror, body horror, religious mania — in hopes that something sticks. But nothing does, so what’s left is a movie about a grieving mother protecting her children from dust and wind for 94 minutes — a scary scenario for 1930s Oklahoma, the film’s setting. But not here.
Instead, there are predictable jump scares, creaking floorboards, silhouetted figures in the distance and every 10 minutes another fire for Margaret to put out. It’s “The Mist” but silt, “The Babadook” minus a Babadook, “The Night of the Hunter” with no edge. (Stream it on Hulu.)
‘V/H/S/Beyond’
Over 12 years and six franchise films, it’s been a mixed bag for the “V/H/S” found footage anthologies. This new science fiction-themed installment is no different, offering only a single film worth fast-forwarding to watch: Justin Martinez’s spectacular, darkly comedic “Live and Let Dive.”
Written by Martinez and Ben Turner, it starts as a group of friends squeeze into a plane and prepare to sky-dive to celebrate a pal’s birthday. But their plane gets hit by turbulence, not from wind but by an alien invasion. After a spaceship crashes into the plane, bodies fall through the air and some survivors land in a citrus grove, where the monstrously long-limbed creatures finish them off except for the leading man with the camera. It’s unclear if Martinez shot the film while skydiving, but it looked real as hell — found footage gold.
The other short films in this anthology pack visual punches but lack fleshed-out scripts. They would be great to have in the background at a Halloween party. (Stream it on Shudder.)
‘House of Spoils’
One of the more peculiar horror subgenres is the restaurant film, from schlock like “Blood Diner” to the dark comedy “The Menu.” This supernatural thriller from writer-directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy — former servers in New York City restaurants — is a well-intentioned but unfilling addition to the menu.
Ariana DeBose plays an ambitious chef who with a wealthy business partner (Arian Moayed) and a fellow chef (Barbie Ferreira) opens a high-end restaurant she hopes to turn into a destination. The problem is that the restaurant sits on land saturated with the blood and sweat of undervalued ancestors thirsty for their due.
DeBose, a charismatic stage actress, here looks disinterested, a deadly state for a movie chef in the “Bear” era. Not even her character’s waking nightmares — of slimy black bugs crawling from elaborately plated dishes — unnerve her much. Or make her leave, an inveterate horror movie conundrum the script never satisfactorily addresses.
Then again, for many women in the restaurant business, survival can mean staying at a job that surrounds you with monsters. (Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.)
‘Salem’s Lot’
On Nov. 17, 1979, CBS aired a Gen X horror touchstone: “Salem’s Lot,” Tobe Hooper’s miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s 1975 bestselling vampire novel. Its blood-chilling bedroom visitation scenes are master classes in timing and reveal.
It’s hard to imagine any generation being scared by this paint-by-numbers adaptation written and directed by Gary Dauberman and starring Lewis Pullman as a successful novelist who moves back to his Maine hometown, where he joins locals in fighting off a hostile vampire takeover.
Tonally, the film veers like a drunk Dracula on Halloween night, from Spielberg-like family film to Gothic melodrama to a Hallmark Channel romance. Not even three terrific actors — Bill Camp, John Benjamin Hickey and Alfre Woodard — help the film pump fresh blood into the source material. If there’s a bright spot, it’s Virginia Johnson’s era-fabulous costumes. (Stream it on Max.)
‘The Platform 2’
Much like the “Human Centipede” films, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s stomach-churning, Spanish-language thriller “The Platform” (2019) introduced a brutal sui generis world of desperate and repulsive circumstances. It’s set in a vertical prison where inmates get food delivered via a platform that moves between floors. The problem is that by the time the platform reaches the final floor, there’s nothing left to eat except body parts left over from fights over leftovers.
Gaztelu-Urrutia’s frustrating sequel piles on too many new rules and new characters, including a Messiah figure, that unnecessarily fatten the run time. (The original is barely recapped, so viewers will be lost without having seen it.) There is gore galore but whatever pleasure that brings gets undercut by repetitive chatter about global food distribution and relative morality — discussions as cinematically thrilling as a U.N. dossier. (Stream it on Netflix.)
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