2026-05-13 11:17:52
I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so acutely unemployed as when I realized I’ve spent the day watching back-to-back Piranha movies.
Anyway, after being disappointed by Piranha 3D, and a little unsettled because I’m not sure whether I’ve seen it before, I decided to go back and watch the original, which I’m certain that I haven’t seen. I would’ve been too scared in the 1970s, and then after that, too scared that it was as bad as it looked.
It’s been well established that kids growing up around the time I did were taught to be terrified of killer bees and quicksand. But I remember the fear of piranha — or as pronounced by exactly two of the characters in this movie, piraña — being just as strong. It was the kind of primal and completely irrational fear that putting even a finger into any natural body of water would end up with me pulling up a gristly bone.
That fear is what Piranha was trying to tap into, but also I think we’re all aware of what Piranha was really trying to tap into: the unprecedented success of Jaws.
The aura around this movie has grown over the years to the point where takes on it are all over the place, ranging from a straightforward “this was a parody of Jaws,” to “how can you even suggest this is like Jaws, this is doing something completely different tonally and thematically.” And neither one is accurate. It’s not an outright parody (or if it is, it’s not a very good one), but it doesn’t try at all to hide what it’s doing, either.
If you weren’t tipped off by the opening, which has a couple of young people encountering something in the water during an illicit nighttime swim, then they have one of the main characters playing a Jaws video game in an airport at the end of the opening credits. I wonder if people got too attached to the idea that this was a Joe Dante & John Sayles collaboration like The Howling, and forgot that it was a Roger Corman production like, well, everything that Corman was producing around this time.
All through the opening, I started wondering if Piranha was a hidden gem that I’d been missing out on all these years. I have a tough time classifying it as a “comedy,” since it’s never particularly funny, even by late 1970s standards. But it did feel like everybody was having fun with it.
And in a sequence in a military research lab, when one of our heroes sets off the entire disaster, there’s a stop-motion creature wandering around. Phil Tippett was credited as creature designer and animator. It had me intrigued at the idea that this might turn into a very different kind of movie than what I’d been expecting. Unfortunately, it’s never seen again.
The only creatures in the rest of the movie are the piranha themselves, which are only shown in chaotic, super-quick shots as they’re chewing through ropes or children’s legs, butting their heads into swimmers, or leaping from the water to bite the face of a camp director. All the while making a weird buzzing, swarming sound, maybe to make the audience associate them with killer bees?
And the rest of it plays out like a very late 1970s movie for the most part, with a summer camp, and small-town jails and chases in cop cars, and a military-led conspiracy. Again, I don’t get the “comedy” label, since it’s more flippant than funny, but it does lean hard into the can’t-trust-the-government-or-big-business angle.
There are a couple of funny moments. I did like the deadpan delivery of: “What about the piranha?!” “They’re eating the guests, sir.”
And earlier, there was an exchange between the two leads as they’re hatching a plan to escape from a tent guarded by an army officer. “You know, distract him.” “What if he’s gay?” “Then I’ll distract him.” That’s the kind of joke I don’t remember seeing at all in the late 1970s, and it feels ahead of its time. It’s the point of the whole extended gag, but it doesn’t seem judgmental, either. Back then, the media was reluctant to casually accept that some people are gay and it’s no big deal. Maybe I just wasn’t seeing this kind of movie back then, because the scene culminates in the briefest-of-brief flash of the main character’s breasts.1
But those are literally the only two moments that I can think of that feel original or transgressively funny. The relationship between the two leads is kind of charming, and I like how she takes a more commanding role over the action, instead of just being his sidekick. But the rest of it feels oddly safe, leaving me to wonder what exactly this movie was trying to do.
I doubt I’m going to be blowing any minds when I declare that Jaws is much better than Piranha. But I don’t know if I would’ve appreciated how much better it is, if I hadn’t rewatched it recently, in a theater, for its 50th anniversary. I feel like its reputation — and the oversized reputation of Spielberg’s later movies — has grown so much over the years that it’s dulled everyone’s collective memory of it. I know that I remembered the key moments, and I always thought of it as a classic, but I’d forgotten just how well those moments work in context.
Just the opening scene, which Piranha plays off of, for instance. Piranha has a woman take her top off, and then the scene plays out with the two young people2 getting bitten and panicking and then being pulled under water. I didn’t feel much of anything. The opening of Jaws, though, is still genuinely, viscerally, horrifying. She’s alone in the water. She gets pulled under. You can feel the panic. She almost makes it. I had completely forgotten how much I felt it.
And Jaws is genuinely funny, much more than I’d remembered, and with different types of humor than I’d remembered. And its mayor character is broad and memorable, but ultimately feels like a real character. Piranha‘s closest equivalent is a resort owner played by Dick Miller, and he’s more of a caricature.
