"Weapons" 4K Review

While Hollyweird seems mostly interested in rehashing the same old ideas, there have been a few more original sleeper hits this year in the horror genre, first with the OK-but-overrated Sinners and now the weird Weapons. The story of how all but one of a third grade classroom's students disappeared without a trace is the sophomore effort by writer-director-co-scorer Zach Cregger whose previous feature Barbarians (which I didn't see, but the missus did and didn't like) made him a buzzy name in town and sparked a fast and furious bidding war for this script.

Weapons starts simply enough with a child's voiceover setting the stage: Two years before, 17 children in Justine Gandy's (Julia Garner, Ozark) third grade classroom simultaneously got up at 2:17 am and ran out of their homes into the night never to be seen again. Security cameras captured some of their flights, but little more.

After several weeks, it's decided that school needs to continue, but at a meeting between school officials and parents, blame is cast upon Justine with Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), voicing his displeasure at the lack of progress to the school principal, Marcus (Benedict Wong, The Martian), and a police captain (Toby Huss).

With an alluded-to checkered past and passions running high, Marcus puts Justine on leave and she falls into a spiral of drinking, leading to a hook-up with her ex-boyfriend, a cop named Paul (Alden Ehrenreich, Solo), whose wife is none to pleased with that development.

Cregger tells his story through various point-of-view segments following Justine, Archer, Paul, a crackhead lowlife that Paul encounters (Austin Abrams, Euphoria), Marcus, and finally Alex (Cary Christopher, making his major debut), the sole child not to disappear and whose Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan, Field of Dreams) is shaping up to be a popular Halloween costume.

Cregger does a few jump scares and the gore is icky, but fleeting, but overall he succeeds in ratcheting up the tension and keeping us tantalized with the mystery. There's always a risk of when what's going on is revealed and explained that it won't resolve things satisfactorily and if you think about what you're told, you'll be left with several "For why?" questions that could've been better addressed. (e.g. What's the deal with the giant floating AR-15 hovering over the house during a dream?) But those will come after the big payoff bonkers ending which shows Cregger shows he knows sending the audience off entertained papers over any gaps in logic until the drive home.

The performances are solid across the board though the characters are thinly-drawn with Cregger choosing allusion to specificity when erring hair the other way would've helped. The MVP is Madigan whose Gladys is a ballsy creation for an actress to portray, leveraging the truism that people begin to look like their spouses when she's been married 42 years to Ed Harris.

The 4K Dolby Vision presentation doesn't offer much in the way of nit-blasting highlights, but helps keep the many dark, gloomy scenes from dissolving in black crush.

While it could've been deeper, Weapons manages to creep you out then release the tension effectively. Recommended for those not super-picky about plotting.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Honey Don't!" Review

 I'm not going to lie; the major reason we watched Honey Don't! was for the lesbian sex scenes between Aubrey Plaza (Parks & Recreation) and Margaret Qualley (The Substance). The reviews were bad with even the more favorable ones complaining about the gratuitous nature of the sexuality. (Hey, I said we wanted to see it; you don't need to sell us.) So how was the rest of the movie? A mess and if you're just looking for the smut, that's why Lemmy invented the Internet.

Qualley is Honey O'Donahue, a private investigator whose potential client turns up dead in an wrecked car on the outskirts of Bakersfield, CA. The homicide detective who called her to the scene, Marty Metakawich (Charlie Day, Pacific Rim), hits on her and she has to remind him for the umpteenth time that she likes girls.

She gets the address of the dead woman's family and after interviewing them learns that she has been involved with Four-Way Temple, a church operated by the sketchy Rev. Drew Devlin (Chris Evans, Not Another Teen Movie). She finds the woman's church robe under her bed and out falls a leather & chains BDSM bikini. Hmmmm.

Rev. Drew is a piece of work, constantly banging ladies from his congregation while dumb henchmen from his drug trafficking side business walk in on his activities. Flanking his "altar" are huge portraits of himself looking like bad modeling head shots done at Sears Photo Studio, not Jesus. Evans is having a blast as the cheesy preacher who's more interested in how he looks than his partners feel.

There's also a side plot involving a drug mule of the Rev's having a deal go very sideways with the boyfriend of a client who'd hired Honey to see if he was cheating on him, but what you want to know about his the Good Stuff, right? Well, Plaza evidence cop, MG Falcone, is her usual tart sarcastic self, but this time she's gay and somewhat obsessed with Honey who is receptive to her interest beginning with a fine how do you do in a bar. It's not Bound and it's definitely not Blue Is The Warmest Color-grade lesbionics, but the Mr. Skin crowd will like it.

But that's only a couple of minutes and there's another 87 minutes to fill and co-writer/director Ethan Cohen and his co-writer wife Tricia Cooke (though according to this, "wife" seems inappropriately normative) go with a patchwork of pastiches from his better works with brother Joel like Fargo, Burn After Reading, and No Country For Old Men (which I hated and it sucked and FIGHT ME!) setting up a lot of quirky moments, but nothing cohesive or compelling.

The movie opens with a woman at the crash scene, pulling a signet ring for the Temple off the woman's body before being shown fully nude floating in a river, copying a scene with his sister-in-law, Frances McDormand (Nomadland) in the movie Nomadland, before riding off on her scooter. Who is this woman; I thought it was Honey and was confused by the next scene being her arrival at the crash. She's somewhat explained, but not really as references are meant to substitute for substance.

A side plot involving Honey's Goth niece (Talia Ryder, Do Revenge) disappearing after an encounter with an sad old man outside her burger joint job sets up a weird twist then plays into the out-of-left-field resolution of her fling with Falcone. And the way the scooter-riding femme fatale wraps things up is another head-scratcher in a movie full of them.

There are several good laughs - a runner about Honey having "book club" is one - and some potential for a quirky story, but they're not fleshed out in a movie that feels longer than its 89-minute run time would imply. But everyone is a cartoon when they're not just an insulting hick caricature.

And it's too bad because as Film Threat's Chris Gore said in his negative review, Honey is an interesting character stuck in a crappy movie. With her retro fashion and wise-cracking lines, Qualley manages to make Honey more than just a gender-flipped queer take on the hardboiled private dick trope even though the trite script doesn't really give her much to play. 

Honey Don't! is the second of a "lesbian B-movie trilogy" Coen and Cooke are making which began with Drive-Away Dolls last year (a movie the missus turned off after 10 minutes) so, to say anticipation for the third installment is non-existent would be accurate. With a budget of $20M and a gross of only $6.7M it was a bomb, making a million less than Drive-Away Dolls - which the studio paid $20M for the privilege of trying to sell it because "a director of Fargo & No Country For Old Men" made it - so perhaps two failures are enough to prevent this conclusion from happening.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.