Post by Dracula on Sept 24, 2022 18:38:28 GMT -5
Pearl(9/21/2022)
When Ti West’s film X came out I can’t say that I had pegged it as a film terribly likely to be a franchise starter, little did I know that a prequel had already been shot and it was going to be released less than a year after the original film. On top of that this prequel is actually pretty radically different from the first film and more or less stands on its own. The film follows the early life of the elderly villainous from X all the way back to 1918 when she was living at a farm with her parents and was waiting for her husband to return from the First World War. Of course everything that made Pearl a villain in X is still going on here so there’s some mayhem to be found. Stylistically and in terms of story structure this is completely removed from X. That was a grimy southern fired slasher movie inspired by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre whereas this movie seems to be drawing from a lot from early Hollywood melodramas. Mia Goth reprises the role of Pearl, this time without the old age makeup, and her performance is clearly a pastiche of Judy Garland and specifically her work in The Wizard of Oz. Where X was trying to look like a grainy exploitation movie, Pearl is shot in widescreen and in a color palate that seeks to evoke the technicolor look of the forties and fifties. Linking the film to X like it does can be a bit awkward. Everything about the iconography of this movie seems to scream “midwest” and yet because it’s a prequel to X it technically needs to be set in the Texas gulf coast and every time Pearl’s alligator shows up it’s a touch jarring. Overall I’d say this is a clear improvement over X, a movie that had some things going for it and provided some gory thrills but which also went in some misguided directions and ultimately wasn’t giving us that much we hadn’t seen before. Pearl is much more creative and I really liked Mia Goth’s rather unhinged performance that finds a certain mania underneath those Judy Garland mannerisms. There is however a tradeoff to be paid for using this approach and that’s that the film isn’t really that scary. Movies where the killer is the protagonist generally aren’t able to engage in suspense in the way that movies where victims are the point of view character you empathize with and this one is no exception. Still, it’s a pretty invigorating genre exercise, one that serious horror fans are going to be interested by.
***1/2 out of Five
When Ti West’s film X came out I can’t say that I had pegged it as a film terribly likely to be a franchise starter, little did I know that a prequel had already been shot and it was going to be released less than a year after the original film. On top of that this prequel is actually pretty radically different from the first film and more or less stands on its own. The film follows the early life of the elderly villainous from X all the way back to 1918 when she was living at a farm with her parents and was waiting for her husband to return from the First World War. Of course everything that made Pearl a villain in X is still going on here so there’s some mayhem to be found. Stylistically and in terms of story structure this is completely removed from X. That was a grimy southern fired slasher movie inspired by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre whereas this movie seems to be drawing from a lot from early Hollywood melodramas. Mia Goth reprises the role of Pearl, this time without the old age makeup, and her performance is clearly a pastiche of Judy Garland and specifically her work in The Wizard of Oz. Where X was trying to look like a grainy exploitation movie, Pearl is shot in widescreen and in a color palate that seeks to evoke the technicolor look of the forties and fifties. Linking the film to X like it does can be a bit awkward. Everything about the iconography of this movie seems to scream “midwest” and yet because it’s a prequel to X it technically needs to be set in the Texas gulf coast and every time Pearl’s alligator shows up it’s a touch jarring. Overall I’d say this is a clear improvement over X, a movie that had some things going for it and provided some gory thrills but which also went in some misguided directions and ultimately wasn’t giving us that much we hadn’t seen before. Pearl is much more creative and I really liked Mia Goth’s rather unhinged performance that finds a certain mania underneath those Judy Garland mannerisms. There is however a tradeoff to be paid for using this approach and that’s that the film isn’t really that scary. Movies where the killer is the protagonist generally aren’t able to engage in suspense in the way that movies where victims are the point of view character you empathize with and this one is no exception. Still, it’s a pretty invigorating genre exercise, one that serious horror fans are going to be interested by.
***1/2 out of Five