Based on what I’d been hearing for years, I got the impression that Piranha was ultimately an “elevated B-movie.” A creature feature made by filmmakers with genuine talent, who were playing around with genre conventions. So I’d expected it to be more of a deconstruction, or a self-aware parody, or even just an unabashedly transgressive take on the “safer” summer blockbuster from a few years earlier that inspired it.
But I think Jaws even does that better, honestly. At its core, it was a contemporary take on monster movies. Its characters are larger than life, which might be easy to forget since they so quickly became archetypes. I have to wonder whether our collective memory of Jaws has become like my impression of Psycho, where I regarded it as a classic for so long that I forgot that, at its core, it was kind of a trashy and manipulative suspense thriller.
I didn’t dislike Piranha, and I actually liked it better than Piranha 3D, even though it doesn’t come anywhere near as close to delivering on the promise of gruesome monster attacks. But I think I have the same basic criticism of them both, which is that they have a lack of sincerity that feels grating. They both feel like they’re playing with the idea of a movie, and it would’ve been a lot better if they’d just made that movie.
2026-05-13 06:53:49
To be clear, I wanted to see Piranha 3D. I rented it from Apple to watch on their overpriced headset, specifically hoping that I’d get the full 3D version. But for whatever reason, they only have the HD version, and I just had to imagine that all the fish and oars and motorboat props and breasts were comin’ right at me.
I might very well have seen this movie before. It all seemed extremely familiar, but I still can’t tell if that’s because I saw it and completely forgot about it (entirely likely), or because every single second of the movie is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do.
Whether or not I actually saw it around 2010, I’m pretty sure that I would’ve been more into it back then. It’s exactly the kind of proudly stupid, self-aware satire-of-exploitation-that-is-also-exploitation that would’ve been pure Chucknip. I would’ve likely praised how it acts as a deconstruction of horror and disaster movies, giving the audience a bunch of characters of varying degrees of likeability, and then killing them off appropriately. I would’ve appreciated how over-the-top it was willing to go in the sequence where the disaster takes full effect. And I would’ve thought it showed a surprising amount of restraint for never going so far into comedy that it stopped working as an old-school horror movie.
Even watching it now in 2026, I was initially impressed by how most of the performers are playing it straight1, and even with the presence of Paul Scheer, it doesn’t play out like a parody of horror movies. The main exception is Jerry O’Connell as the sleazy, coked-out director of Girls Gone Wild-style videos, who hires our young protagonist to guide his crew to a secluded spot on the lake, so that he can get some quality footage of his hot models swimming naked and making out with each other. O’Connell is an over-the-top cartoon.
Even that is underselling it; he makes Christopher Lloyd’s performance as a panicked ichthyologist seem naturalistic. Hell, Eli Roth is in this movie, as a sleazy wet T-shirt contest host who uses 100 different euphemisms for tittays in about 2 minutes before getting his head smashed off his body by an out-of-control boat2, and O’Connell makes even that look restrained by comparison.
But still, he’s doing exactly what the movie asks of him. I was even tempted to begrudgingly give this movie a pass, just for his death scene, because his gruesome puppet half-body on a boat screaming “They took my penis, Jeff!” felt inspired. But Piranha 3D wasn’t content to let its best joke stand there. They had to double down on it, then quadruple down on it, all in 3D.
Somehow, counter-intuitively, the fact that everyone else was playing it straight didn’t make the movie make work better for me. It just got more and more grating as time went on. It felt like someone sitting on the couch next to me, grinning with barely-contained excitement the whole time, eyes locked on me, hoping for the reaction they wanted. Occasionally muttering “oh! get this! this is the good part!”
I’m a little baffled, honestly. Normally I consider it the highest praise to say that everybody involved in a production knew what they were making. Just recently, I was praising Mortal Kombat II for exactly that. But with Piranha 3D, I felt like there was a line where it had crossed from “give the people what they want” to “give the people what you think they want.”
It might’ve been largely because the presence of the Weinsteins threw me off. I have no idea how much they were actually involved once the Dimension logo left the screen, but the movie was so breast-forward — Piranha 3D has lots of motorboating of both types — that it was impossible for me to shake the mental image of an old man rubbing his hands together and occasionally wiping the drool from his mouth. And then muttering “don’t look at me like that! This is satire! It’s post-modern!”
And seeing all the recklessly horny Spring Breakers getting their comeuppance in the big, gory, slaughter sequence felt like all of the imagery had gotten hopelessly tangled, and the filmmakers had completely lost the script about whether this was satire of exploitation or just exploitation.
I don’t know if it was due to wanting to keep it at a mercifully short hour and a half, but it felt like there were entire story beats that were just missing. The movie ended about an hour ago, and I’m only just now realizing that Scheer’s character basically disappears. I don’t recall a death scene for him; he’s just in the movie right until he’s not. The movie so clearly marks its characters for death that I’d expected of course there’d be a special sequence reserved for him, but they were instead saved for various random people in the water at a beach party.
