sometimes you just have to hate the thing

at the top of this month's entry, i think i should tell you upfront that i had intended this edition of three stars fine to be something entirely different. not to immediately start you out on a bum note, but i actually had great intentions for the august-slash-september edition of this substack, and the fact that i've had to fuck those great intentions into the wall is disappointing, but then again, things happen, and here today gone tomorrow and all flesh is as grass and so on, and i can't be blamed if certain occurrences make it difficult to stick to original plans.

you'll be disappointed to hear this, no doubt. you will, i'm sure, feel the bittersweet kiss of what might have been when i tell you that i saw the movie bring her back (2025) and thought it was excellent and then thought that it might be interesting to address the concept of the adultified teenaged boy in horror, touching on a story my friend alison once told me about how when she went to see the movie hereditary (2018), various people in the audience started laughing when alex wolff started crying like a child, and what a fascinating insight that is into the discomfort purportedly sophisticated people still feel about young men displaying emotion and how that reads onto the treatment of billy barrett's truly inspired portrayal of a seemingly adult and creatine-chugging but nonetheless braces-wearing child in an increasingly powerless situation in bring her back. you will, i'm sure, feel the true sting of grief when i tell you that i had all but marshalled my facts and prepared to dash off an essay about this, when i made the mistake of going to see the movie weapons (2025), at which point every intention other than the urgent firey need to tell you how much that horrible movie sucked was blown clean out of my head.

i'm very sorry. these things happen. and frankly i would just as rather it hadn't happened to me. but such as it is, here you are.

notes on the dread occasion of going to see the movie weapons (2025) under the mistaken opinion that i would enjoy it, and find it entertaining, and not spend the last thirty minutes longing for the sweet kiss of death

- look whatever

- i understand a lot of people liked this movie

- and everyone is entitled to their opinion

- and i understand that some of what i am about to say is likely easily dismissed under the banner of it not actually being that deep

- which is absolutely fair enough

- except to say that i spend the majority of my life and all of my time on this substack writing about movies that are absolutely not that deep and yet none of them have managed to offend me on the bone-deep level this movie offended me

- which is to say that i thought the movie weapons was nasty and reactionary in a way that i do not actually think it intended to be

- (because frankly i do not think this movie was intelligent enough to have intended anything)

- and yet, whatever stephen king may love to claim to the contrary, subtext does not actually just happen on its own

- so let's talk about that a bit

- i was talking recently with someone i know who writes extensively and fascinatingly on horror, who noted that it's interesting how the most reactionary horror movies of the past few years (read: longlegs and the substance) proved to be the ones which broke containment and found real mainstream success, and i would hazard a guess that the kind of success weapons is on track to achieve has roots in a similar truth

- i think that for about the first forty minutes or so of this movie i was, if not enjoying myself, then at least only politely baffled

- the movie, i should point out for the uninitiated, is told from a variety of viewpoints and starts with a teacher played by julia garner who is responding to widespread suburban censure after her entire class of young children, bar one, are revealed to have walked out of their houses and disappeared without trace

- incidentally, the opening child voiceover introduces this disappearance to us and claims that all of the vanished children "never came back"

- this is presumably just said to sound cool, because by the end of the movie all the children demonstrably have come back after what amounts to about thirty days, despite the voiceover being positioned as belonging to a voice speaking to us from after the action, but if this is the kind of detail likely to rankle with you then i'm afraid you are already thinking too hard about this movie

-when i say someone never came back i tend not to then be like oh btw they came back, but why split hairs

- anyway

- as i said, for the first forty minutes or so of this movie i was, if not having a rollicking time, then at least still mildly curious. admittedly no overtly horrific thing ever seemed to happen outside of a dream sequence and admittedly there seemed to be an increasing number of improbable gaps in logic for a movie that appeared to think so highly of itself as both a horror movie and a procedural (why had the cops not triangulated everybody's ring doorbells. were there too many other things going on in this town where nothing happened.), but still.

