Long time no see! It’s been awhile since you’ve had to endure one of my movie reviews. So to ease back into things, I thought first I’d talk about everything I’ve been up to since this whole quarantine pandemic thing started.
How are everyone’s quarantine beards coming along? I always get beard rash, so it sucks for me!
Hopefully some of you have taken this downtime to start working on your isolation scripts. What better time to write something low budget in a limited location than now, when you’re on a budget and in a limited location. I mean, that is if you can get yourself away from visiting Pornhub every chance you get.
So the first few week were pretty boring, there weren’t any movies to see or talk about so I spent most of my time playing Doom Eternal.
What I really love about this game is just how much moving depends on your survival. You can’t do what most FPS (first person shooters) do these days, take cover and regain health. No, like a shark, The Doom Slayer must keep moving at all times or you’re dead.
And if you’re low on health and there aren’t any medkits around, that means you have to get in close for a glory kill.
The game does seem to focus a bit more of trying to tell you a story this time around. But if you aren’t reading the transcripts found around each level, you aren’t going to know what the hell is going on.
When did Doom start to have a story anyway? You can play 1 and 2 in Doom Eternal, those games just plop you into the action, I saw nothing resembling a story whatsoever.
All I’m really familiar with are the shitty live action movies.
I enjoyed the first film, if you don’t look at it like Doom related material, but more like something akin to say Ghost of Mars, a schlocky action movie. Plus it has Richard Brake in it, so instantly the movie is better. You thought I’d say The Rock, well, yeah, he’s great too, but that’s a given.
They made another Doom movie in 2019, yet again having nothing to really do with Doom and shocker, that one was absolutely terrible. I believe I mentioned it briefly during horror month last year.
Instead of Doom Guy or anything resembling Doom Guy we got this tiny lady. The comedy comes in when she has to hold these massive guns. She looks absolutely ridiculous while trying to wield the BFG, as the gun is bigger than she is. They were going for bad ass chick, but ended up with midget holding a shotgun.
Also during quarantine, I made whipped coffee, like everyone else in the world or on YouTube. However it tasted like complete crap. I’m not a coffee drinker by any means, the only reason I had instant coffee in my pantry was for baking purposes. Pro tip, instant espresso helps bring out the chocolate flavor.
Anyway, maybe I didn’t add enough sugar, but I followed the recipe exactly as everyone else on the internet has been making it.
But it tastes bitter and fucking gross, I would not recommend it.
So for years I’ve been working on a solo music album. Just a collection of instrumental songs, I’ve been doing for years now off and on. I had a total of 6 tracks but since I didn’t have much to do while all this is going on, I thought maybe I could just finish it.
I made 7 more tracks, only added 5 to the album and released it on band camp and soundcloud. And let me tell you, the album was a hit…
Sorry, typo. I forgot the S.
The album was a shit. It was shit. I like it, but clearly I’m a bit biased.
Turns out, just about everyone had the same idea, so I was competing with real musicians with actual fans as they too produced new music on their quarantine downtime.
I guess maybe it didn’t help the gimmick for my band was we were a Japanese techno noise rock band that was obsessed with American fast food.
I actually got a bit more traction on soundcloud than bandcamp, which seemed surprising because when I think soundcloud, I think of soundcloud rappers. Not fake Japanese techno noise rock.
After that I went deep on YouTube and discovered this crazy stalker lady’s channel where she is stalking Elon Musk.
That’s right, stalkers have their own YouTube channels now. And it’s more popular than mine, which is depressing to think about.
It’s hard to really compile her ramblings into a narrative that makes sense, but let me try the impossible. So clearly she’s crazy, trust me, once you spot crazy, you know it.
I had a run in with a guy at the grocery store not long ago yelling about how the corona virus is a conspiracy thought up by Fauci and Bill Gates so they can put chips in you to track you and steal your information.
Sounds reasonable enough, which is why I was so surprised when I saw his van and it looked like the van that whackjob who sent bombs to news organizations drove.
But back to this lady. Her thing is, she hates Grimes, the singer. I’m a fan of her music, which is how I discovered this crazy lady’s YouTube channel. I’m not going to give you the name of her channel, but it isn’t hard to find.
But I was watching… it was either an interview or a new music video and Grimes looked a bit fuller in the face and instantly I thought, wait is Grimes pregnant?
And sure enough she was. She’s having a baby with Elon Musk, who she briefly dated, I’m not completely sure on their relationship now.
