Dog’s Movie House: “Last Night In Soho” and “Paranormal Activity: Next Of Kin” Hit The Movies Just In Time For Halloween!

Let’s start with “Last Night In Soho.” Edgar Wright (“Baby Driver,” “Shaun Of The Dead”) is one of my favorite directors, but he’s never dabbled in pure suspense until now. I am happy to report that “Last Night In Soho” is a rousing success as not only a thriller, but a love letter to 1960’s London. The story involves Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) a young fashion student heading to London to begin her schooling in fashion design. After a mishap with her roommate, Eloise moves out of the dorms and into a boarding house run by Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg, dynamic in her final role). After taking the room, she begins to have vivid dreams about a girl named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) an aspiring singer in 1960s swinging London. Sometimes Eloise is observing and sometimes she’s actually Sandie, navigating the hot club scene and falling for a charismatic man named Jack (Matt Smith). Soon the dreams not only become sinister, but start to invade Eloise’s waking hours, causing her to doubt her sanity. Her only hope is to solve the mystery of what happened to Sandie all those years ago before she loses not only her mind, but possibly her life.

If that description sounds a bit cryptic, it’s supposed to. Part of the fun of “Last Night In Soho” is navigating the various twists and turns of the plot. Is Eloise time traveling or is it all in her head? Eloise’s emotional and mental health is suspect given her past and losing her mother at a young age to suicide. Or is it something more. . . spiritual? It’s all part of the fun. The script, by Wright and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, plays with the conventions of the genre without mutating them so much that you can’t tell what’s going on. The visuals are fantastic, from the reflections in the mirror to the transitions from the dream state to reality (and back again) to the lovely recreated 1960s London scene. When Eloise first emerges in the dream she comes out in front of a big theater marquee featuring James Bond in “Thunderball” and I had a big smile on my face the entire time.

Wright’s predeliction for music in his films is on full display here with orginal versions of “Downtown” and other songs giving the film its atmosphere. The energy often serves as a contrast to the plot, which isn’t afraid to delve into the seedy side of show business. Sandie wanted to be a singer but ends up being little more than a whore for Jack and his rich friends. Yet Taylor-Joy allows us to see the strength in Sandie even as the big city tries to crush her down. The endings’s a corker too, giving me reason to believe there is more supernatural force at play than the film initially lets on.

Wright gets wonderful performances from Taylor-Joy and Thomasin who seem to be two sides of the same coin. Eloise is shy yet determined while Sandie is outgoing yet a tad insecure on the outside. Smith is wonderfully hissible as Jack, and Rigg is a treasure as the no-nonsense land lady Ms Collins. It’s also a treat to see Terence Stamp as an aging ladies man who may or may not be Jack grown old.

All in all, “Last Night In Soho” works on so many levels that it’s hard to tell which one works the best. I love the thriller aspect, the supernatural aspect, and the recreation of London aspect with equal measure. This is a wonderful, suspenseful, and well-acted film that you should see if you want a little something different. 4 1/2 Out Of 5 On Kendog’s Barkometer!

Next we get to “Paranormal Activity: Nexit Of Kin” a film that is streaming exclusively on Paramount+. This latest “found footage” chapter of the long-running series takes a jog to the left from the original mythology. This time we follow Margot (Emily Bader) a documentary filmmaker who is going back to her roots in an Amish community in Upstate New York to meet her relatives. Her mother abandoned her when she was a baby, and this project is a way for Margot to find some answers about her mother and maybe get some closure. Filming everything is here lead cameraman Chris (Roland Buck III) and producer Dale (Dan Uppert). They are guided to the farm by a relative of Margot’s named Samuel (Henry Ayres-Brown) and soon they are asking questions of the elders, the women, and even the children of the small community. Things start to change when they start hearing things go bump in the night and strange sights like the townspeople heading out in the middle of the night to what looks like to be an abandoned church. Soon Margot and the others are trapped in a battle for their lives as things are obviously not what they seem and there’s more than Margot’s life at stake. She’s also in danger of losing her soul. (Cue dramatic music here, heh.)

The main problem with “Next Of Kin” is that it gets off to a slow start and by the time things start to pick up in the final third of the film, the shaky cam will have you fighting not to puke. That’s always the risk with found footage films: the attempt to immerse the audience in the documentary style of filmmaking makes it difficult for the same audience to tell what the hell is actually going on half the time. The brilliance of the original “Paranoramal Activity” was the the cameras were static and stationary, giving the film a documentary feel while allowing the audience to full experience the tension. This film doesn’t do that at all.

The movie’s performances are fine, but none of them particularly stand out. They just kind of lay there in search of a better movie. There are some decent jump-scares and the demon chasing them around at the end is suitably freaky, but the found-footage conceit keeps you at a distance and I never really felt emotionally engaged or invested in the fates of these characters. This one’s for completists only. 2 Out Of 5 On Kendog’s Barkometer! So Sayeth The Kendog!

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