And I’d been expecting to see a better payoff for the two bullies who torment our protagonist all throughout the beginning. They threw a drink on him and gave him the finger, which in this movie means they deserved to be viciously torn apart by killer prehistoric fish. But the more obnoxious one just straight-up vanishes, as far as I can tell. And the other one has this long sequence where he’s piloting a motorboat through a crowd of panicking swimmers, to prove how evil he is, but everybody else in that sequence seems to get it a lot worse than he does.3
It all combines to make the movie feel off. Like it doesn’t know exactly the kind of movie it’s making, but it knows just enough of the most familiar elements to fake it. In the end, I think I would’ve liked it a lot better if it had been a lot worse. As it is, the most gruesome kill in the movie is how much it killed any nostalgia I might’ve had for the 2000s, or my confidence that of course I like self-aware horror comedies.
2026-05-13 01:00:00
Seeing another LA landmark last week had me thinking about the years I’ve spent settling in, gradually transitioning from “newcomer” to “resident.” I thought I’d choose a couple of songs about Los Angeles as a tribute.
There’s definitely no shortage of them! Frank Black’s, Randy Newman’s, or anything from the La La Land soundtrack comes immediately to mind. But soon after we moved, I started noticing that people almost never write earnestly about the city. At best, there’s a begrudging acceptance: “this place kind of sucks, but I like it anyway.” And there’s always the dissonance of songs and movies calling out LA for cruelly crushing dreams of success, delivered by people who’ve achieved success (or otherwise I wouldn’t be hearing their songs or seeing their movies).
Out of all of them, the song I keep coming back to isn’t about Hollywood, or palm trees, or beaches and surfing, but “All I Wanna Do” by Sheryl Crow. It’s the one that most vibes with my impressions of Los Angeles (so far). Sure, part of that is simply because she starts the song by declaring “This is LA,” and repeatedly mentions Santa Monica Boulevard. But more than that, it captures my favorite thing about living here, which is day drinking.
No, wait. My days of hanging out in bars are years behind me now, and even back then, I wasn’t doing it during the day. I couldn’t have; I was always at work. But even during the period I did have a full-time job here, Los Angeles is the first place I’ve lived that felt like it recognized a distinction between your job and your life. This just feels like a place where, if someone asks, “What do you do?” they’re not asking about your employer, but about your interests.
I only learned recently that the song is an adaptation of the poem “Fun” by Wyn Cooper, which was written in 1984 and set no place in particular. That explains a lot. For one thing, it’s always been confounding to me how the same person who made “All I Wanna Do” also made “Soak Up The Sun,” which seemed like they couldn’t have been more different in lyrical sophistication. It also clears up the bit where Crow says a guy was “plain ugly to me,” which always felt unnecessarily rude.
The version that Crow and her co-writers recorded removes some of the lines, reworks the opening into a catchy chorus, and explicitly sets it in Los Angeles. And I can vividly imagine a bar across from a car wash. The city is full of the ugliest architecture against a backdrop of beautiful mountains and sunsets, with wildly disparate businesses all plopped randomly next to each other. There’s a strong likelihood that your favorite restaurant in the city will be in a depressing strip mall, right between a smoke shop and an orthodontist.
Also, it’s likely that a stranger will just strike up a conversation with you out of nowhere. I’ve had this happen more in LA than anywhere else I’ve lived, and I like the casual friendliness of it. Even if it rarely takes long before I’m reminded why I don’t like talking to strangers.1
And by making the poem more upbeat, the song has the side effect of removing the sense of arrogance and defensiveness I get from the poem. Changing the narrator to a young woman musician, especially one who looks like a pop star and/or model for a line of casual beach wear, makes it feel like she’s choosing to be in a bar at noon on a Tuesday. It’s not that she has no better options. It no longer feels like a guy alone in a bar on a weekday, trying to convince himself that he’s not like the worker drones across the street, or the out-of-place couple that just walked in; he’s got a freedom that all of these people lack.
Meanwhile, Crow doesn’t sound like she’s trying to convince herself of anything. It sounds like she really has figured it out. And the simple addition of “I’ve got a feeling I’m not the only one,” gives it a sense of camaraderie and inclusion. “They’re nothing like Billy and me” has a sense of serenity to it. We’re all doing our own thing, and we all basically want to enjoy life.
This is a city with weird rhythms, because so many people have weird jobs — seasonal, contract work, project hires, or just plain weird hours. There’s always traffic, and shops and stores and parks always have people around. There are millions and millions of people here all trying to make it, whatever “it” means to them, and we’re all having varying levels of success, but we’re more or less in it together.
