well then i guess i'll just have to get into the crawlspace again

i am currently trying access a memory of a movie i swear i've seen in which one character says to another "oh yeah it's a real nightmare when someone doesn't update their blog". unfortunately, when i google this quote, i am rewarded only with subreddits about website outages and a quora post that starts i had an awful, vivid nightmare unlike anything before, plus the imdb page for a nightmare on elm street (1984), which is apropos in its way, i'll grant you, but nonetheless not the answer i was looking for, so i have to assume that either i am misremembering the quote or the quote doesn't exist or possibly i just have alzheimer's and in any case i'm not going to figure it out now. suffice it to say, i would apologise for not updating my blog recently, except that in a movie i have apparently invented, someone is so scathing about the concept of apologising for not updating your blog that i would be embarrassed to do so, and by the way it isn't chris messina as julie powell's husband in julie & julia (2009), though i did consider that, so please don't suggest it, but thank you very much nonetheless.

anyway.

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when i told a friend what i was planning to cover in this month's edition of three stars fine, he looked at me warily and then told me i'd already done that, to which i responded that no i hadn't but that in fairness i could understand how he’d got there. the fact, of course, is that the movie i plan to talk about today is in many ways so ubiquitous a star in the constellation of shitbox garbage made for idiots that i can imagine it shining proudly out of every piece i have ever written, regardless of whether i actually address it by name. it is, in many ways, the movie i am always talking about, in as much as i am raymond carver and what we talk about when we talk about crap is ultimately always the same. even if we pretend we are discussing paranormal activity (2007) or sinister (2012) or that bit in the movie trap (2024) where a serial killer's wife asks m night shyamalan's daughter whether a pie she has served is fluffy, we are, of course, really only ever discussing one thing. and that thing, of course, is the movie the boy (2016).

we decided to rewatch the movie the boy really very recently, because the father of a friend of mine had asked us to watch it with him, and having already put him through the movie orphan (2009) and the movie m3gan (2022) both in living memory, it felt unkind to leave him hanging. much in the manner of, i guess, a conscientious murderer, it seemed necessary to finish the job - the job in this case being the pantheon of doll and doll-adjacent movies that will, in the fullness of time, be rounded out by the chucky movies, annabelle (2014) and annabelle comes home (2019), after which i guess we will all at last be permitted to die or otherwise emerge from the basement and go about the business of pursuing other goals.

the movie the boy takes place in what purports to be an english country house - which the american protagonist nonetheless reaches via black cab - although the setting is in truth so blatantly canadian that i spent the vast majority of the first twenty minutes vainly googling knives out house the boy brahms same or not??? and came to no clear consensus. so. in case you were wondering. i've got no idea.

our protagonist whose name i have now forgotten so let's call her becky is moulded in the grand tradition of many of the half-awake heroines of the late noughties and early teens, being as she is both extremely bland and palpably drowsy in a way which bleeds into much of the rest of the film. in much the same manner as, say, camilla belle in the movie when a stranger calls (2006), our heroine who might be called becky is giving at all times a performance that implies that she has perhaps only recently taken antihistamines and i can admire this, in its way, for the sheer gumption required to turn up to work and be like yes i'm here please ask nothing more of me. sleepy bitches of the 2011s, quiet quitting before their time.

stray observation: a laudable exception to this tradition is briana evigan in sorority row (2009) and it is a real shame she completely disappeared after making both that and step up 2: the streets (2008), because she was hot and i liked her and all things should be organised specifically to benefit me.

anyway, the point of the movie the boy - of course - is that becky has been invited here to act as nanny to a child who i'm afraid the screenwriters did indeed decide to name brahms (i've talked about this too many times in the past to go into it again in detail, but suffice it to say that there is nothing funnier to me than the idea of a room of entirely american writers being like idk what do english people call their kids, presumably nixing the name poochie and then going with the very next best thing). the child - also of course - turns out to be a doll, and the elderly couple purporting to be his parents introduce him to becky under such a thundercloud of deep and overly soundtracked dread that you half expect them to be like becky this is brahms who is going to kill you, please be considerate with the contents of our house.

anyway, rather than relay the whole thing to you in unedifying detail, here are some of the notes i made on my phone on the occasion of showing my friend's father the movie the boy.

some of the notes i made on my phone on the occasion of showing my friend's father the movie the boy:

- the parents have not even left the house yet and already becky is poking through their things. the subtitles say [twangs][whirring]. no note on what this in regards to.

