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Here are two more genre delights for your streaming pleasure

Malay Mail
Malay Mail

FEBRUARY 4 — The Oscar season is in full swing, now that the nominees have been announced last week and the awards ceremony being set for March 13, 2023.

I haven’t managed to check out all the major nominees yet, of course, although I have seen quite a few of the movies already last year.

With more than a month to go until the awards ceremony, there’s still plenty of time for me to catch those that I’ve missed, and of course to write about my thoughts on the nominees (I’m glad that Aftersun, one of my favourite films of 2022, at least scored a major one with Paul Mescal in the Best Actor category).

Before I dive headfirst into all these more “serious” films, I’ve given my cinematic palate cleansing session a head-start with a few more down and dirty genre/horror flicks.

To my surprise, I still managed to come across some pretty good ones.

Here are two that I think will please most horror fans out there, with one of them being so good that it might even make it to some 2023 year-end lists come the end of this year.

'Candy Land' is about a group of sex workers in a truck stop who encounter an increasing number of dead bodies in their place of work and residence. — Screen capture via YouTube/IGN Movie Trailers
'Candy Land' is about a group of sex workers in a truck stop who encounter an increasing number of dead bodies in their place of work and residence. — Screen capture via YouTube/IGN Movie Trailers

'Candy Land' is about a group of sex workers in a truck stop who encounter an increasing number of dead bodies in their place of work and residence. — Screen capture via YouTube/IGN Movie Trailers

Candy Land

Available to buy/rent from platforms like Amazon, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu, Candy Land is going to be one heck of a calling card for director John Swab, whose only previous film I had seen was the quite excellent action thriller Ida Red from 2021.

On the surface, this seems like another one of those lovingly made throwbacks to the grimy grindhouse films of the 1970s, complete with retro fonts used for the opening credits.

It’s populated with characters and settings that won’t seem out of place in those movies as well.

This one’s about a bunch of sex workers in a truck stop who then encounter an increasing number of dead bodies in their place of work and residence.

So far, so slasher, right? As a logline/summary of the film’s plot, yes, Candy Land is very much a truck stop slasher flick, complete with a mystery killer (and a twist that I’m sure most would’ve guessed correctly) and plenty of grisly kills, but there’s a level of empathy and depth of character here that might not even seem out of place in a critically acclaimed arthouse film, not to mention some very eloquent shots and blocking by Swab.

There’s an intimacy here, helped immensely by the surprisingly strong acting from all of the main actors that help the audience to buy into the world that the filmmakers are creating — this close-knit group of sex workers really are a family in all but name, and we care about their survival (as real people in the real world, not as characters in a slasher movie).

It’s really hard to single out only one actor, but if I can only pick two, it’ll have to be Owen Campbell as Levi and of course Olivia Luccardi who plays Remi, the latest addition to the group (who’s escaped/banished from a religious cult), who is the film’s own version of Pearl/Mia Goth.

These two actors/characters are the heart and soul of this surprisingly great film, juggling between heartbreaking, harrowing and terrifying with terrific ease, and all of it done with a natural poise and none of that showy actorly swagger that can sometimes spoil a good performance.

John Swab, Owen Campbell and Olivia Luccardi — watch out for these names in the near future; surely they are stars in the making.

There’s Something Wrong With The Children

A pretty fun Blumhouse horror flick that surprisingly only got a January digital release instead of a theatrical one, this second film from director Roxanne Benjamin (who debuted with the pretty tight Body At Brighton Rock) is one of those “evil kids” movies that I’m sure all us horror fans have encountered and loved at some point in our lives.

And I’m pretty sure that even non-horror fans would’ve seen or at least heard of films like The Children, Village Of The Damned, The Omen and Children Of The Corn before, so we’ll know what we’ll be getting once we walk into one of these films.

What Benjamin and screenwriters TJ Cimfel and David White have done to shake things up is what makes this film a wee bit more compelling in terms of drama and characterisation.

Firstly, by setting this film during a weekend getaway between two couples, one with two kids and the other a childless one, the filmmakers have directly weaved the fear of having children into its narrative, and its exploration of the choice to not have children is quite interesting indeed.

But even more strikingly, the gender of the gaslit adult (usually a woman in these films) has been reversed, as it’s now an adult guy who knows that there’s something wrong with these children, but no one wants to believe him.

And don’t even get me started on the drama that unfolds within the film, which was kickstarted by a foursome gone wrong that one of the couples participated in, resulting in lots of resentment and trust issues piling up as the movie goes along, which in short, makes this film way more fun than I expected.

Not perfect by any means, but it won’t waste your time if you need a new evil children movie to kill time with.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.