The Empty Man (2020)

Even though it stumbled a bit in its closing moments, The Empty Man surprised me in ways no other film has managed recently.

Available to stream on Disney Plus, the trailer I'd seen beforehand (see below) suggested this was going to be a totally serviceable "teens discover local urban legend actually exists" monster movie, which I was totally okay with.

But what I got was so much more.

Opening with a 20-minute, pre-titles, atmospheric flashback to a group of backpackers in snowy Bhutan, who stumble upon a weird skeleton in a hidden cave, the film then shifts more towards what I was expecting as its focus jumps forward to a small town in Missouri in 2018.

Grizzled, former police officer James Lasombra (James Badge Dale) offers to help his widowed neighbour Nora Quail (Marin Ireland) - with whom he shares an unspoken secret - find her runaway daughter, Amanda (Sasha Frolova).

Taking on a Nordic noir/True Detective tone, this stage of the story unfolds like a police procedural, as James discovers that almost all Amanda's close friends have also disappeared after playing a "child's game" on a local bridge.

The night before, they'd found an empty bottle on the bridge and dared each other to blow into it... to summon "The Empty Man", a local urban legend.

Eventually, after some shocking revelations, James is led towards a bizarre self-help "cult", The Pontifex Institute, fronted by the charming Arthur Parsons (Stephen Root).

After being caught sneaking around the cult's headquarters, James gets a lead that sends him out to a seemingly abandoned Pontifax Institute facility in the wilderness, where things start to get really bizarre.

Initially, believing The Empty Man to be a "simple" teen horror, I couldn't understand how it could justify a two hour 20 minute running time.

However, once I realised I was in for something rather special the time seemed inconsequential as the story kept reinventing itself as it developed.

A key aspect of this very well made movie that I really appreciated was the conviction with which the characters approached the increasingly odd and distressing situations they were coming up against, giving the whole film a real sense of believability and verisimilitude.

Much like In The Mouth of Madness, with the The Empty Man you suddenly realise you're knee-deep in an incredible, mind-blowing, apocalyptic, nihilistic, Lovecraftian horror, and can't quite remember when you turned down this dark pathway.

Even though The Empty Man isn't overtly based upon any specific story by HP Lovecraft, I'm pretty sure I heard chants of 'Nyarlathotep' at one stage (which certainly makes sense in the context of this tale).

Lovecraft much?

Even a single viewing of The Empty Man requires a degree of concentration to stay on track, but I'm certain that this is a film that would reward a second, closer, examination as I'm sure there were many occult Easter Eggs I missed while on the initial journey.

As the narrative danced towards its final act, it became clear that The Empty Man was borrowing tropes from some of my other favourite horror movies, but it still managed to take a wild swing at putting a fresh lick of paint on its big twist.

Based on a Cullen Bunn comic book series, published by BOOM! Studios, The Empty Man was written and directed by David Prior and was one of the last films produced by Fox before it was brought out by Disney.

Apparently, The Empty Man got a low-key cinematic release, making so little money that even a home DVD release was ruled out as unprofitable.

All that said, The Empty Man is a strange and cerebral horror film so I realise it's not going to appeal to everyone, but I reckon in a few years it may well have spawned its own cult following.

Broadcast Signal Intrusion (2021)

Chicago, 1999. Video archivist James (Glee's Harry Shum Jr), haunted by the disappearance of his wife Hanna, stumbles across a surreal, nightmarish, clip of a "broadcast signal intrusion" - a mysterious pirate hack of a televised signal.

Fascinated, he starts to dig deeper, learning that these signal hacks are extremely rare and the authorities have managed to track down those responsible for all except for the one that initially triggered James's interest. 

He discovers that not only was this one of a pair of known intrusions, but there was possibly a third as well.

Mixed up with all this is the fact that a woman supposedly disappeared, probably kidnapped and maybe murdered, the night before each intrusion - and the last one was the night after his wife disappeared.

Instead of reporting her to the police, James teams up with Alice (Kelley Mack), a strange woman who follows him one night, for nebulous reasons.

Together they disappear down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, crossing paths with a selection of enigmatic and oddball characters, as James becomes increasingly paranoid on his dual quest to find out who created the "broadcast signal intrusion" and what happened to his wife.

Starting from a similar space as the far-superior Archive 81, Broadcast Signal Intrusion instead apes True Detective (poorly) using this elaborate, potential Creepypasta urban legend to obfuscate a very linear murder mystery.

I'll confess I was hoping for another Archive 81, Deadwax, or Cigarette Burns.