- the english grocery boy has turned up. he is called malcolm, presumably on account of popular english boy's name brahms already being taken. he asks becky to spit her gum into his hand.

- spit on my hand becky welcome to our glorious country.

- the elderly woman has just referred to the elderly man as daddy, which together with the spitting thing really has confirmed that this movie's main thesis is that everyone in england is a raging sex pervert.

- i'll tell you what, it's been ten whole minutes and already you're fully sitting here like you're a rat bastard, brahms.

- bucolic garden interlude in this canadian wilderness for the elderly man to look seriously at becky and be like i know this must seem weird but our son is very much here, becky. don't worry about it tho.

- anyway, the parents take off. time for becky to dump brahms upside down on an ottoman with a blanket over his head (as he deserves) and call her friend, who is one of those pathologically unbothered friends you encounter from time to time in scary movies who are always saying things like sure it's creepy and the windows don't open but i'm sure it's fine.

- it has been twenty minutes and my friend's mother has declared i am on brahms's side.

- becky now has a exposition-heavy dream in which she is being haunted by brahms whilst, for some reason, wearing a much sexier outfit. it occurs to me at this point and for no real reason that we are so, so lucky to have allison williams. what an actress she is, what a light in whatever project she finds herself in, how happy i would be if she were here right now.

- malcolm's back and my wife now takes it upon herself to announce that he plays the dad who died from a bee in the tv show bridgerton. he is also seriously dogging becky. it's been two days and he's like the real brahms died in a fire and they're keeping the doll as a demented proxy btw i am single.

- becky is like but if brahms died x amount of years ago...wouldn't he be your age....

- this would be an interesting red herring were it ever picked up again but as it is not i don't recommend paying much attention to it.

- there is a lot going on suddenly. becky goes up into the attic and is seemingly trapped up there by brahms. she is plagued by sexy outfit dreams in which brahms seems to haunt her. we cut away to the elderly parents who stick rocks in their pockets and write a letter to brahms like the girl is yours now before drowning themselves. things move around the house seemingly at random. becky decides that she ought to treat brahms like a real boy to avoid all the haunting, and so immediately goes completely insane and starts carrying him around and reading to him and referring to him as brahmsie.

- my wife points about that this entire movie is actually just a fairly accurate representation of what happened to us and the cat during lockdown.

- malcolm comes back a whole day and a half after his last pick-up attempt to find that his prospective girlfriend has gone bananas and is now attempting to feed porridge to a china doll. he is like uh i'll have you know the real brahms CRUSHED THE SKULL OF ANOTHER LITTLE GIRL BEFORE DYING IN A FIRE. the revelation should be alarming but given that malcolm is still dogging becky so hard it's difficult to assume he offered this information for any real reason other than i guess jealously and to stop becky having sex with the doll.

- it is around this point that my wife takes her glasses off in protest.

- becky's ex-boyfriend turns up. he is apparently a Bad Man but it is hard to intuit much of anything through the slur of one of the worst american accents i have ever heard committed to film. he also looks like if jason ritter were in sons of anarchy. i could not tell you his name.

- the nameless ex-boyfriend's appearance and callous destruction of fragile porcelain brahms precipitates the movie's main reveal, which is of course that brahms - the real brahms - has been living in the wall lo these twenty years and is in actuality a strangely ripped adult in a doll mask and scoop-neck undershirt. i can confirm that if you google real adult brahms you will find a surprising number of hear me out posts.

- brahms - the real brahms - murders the nameless ex-boyfriend and then proceeds to chase becky and malcolm through the walls, all while speaking in a babydoll voice and being like will you be my mother. it is, from a freudian perspective, extremely interesting but is hampered by the fact that i keep wondering who amongst the writing team saw omen 3: the final conflict and was like yeah ok but what if damien was hairier.

- [i do not remember what happens here but apparently i wrote the following] she femdoms him to death.

- it is occuring to me now that becky's name is greta.

anyway, if you liked the boy i can guarantee that you will not like brahms: the boy 2, in which ralph ineson posits that the whole main reveal of the first movie - ie that it was not a supernatural force but simply a guy - what actually a load of shit and that it was indeed ghosts after all. also katie holmes is in it. such things they have now.