Several years ago on social media, I read the quote “Los Angeles is shitty heaven, and New York is fun hell.” And having spent some time living in both, it feels accurate. I’m not going to claim that all the things that make people think LA is shitty aren’t true, but I do suspect that I just came here at exactly the right time in my life not to have to care that much about them. I’m married, I’m not interested in making it as a performer, and I don’t have to drive that much, so I mostly just get to enjoy the weather and laid-back vibes.
Honestly, it’s made me appreciate that there’s a meaningful distinction between “resignation” and “contentment.” I don’t need a place to be perfect to be perfectly content.
And even people who love the city can be disappointed by it. I was surprised when I first heard “Los Angeles” by HAIM, because if ever there were people qualified to be the city’s Brand Ambassadors, it’d be the Haim sisters. How could even they be over it? The song makes the city sound like flypaper, or the swamp of sadness. Even if you want to leave, you can’t.
But I say it’s a reassuring reminder for all of us that even if you’re rich and famous, and you have rich and famous friends, and you live near your family in a city where you’re free to walk down the street taking your clothes off, you can still find things that aren’t perfect. It’s a reminder to have gratitude for however close you are to heaven, even if it is a shitty one.
2026-05-12 13:28:42
I guess it’s thematically appropriate that ever since I saw Hokum last week, I’ve been haunted by regret. In my case, it’s because my take on it was positive, and I hope it came across as a clear recommendation, but it was still overly dismissive of everything the movie was trying to do.
Even after acknowledging that it’s reductive “stay in your lane” mentality to want an artist to just keep making the same thing you liked over and over again, I still did exactly that. Praising the contemporary take on horror folklore creeps and scares, and shrugging off the central character arc.
I went back and watched it again1, and I had a better appreciation for how well it’s structured, once I was paying attention to the movie on the screen instead of the one that was playing out in my head. Plus, it was simply nice to see the jump scares being more effective in a more crowded theater. And it made me realize a few interesting things not just about Hokum, but about the current state of horror movies, and about the process of watching movies in general.
There’s one scene in particular that made me suspect that Hokum had more going on than I’d appreciated on my first watch. It’s when Bauman is telling the bartender Fiona that he’s here to scatter the ashes of his parents at a place that had been significant to them, a big tree in the forest near the hotel where they’d come for their honeymoon.
He shows Fiona a photograph of his mother at the tree. She says, “she looks happy.” He replies, “My dad took that.”
In the moment, I thought it was a really clever double-entendre. He hadn’t just taken the picture; he’d taken his mother’s happiness. We’d already seen that Bauman had a lot of resentment of his father; at the tree, he was thoughtful and considerate about spreading his mother’s ashes, and then unceremoniously dumped out the canister with his father’s remains. Clearly there was even more intrigue to the story, and we’d be uncovering more details later.
And we do by the end of the movie, but it reveals that Bauman was being misleading. His mother’s death was an accident, not a murder. And we don’t get any indication that their relationship was troubled before the accident. Instead, he didn’t give his son any outlet to process his grief, and it festered into a lifetime of resentment, blame, guilt, and self-loathing. Which makes the line no longer work as a double entendre.
I figured that these movies don’t really deal with wordplay anyway — the “do I look stupid?” exchange from Oddity notwithstanding — so I must have been over-thinking it, as usual. You can (and I do) retro-actively reinterpret it to suggest “my dad took away my memories of my mom being happy,” but at that point, you’re doing a lot of heavy lifting, and the line doesn’t have the same impact.
The thing that’s interesting about that to me is how I seem to treat the script and dialogue of a movie as functioning on a different level from everything else. A movie means what it means at the ending, and every exchange or idea up to that point is for the purpose of building to that ending, or else it doesn’t fit.
But back up to the scene at the tree. It came after we’d seen the hotel owner Cob terrifying a couple of children with stories about a witch in the woods who shackled her victims and dragged them down to tell, ripping parts of their bodies off as trophies (taking particular delight in suggesting that she rips off the dicks of little boys). As he tells it, we see close-ups of a diorama with little white figurines of terrified children, being dragged underneath a grassy barrow. And when we see the tree, there’s sinister music and close-up shots of a dark hollow at the base of the tree.
At the time, it’s pretty clear that this tree is going to turn out to be the source of all evil, and Bauman performing an emotionally significant ritual at it will somehow unlock the dark forces hidden beneath. Probably not yet, but this is the scene where we’re most likely going to see our first hint of the witch living out in the woods.
But none of that happens. The evil doesn’t live in the tree or even in the woods; it’s all contained inside and underneath the hotel. The scene at the tree is taking full advantage of all the potential energy of the beginning of a scary story, where we’re still in the process of establishing what’s happening, and we’re primed to look for dangers everywhere. I didn’t have any problem with that, and I didn’t consider it a “cop-out” or anything because it didn’t explicitly resolve into anything by the movie’s end. It’s just effective build-up of suspense.
