All in Film
As a Pokemon fan from the start, did I ever think the franchise would be big enough to be adapted into a major Hollywood live action film? No. No I did not. I also didn’t think we’d get seven generations of Pokemon games and over 1000 episodes of the anime, but here we are.
It’s been 40 years since Michael Myers escaped from a mental hospital for a killing spree on Halloween night. Laurie Strode, the young woman who survived, has spent every day since then preparing for his return to Haddonfield. She sacrificed her money, her social life, and even her family to set up a defensive fortress deep in the woods stocked with every kind of artillery and security feature you can imagine. No one else believes that Myers could ever return, but no one else actually witnessed with Myers is capable of. It’s the night before Halloween and Myers is going to be transferred from one facility to another. Never give Michael Myers an out; he never misses an out.
Content warning: the foundation of Afterbirth is sexual assault implied but not shown at the start of the film.
Antibirth is modern weird fiction. There’s really no other way to describe it. It’s a modern psychedelic horror film with a very loose plot connecting a lot of strange imagery meant to scare the audience. The time period is ambiguously modern—the characters talk like they’re current but the town they live in is behind the times, complete with wood panel tube tubes—and there’s not much logic to the story. The film gets away with it, too, since writer/director Danny Perez sets his protagonist as a drug addict and an alcoholic.
Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t get into a film. You can acknowledge its merits, appreciate the technical quality of the film, and just get nothing from the overall story. It makes reviewing a film like The Ritual a challenge.
This will shock any long time reader of this site. I once had an obsession over a board game. Yes, shocking news from your friendly OCD critic here. It was called The Harbingers and was part of a VHS board game series called Atmosfear. I was obsessed with this game. My parents knew that I would just focus in on every detail of the story and character design to the point of losing sleep, so they held off on getting it for me until a year after its release. It became a Christmas gift that gave me many sleepless nights of crafting backstory and essentially fan fiction before even pressing play on the tape once.
