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I have been watching movies for a long time. The vast majority of them have been perfectly acceptable entertainment, or at the very least distraction from the humdrum reality that surrounds me. It was only the other day that I began to consider what a huge part I play in this equation. How much my mood when I enter the theater or press the play button matters. Who am I sitting with? Have I eaten recently? Are Junior Mints involved? 

I understand this is supposed to be a passive event, this watching projected images and prerecorded sound, but I can't help but believe that there is so much more to it. On successive nights, I watched CODA on Thursday, and in the last couple hours of Friday I watched Hell Night. My wife and I went out to a movie theater to see the Best Picture winner, CODA, and had a nice dinner beforehand. We watched the story of a plucky child of deaf adults find her way to a dream audition at the Berklee School of Music. We came away feeling disappointed. How could we not? Academy Awards! Dinner and a movie while COVID continues to rage around us. This had better be special! 

And maybe, somewhere in there, it was. It just didn't feel that way to us. About halfway through, I found myself imagining all the ways this movie could be better, different. The story it was telling about overcoming the odds wasn't so special or unique that it made me forget about all those stories about overcoming the odds. I felt trapped, waiting for the eventual and expected triumph. At that level, I was not disappointed. The plucky girl got to go to music school. It occurred to me that a more interesting story would have been to have the plucky girl not make it to music school. Or maybe that's because I am such a fussbudget. 

Hell Night, starring Linda Blair some eight years after her demonic possession, made absolutely no attempts to rise above its conventions. None. Horny college kids are dared to spend a night in a haunted house. Lo and behold, only one of them survives the night. The girl whose name appears above the title. I watched this one from the comfort and safety of my bed, with the sound off while my wife slept soundly through it. I did not feel that I was missing any nuanced dialogue or subtle music cues. Just a series of genre expectations: horniest kids die first, and the purest among them will be spared for that final freeze frame as the sun comes up. That's when I turned off the TV and went back to sleep, insomnia oddly abated. 

I cannot say now which movie I enjoyed more. One didn't live up to its pedigree, the other lived right down to its baser impulses. They both served the purpose of occupying a couple hours of my time. Which one did I enjoy most? It would be simple enough to write it off as apples to oranges, but it's more complex than that. I know that I judged CODA harshly because of its reputation, and I found absurd solace in the rote slasher mechanics of Hell Night. I suppose the real test will come some night in the future when I can't sleep and I turn on the TV to see some plucky young thing try to escape the little fishing town in which she is stuck. Maybe it would help if she was being chased by a knife-wielding psychotic.