What Did I Fucking Tell You About Children?

"Oh, hey!  How ya doin'?  Podcasting is going well.  Work is fine.  How's the wife and kids?

Oh, your stepson is the Antichrist.  That's fun to know.  I'll, aaaahhhh... I'll be over here.  Not pointedly laughing at the horrible birthday clown who IS NOW ON FIRE, WHAT THE SHIT, MAN?!?"

And THAT'S the conversation I would be having with Adam Scott in the new Netflix piece, Little Evil, which wins absolutely no awards for having such a douchey name but it's still kinda fun, should I have gone into acting like I always wanted but my lack of any drive whatsoever kept me from pursuing, except I'm ALL ABOUT the casting couch because I am a sex-positive person and if a blowjob is gonna get me some choice parts, I swallow, thanks.

So, Adam Scott is playing Gary.  New stepdad to Lucas, the titular Little Evil, and new husband to Samantha (Evangeline Lilly) who is adorable and lonely and clueless.  She's really not a helicopter mom but she watches out for her boy.  Her boy who was conceived during a cult ritual and she fucking knew it, so her son being the actual Antichrist really shouldn't have come as such a shock to her but, y'know... here we are.

Awww, lookaher... All smiles and adorableness... and stupidity...

Gary, of course, being the stepdad, just wants to be a good guy.  Soapbox derby cars, ice cream, the works.  The kid, on the other hand, has some fuckin' issues.  The most pressing, of course, being that he is literally the spawn of Satan, begat via creepy reverend (Clancy Brown) who moves into town to harvest the goddamn crop.  Gary, meanwhile, is showing this dude property, none the wiser.  He's ALSO getting calls from the wedding videographer who, while taping the ACTUAL FUCKING TORNADO THAT DESTROYED THE WEDDING GROUNDS, noticed that Lucas was untouched by winds that have been known to pick up and toss around cows and trains.

Yo, Damien.  It's past your bedtime, buddy.

So, what does Lucas do to Gary the first day he drives him to school?  Manages to get himself detention and get Gary blamed for it.  Gary, who has to attend mandatory therapy and now has a Child Protective Services agent visiting (played delightfully by Sally Field).  His co-worker, a male-identifying individual by the name of Al (Bridget Everett), is also part of the the group, and they form a bro-bond over the whole thing.  A bond that is as tight as Octomom's pelvic floor.  At least at first.

She has a fantastic eye for sweater-vests.

Suffice it to say that Lucas is so upset at having a new daddy that he buries him alive.  Literally.  Called Samantha from a box under the swingset.  She DUG HIM OUT.  Which upsets Gary which upsets Samantha who puts Lucas in a time-out (seriously?) and proceeds to not believe Gary which almost gets divorce papers signed but flowers and a trip to the water park for Gary and Lucas are all it takes for happy families, I guess.

If this SOUNDS like a set-up, that's because it is.  What do we do with the Antichrist when we find him, kids?  That's RIGHT!  We try to kill him.  And that's when the fun REALLY starts.

No, for real, kids, other than that whitewashed sack of weeaboo fangasm, Death Note (which I'm currently in the middle of and thoroughly hating), Netflix is putting out some good material and, while this is not really Oscar-worthy (and come on, how much do I watch that is), it's actually pretty good.  It funny, it makes good use of its people, it's heartwarming in that "You can be whatever you want to be and I don't want to kill you, anymore" kinda way.  It's actually a decent "family" horror-comedy. 

Give it a shot.  It's cute. 

No Vacancy

Sometimes a movie comes along and you think you should hate it but you kind of don't.

2011's The Innkeepers is that movie.

See, it's kind of this Clerks-esque ride into the "ghost hunting" thing that Syfy has made so popular, much to the dismay of anyone but a complete dumbass.  I mean, seriously, I'm perfectly OK with admitting the possibility of ghosts just because of the Law of Conservation of Energy but do these people really expect something to happen to them a la Amityville?  Call me a skeptic but unless I see stuff flying around and blood dripping off the walls, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the dead really just don't care about you that much.  Because you're the tool with the camera.

Yep.  Tools.

In The Innkeepers, we are treated to the final weekend of  the Yankee Pedlar's existence.  (The Yankee Pedlar is a REAL hotel, by the way, in Torrington, Connecticut, that is REALLY supposed to be haunted.)  We don't know much about the hotel other than that it supposedly houses the ghost of Madeleine O'Malley, about whom we also don't know much other than that she hung herself in the hotel and the owners buried her in the basement.

Aww.  Why so glum, chum?

Claire, (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) are stuck manning the front desk and most of the movie is them not manning the front desk because they really only have 2 legitimate rooms booked throughout the whole movie.  But, they're amateur ghost hunters, dammit, and they want to prove that this place is haunted.  Except they broke the camera so they have to do it with audio, only.

Enter the failed actress, Leanne (or Lee, played by Kelly McGillis) of whom Claire is a HUGE fan.  She's kind of a mean drunk but she's also a psychic.  Since she can sense some stuff, she, like a gap-toothed five-year-old in a Shake'n'Bake commercial, helped.

Kind of just by being there.

In the most useless way possible.

Fuckin' magical lesbian.

Woo.

Anyway, there are a LOT of reasons to hate this movie, primary among them because there are really no scares in it until the very end.  There's no escalation of events, either.  It goes from zero to sixty in the last fifteen minutes (actually more like zero to 35... school zone, y'see...) and drops to zero again.

 Also?  Spooooooky gummie bears.

But the funny thing is I don't hate this movie at all.  I kind of like it.  It's got great dialogue which is incredibly natural, the cast is wonderful and the story is believeable.  It's very much a throwback to the single-setting horror flicks of the seventies and eighties and I will say that, compared to Shark Night 3D, Sara Paxton was kind of delightful to watch as the weird, quirky, pixie girl.  She didn't always look as if she were about to burst into tears.  And Pat Healy is adorkable.

This movie could be seen as a testament to the failure of the economy that people are willing to hang onto a job until the very last second for a paycheck, even if they'll completely slack off on the last day. 

This movie is, for lack of a better word, cute.  It's got some scares and it does rev up at the end but don't watch it if you expect to be scared.  You won't be.  Watch it for the character interaction which is actually brilliant.

You kind of expect Dante and Randal to show up.