Reviews
‘Bad Things’ Tribeca Review – Mommy Issues and Flawed Characters Haunt This Riff on ‘The Shining’
Writer/Director Stewart Thorndike’s 2014 film Lyle introduced a contemporary riff on Rosemary’s Baby. Thorndike’s latest, Bad Things, continues the filmmaker’s horror explorations of motherhood, this time through Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. A psychological horror film set at an isolated, wintry hotel becomes ground zero for deeply flawed characters to explore their ghosts to mixed success.
Much like Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance, Bad Things introduces the lead character Ruthie (Gayle Rankin) as someone already a bit unstable from the outset. The idea is to spend a weekend with friends at the hotel Ruthie inherited, albeit an isolated hotel trapped in yesterday with outdated décor and a lack of guests. While Ruthie’s less enthused about staying at a place that holds traumatic memories, she’s distracted by her messy relationships with supportive girlfriend Cal (Hari Nef), Cal’s fiercely loyal pal Maddie (Rad Pereira), and the esoteric Fran (Annabelle Dexter-Jones), with whom Ruthie has cheated on Cal before and still harbors attraction.
Deep-seated traumas combined with complicated relationships in a secluded place dislodged from time transform a business venture test run into a violent nightmare.
Image credit: IFC Films
Thorndike uses Kubrick’s classic horror movie as a blueprint to track Ruthie’s unraveling through flawed relationships. She begins as volatile and unreliable and only becomes more so when her sweet yet pushy girlfriend sees her inheritance as a potential business venture against her protestations. Cal also thinks this is the ideal weekend where Ruthie will finally take their relationship to the next level, despite Maddie’s mistrust and constant attempts to exploit Fran’s feelings for Ruthie. That constant needling, trying to corral Fran’s emotional outbursts, and the looming specter of Ruthie’s estranged mother (Molly Ringwald) mean that Ruthie begins from a place of extreme duress and tension.
In this depiction of complicated characters allowed to be flawed, selfish, and sloppy, Bad Things is at its most engaging. Rankin more than rises to the occasion of playing a protagonist prone to lashing out, giving into temptation, or retreating behind impenetrable emotional walls on a whim. Engaging in dialogue with The Shining, complete with ghosts, hallucinations, and iconic scenes revisited, underscores the central theme of self-preservation in the wake of misdeeds, feelings of abandonment, and haunted memories.
Image credit: IFC Films
As refreshingly unapologetic as Bad Things can be for its unreliable, unlikable characters, introducing them already in a state of disarray and chaos leaves little room to evolve. Ruthie’s channeling of Jack Torrance means her arc is more of a flat line, albeit one that gets a bit bloodier as it barrels toward its conclusion. Maddie feels shoehorned into the proceedings, existing solely to drive a wedge between Cal and Ruthie and nothing more. Though it’s not a complete retread of The Shining, the parallels make it easier to predict the story’s direction.
Bad Things lets its women misbehave, affording them the space to cheat, lie, and come undone by mommy issues or unhealthy relationships. It does this by conversing with Kubrick’s seminal psychological horror adaptation of Stephen King’s story, warts and all. It’s a little too reliant on The Shining regarding the film’s identity. While the character arcs aren’t robust enough to satisfy, Rankin’s unhinged performance and the contemporary update to familiar work make for a fascinating horror exercise all the same.
Bad Things made its World Premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and will release on Shudder on August 18, 2023.
Chuck Tingle‘s writing is embedded with a particular tonal trick that makes him perfectly suited to horror. “Propulsive” is the first word that comes to mind when I think of Tingle’s energetic prose, and when his books start wrapping themselves around characters and digging through their various complexities, it’s easy to be pulled along, absorbed in the feeling that an old friend is simply telling you a story.
Then Tingle will drop one of the single creepiest bits of imagery you’ve ever read, and you’re right back in the horror space. It’s not always a jump scare, but it is always a pulsing feeling of dread that keeps you hooked through the rest of the book.
Fabulous Bodies, Tingle’s latest horror novel, carries on these gifts, and the promise Tingle showed on books like Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays. His fiction’s growing ever more confident and precise, and his eye for horrific detail hasn’t dimmed in the least, making this a summer reading delight for horror fans.
Poppy is a single mother determined to make a better life for her daughter, particularly after growing up in group homes and foster systems. By day, she works hard to keep up the flow of upbeat, enthusiastic content as a fashion influencer, and while that’s going well, it’s not yet making ends meet. To make up the difference, she moonlights as a grave robber, lifting bodies from morgues and funeral homes and selling their pieces on the black market. It’s grueling, dangerous work, and it’s about to pay off big. Out of the blue, Poppy gets a call to transport the newly dead body of her musical hero, the legendary Eddie Michaels. It’s a weird gig, but the payout is big enough that she could walk away from her macabre side gig forever. Poppy takes the job, and things get complicated when Eddie turns out to be, well, only mostly dead.
From the moment Eddie’s corpse enters the picture, Fabulous Bodies takes on the vibe of a road novel, as the grave robber and the undead rock star make stop after stop, and Poppy tries again and again to wrap her mind about what she’s gotten herself into, and how she might get herself out. It’s a delightful premise, and Tingle never loses his grip on the fun of it. No matter how dark the novel gets, and it does get quite dark, the narrative keeps barreling forward, delivering macabre laughs and moments of beautifully gruesome invention along the way.
Because he’s set his protagonist up as a fashion influencer, Tingle has lots of room to play in the space of how we view human bodies, both alive and dead, how we use them, and what we value in them. This is the emotional core of Fabulous Bodies, and while it’s sometimes overshadowed by the runaway train of the plot, it remains a potent source of thematic exploration throughout the book, and it gets more complicated when you consider certain gifts Eddie’s been granted in his strange supernatural state.
In essence, we’re looking at a story about a grave robber who discovers a body that not only fights back, but takes control of any given situation. That throws Poppy for repeated loops and keeps the plot moving, but it also makes us consider on a deeper level exactly what we value about our own physical form, and what might happen when we lose our grip on it entirely.
The book’s themes and emotional concerns hum through the whole narrative, but the overwhelming impression I got while reading Fabulous Bodies was just how much damn fun this book is. I couldn’t stop reading it, not just because it’s so filled with sudden swerves and ghoulish setpieces, but because Tingle has honed his horror storytelling down to a fine, very sharp point. Fabulous Bodies moves like a roller coaster, complete with a tension-filled ramp-up and a finale that’ll leave you breathless by the time the ride is over.
If you haven’t been reading Chuck Tingle’s horror work up to this point, it’s time to get on board, because he’s just getting started, and he’s already mastered the art of the scary page-turner.
Fabulous Bodies is available now.
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