A wild film about a monster dust bunny, a horror film about a killer getting back at vapid content creators and an award-winning gay love story from India are all in the offing this weekend.
All are worth watching.
Here is our roundup.
“Dust Bunny”: Remember that childhood nightmare that lurked under our beds? Did anyone ever imagine that the maleficent entity was a dust bunny? Doubt it. In In this debut feature film by Bryan Fuller (TV’s “Hannibal” and “Pushing Daisies”), an at first unmenacing dust bunny turns into a big-toothed monster and starts to grow faster than a viral rumor about one of the Kardashians. It also stands accused of frightening precocious 10-year-old Aurora (Sophie Sloan, a child star is born) and also gobbling up her parents in the fam’s New York apartment. Aurora hires the hot but kooky neighbor next door, an unnamed monster hunter (Mads Mikkelsen), to take out that enormous wabbit.
Fuller concocts a devilishly clever fractured fairy tale and sends viewers down a welcome rabbit hole into a vividly imaginative world. His film is a visual wonderland and shakes in elements of the Brothers Grimm as well as a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film and even adds in a couple of dashes of Guillermo del Toro and the quirkiness of Wes Anderson. But somehow it never seems derivative. The cast is chosen well, with Mikkelsen — so diabolically evil and handsome as Hannibal Lecter in Fuller’s ghoulish series — giving another magical, very physical performance, and Sigourney Weaver as his, ahem, adviser on monster matters. “Dust Bunny” sucked me into an “Alice in Wonderland”-like realm for one of the biggest and best surprises late in the year. That “Dust Bunny” also comments with restraint on parenting and all monsters we need to purge from our lives, elevates it even more so. As does Mikkelsen’s envious wardrobe. Details: 3½ stars; opens Dec. 12 in theaters.
“Influencers”: Director/screenwriter Kurtis David Harder sharpens the cutlery for his attack on social influencer culture, all but garroting the obscenely rich, tin-souled click baiters out there. In the process, his polished sequel to the 2022 breakout hit achieves something even more thematically satisfying than the first film by giving us a touch of AI into the vengeance-seeking storyline. He also gives his fearless, enigmatic protagonist CW (the supremely talented Cassandra Naud) a tortured soul. The opportunistic but kind-of likable psycho who’s hop-scotching the globe to take out the content-creating Instagram crowd is, at the start of the film, in love (or so it seems) with girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar) in France. Could it be that CW is going soft? Hold on to that thought.
Their blissful romance gets interrupted when CW and her wealthy sweetie cross paths with a vapid, demanding influencer (Georgina Campbell) while on a trip. The chance encounter and what later goes down between CW and a young deplorable content-creating couple (Jonathan Whitesell and Veronica Long) in the tropics leads a survivor (Emily Tenant) of CW’s past crimes to go after her nemesis. Harder’s social commentary tears into the material like a mad dog and never lets go. He gives the horror crowd the bloodshed they crave, but he also makes CW more human than the monsters on social media. It’s a table-turn that gives the film more snap and dimension, with Naud deserving just as much praise as Harder for pulling it off. Details: 3½ stars; streaming Dec. 12 on Shudder.
“Silent Night, Deadly Night”: While it isn’t as well-known a franchise as “Halloween,” “Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Saw,” “Scream” or “Final Destination,” this once-controversial psycho Santa Claus series, which outraged parents in 1984 and got yanked from theaters for a spell, has produced its fair-share of sequels. Now comes this even more tongue-in-cheek reboot that succeeds in some moments but falls down the chimney chute in others. Director and screenwriter Mike P. Nelson (the freaky “Wrong Turn”) preserves some of the narrative threads from the initial outing but diverges and then opens the door for sequels. (I’d be up for that.) His sneaky detours mostly work. “Halloween Ends” actor Rohan Campbell stars as Billy, a troubled guy who suited up as a serial killer Claus after witnessing his wretched parents’ grisly slayings at the hands of a killer in a Santa suit. With a bloody advent calendar to thumbprint his annual “kills” and the voice of his parents’ murderer egging him on in his head, addled Billy lands in a quaint town populated by seemingly nice townsfolk hoarding vile secrets of their own. He takes a shine to hot-headed Pam (Ruby Modine of “Shameless”) and even lands a job working with her at a quaint tchotchke-stuffed store, giving him a chance to survey his next victims.
Never scary, “Silent Night, Deadly Night” can be enjoyed for its appreciation and reverence to all those ‘70s and ‘80s slasher flicks, and for perhaps cleverly skewering all those pious and high-minded critics of said horror films who chastise their existence. Nelson reflects with a wink that there’s more than just Santa with an axe worth grinding in this Capra-esque town, including a pack of neo-Nazis. That comeuppance scene is well worth the ticket price. Details: 2½ stars; opens Dec. 12 in theaters.
“Cactus Pears”: Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s from-the-heart feature debut intimately explores a still button-pushing topic in India of wo men falling in love ,and does so in the most compassionate, sensual and soulful way. The statically shot award winner (Sundance Film Festival) comes from a personal place and won’t be for all taste since it slowly wins you over by emulating the unharried pace of life in a small village way outside of the city limits in West India. It is there that an unexpected love blossoms between former childhood friends when one returns home for a 10-day mourning period after his father dies. In between grieving with relatives and friends, Mumbai call center worker Anand (Bhushaan Manoj), who is gay and has been absent from the village for years, begins to get closer with childhood friend, goat herder Bayla (Suraaj Suman). Their at-first chilly reception morphs into something more intense and deep, despite their differences. Kanawade’s feature is refreshingly not a downer and sees realistic hope not only in this romance but in the warm embrace that Anand’s mother extends to this love while others denounce it. This is a gentle beauty of a film from a filmmaker who is on his way to greatness. Details: 3½ stars; opens Dec. 12 at the Roxie in San Francisco.
“The Abandons”: Two at-odds 19th century Wild West momma bears (Gllian Anderson and Lena Headey) square off in what becomes an ultimate grudge match over a patch of silver-rich property where one – Headey’s Fiona Nolan and an adopted brood – roosts. Facing blunt-force pressure to snatch that slab of land owned by Nolan and a few neighbors, Constance Van Ness (Anderson) leans on the “talents” of her two sons – coarse drunkard Willem (Toby Hemingway) and shrewd calculator Garret (Lucas Till). Meanwhile, her headstrong daughter Trisha (Aisling Franciosi) falls for one of Fiona’s adopted sons, Elias Teller (Nick Robinson, give the best performance in this bunch). Uh-oh. Yes, that leads to obvious trouble in the Washington Territory as monkey wrenches aplenty get thrown into the paths of these two resilient women. Netflix’s seven parter from executive producer Christopher Keyser doesn’t leave other Western series (“Deadwood,” “Yellowstone”) in the dust and suffers from seeming not always in sync (at least cursing wise) within its own time frame. Anderson and Headey give it their full commitment but their characters are painfully one note. “The Abandons” doesn’t rustle up the interest that it should and that open-ended final begs for another season. Don’t think I’ll be saddling up for it. Details: 2 stars; now on Netflix.
Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com.
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