Spiral

Well, this movie put one over on me. Starts off with a bunch of guys having a reunion for a bachelor party in a fancy rental house, which logically promised lots of agressive dipshit behavior and characters I wasn't going to like at all. My dirty little secret is I'm often multitasking when I watch movies, and the good ones draw my attention, otherwise I wind up missing a lot, and I tucked in with my laptop expecting to miss most of this one. The loutish behavior in the early scenes (set in a strip club, naturally) did nothing to dussuade me that this would be anything more than 90 minutes of shriek-filled audio wallpaper.

But somewhere in the middle, I noticed the appearance of an antagonist who was incredibly well-cast, just seriously creepy. And very soon the disappearance of one of the guys in the middle of the night prompts a hard right turn into serious David Lynch territory—and while a lot of David Lynch wannabe have made terrible movies, this isn't one of those. This one took the lessons to heart, and this thing gets very surreal, and plays it straight-faced, without crossing that omnipresent and dangerous line into corniness. Unfortunately I'd already tuned out so much that by the time I realized what was going on, I'd missed a lot. It snuck right past me. But, wow, does it get trippy.

This one will get a more attentive rewatch, ut earned that.

There's not a lot of post-Lynchian surrealism I might've said that about. And it's all the more remarkable seeing has how it started off seeming like it was going to be a bunch of apes aping around. No, it's way more polished than that, and far stranger. We'll see what I think when I give it a proper viewing. But it definitely seems to be something different.