- ok fine, did it seem somehow off the mark for someone to write witch on julia garner's car, when the claustrophobic small modern town being conveyed to us would have seemed to support the writing of some more pointed or troubling epithet?

- sure

- was it ever made satisfactorily clear why we were having to spend so much time with alden ehrenreich’s cop repeatedly monstering an addict all around town and then asking whether he had AIDS?

- no

- was it a peculiar choice to make a movie about the far-reaching social ramifications of a whole class of children disappearing into thin air, only to show us a grand total of two parents reacting to it?

- yes

- did it seem perhaps a little weird that the only horrific image being presented again and again was some variation on a dream sequence where a small boy was revealed to be wearing make-up?

- er, yes

- but still

- i'm not saying i wasn't having an ok time

- at one point early on i leant over to my friend and said oh there's thomas haden church, because i thought it was thomas haden church, because thomas haden church is to josh brolin what jeffrey dean morgan is to javier bardem and what the hell would josh brolin be doing in this movie, only in actual fact then it turned out it actually was josh brolin, and that was was pretty funny

- i didn't mind it when julia garner had a bad dream and then woke up from the bad dream only to find she was still in a bad dream. like - i'm not a monster

- only then idk man

-idk

- was it necessary

- was it quite necessary for me to watch the exceptionally talented benedict wong viciously headbutt his husband to death on full camera with no breaks for what felt like five minutes and then get ploughed into and killed by a lorry because of an old lady's voodoo spell?

- like

- i am simply not one of those people who subscribes to the don't kill your gays theory

- goodness knows

- i've sat through and excused the lesbians in the conjuring: the devil made me do it (2021) being the ONLY ones who beat each other to death whilst the power of love saved all the straight people

- so i think there is something to be said for the nasty, building, pervasive and genuinely dogwhistly nature of this movie that when this scene took place i felt both revolted and, in point of fact, actively distressed

- idk man

- like

- ok hang on

i understand that this movie seems to think it is about school shootings or the danger of suburban complacency or moral panic in an increasingly fractured society. i understand it thinks this, because at one point josh brolin has a dream where he sees a gigantic assault rifle hanging in the air and we all just have to sit there looking at it like oh right, weapons, lol. but actually this is not a movie about school shootings or the danger of suburban complacency or moral panic, because it has absolutely no interest in anything other than the very real danger of the corruption of your children rendered by an entirely external force. like. i hate to nitpick. but if you're making a movie which at various points seems to be going ha ha ha these suburban morons painted witch on some outsider's car because they're so reactionary...you can't then turn around and go oh hey actually they were right their children were being corrupted by a monstrous outsider, it was just some other monstrous outsider. i mean, of course, you can do that, but if you do i have to question what it is you really think you're trying to say.

idk man. much has been made about amy madigan's turn as gladys the old voodoo witch woman who stole all the children and kept them in her basement as being a masterpiece in horror camp, to which i can only say that i think she's really excellent but that to be camp a movie has to not in its deepest heart wish to reify a very conservative set of values. it cannot be a movie which presents the dangers of a mob mentality, only to then be like actually yeah the mob was right. like. i don't think this should be a hard concept to grasp?

this is, of course, all quite without sitting down to talk about the fact that zack cregger has once again made a movie whose whole entire point and purpose seems to going lol old lady titty, but if i think about that too much in my current mood i'll go actively insane. welcome to hollywood you fucking crones it's this or the substance.

this also quite without sitting down to talk about how this movie's entire central selling point - ie the magnolia concept of multiple interconnected branching narratives circling around the same story - was so poorly conceived and carried out that by the end it had spoonfed every single plot point to you so exhaustively that you were both no longer scared and also SCREAMING for the movie to end so you could rejoin the land of the living.

this is also quite without sitting down to talk about why exactly this movie is called weapons when gladys appeared to be keeping the kids in the cellar as batteries rather than as weapons but actually you know what i don’t want to think about that any more because i really really don’t care.

anyway.

what’s fun is that whenever i hear the name gladys i immediately start thinking gladys the groovy mule, so i guess that’s a cost that i have incurred.