Monster House: MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a Tim Burton movie through and through. It’s yet another of his stories about pale loner weirdos confronting an abrasive normality that has no idea what to do with them. Here’s where I’d list off a few relevant comparisons from the filmmaker’s back catalogue, but we all know in this case it’d just be a complete list of his work, from Pee Wee and Beetlejuice to Batman and Edward Scissorhands to Ed Wood and Big Eyes to Sweeney Todd and Dark Shadows and on and on. This particular iteration, adapted by screenwriter Jane Goldman (Stardust) from the book by Ransom Riggs, locates a group of fantastical freak show oddities hidden in an orphanage in Wales wilderness and a time-bending bubble of stasis that protects them from prying normal eyes. Their secret is out, though, in the creepy bedtime stories of a grandfather (Terrence Stamp) whose mysterious death sends his teenage grandson (Asa Butterfield) off in search of the peculiar children.

That sounds simple enough, and it’s certainly sufficient reason for Burton to play around with eerie horror imagery. By the time the grandson finds the peculiars he sees an invisible boy, a girl as strong as ten grown men, a firestarter, tiny twins in spooky masks and white burlap suits, a surly teen who can animate the inanimate, and a girl lighter than air who must wear lead shoes to keep her grounded. It’s the sort of hard-edged whimsy that’s fine creature fantasy and can also hit genuinely unsettling notes, especially by the time their headmistress, Miss Peregrine (Eva Green, underplaying her wild-eyed chirping mode), informs the lad that they’re being hunted by tall, pale, long-limbed, faceless tentacle-squirming invisible monsters and their haunting masters (led by a campy, pupil-less, white-haired Samuel L. Jackson). It involves a disgusting plot to eat the eyeballs of peculiars everywhere in a bid for immortality, a slight shift after the villains’ plan to suck the lifeforce out of shape-shifting birds backfired in gnarly fashion.

As I recount the basic facts of the plot this doesn’t sound so complicated. But in practice it plays out as a ton of unwieldy setup that must be hurdled to get to the fun parts. Instead of drawing its point-of-view character – and, by extension, the audience – into the world, clearly establishing lines of conflict and reasons for suspense, the film progresses as a jumble of fits and starts. It leads to confusion. As I watched grotesque tableaus and cute creepiness I took some delight in the off-kilter Burton-y visual aspects – although its images are curiously scrubbed clean of the textures and atmosphere with which his other films excel – but it wasn’t cohering. Worse, it wasn’t providing a narrative engine, or a reason to care. It’s one of those teen fantasy novel adaptations where every faction has a name and every backstory has its corresponding jargon and every gesture is imbued with meaning readers can intuit while leaving the unfamiliar in the cold. By the time it is finished introducing everybody and sets up the stakes, it turns into something much more reasonably diverting. But even then it’s hard to be too invested in the happenings.

There’s a fun conclusion involving nonsensical time travel, a tapestry of teamwork powers in action, teeth-gnashing villain monologuing, and fun unreal effects work. Burton’s facility with CG still doesn’t match the thrill of his early days with makeup, miniatures, and stop motion tricks, but at least here it’s blended in with the slightly softer visual sense. Until the movie finally dispenses with cloudy setup and gets down to action, there’s no sense of true invention, all the best moments passing quickly while the plot follows a glum drumbeat of its own convoluted internal logic. There’s an artifice that’s not like the giddy creativity of early Burton or even the confident self-referential Gothic Hammer Horror-riffing that he’s played so enjoyably before. No, here it’s just phony, with a stiff lead performance (Butterfield clearly stifled under a so-so American accent) animating a painfully routine Chosen One secret-powers-and-totally-unconvincing-romance-subplot scenario. Even the peculiars themselves aren’t full characters so much as visual gags we’re meant to love for their adorable qualities while being alternately charmed and creeped out by their macabre features. The whole movie is a mixed bag, with maybe just enough to like jumbled in with a lot to endure.