When I realized that I was perfectly capable of appreciating how misdirects work in terms of visuals, but not in terms of revealing details of the story, it was yet another reminder to just slow down and watch the movie. Pay attention to what’s happening in the moment, instead of treating it all as incidental until the ending, when it tells you what it was all about. Bauman’s story about his parents is foreshadowing the fact that we’ll find out more about them later, and it’s key to understanding what’s wrong with his character.
One of my biggest gripes after my first viewing of Hokum was the framing sequence at the beginning and end of the movie, showing us two versions of the epilogue of Bauman’s book.
I had it stuck in my mind that Hokum was Mc Carthy’s “big budget breakthrough,” and it gave me the impression that more money had drained some of the charm out his earlier movies Caveat and Oddity, charm that came from creative people working within constraints. What clearer example of that unnecessary excess could there be, than a film set in Ireland having short sequences requiring a completely separate shoot in Abu Dhabi?
It’s an assumption I could’ve dispelled if I’d done even the smallest bit of research. Image Nation Abu Dhabi is listed as a primary production company financing the movie, so for all I know, it’s entirely possible that the shots filmed there were a prerequisite for getting it made, not a needless extravagance. And what’s more, the “big budget” is estimated at 5 million dollars, which is small by Hollywood standards.
But I was primed not to like those desert shots, and I went away disappointed that they felt like a clumsy and contrived attempt to get across ideas that could’ve been expressed more subtly and simply.
The opening was absurdly contrived and constructed to have a pointlessly nihilistic conclusion that just didn’t make sense — it was made explicitly clear that Bauman was shooting for a “bleak ending,” but this just made him seem like a hack writer.
And the final version of the epilogue seemed to undermine itself by giving it a too easy and maudlin change-up: the greatest treasure of them all is a hug when you need it most. It retroactively made the movie’s climax seem more maudlin, because it had Bauman unable to forgive himself until his ghost mom appeared and gave him a hug.
After a rewatch, I think it’s clear that I completely missed the point. I took the shallowest possible interpretation, and then faulted the movie for being shallow, assuming it would have been better if it had just concentrated on being scary.
Which was due to my wanting Hokum to work like Oddity and Caveat, which both seemed to be content to work as well-told scary stories. They were intensely scary, beautifully shot, with impeccable art direction and editing, and a complete lack of pretentiousness.
They felt like a refreshing change from the “A24 Era,” where horror movies have this obligation to be about something more than just horror storytelling. It’s not a bad thing in itself. I enjoyed It Follows as a story about the loss of innocence, 28 Years Later and The Bone Temple as commentary on British history, and of course, Sinners is an absolute masterpiece. The problem isn’t the depth, but the obligation.
Even Weapons, one of the rare horror movies to get mainstream respect and attention, had people eager to treat it as a commentary on school shootings. I thought the genius of it was that it was simply a cleverly-told story.
And some of my other recent favorites, like Malignant, Barbarian, and Orphan: First Kill, seemed to have an embedded sense that they were playing with the genre as much as simply executing on it. As if they were somehow unwilling to quite commit to just working as earnest horror.
Needing everything to be a symbol has already started to backfire. I’ve now seen so many horror movies that make their ghosts or monsters or cursed ceramic hands metaphors for grief, that the once-profound idea feels trite. They’ve become better at suggesting depth than really making you feel it at a gut level, which is one of the most potent abilities of horror movies. Making everything cerebral undermines the power of horror to bypass intellect and hit you right in the gut.
There’s this pernicious idea that horror movies are the lowest of genre pictures, having little merit until a real filmmaker like Stanley Kubrick or Jonathan Demme decides to dabble in it and class up the joint. It implies that there’s no artistry to effective horror storytelling itself.
Caveat and Oddity both showed the inherent artistry in delivering a good, old-fashioned, scary story. They can have a sense of humor and be fun without undermining their scariness.
So I split Hokum into its constituent parts and thought of them as playing out in parallel, instead of being interconnected. There’s the haunted hotel story, the murder mystery, the Irish folklore story, the story of a broken man learning to forgive himself, and the theme of belief and being open-minded to the existence of things beyond our understanding. After my first watch, I felt like Bauman’s psychological journey didn’t connect as well as the good old-fashioned scary story did.
On a rewatch, I’ve got a better appreciation for how all of those constituent parts weren’t playing out in parallel, actually, but were all feeding into and playing off of each other as expressions of a core, universal idea. The idea of being open in a more general sense, not just to the existence of the supernatural, but open to each other as human beings.
