Each of these three had satisfying horror moments, but none of them fully wowed me. Let’s take a look.
APPENDAGE (2023)
If you’re looking for a more serious version of Bad Milo, this might fit the bill. Whereas Bad Milo was a monster born of a man’s angst that lived in his ass, this one is a little critter that grows from the side of a young female fashion designer’s abdomen.
She has a tense relationship with her parents. She feels like she’s not good enough to succeed at her job. She fears her best friend and her boyfriend are having an affair.
As a result, a hideous little growth comes along, she cuts it off, and it lives separate from her, feeding her fears with taunts about her worthlessness (yes, it talks).
She locks it in the basement, researches it online, and finds a secret support group of people dealing with the same issue.
Rather than a movie in which the parasite created by the host’s mind goes on a killing spree to get revenge for her, which is what we’ve come to expect, this is instead a slow burn about our main girl coming to terms with everything that irks her in life.
The final act is when things go yucky body horror, but this still isn’t a body count flick. Instead it offers a refreshing twist on this subgenre and takes us to some surprising places. I was really feeling the second half of this film.
AMERICAN CARNAGE (2022)
Not for the anti-woke crowd, this is a political satire right out of the gate, beginning with real clips demonstrating hatred towards immigrants and how they are painted as enemies to scare gullible people for the sole purpose of winning elections. We even get a spot-on presentation of douchey racist white boys at a fast food drive-thru.
As part of his political aspiration, a governor signs an executive order to have the homes of all suspected immigrants raided and everyone inside arrested.
Our main kid ends up in a program working at a senior facility that is supposed to expunge his record and set him free.
There he makes a group of friends, including Jenna Ortega, and they quickly begin to notice something isn’t right and that all the elderly people are virtually comatose.
I was wondering if this was even going to be horror, but then a freaky sort of contortion/possession moment happens and I felt more at home.
Oddly, as the kids figure out the truth of what horrible things are happening at the facility, the contortion thing only happens one more time. Bummer, because there’s a better movie just waiting to be made that focuses strictly on that aspect, which was more or less an afterthought in terms of how this film unfolds.
Even so, the final act is a wild ride as the kids learn why they and the elderly people are really there and have to figure out a way to escape.
HAUNTING OF THE QUEEN MARY (2023)
I probably should have appeased my lack of attention span by not watching a 2-hour movie, but here we are. Haunting of the Queen Mary feels like The Shining meets Death On the Nile. The problem is that it constantly jumps from 1938 to the present with no clean transitions or logical reason why these two stories are being told yet never converge. The attempt at a mystery becomes a huge blur of situations that makes it impossible to cling to any narrative thread or to allow us to connect with any characters in either time period.
In 1938, a lower class couples sneaks on a cruise ship with their kid and tries to pass for an upper class couple.
In the present day, a couple and their child visit the same cruise ship, now a permanently docked tourist attraction, in hopes of creating a documentary or book about the boat’s past.
We are presented with a drawn-out, trippy narrative—leading up to a bloody axe massacre in the past and a ghostly haunting in the present.
I gave up on trying to understand any of it about halfway through. I was never frightened, and any sense of dread or suspense was always interrupted by a time jump.
However, this is often a visually arresting film…at least it is when the scenes aren’t hampered by agonizing darkness that ruins any chance of seeing what’s happening. That’s especially unfortunate, because the horror elements are the only thing you can really appreciate if you simply take them on their own without trying to comprehend what they mean.
