Movie Review: Daddy's Girl

Daddy's Girl (2018) 

Directed by Julian Richards 

Written by Timmy Hill 

Starring Jemma Dallender, Costas Mandylor, Jesse Moss, Britt McKillip

Release Date September 29th, 2020

Published August 23rd, 2022 

Daddy’s Girl opens on an ambiguously ominous sight. A very sad young woman sits at a kitchen table with a gun in front of her. It appears that she is going to kill herself before we cut away and begin the story. The kitchen table scene is in the future, the next act of the movie will be about how we arrive at that kitchen table and what has made this sad young woman so desperate as to be considering ending her life. 

The young woman at the kitchen table is Zoe (Jemma Dallender). Zoe’s life is as tragic and horrifying as the opening scene indicates. Zoe lives in a backwoods town with her father, John Stone (Costas Mandylor). John is a serial murderer who uses his daughter as bait to lure in his victims. The two go to bars and seek out young women on their own, preferably drifters who might not be missed all that much. 

These young women are seduced by the idea that if this older man has this beautiful younger woman on his arm that he must be harmless. That’s when he slips something into their drink. Zoe becomes part of the seduction and the idea of kinky sex drives these young women to go home with the couple. There is no sex waiting in that backwoods home however. Instead, John takes these women into his dungeon and tortures for having thought they would go home with a man and a woman for sex. 

John is not interested in sex with his victims, he only has eyes for his daughter. Yeah, the movie appears to go there. I can’t say for sure that John is actually Zoe’s biological father but she does call him daddy and your skin crawls when she does. Zoe is not fully complicit in John’s crimes. The film indicates strongly that she’s been groomed and abused into this position and that perhaps John had murdered Zoe’s mother in order to frighten her into compliance. 

John’s double life as serial killer and loving father/owner of a small town mechanic shop becomes threatened by the arrival of a new young deputy. Deputy Scott Walker has recently returned to his hometown from several tours in Iraq as a military police officer and has been tasked with investigating the disappearance of a local girl. Scott is not the only newcomer in town as he meets a drifter named Jennifer (Britt McKillip) just as she is arriving in town. He warns her about missing girls in town and she indicates that she’s not staying long. 

That last part is deliberately vague as Jennifer has a part to play in how Daddy’s Girl plays out. Daddy’s Girl is a nasty little slasher movie that never finds a second gear after general cruelty toward women. It’s not that the movie is nasty and misogynistic enough to be memorably awful. Rather, it’s a more mundane sort of misogyny rather typical to the horror genre and thus nothing special. I can’t bring myself to completely condemn Daddy’s Girl, it’s neither poorly made enough or hateful enough for harsh condemnation. 

No, in fact, in the performances of Jemma Dallender and Britt Mckillip we have two charismatic women who give the story more credibility than the movie can bear. Both actresses are quite compelling with Dallender having a lot of trauma to play with and McKillip a mysteriousness that is intriguing. Their coinciding stories are remarkable for how these two actresses play their roles. It's a shame that their performances are undermined by how trashy the movie around them is. 

Daddy's Girl wallows in the muck of the genre and it never feels organic or well displayed. Instead, the trashiness takes away from what little good there is about Daddy's Girl. 

Movie Review: Yes God Yes

Yes God Yes (2020) 

Directed by Karen Maine

Written by Karen Maine

Starring Natalia Dyer, Timothy Simons, Susan Blackwater, Alisha Boe 

Release Date July 24th, 2020

Published July 24th, 2020

Yes God Yes is the sweetest little masturbation themed comedy I’ve ever seen. This debut starring feature for Stranger Things ensemble player Natalie Dyer pokes gentle fun at the hypocrisy of those who try to tell others what to do with their own bodies. The target is specifically religious but the prudish in general could learn valuable lessons about not trying to force your opinions or morality onto others from this odd, unambitious little comedy. 

Yes God Yes stars Natalie Dyer as Alice, a teenager who is only beginning to learn about her body. Recently rumors have started that she had performed a euphemistically named sex act on one of her classmates and while she’s vexed over how the rumor spread so quickly when nothing actually happened, she’s more curious about what this sex act actually is and just generally curious about sex in general. 

The film is set somewhere in the late 90’s or early 2000’s. We know this from the soundtrack featuring soundalike Christina Aguilera tunes, Alice’s old school Nokia cellphone and her dial up internet which she uses to scroll through chat rooms. One day while Alice is playing an innocent game of word association in a chatroom, she’s invited to a private chat by a fellow player. The man proceeds to invite her to what we used to call cyber-sex and she’s up for it, until she’s nearly caught by her mom with her hand somewhere it shouldn’t be if your mom is around. 