Any scene that has a character saying the title of the movie has to be significant, right? In Hokum, it’s that same scene in the bar, after Alby has recounted his story of seeing the witch inside the Honeymoon Suite. Bauman dismisses the story as hokum, but it’s not at all coincidental that it’s happening in the same scene in which he had been telling Fiona about the epilogue to his upcoming novel.
I believe it’s the only moment in the entire movie where he cracks a smile. He’s so pleased with himself for having devised the perfect, bleakest ending possible. That’s why the opening scene is so absurdly contrived; it’s an author who’s become so focused on nihilism and hopelessness that it’s subsumed everything else, even common sense or plausibility. But he’s convinced that he’s come up with something so powerful that no one will be able to deny the truth of it. Except Fiona doesn’t seem to be having any of it, asking “why would you write that?” and saying that she won’t be reading it, if it has that ending.
Bauman replies that some of his books have been made into bad movies, so she can watch that instead. And it’s exactly the kind of line delivery that Adam Scott excels at — sardonic with a hint of self-deprecation — so I just took it as part of their banter. She’s the one person at the hotel he gets along with, because she matches his energy, doesn’t put up with his bullshit, but doesn’t shut him out, either. I hadn’t picked up on the condescension in that comment, though. He’s saying that if the book is too raw and real and challenging for her, maybe the safer and dumber Hollywood version, with its happy ending, will be easier to digest. Bleak endings are truth, everything else is hokum.
His suicide is presented as such a sudden and loud jump scare, that it hadn’t even occurred to me that it was anything other than sudden. But we can infer that it was all premeditated. He’d come here to wrap up final business with his parents, and now that he’d come up with the most perfectly bleak ending for the end of his book series, there was nothing left for him to do. He’d figured it all out.
But he’s given a second chance, thanks to Fiona’s intuition, the first of two times a character’s intuition and selflessness will save him. That idea of people being stubborn and closed off, vs open and kind, shows up again and again.
When Bauman is stuck inside the honeymoon suite and discovers his tape recorder, we hear the recordings that Fiona had made, gradually revealing more and more exposition. But the recordings also seemingly play unprompted, at the most opportune times. Right after Bauman is about to climb into the dumbwaiter, we suddenly hear Fiona’s voice, describing her panic at being trapped in the cellar because the dumbwaiter controls are broken. Someone’s ghost is warning him, trying to help.
When the witch is making her way back up into the room, Bauman uses the piece of chalk to draw a protective circle around the room. Earlier, in that same conversation in the bar, he’d dismissively said something to the effect of if he ever found himself being chased by a witch, he’d need therapy, not chalk. Clearly, he needs both. But men would rather confront a witch than go to therapy and process deep-rooted childhood trauma, I guess.
Down in the cellar, after he’s completely given up, he’s been shackled by the witch, and he’s sitting in an uncompleted chalk circle, that’s when the ghost of his mother visited him. A significant detail is that she puts his hand on his heart when she says “You can’t stay here,” making it another line with a double meaning. He can’t stay trapped in his feelings of guilt and self-hatred.
We see the witch casually able to walk through the broken chalk circle, but it’s also a pretty clear symbol that Bauman is now open and vulnerable, instead of closing himself off. And that’s when the kind version of his mother’s ghost appears, instead of the sinister version that had been haunting him since the beginning of the movie. It’s left a bit ambiguous as to whether she’s been trying to make contact with him for years, but he’s been too frightened, full of guilt, and closed off to see anything other than horrific flashes.
After the climax, when Bauman’s crawling out of the elevator and collapses due to smoke inhalation, there’s no reasonable way he would’ve survived. Except we hear a woman’s voice call out “Fergal,” drawing his attention to find Bauman and drag him to safety. He’d had no idea that Bauman was even there, and little reason to suspect anyone would be near the Honeymoon Suite.
Finally, there’s the scene in the hospital, where we learn that Alby had spiked Bauman’s flask with the magic mushroom powder. I’d completely misread this on my first viewing; I’d taken it to be a last stab at ambiguity, like a B-movie slapping on a final “THE END?” Did these supernatural events actually occur, or were they nothing more than a hallucinogenic trip?
But the movie pretty clearly confirms that it was all real. We get a quick flashback to Jerry insisting that the mushrooms don’t make people imagine the supernatural, but they let people see the supernatural that exists all around them. Bauman sees the marks of the shackles on his wrists, and he has to acknowledge that everything he’d dismissed as hokum was actually real.
And that means everything, including the happy ending. He was saved, multiple times over, by people going out of their way to show him kindness and help him. We’ve been taught that the world is a dark and cruel place, so we’re inclined to believe that darkness and cruelty are ultimately the only things that are real or true. Kindness, selflessness, and openness are too simple and easy; they feel naive and false. Ultimately, Hokum suggests that in a world where genuine evil exists, kindness is the only true thing, because it’s the only chance we have of making it through the darkness.
