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In Candy Land we follow 4 truck stop/gas station/motel prostitutes- 3 girls and a guy, in beautiful Montana. There's also the corrupt town sheriff who has a thing for the guy. The motel owner lady is their madam. One day a religious family shows up trying to "cleanse" our gang, who of course won't have any of it. That day also a dead guy appears in one of the bathroom stalls with eye stabbed and his arms crossed over his chest.

Suddenly the girl who was part of the religious group starts hanging out there by herself, apparently she's decided to leave the group. While it's not clear what she wants to do with her life, our group adopts her assuming she'll join their life. She's shy but somewhat open it seems to the idea. She carries some giant wooden cross with her. But of course she has some plans of her own just as the madam introduces her to a priest who is going to be her first customer. Now things take a turn as the prostitute guy is assaulted Irreversible-style. One of the girls out of the blue has a melt down and says she's had enough and can't do it no more. But by now it's to late...the cleansing has begun.

Candy Land is a solid B horror movie, the way B horror movies are supposed to be: violent, gory, with plenty of nudity. The story is good, the script is well thought out, there's an interesting discussing between religious girl with her mentor for instance. The ending is also pretty surprising. Overall a pretty original movie. Unfortunately the camera focuses more on the least attractive of the prostitutes while pretty much ignoring the other 2. A shame there were no more sights of Montana.

Highly recommended for those who enjoy unusual unrated horror as opposed to predictable sterile PG-13 stuff.

Two Mormon girls stop by at the house of Mr. Reed to do their mission. They can only enter the house if there is a woman present. So Reed promises that the wife is in the kitchen making pie and since it's pouring outside they agree to come in. He's open to hearing about the Church of LDS. One of the girls, the newbie, is eager to recite her script, while the more experienced "sister" tries to slow her down. But Reed quickly takes charge of the conversation. He's interested in their background and present himself initially as an atheist and starts challenging their beliefs. The girls get more uncomfortable as Reed's wife is a no show and he keeps making up excuses. There's no phone signal in the house, the guy can't offer them a phone either. When they want to leave they're told that the door lock is on a timer that he can't override.

So now the girls are stuck with this guy who has something prepared for them. In a room that resembles some chapel he unleashes his tirade about religion. They are all copies of copies. He claims Judaism is the original (I guess he hasn't heard about Zoroastrianism) and makes this point with some dumb Monopoly reference and again with some plagiarized song reference. Then he shows them two doors that lead to the back, one he calls belief and other disbelief. The girls are free to leave through one of the doors but should be careful about which they choose. They take one of the doors which leads them downstairs where there is something or someone. The much promised pie makes an appearance and is offered to the creature. Reed reveals his plan. The girls will be witnesses to a miracle: the pie is poisoned. The person down there will eat it and die, then will be resuscitated and will share what it saw on the other side. And so it happens. Reed calls this person now a prophet.

Finally another character is introduced. Another church guy who goes looking for the girls, but as always Reed has all sorts of lies and excuses ready. So the guy leaves. In the meantime the girls plot their escape, one of them is attacked by Reed, the other discovers a room full of "prophets" in cages. Reed of course wants the girl to learn a lesson: what is the ultimate religion. The girl reveals all she has realized by now about him, some more battles ensue to see if the girls can escape or not.

Heretic is your ultra minimalist movie--few characters in a couple of settings engaged in a battle of wits with Reed. Grant does a good job in making the whole thing tolerable. In other instances everyone would be racing their lines as quick as possible to show how smart they are. Not here, here we have reasonably interesting conversations at an adult pace. But frankly, and what filmmakers fail to understand is that there is a limit to how much argumentative back and forth one can take, even if a topic like religion is interesting. The script is very philosophical so you get eventually the whole brain-in-a-vat scenario. But the whole thing requires Reed to be in constant god mode, knowing everything the girls will say and do. It gets silly in that Reed has a miniature reproduction of the inside of his house and positions figurines of the girls in rooms. But they too go into god mode where they see through him and realize things, they really shouldn't be able to. The whole prophet angle is refreshing, even though we've seen it before in it's most powerful form, I'm referring to the glorious Martyrs of course.

Heretic is smart, over-researched, but worthwhile. With Heretic the writers have rehabilitated themselves after giving us the laughably ridiculous A Quiet Place: Day One.

I wasn't exposed to the marketing so I didn't know what to expect. The title is kinda silly and the movie poster not particularly compelling.

Often these heavy-handed retro-style films deliver in style but not in substance. And Longlegs goes in heavy with the 70s style, but then for some reason sets the movie in the 90s I guess to show us repeatedly official portraits of Clinton.

The atmosphere is there, so is the tension. "Impending doom" is often mentioned, but rather than doom it's more impending twist or impending climax, kind of like in Seven. But here it's not delivered. There is a lot of material: coded messages, evil dolls, satanism, but it doesn't come together well enough. Perkins needed a second writer and probably a different director to fully exploit the material.

The main problem is that this movie is solely centered on agent Harker. We learn nothing about the doings of the villain in the meantime. And Harker is dull and uninteresting. But then in typical fashion and by some cosmically bizarre coincidence she will be the center of the whole thing requiring the villain to be in total god mode to divine the future decades ahead.

Any director who known his job would have made a lot more of the villain, showing us his work here and there. Heck, the movie is called Longlegs for crying out lout. But then Longlegs isn't exactly the charismatic villain he could have been either.

Perkins has a future, he just needs to let go of his ego and nepotism and go back to learning about screenwriting and directing.