Alice’s obsession with masturbation is consuming her every thought lately and with everyone speculating about her wild sex life via rumors, she’s grown only more curious. In an effort to put these impure thoughts out of her mind, she decides to attend a weekend school trip with her Catholic School. Alice hopes a weekend away from the internet and her school and the various temptations therein, she can reconnect with God and stop obsessing over touching herself. 

This goes bad almost immediately as Alice becomes an accidental witness to some of her fellow students, supposed leaders of this ‘Christian’ retreat, committing many sins. The hypocrisy of her fellow students, and even one of her pastors, is the last straw for Alice who sets out to finally accomplish her goal of… well… self-pleasure would be a safe way to put it, she wants to touch herself or someone else as soon as possible. 

That last paragraph might lead you to believe that Yes God Yes is explicit and R-Rated. That’s not necessarily the case. Yes, the film has explicit themes but the movie is much more clever than explicit. Writer-Director Karen Maine aims for sweetness and a lovely sort of authenticity tinged with a broad sense of humor. 

Movie Review: The Radium Girls

The Radium Girls (2018)

Directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher

Written by Ginny Mohler, Brittany Shaw 

Starring Joey King, Abby Quinn, Cara Seymour, Susan Heyward

Release Date October 23rd, 2020

Published October 25th, 2020 

Unbridled capitalism is a lovely idea but in practice, you get a story like that which is told in the new movie, The Radium Girls. If you aren’t familiar with the story of The Radium Girls, it’s a horror story about the lengths that some will go to protect profits. The company American Radium was willing to sacrifice the lives and health of poor female workers just to protect a few million dollars. It’s a story of monstrous greed and a company that abandoned basic humanity and decency in favor of money. 

Joey King stars in The Radium Girls as Bessie, the youngest of three sisters, all of whom have worked for American Radium. The oldest sister, Mary, passed away three years prior to this story. Her death was deemed to have been due to syphilis. Now, middle sister, Josephine (Abby Quinn) has fallen ill with similar symptoms to Mary. When a doctor, working on behalf of American Radium, diagnoses Josephine with Syphilis, the sisters realize that the company is lying and trying to cover something up. Josephine is a virgin, so an aggressive STD is not causing her illness. 

At the recommendation of Walt (Colin Kelly-Sordelet), a young man that Bessie has met and fallen for, the sisters meet with the New Jersey Consumer League, headed up by Wiley Stephens (Cara Seymour) who informs them that she’s received complaints about American Radium before. Stephens convinces the sisters to see a new doctor and to take the drastic step of exhuming Mary’s body so that her actual cause of death can be determined. When Mary’s grave is opened, her bones are so radioactive that they glow in the dark. 

While working at American Radium, the sisters worked as dial painters. Their job was to paint the numbers on a watch with a radium based paint so that the numbers glowed in the dark. To get the finest point on their brushes, the girls were instructed by the company to lick the tip of their brushes. At one point in American history, after the discovery of radium, actual campaigns pushed radium as an elixir and bottled it for sale as a drink. 

That was before it became clear what Radium was doing to the people that consumed it. We will come to find out that American Radium knew, well before the death of Bessie and Josephine’s sister, that consuming radium was deadly. The company conducted their own study of radium exposure and when the results came back and showed how deadly radium was, the company buried their own study and kept instructing the workers to lick the tip of the brush. 

What American Radium did is unconscionable. It’s monstrous and, as Joey King’s Bessie states in The Radium Girls, they should have been tried for murder. The company willfully facilitated the deaths of its employees because glow in the dark clock faces became a multi-million dollar market. The company buried their own scientists, literally as the movie shows, in order to cover up what they did to their workers. 

I was once a strict capitalist. I believed that market pressure would be enough to get companies to act in the best interests of the public and their employees. Then, I read the story of The Radium Girls in college and I lost my taste for unfettered capitalism. I simply cannot abide what American Radium did to desperate, poor women in the name of capitalism. Now, I am certainly not a communist but unlike a lot of people I can be critical of capitalism and still believe in it. 

The Radium Girls were a flashpoint that led to the creation of unions and federal regulations that gave unions the teeth to deal with corporate exploitation for profit. In the last three decades however, as unions were consumed by their own greed and workers rights have become a passé issue among the political elite, we appear to be heading toward another flashpoint. As billionaires get richer and richer, their exploitative practices that risk the lives of their employees and customers alike, get more extreme. 

We need stories like The Radium Girls to be told as a cautionary tale. People need to be reminded that when we aren’t vigilant about worker’s rights and working conditions, companies will willfully exploit our ignorance. The actual movie is a tad on the rudimentary side. It’s not a special movie from a technical standpoint. That said, the movie has tremendous value as a polemic and an example. With what we are still learning about the way modern corporations have intentionally crushed unions and ignored environmental concerns, movies like The Radium Girls should be a flashpoint for remembering the need to keep a check on the powerful.