After my first viewing, I was a little disappointed that the kindest characters are killed off, after helping the jerk of a protagonist survive to the end. But after rewatching, I had a sense that Fiona and Jerry were the characters who had nothing left to prove. Bauman still has to make good on his new life, and work to bring some light into the world for a change. I realize that there’s a strong implication that Fiona was dragged to hell by the witch, but her ghost was still sticking around, at least. If this is a movie all about earning your happy ending, I think she earned hers.
There were other great details that I picked up on a second viewing. I hadn’t noticed that the bell at the front desk is the same bell that featured in Oddity. And I love seeing these cursed objects carry over from one Damian Mc Carthy movie to the next, like the rabbit from Caveat on the shelf of the oddities shop.
And I should probably address the Jackass in the room: I don’t really like Jack the Donkey. Visually, he’s brilliant. Immediately, intensely creepy, even without any context. Plus there’s the visual connection to Fiona’s body, and to the rabbit from Caveat. But I have a peculiar pet peeve about “children’s character that is actually scary and evil.” Doubly so if they ever utter the phrase “hey, kids!”2 In Hokum it works thematically, and it’s an iconic representation of how Bauman’s entire childhood had been completely corrupted by that one traumatic accident. But I still don’t love it.
I’m hoping the Honeymoon Suite clock is the cursed artifact that makes its way into the next movie. That little guy was an MVP.
2026-05-10 10:22:50
Last week I saw a link to a review of Mortal Kombat II where the subhead claimed “fans deserve better than the sloppy CGI blood and empty characters.” It just made me sad. Why are they sending reviewers out to movies without telling them what they’ll be seeing?
For me, my take was: I bought the ticket, I knew what I was getting into. And I can’t really claim to be a fan of Mortal Kombat; I’ve played one of the games exactly one time, and it was around 45 minutes of “matches” against my former roommate, which were each about 30 seconds of him using “get over here!” repeatedly until I was dead. But I know enough about it to be completely baffled by the claim that Mortal Kombat fans would be turned off by CGI blood and empty characters. “Fans of Tomb Raider deserve more than all of this raiding of tombs.”
I also didn’t see the first movie in the reboot, although I did see a recap, which pretty much reinforced the consensus that it was very dull. I couldn’t get a sense of whether they believed it was crucial to build up the characters and their relationships, the universe of the Mortal Kombat and the tournaments, and please the type of person who’d go into one of these movies expecting more story and deeper character development.
Maybe it’s just that they came up with the idea of Sub-Zero stabbing a guy with a frozen spike of his own blood, and they were so proud of themselves that they didn’t bother with anything else. (And honestly, can you blame them? That is, objectively, the most bad-ass thing ever committed to film).
In any case, I never once felt like my lack of preparation was robbing me of any of the enjoyment of this movie. And I never once got the impression that you had to have been a fan of the franchise to get what’s appealing about this one. The exact same forces that drive the popularity of the games are what drive this movie. It’s not complicated.
Because Mortal Kombat II focuses on two characters: Kitana for the lore, and Johnny Cage for the self-awareness and humor, there is even an exchange that says exactly that, as plain as it could possibly be. Cage is balking at having been recruited for the tournament, saying nobody told him that they’d have to fight to the death. Sonya says, “It’s called Mortal Kombat.”
On Rotten Tomatoes, a particularly asinine blurb stood out, where the reviewer said, “I’m terrified that maybe it’s the future of movies.” Stop clutching those pearls, Cassandra. My only fear about media literacy comes from reviews like that one, which act like this isn’t the past and present of movies. It’s not even new to this franchise. The 1995 movie was gloriously stupid fun. The 1997 sequel was a complete mess, largely for acting as if the game’s nonsensical lore and characters combined with late 90s CGI would be rich and fantastic enough to drive an entire movie on its own.
And again, that’s something that Mortal Kombat II makes a self-aware comment on. My favorite part of the movie is when Johnny Cage is introduced, via a scene from his hit movie Uncaged Fury. It’s a 1993 production from New Line Cinema, and we get to see the action-packed finale, with Cage fighting off a bunch of bad guys and one villainous woman with a missile launcher.
I thought it was pitch perfect. Clumsy martial arts choreography that wasn’t so clunky and amateurish to be completely unbelievable, but still just ludicrous enough to be funny. Karl Urban as Johnny Cage pushing right up against the border of too over-the-top, but never quite going so far that it collapses into outright parody. And the climax, which makes no sense but would’ve seemed rad as hell at the time.
You really can’t overstate how much this is Karl Urban’s movie. He is an actor with an unstoppable streak of just plain getting it, the highlights for me being Dredd, Star Trek, and even playing it straight in The Lord of the Rings. But I’ve never seen him in anything where it wasn’t immediately obvious that he knew exactly what he was doing, exactly what the movie required, and making every correct choice to pull it off.