And this news has driven this crazy YouTube channel lady even crazier. So like most stalkers, Elon Musk can do no wrong in her eyes. Everything bad has to be Grimes. Strange tweet from Elon’s account? Obviously Grimes hacked it or used his phone. Duh!
So in her mind Grimes is blackmailing Elon Musk… how and for what I don’t know. Apparently, she claims the two never dated and Grimes is faking her pregnancy.
And apparently she thinks all this will be exposed once some court date is set or something… like I mentioned it’s unclear.
She also thinks that she was asked personally by people close to Elon Musk to expose Grimes. Why her of all people? No idea. She doesn’t seem to have any kind of connection with him or his company, so…
She also has a small sub base, larger than mine granted but still, not something someone would say, yeah we got to get this lady with all these subscribers to get the message out about Grimes blackmailing our close friend Elon Musk.
She also has maybe 8 videos posted a day, so keeping track of everything is also hard to do.
She also deletes a bunch of stuff, at one point while I was going deep into this rabbit hole, she posts a video saying she can no longer make these videos because the police came to her house, ordering her to cease and desist.
Out of all the crazy things she has claimed before, that I actually believe.
Because as Grimes gets more and more visibly pregnant, crazy lady becomes more and more convinced that Grimes will fake the death of the baby to try and gain sympathy. Though I think now she has amped up her claims by saying Grimes will now kill herself and put the blame on Elon Musk, I guess setting him up for murder?
Shit gets weirder and weirder.
After her video about the police coming to her door, I thought, wow what a perfect ending to this story.
But the next day she’s back to posting like 10 videos a day about Elon Musk, so I guess maybe she was just having another episode.
I’ve since stopped watching her videos as they have just become repetitive, repeating the same bizarre conspiracies that make no sense over and over. And if you press her on anything she only replies with wait until the trial and all will be exposed. Okay, crazy lady. I’ll make sure to do that.
A quick update since Grimes had her baby, I wanted to check on crazy YouTube lady and see how she’s taking the news.
So apparently Elon is being forced to take photos with a stranger’s baby, because it looks like he has a bruise on his cheek.
Thanks internet for finally giving the crazy people in the world a voice.
I know, not as interesting as when I went on and on about the fucking idiots who think putting semen in a chicken egg can create a real life homunculus, but still.
Okay, I guess I should get to the whole reason you’re here anyway, to read a review on Possessor. And you might be asking yourself, what the hell is Possessor? Seeing as it doesn’t even have a trailer available.
Well, there’s slim pickins these days, so I wanted to come back with something a bit more unusual, something with a bit more teeth.
That brings me to Possessor, the new film by Brandon Cronenberg, son of David Cronenberg.
Brandon Cronenberg has only done one other film called Antiviral. A movie I loved, so I have been eagerly awaiting his followup.
Did it live up to all the hype? Let’s find out!
Like I mentioned, Possessor doesn’t have a trailer yet, so really all I had to work off of was the plot synopsis and the script. And maybe a few movie stills that really tell you nothing, except it might have some interesting visuals.
In my head, I was picturing Johnny Mnemonic meets Scanners. But what I got was a very different experience. One I’m not sure what I can compare it to.
If Antiviral was a commentary on the obsession of fame and celebrity, quite literally living in a world where you can buy the cloned flesh of your favorite celebrity and eat it, Possessor’s message, albeit on the nose, is a film that relishes in how grotesquely violent it is.
It dares you to like it. You want to see violence? Here you go, a nice close up of every disgusting detail.
It pokes its finger in your chest, almost scolding you for liking what you’re seeing, kind of reprimanding you.
This is what you wanted, right? So why are you looking away?
Why? Because Sean Bean has a fire poker in his eye and mouth, bashing out his teeth. Not to mention the camera is basically shoved up his nostril so we can see it.
Possessor stars Andrea Riseborough, AKA the actress who played Mandy in the cult classic film of the same name.
And that gets our Mandy mention out of the way.
Here she plays Tasya, a ghostly woman who looks like she forgot to stock up on vitamin D during quarantine.
She works as an assassin for a corporation that specializes in remote killing. How they came to the conclusion that this technology should be used for murder for hire is a bit of a mystery. Not the first thing I’d think of but whatever.
What this company does is find someone close to the target, implant a devise into their brains and from the safety of a couch in their office building, take over the body, replacing them with a hitman.
In this case, Tasya who is a psychopath.
Actually, from the description, I assumed the opposite to happen. Male assassin ends up trapped in a female body, but nope. Reverse that.
Don’t let Tasya’s pale, weak complexion fool you, she’s coldblooded. They supply her with a gun, but rarely does she feel the need to use it, especially when a knife or fire poker is nearby.
