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| Your ass is grass. And so is your face. |
I have not read the short story,
In The Tall Grass, by Stephen King and his son Joe Hill. I didn't even know there
was a short story called
In The Tall Grass by Stephen King and Joe Hill. I was just bored on my day off and happened upon the film
In The Tall Grass, based upon the short story
In The Tall Grass, by Stephen King and Joe Hill. I had two hours to kill and the trailer looked interesting, if a tad derivative of
Children of the Corn, a movie
also based on a short story by Stephen King, but not Joe Hill, who would have been about 5 years old or so when said story was written. But as the opening credits unspooled, it quickly became obvious why it looked like an old movie based on a short story by Stephen King. You may now return to the beginning of the paragraph and re-read it as many times as necessary if I'm being too subtle for you.
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| The Jerk, the Chick and the Geek. |
So, obligatory synopsis: geeky brother and pregnant sister are driving through America's heartland in the middle of summer, making for the west coast. A sudden and unplanned stop brings them abreast of a massive field of grass - very tall grass indeed. They hear a young boy calling for help from within the field and decide to help him. Once in the grass, the siblings lose track of one another and cannot find the boy. Lost, wandering in hopeless circles and unable to find their way back to the road, the grass reveals several other lost souls (look, a pun!) and a weird presence within which seems to warp space and time. Think of it as
Groundhog Day without the snow or the humor.
Actually, as the film went on, several other movies came to mind, making it seem even more derivative and unnecessary...
The first thing that came to mind upon seeing the title of this movie was a shouted line of dialogue featured in 1997's
The Lost World: Jurassic Park 2.
"Don't go into the long grass!" A line which is, of course, ignored as the entire cast immediately plunges headlong into the massive field of elephant grass and get their asses handed to them by a handful of hungry Velociraptors. I cannot be the only person who spent the entirety of
In The Tall Grass waiting for a Velociraptor to pop up.
A rarer reference is the 2009 film
The New Daughter, starring the little girl from Pan's Labyrinth as a slightly bigger girl named Louisa who becomes infatuated with a huge mound of earth in the yard of her new South Carolina home. Soon, bland dad Kevin Costner starts noticing that Louisa is acting weird, even for a teenage girl. Turns out the mound is actually an ancient structure housing even ancienter gods, who look like bundles of sticks with piranha teeth. Louisa has been chosen by the stickmen to be their new hive Queen, eager to impregnate her and start a whole new race of mutant god sticks or some shit. Not a bad little movie, despite the icky presence of the stunningly dull Costner.
A particularly gross sequence about midway through
Tall Grass brought to mind the Aronofsky flick
"Mother!" which audiences either declared genius or dismissed as repugnant. If you've seen either flick, you'll know to which scene I am alluding. If you haven't seen either flick, you probably still know what I'm talking about and will therefore understand why I did not go looking for a gif to accompany this paragraph. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go google it. Or you can watch the 2018 German film
Hagazussa...but don't. It took me weeks to brush that nasty, greasy fucker out of my teeth.
Kill List and
Midsommar also came to mind while watching this eco-apocalypse, if only for the shaman's masks and sacrificial finale of the former, and the blending of flesh and foliage imagery of the latter.
Midsommar is itself incredibly derivative of 1974's
The Wicker Man (I refuse to acknowledge the existence of the remake, even though I totally just did) but is beautiful all the same and definitely worth a watch or two. And if you haven't seen
Kill List yet, do so immediately or die incomplete.
So ultimately...yeah.
In the Tall Grass has been done before, both better and worse, in full and in short. There was really nothing new to find here. It was as repetitive and unnecessary as driving through the heartland. I would have been far more scared by wandering through an actual field in Kansas or Nebraska.
And need I really mention...
The first thing that came to mind upon seeing the title of this movie was a shouted line of dialogue featured in 1997's The Lost World: Jurassic Park 2. "Don't go into the long grass!" A line which is, of course, ignored as the entire cast immediately plunges headlong into the massive field of elephant grass and get their asses handed to them by a handful of hungry Velociraptors. I cannot be the only person who spent the entirety of In The Tall Grass waiting for a Velociraptor to pop up.
