Monday, October 24, 2022

October Horror Challenge 2022 #99: "10 Cloverfield Lane"

The first Cloverfield movie was a big mess to me. it was a bunch of people who openly didn't like each other making a video supposedly as a gift for one of their friends where they talked about how they didn't like the guy on video, then all of a sudden the end of the world starts to happen and they decide to keep filming, and we get to see what happens as creatures take over the world and it was a cool idea that just didn't feel like it worked for me in the end, so when this movie was announced as a pseudo sequel, I was curious to see what they would do with the story, but time got away from me so I never managed to check it out until tonight. Let's see what I finally think of this movie after all this time.

In this movie, a woman suffers a car accident and wakes up in an underground bunker with a mysterious, controlling man named Howard who insists that there was a massive chemical attack above ground, well, he's actually not sure if it's chemical or biological, but the air is contaminated from the attack and so the only safe place is underground with him. She is disoriented at first, and she's not sure who to trust. There is another man in the bunker with them named Emmett who believes the story about the world ending and their only means of survival being to stay inside the bunker, but the woman (named Michelle) isn't sure if she believes everything Howard says. Despite the bunker having all the comforts of home, Howard's controlling nature makes her want to leave the bunker and take her chances outside, in spite of seeing evidence of the horrible things that can happen if you're exposed to the air outside. As tensions rise, Michelle has to take matters into her own hands in order to save herself.

It would be just my luck that the world would be ending and I would be stuck with a controlling guy who didn't let me go outside because the air was supposedly contaminated. I said similar things when I saw the movie "The Mist," like that it would be just my luck to be stuck at the end of the world with people like that. This movie is like a lot of post-apocalyptic movies, with the survivors barely holding it together, though given the controlling and paranoid nature of Howard, the people in this movie held it together for longer than I would have expected them to do (probably longer than I could have, with my big mouth).

This movie seems to be picking up where the original Cloverfield left off, and taking place sometime around the events of the first movie, though we don't know how long the people are in the bunker, I'm going to say two months or so? Which is a long time to survive with circumstances like these, a paranoid control freak holed up with two people he barely trusts in an underground bunker like this. Once things get going the movie flows pretty quickly, and that's a testament to the performances of the leads, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Michelle, John Goodman as Howard, and John Gallagher Jr. as Emmett. The three of them give great performances (John Goodman is particularly menacing in his role, and he really creeped me out). Overall I would say I definitely enjoyed this movie more than the first one, and I'm glad I finally decided to check it out.

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