Spies of the Roundtable: KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE

Director Matthew Vaughn is always making movies about other movies, not subverting formula or deconstructing tropes, but doing his favorite genres louder, gorier, and goofier than before. The British gangster picture Layer Cake, fantasy Stardust, and superhero movie Kick-Ass are of equal falseness, movies for the sake of movies. They have their moments, but is it any wonder his X-Men movie is his best? The dictates of franchise care required him to play it straight, funneling his skills into his energy and staging instead of stunted and narrow movies borrowing real world pain for nothing more than bloody riffs, one step further removed from anything worth caring about. His latest, Kingsman: The Secret Service, is a colorful goof on the James Bond formula, following the basic outline of the typical 007 plot but playing it looser, faster, bloodier, and cheekier. It’s an enjoyable movie right up until it isn’t.

Maybe it’s more accurate to call Kingsman a half-serious Austin Powers for how consciously silly the plotting, how fawning it is over retro gadgetry. It’s eager to tell us how smart it thinks it’s being, which takes some of the charm out of its self-congratulatory deployment of Bond-style gadgets – bulletproof umbrella, poison pen, exploding lighter – and plot turns. After all, this is a movie with a megalomaniac villain and his exoticized henchwoman trying to execute their convoluted plot for world domination, complete with a giant glowing countdown clock. Several times characters make reference to fictional spies – Bond, Bourne, Bower, you get the picture – and trade the barb, “It’s not that kind of movie.” Oh, but it is. From the first notes of Henry Jackman’s John Barry-esque score, it’s obvious what territory we’re in.

The film’s one clever idea is to recast the double-ohs as a clandestine organization carrying out secret spycraft, a good old Spies of the Roundtable complete with codenames like Lancelot, Galahad, and Merlin. Called The Kingsman, they’ve had a sudden opening. And so respectably stuffy Colin Firth, properly situated in a sharp suit, recruits a rough, tough, street-smart lad (relative newcomer Taron Egerton) and bets he can turn him into a proper superspy, a sort of My Fair Lady actioner (a reference explicitly made). Vaughn, with his usual co-writer Jane Goldman, milks these riffs on pop culture past for bright engaging action. It’s often jolly good fun, drawing on X-Men: First Class montage swagger for early team-building training sequences as Egerton grows from a street kid to a spy, then turns into a adolescent power fantasy. Save the world, get the girl, and all that jazz.

There are giggles to be had in seeing Firth turn into an action hero in elaborately staged, CGI assisted, action sequences. The kid’s quite good, too, holding his own against the older folks while looking dashing in his eventual spy uniform. Their colleagues include a comic relief Q figure (Mark Strong), an underwritten-but-capable pretty girl (Sophie Cookson), and a wise old mentor (Michael Caine). Their villains are nasty, a crazy billionaire (Samuel L. Jackson, hamming it up) and his flunky (Sofia Boutella), a woman with razor-sharp prosthetic legs that make her as fast and deadly as a certain Olympic athlete. The cast is engaging and entertaining, having as much fun playing broad comic book shtick as Vaughn is having a good time whipping up scenarios for near-death action movie experiences for them, like a tense skydiving sequence that’s the cleverest the film gets.

More fun than not for awhile, the movie goes wrong by giving in to its regressive fantasy, probably leaking in from the Mark Millar source material. His are the most gleefully ugly comic books around, trafficking in unapologetic laddish humor and smug shock violence. Kingsman isn’t that bad, but it is a movie in which the villain is an evil lisping black man and the only hope for the world is a bunch of upper-crust white guys and the one up-from-his-bootstraps recruit whose eventual reward is access to a woman’s body. The optics are obnoxious. It’s a movie so caught up in its splashy R-rated cartoonishness that it loses sight of what, exactly, it is enjoying. It spends its time tweaking tropes in the name of escapism, but can’t escape the implications of its giddy gore that ends up giving rightwing nuts something to cheer. (I’d trim two scenes of a real-life world leader if I could.)

