a review of

HOOPTOBER XII NIGHT SEVEN: Feels like a weird agglomeration of about a half-dozen other very similar horror/mystery/thrillers that didn't add enough that was new to the mix to really justify its existence. This is in spite of a fine lead performance by Ayo Edebiri and a fun (if mostly underutilized!) ensemble of recognizable actors, headed up of course by John Malkovich, giving us yet another in his long line of quavery cinematic creepos. The movie starts off in a familiar quirky/dark comedy vein and mostly just kinda stays there for the first hour, before executing an ill-advised gear-shift change into grotesque cult/conspiracy horror that doesn't feel adequately set up by the previous section at all. Malkovich seems like he might be purposefully miscast here, playing a character who's supposed to be this world's equivalent of Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Elton John, and Prince, all kind of rolled into one. The problem with this is that it makes the pop-music satire feel sort of scattershot and non-specific, since all of these archetypes have VERY different vibes that are hard to reconcile. Combine that with the fact that we as moviegoers KNOW what John Malkovich was like in the '80s and '90s, and it's very hard to accept him as a chameleonic superstar who stacks up honorifics like "The Debutante" or "The Wizard of Wiggle" without serious suspension of disbelief. When we do hear his character's music (to his credit, all sung by Malkovich), it sounds like a dull approximation of adult-contemporary pop, maybe the kind of stuff that has its fans *somewhere* out there in Spotifyland, but not really the sort of thing that I could see people of every age and demographic bobbing their heads to in the way we see demonstrated here. When we finally do get an explanation of the big "WHY?" behind this whole scenario, it feels like too-little, too-late for a movie that mostly squanders its runtime on reheated jokes about celebrity/fame culture before moving towards an unearned resolution.