Being inspired by true events (there were actual signal intrusions of a similar nature in the mid-to-late '80s), I had high hopes as to what fantastical journey the movie would take its conspiracy theory-driven protagonist on.

However, of all the potential stories that could have sprung from this set-up, a poor man's Batman adventure - where the villain leaves a trail of breadcrumbs that only the protagonist can follow (despite years of investigations by various branches of the government and law enforcement) - was a major let-down.
 
There are films where you can recognise their greatness early on, but there are others - usually mystery stories - where everything hangs on the final reveal, which can make or break the audience's investment in the piece.

Sadly, as  became increasingly clear as the 104-minute movie dragged on, the climactic revelation of Broadcast Signal Intrusion, despite being dressed up in the trappings of James's dramatic dive into insanity, raised little more than a shrug and a underwhelmed "oh, was that it?" reaction.

For all the smoke-and-mirrors, James' unearthing of this great secret is mindbogglingly straight-forward, with the only real mysteries being the unexplained comings and goings of the small coterie of supporting characters.

Phil Drinkwater and Tim Woodall's script, directed by Jacob Gentry, was riddled with convenient coincidences,  inconstancies, and plot holes that you were probably expected to hand wave away with a "that's the nature of the beast" get-out-of-jail-free card.

But filmmakers have to earn that sort of trust from their audience and Broadcast Signal Intrusion falls well short.

The Dark Tower (2017)

I've only read the first three of Stephen King's Dark Tower books - and that was many, many years ago (pre-stroke), so don't have particularly enduring memories of any of them beyond the first, The Gunslinger, which I have returned to a few times.

But I thought that lack of investment in the source material might be a benefit when coming to the cinematic adaptation, as I understood this was to be a 'different take' on the story, possibly a sequel or an alternate world view of the epic events of the multi-book mythology.

While I really liked the occasional Easter Egg nods to other works of Stephen King, what I wasn't expecting was a very generic, stereotypical teen adventure (with shades of The Mortal Instruments, The Neverending Story, Maze Runner, Hunger Games, and even the Star Wars Prequels with their demystifying of The Force through the introduction of midi-chlorians).

Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) is a troubled New York kid, living with his mum (Viking's Katheryn Winnick) and douche-bag step-dad (Nicholas Pauling), but plagued with dreams of an otherworldly Dark Tower and an ongoing battle between the Man In Black (True Detective's Matthew McConaughey) and the last of the gunslingers, Roland (The Wire's Idris Elba).

Jake runs away from home, to find a house he dreamed of, which contains a portal to Mid-World - a post-apocalyptic world-between-worlds.

There he discovers that not only were his dreams real and that he is gifted with something called The Shine (the same psychic power as evidence by little Danny in The Shining), but also that the magic-using Man In Black aka Walter O'Dim believes Jake's powers are strong enough to topple The Dark Tower.

Teaming up with Roland, Jake also learns that the Dark Tower is keeping the Multiverse safe from the demonic hordes that live on the outside, and Walter wants to bring the tower down and welcome in these murderous creatures.

The story jumps from Mid-World to our world, place to place, with the brevity of a CW hour-long drama, and even as it stands, The Dark Tower clocks in at less than an hour and a half duration - a fine length for a trashy, direct-to-DVD movie, but way short for a modern Hollywood blockbuster.

Going from zero to hero in no time at all, Jake manages to master The Shine (quicker than Luke Skywalker masters The Force in the Original Trilogy), and then is handed one of Roland's hefty pistols and appears to be a crack shot with that as well (again, with no background in firearms and, you know, being a kid and all).

It's as though all The Dark Tower's character development moments were trimmed down, or cut out completely, leaving just a framework of action-driven set pieces featuring people we know (or care) little about.

Although incidental characters are killed off (with no lasting emotional impact on the main characters), Roland is frequently injured (but seems to shake it off within a scene or two), and Jake does get captured by Walter, there's no real sense of jeopardy and grand scale in the goings-on.

There are moments where the action is quite thrilling, and Roland's various bullet tricks are neat, but the story never really engages beyond a superficial level, even with such talented and charismatic leads as Elba and McConaughey.

This is not the opening salvo of an epic to rival Lord Of The Rings or Star Wars that we were promised.

I understand that Mike Flanagan is currently pushing on with plans to develop an (unrelated) The Dark Tower series for Amazon Prime Video, but there's generally been tumbleweed on the news front as far as that's concerned lately.

At least, horror maven Flanagan has opted for a reboot, presumably learning from the mistakes of this movie, and returning to the source material that's held in such high esteem by legions of Stephen King fans.