She seems to also be suffering from a bit of an identity crisis, a known side effect for this unusual process.
Of course she keeps this to herself, leading to serious complications later on.
Aside from watching Tasya stab a man to death at least 30 or 40 times, we also get a sense she isn’t exactly normal when she even has to rehearse how she’ll talk to her son and husband. Much like what she does before taking over the body of her next victim.
After a messy job, Tasya gets offered another, this time to take out a wealthy man played by Sean Bean. She is to take over the body of his daughter’s boyfriend. The goal is to kill them both and make it look like a jealous rage drove him to murder them and then himself.
But Tasya is having difficulties keeping control of her own identity, cross bleeding into Collin’s life, the man she is now in control of.
Collin is more or less in a relationship with a sugar momma, even though she’s a lot younger than what you’d associate sugar momma with.
He was Ava’s drug dealer, the daughter to Sean Bean’s character, the one with a price on his head. He’s a bit of an asshole who doesn’t respect Collin whatsoever.
Collin works at Ava’s dad’s company doing really bizarre work, spying on people through their webcams, seeing what items they own to help sell them more stuff.
Collin is on curtain detail.
The shitty job only helps sell the gruesome soon to be outcome.
Tasya is to wait until Sean Bean’s birthday party, where Collin is to make a drunken scene, causing a very public ruckus.
After getting kicked out and as the party dies down, Collin comes back to the house, armed with a gun.
But Tasya sees a fire poker and decides to have some fun, bashing Sean Bean’s face in, poking out his eye, and ripping out his teeth.
He does actually manage to survive this attack. I know, one of the rare times Sean Bean actually gets to live.
Ava on the other hand isn’t so lucky as she is gunned down when trying to flee.
The trauma of not only seeing but committing these horrific actions, sends Collin spinning, forcing Tasya out and putting Collin back in control.
Knowing what he’s done but not fully understanding why or how, he goes on the run and finds shelter with one of Ava’s close friends who he has been having an affair with.
Leading this assassination business is Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character Girder. She’s doing everything she can to pull Tasya out of Collin safely, but Tasya can’t seem to kill her “host” by suicide. I’m guessing the only way to really free the link between them.
Collin starts to see flashes of Tasya’s life, bleeding into her memories and one self. He goes looking for her family, hoping he can get Tasya to come out and leave him be. Or maybe he just wants a little revenge for what she made him do.
Either way, it results in him hacking her husband up with a meat cleaver. Even then Tasya is unable to kill herself, freeing her mind from Collin’s.
And if this film wasn’t already grotesque enough, it turns out Girder has taken control of Tasya’s young son, using him to kill Collin, freeing her. But not before blowing her son’s brains out.
And that’s how we end the movie, Tasya being free of the family she feared was holding her back.
Possessor is devastatingly violent, with close up shots of just about every horrific kill. It’s also a film that is beautifully and artistically shot.
The sex scene especially I found to be extremely unique, with Tasya confusing herself with Collin as she has sex with Ava.
The plot however is very thin, lacking much of the details needed for proper and necessary world building.
Why a corporation that has the technology to remote control other people would specialize in assassinations is unusual to say the least.
It also seems a bit like overkill, considering all the effort it takes to pull this off. When I’m sure just a thug with a gun would be just as effective. Not to mention cheaper than sedating someone, implanting a device in their head so you can control their body with technology I’m sure wasn’t cheap to develop either.
A premise like this, I wanted it to dive deeper into what makes this world tick. Much how John Wick has, less story but gave us more world building.
You also don’t feel much for these characters. Tasya is crazy, clearly suffering from psychotic delusions of killing her family, which soon become realized.
But you also don’t care much for Collin either, who is more or less an innocent victim in all this. He’s mostly portrayed as a scumbag, using Ava to live the high life, cheating on her behind her back.
Obviously he didn’t deserve to be used the way he is, but at the same time, you really don’t care either.
I guess the ones you truly feel sorry for are Tasya’s family, who are unaware she is a contract killer. Or that she has fantasies of seeing them dead.
This is not a happy movie, with very little joy involved. It tries to shock you with its violence, almost punishing you for watching the movie in the first place.
So for that, I’m not sure what to rate it. I do recommend watching the movie, but I can’t say how much you’ll enjoy yourself as the film’s goal seems to make sure you don’t.
For that, I give Possessor a RENT IT rating.
Want EARLY access to our videos, uploads, and movie/script reviews? Members get them FIRST! Follow this link to our Discussion Forum.