Its most troubling scene is a turning point between goofy wish fulfillment and poisonous misanthropy. An elaborate gory massacre is played for laughs, scored with rock and staged with slapstick. It’s followed immediately by the death of a major character we’re supposed to mourn. (How we’re to care about deaths, and yet also find exploding heads hilarious is beyond me.) As this rockets the movie towards a crescendo of climaxes, the movie wants us on the edge of our seats fretting over the fate of the world as violence erupts here, there, and everywhere. I felt the suspense, was effectively manipulated by the crosscutting. And I would’ve enjoyed it more but for the feeling the film was reveling in the carnage and wouldn’t mind if its heroes failed to stop it. It’s a brisk, exciting movie, better in its breezy charming moments than its splashy nasty conclusions.

More Than a Woman: THE WOMAN IN BLACK

There’s a big, scary haunted house in the middle of The Woman in Black, a charmingly old-fashioned horror film. It’s a towering Gothic building with endless candlelit rooms stuffed with seemingly endless bric-a-bracs and musty furniture. The grounds, including its very own cemetery, are overgrown with twisting weeds and long grass. Of course, this is a place the local villagers will not go. It’s quite a ways out of town and when the tide comes in it becomes a small island. It’s dark, creepy, and isolated.

It’s the dawn of the 20th century when the old widow who lives in the house dies with no living relatives. A young, freshly widowered lawyer (Daniel Radcliffe, nicely filling the requirements of his first post-Potter role) is sent away from his toddler son and their big city home to sort out this countryside estate. When he shows up, the greeting is hardly what you’d call hospitable. The village is filled with the kind of small-town horror-movie people who seem nice enough but speak slowly, as if they’re afraid they’ll spill their town’s dark secrets if they didn’t watch their words close enough.

They have reason to look so glum. There be ghosts here. It all has to do with that big creepy mansion on the far outskirts of town, the kind of half-regal, half-decrepit old building at which Very Bad Things have happened. These Bad Things must have something to do with the worrisomely high mortality rate in town. The villagers calmly and forcefully tell Radcliffe not to go to that house, to just turn around and go back home. Even the kindly older gentleman (Ciaran Hinds) and his wife (Janet McTeer) who ask him over for supper can’t help but let their apprehension show through their kindness. But it’s the young man’s job to close the account, so head out into the isolated manor he must.

The satisfying, mostly wordless, centerpiece of the film finds Radcliffe sorting through papers, old letters, and scratched photographs at the house, intermittently interrupted by ominous creaks and mysterious footsteps. Other times a woman in black, the ghost of the title, appears. He sees her through a window, standing in the cemetery. He goes out to investigate and she’s gone. He turns back and sees her standing at an upstairs window. He goes back inside, climbs the winding stairs and finds the room empty. It’s creepy, for sure, but director James Watkins has such a sure hand in staging Jane Goldman’s screenplay (based on a novel by Susan Hill) that he taps into a mournful mood that slowly builds startling moments and an unsettling sense of wrongness into a kind of heavy atmosphere that settles under the skin.

When Hinds offers to return for Radcliffe after the tide recedes later that evening, and the younger man says that he prefers “to work through the night,” it gave me a sinking feeling. It’s a ghastly ghost story trope that worked on me here. It’s not always so enjoyable to wonder why a character won’t just leave the haunted house. Here the emphasis on the decaying architecture of the big old house, the accumulating terror from the likes of cracked porcelain dolls and various eerie wind-up figures, is effective. Much praise is due production designer Kave Quinn, art decorator Paul Ghirardani, and set decorator Niamh Coulter, without whom this candlelit building would seem considerably less haunted.

The film comes from a fairly recently reconstituted Hammer Films, the British studio that made a name for itself churning out horror films of just this sort – by and large patient, suspenseful, and with a whiff of the literary about them – during its greatest prominence from the 1950s through the 1970s. The Woman in Black fits quite well in this tradition. It’s so effectively old-fashioned, in fact, I thought I had it all figured out. It’s a terrific piece of craftsmanship. It was creeping me out, but I had an understanding of its approach and its technique that I thought was keeping me from being truly scared by the film. At one point, when the ghost suddenly appears in a classic jump scare, I heard a loud gasp from somewhere near me in the audience. It took me a second to realize that the gasp had come from me.