But really, everybody involved seemed to understand exactly what movie they were making. Highlights were Adeline Rudolph as Kitana, given the thankless job of being a completely serious lead character in an otherwise silly, funny, and hyperviolent movie; Josh Lawson as Kano, foul-mouthed comic relief practically begging for a Cage/Kano buddy movie; and CJ Bloomfield as Baraka. But pretty much everybody delivered on exactly what they were there to do.
The fact that Kano was brought back to life, after being killed in the last one, is evidence that this movie is concerned first and foremost with giving people what they want.1 Fun, cool, or hot people (or a combination of the three) in fantasy settings fighting each other with cool magic powers or scary weapons, with the chance of seeing an over-the-top gory or gruesome finishing move.
I thought Mortal Kombat II delivered on those as well, by the way: there were at least four surprisingly gory kills, and while I had been expecting the gory finishers, I hadn’t expected any of them to play out exactly like they did.
Movie adaptations of video games too often fall on the side of being too faithful or too dismissive. Either they try to treat the characters as having the kind of depth that works in movie narratives, or they act like video games are inherently silly, so anything goes. I can respect the reboot wanting to establish stories for characters that have resonated with players, but even that is a little condescending. It assumes that the parts that resonate are the parts that approximate film, instead of understanding that a lot of the time, the parts that resonate are the parts that work as games.
Liu Kang is interesting because he’s a champion fighter who can shoot fire out of his hands. That’s really all you need. You don’t need to give a guy with huge robot arms a tragic backstory to make him cool. Same for a guy named Scorpion who can shoot out a grappling hook, or a guy named Sub-Zero with ice powers. Also, Sonya is here.2
So Kano’s back because he’s a fun character that people liked. He asks for an eye that shoots laser beams, and they give it to him. Again: none of this is that complicated.
And when the attention of the plot splits between the tournament and some bullshit about having to find and destroy a magic amulet3, it’s fine. There’s little sense that the movie is asking us to get any more invested in it than we would in any MacGuffin, because we’re all aware that it’s a setup for more fights between cool characters.
I will always be annoyed when I see someone describing — or worse, defending — a movie by saying “you have to turn your brain off.” I have seen plenty of movies like that, and they’re just plain bad. You have to be genuinely smart to make something that understands exactly how smart it needs to be, and where. Otherwise, it’s obvious that you think you’re smarter than the material, and worse, smarter than the audience, without having made any effort to demonstrate it.
And that goes double for light-hearted self-awareness. In clumsy hands, self-awareness reads as, “we’re perfectly aware of how silly all of this is.” Prompting an immediate response of, “are you, though?” In the right hands, as in Mortal Kombat II, the self-awareness reads as, “we’re perfectly aware of what makes all of this fun and cool.”
2026-05-09 14:29:45
Book
Strange Houses (Henna Ie) by Uketsu
Synopsis
The author receives an unremarkable request from an acquaintance to look over the floor plan of a house that they’re thinking of buying. An odd detail in the layout leads to other unusual observations about the house, and unsettling speculation about what the previous residents might have been using it for.
Notes
This is the second book in a series by the mysterious Japanese YouTuber and author. I haven’t yet read the first book Strange Pictures, but that’s the one that was making the rounds in book recommendations last year.
Strange Houses is a very quick and propulsive read — I checked it out from the library this afternoon, didn’t intend to start reading it immediately, and had already finished by this evening. Many of the pages are taken up with repeated depictions of the floor plans, each highlighting a different portion of the plan described by the text. The rest is taken up by mostly by conversations between the author and other characters, presented as if it were dialogue in a script.
And the writing is simple, clear, and objective, to a fault. The translator makes note of this in an afterward, praising Uketsu’s style for being so completely committed to clarity and accessibility while still having room for ambiguity and layers of suggested interpretations.
In my opinion, the writing is so straightforward and minimalist, the story so lurid and convoluted, and the revelations so dependent on wild speculation and coincidences, that it feels more like a writer’s notes for a horror thriller that they intend to flesh out later. The bulk of the book consists of guesses that turn out to be exactly correct, or characters arranging for a meeting at which point they reveal entire swaths of backstory, or letters full of exposition.
That isn’t to say that it isn’t interesting, though. And the hints of did you catch this detail? ambiguity at the end make it feel a bit more intriguing and open-ended than you’d guess if you’d simply stopped before reading the epilogue. The author’s secret identity and internet persona help place the book firmly in the realm of pop culture thriller.
Verdict
Interesting and clearly an engaging read, considering I finished it in a few hours. But it does feel more like an entry from the SCP Foundation, or a series of creepypasta posts on Reddit, than a full novel.