This week’s minor VOD releases pay questionable tribute to Duel, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, with side trips to Cambodia and the real Halloweentown.
Delivery Run (VOD and select theaters October 17): There are quite a few moments in this Duel-inspired snowbound thriller that straddle the line between “homage” and “legally actionable,” but Steven Spielberg doesn’t have anything to worry about. Director and co-writer Joey Palmroos can’t replicate the sustained tension of Spielberg’s 1971 debut feature, but he delivers a solid thriller, which expands the lean storytelling of Duel into a broader serial-killer narrative. It’s still pretty economical, clocking in at under 80 minutes and offering just enough backstory to get audiences on the side of hapless food delivery driver Lee (Alexander Arnold). While traversing the frigid mountain byways of rural Minnesota, Lee is followed and attacked by an enormous snow plow, driven by an apparent madman. Palmroos makes effective use of the eerie, snow-covered roads, and Arnold makes for a likable, resourceful protagonist. The frequent detours for Lee to work out his personal drama can stifle the momentum, but when it’s just Lee and the sinister driver alone on the desolate highway, Delivery Run is focused and gripping. Grade: B-
The Weedhacker Massacre (VOD October 17): It takes 15 minutes of multiple convoluted prologues just to set up this dumbass horror comedy about people getting murdered on the set of a movie about a famous killing spree. Nothing about the timeline makes any sense, and the frequent reminders about the elaborate origins only serve as irritating distractions. Then again, maybe the audience needs to be distracted from the atrocious performances, terrible humor, and awkwardly constructed scenes that feel like they’ll never end. The title is an obvious play on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and original Texas Chain Saw star Allen Danziger gets a story credit and shows up in a bizarre bit part. The Weedhacker Massacre isn’t remotely intelligent enough to qualify as parody, though, and its weak jabs at the perils of indie filmmaking are especially pathetic. There’s barely enough material here for a brief comedy sketch, but the filmmakers drag out the one-note premise, all in service of a basic joke that never gets any more amusing than the title. Grade: D
The Spirit of Halloweentown (VOD October 24): Fans of the 1998 Disney Channel original movie Halloweentown won’t find much about their beloved childhood favorite in this documentary on the real-life town where the movie was filmed. The residents of St. Helens, Oregon, have leveraged their connection to Halloweentown into an annual spooky-season festival that draws tens of thousands of people to their otherwise sleepy enclave. Directors Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb follow a handful of residents in the lead-up to the festival, while paying minimal attention to the logistics, the pop-culture connections, or the attendees who make the event so popular. Instead, there’s a tedious extended storyline about a local restaurateur dealing with negative online attention from a bad review, some dubious ghost-hunting footage, and a clearly unhinged conspiracy theorist as the only dissenting voice on the massive weeks-long endeavor that strains local infrastructure. The movie is slickly produced and sporadically engaging, especially when it spotlights people with personal emotional connections to the holiday, but it doesn’t have much to do with the spirit of Halloweentown. Grade: C+
Tenement (VOD and select theaters October 24): It seems unlikely for a country to select such a conventional horror movie as its official submission for the Best International Feature Film Oscar, but that’s what Cambodia has done with this familiar but appealing ghost story. It begins in Japan, where Cambodian-born manga creator Soriya (Thanet Thorn) discovers a photo of previously unknown relatives in a box of her late mother’s things. Her Japanese boyfriend Daichi (Yoshihiko Hosoda) then convinces her to travel back to Cambodia for a reunion. They arrive at a decrepit apartment building that might as well have a “This Place Is Haunted” sign, and Soriya’s long-lost Aunt Mao (Sveng Socheata) is disturbingly insistent about Soriya’s eating habits. It’s a bit J-horror and a bit Rosemary’s Baby, with muddled references to Cambodia’s past social upheaval. Writer-directors Sokyou Chea and Inrasothythep Neth craft plenty of creepy images amid their predictable story, and the well-meaning protagonists are easy to root for. Tenement may not be a genuine Oscar contender, but it’s a decent horror movie. Grade: B
This Too Shall Pass (VOD and select theaters October 24): So generic that an opening title card merely places it in the “late ’80s,” this coming-of-age dramedy goes hard on the tiresome 1980s signifiers without coming up with an interesting story or characters worth caring about. Desperate to escape his overprotective parents, smarmy teenager Simon (Maxwell Jenkins) seizes on a vague reference from a cute girl as an invitation to visit her in Ottawa. He and his carefully curated friend group travel across the border from Syracuse, getting into mild hijinks as they each play out their predetermined subplots. The characters constantly reference the most obvious 1980s cinematic touchstones, and writer-director Rob Grant may have spent a substantial portion of his budget on recognizable 1980s needle drops. He certainly didn’t spring for any vintage visuals, and This Too Shall Pass looks like digital garbage compared to its supposed inspirations. Katie Douglas gives the movie’s best performance as the girl Simon’s actually meant to be with, but all she can do is struggle valiantly against the clichéd writing. Grade: C
