Alexandria, VA – In Variety-ese slanguage, boffo socko means that a film achieves an overwhelmingly popular and financial slam-dunk success. YouTubeist filmmaker Curry Barker took a modest $750,000 investment, filming a contemporary love twist on the Monkey Paw trope into box office Californium. The film, Obsession, has already delivered well upwards of $300 million, on track to fast becoming one of the most profitable horror movies ever.
It’s also been described as shocking, disturbing, traumatizing – a bleak metaphorical expose on the next generational trials and tribulations of dating and socialization in the time of swiping left. Obsession calls to mind Fatal Attraction and Play Misty for Me. No bunnies are boiled on screen but I wouldn’t recommend eating anything prepared by femme fatale Nikki. Those obsessive dating debacle scenarios are pretty tamely formulaic compared to the ones in Obsession.
The plot is a tale as old as…. dating!
Bear likes Nikki. Nikki barely notices Bear.
Or doesn’t she? What to do? Wish on a vintage gag toy schtick stick that the girl of your dreams will go mad for you. And so she does. Dating fatality flicks are as much tragedy as horror. Hamlet must have been a Libra – his indecisiveness is the bane of everyone and everything.
To see or not to see is not the question. Bear’s outrageous fortune works wonders.
Barker’s meteoric rise from YouTube shorts and Tick Tock reels to being one of the most in-demand and on-demand filmmakers in Hollywood (and beyond) is the stuff by which imposter syndrome is made – as well as dreams. He’s already been signed to direct the reboot of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Barker, like Bear, knows all too well another tenet of horror genre and life: Be careful what you wish for – you may just get it!
Another wunderkind creation taking Tinseltown by storm is Backrooms. This morphic sci-fi psychological horror/thriller takes place in an undiscovered alternate dimension revealing a labyrinth of bizarro-world underground vacated office and retail space. Twenty-one-year-old director Kane Parsons’ $2 million low-budget film has grossed over $275 million worldwide, setting an A24 studio record, making Backrooms its highest earning film of all time.
Backrooms deftly interweaves classic thriller genre, that tried and true what’s-around-the-corner suspense, with graphic horror recoil, throwing into the mayhem an incongruous science fiction twist. The concept presents as a wildly disturbing, never-ending nightmare. That pretty much aptly describes it. Much like when coming upon wrecks we all slow down, wondering what happened?!?
The sci-fi element evokes a 2001: A Space Odyssey caliber of Kubrick-esque confusion, begging the question: WHAT is going on here? Parsons’ compelling direction, focusing on room after room after room, is reminiscent of the iconic cinematography tracking Danny Torrance’s Big Wheel tour around the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
The production design at times almost upstages the acting and plot. If you don’t scare easily, the furniture alone in Clark’s failing furniture showroom will send shivers up your spine. The preternaturally prevalent fluorescent lighting is as ghastly as the supernatural concoction coming and going into and out of the backrooms.
Backrooms – the word inherently calls to mind places relegated to making dirty deals, where underhanded, illicit, and illegal business is born. Doesn’t exactly sound like Halloween night in Haddonfield. What lies beneath an unassuming bargain basement home-furnishing showroom, and in the minds of men (and women) may not be the stuff of Freddy Kruger’s Elm Street.
But be warned. Heed the cinematic rule of law in any horror happenstance: do not assume that the killer is dead. And never EVER say, “I’ll be right back!”
They’re baaaaaaack! For some light-hearted LOL with mild shock-value spice there’s Scary Movie. The Wayan family’s sixth installation rebooting, 25 years after the original, spoofs more than spooks with up-to-date parody sparking fright-night dare fun. Anna Farris and Regina King star along with a cast of a thousand Wayans. The Final Destination theme park parody alone is off the hook, à la Candyman.
If you’re in the mood for something more cerebral, Spielberg’s Disclosure Day delivers a thoughtful, provocative script with a stellar cast: Oscar winner Colin Firth, with nominees Emily Blunt and Coleman Domingo. Revisiting close encounters of not-so-endearing extraterrestrial life may or may not be the right stuff for these feeling-scared times. But the film makes me really want to see what would happen if Spielberg wasn’t afraid to go back into the water.
