Barely Stretching: “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” “The Home,” and “House on Eden”

THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS

Not that it really matters, but in what year, or at least what era, is The Fantastic Four: First Steps set?

A number of outlets, including that bastion of reliability Wikipedia, label the time period as “the 1960s,” though there's disagreement on whether it's '64 or '65. Given the overall Mad-Men-meets-The-Jetsons vibe of Marvel Studios' latest, this would make sense, its more fantastical elements perhaps owing to events taking place on an alternate-universe “Earth 828.” But the Web site for Marvel's parent company (TheWaltDisneyCompany.com) states that First Steps is “set in a 1960s-inspired” – italics mine – “retro-futurist world,” which I guess means it could be any year, even 2025, so long as the titular comic-book clan finds their way to the Avengers in 2026.

Again, it's a borderline-irrelevant question. But it does, I think, speak to the confusion of director Matt Shankman's Fantastic Four, which has its merits, yet seems uncomfortable about crafting a unique identity, and never appears certain about how seriously it should be taken. Truth be told, I laughed at the movie far more often than I laughed with it. And when I wasn't laughing, which was most of the time, I was usually bored. This 37th MCU entry goes to considerable lengths (and expense) to create a singular, amusingly eye-catching visual aesthetic, and there's promise in its narrative turn that demands from our heroes an impossible choice. By the finale, however, nearly everything of early interest has succumbed to the same ol' visually indistinct, destruction-of-the-universe meaninglessness, with the added hangup of the action being almost insultingly stupid. Not quite as dumb as First Steps sending a woman in her third trimester on a months-long, potentially fatal space journey, but close.

Before that baby becomes our central focus, we're given the Fantastic Four's origin story – a reminder of how, on a previous interstellar mission, cosmic rays caused Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), her brother Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn), and Reed's best friend Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) to respectively become superheroes Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch, and the Thing. Blessedly, this familiar tale is told through a five-minute talk-show montage, a narrative shortcut that I pray all comic-book movies usurp from now through the end of time. Freed from the burden of exposition, much like in DC Studios' current Superman, we're allowed to jump straight into the good stuff, which, here, involves the discovery that Sue is finally pregnant after years of trying, and that – as heralded by the shiny entity known as the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) – the deep-space baddie Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson) is coming to effectively, or maybe literally, eat Earth. Or rather, Earth 828, wherever and whenever that may be.

Up to this point, almost a half-hour into Shankman's 114-minute film, I was having a pretty good time. First Steps' “retro-futurist world” is indeed a knockout, its gleaming smoothness and tubular accessories – the mise en scène part Jetsons, part that decades-ago “home of the future” at Disney theme parks – rubbing shoulders with an urban-Rockwell NYC sprawl in which all the mean wear hats and all the women wear pearls. The citizens themselves, although we meet few personally, are equally endearing in their unified love of the Fantastic Four – a devotion evidently shared by everyone on the planet. All cheer the news of Sue's pregnancy; a local Hebrew-school teacher (Natasha Lyonne, welcome but underused) flirts with the equally smitten Ben; the nefarious Mole Man (Paul Walter Hauser, legitimately hilarious and deeply original) is defeated through compromise … . It's all so wholesome and charming that I eagerly anticipated seeing what would happen when this time-capsule place and its people were faced with something truly harrowing, such as the threat of annihilation by an intergalactic world devourer.

What ends up happening, though, is a whole lot of nothing. Knowing, somehow, that the Fantastic Baby will one day be a powerful force to exceed all others, Galactus makes the superheroes a deal: Give him the child, and he'll spare the Earth. Our team understandably refuses, and there were hints of a darker, more biting Marvel ahead after Earthlings learned of the offer and instantly turned against the Fantastic Four for putting their newborn's welfare above the lives of 8 billion others. Yet disappointingly, this PR nightmare lasts all of 10 minutes. After some huffing, puffing, and mild protests, the angry masses are instantly soothed by Sue introducing them to little Franklin – so cuuuuute! – and giving a low-energy speech about how the superheroes will always be their protectors. From then on, it's a(nother) pro-Four world all the way, everyone collectively agreeing to follow defense strategies to the letter and, when necessary, evade Galactus' wrath by hiding.

This bit, I'll admit, got a chuckle out of me. But I don't think it was meant to, just as I'm sure I wasn't meant to derisively giggle whenever Johnny's flaming body didn't appear to generate any heat (people standing a foot away don't register any discomfort), or when Galactus lumbered about New York like a B-movie kaiju, or when Sue's force-field attacks made her resemble a mime student doing that walking-into-the-wind exercise. While the central performances, excepting the unseen Moss-Bachrach's suave readings, are too dully serviceable to be actively bad, the same can't be said for much of the rest of the film, and I couldn't tell if I was more bummed by the generic, obnoxious action climax, the weirdly (and maddeningly) boring Silver Surfer encounters, or the nearly complete absence of Mr. Fantastic employing his miraculous powers of elasticity.

Although the tenor of so many of my MCU and DCU reviews suggests that I wasn't into comic books as a kid, those who knew me when can attest that I very much was, and the Fantastic Fours were my favorites of all. But despite being an easy improvement on 2015's disgraceful effort (though not 2005's actually-really-decent one), The Fantastic Four: First Steps squanders its initial goodwill and exceptional design with one halfhearted or dimwitted choice after another, not least of which is the only memorable showcase of Reed Richards' powers: Galactus entertaining himself by pulling the stretchy guy out like taffy. We Mr. Fantastic fans deserve better than that. After the fates he's already suffered this year in The Last of Us, Materialists, and Eddington, so does Pedro Pascal.

THE HOME

Even at his most alert, Pete Davidson generally looks like he hasn't slept in weeks, which makes him ideal casting for director/co-writer James DeMarco's batshit-crazy horror yarn The Home.

Faced with either community service or a prison stint, and still mourning the decades-ago death of his foster-home brother Luke, Davidson's recently arrested graffiti artist Max grudgingly accepts a months-long, in-house residency as chief janitor at the Green Meadows retirement home. Sure, there's a creepy face staring at him from a fourth-floor window. The other residents, however, seem friendly enough, and the job proves not too burdensome. Still, Max can't sleep – partly due to his nightmares involving Luke and the elderly residents, partly due to the screams he occasionally hears from the fourth floor … and mostly due to his growing sense that there's something very wrong with this place. A feeling exacerbated by retiree Norma (Mary Beth Peil), the most endearing of the retirees, telling him, “There's something very wrong with this place.” What that something turns out to be, though, is so outlandishly ridiculous, yet so joltingly perverse, that I'm pretty sure my jaw dropped and stayed dropped for the 20 minutes that followed its reveal. Not since 2021's Malignant, or maybe the following year's Orphan: First Kill, has a fright flick so gobsmacked me with a narrative shock that it wound up making a mediocre movie kind of awesome.

Not all of The Purge creator DeMarco's latest boasts that twist's level of genre ingenuity; the dream sequences get an overly thorough workout, there are visual clichés (cobwebby tunnels, scrapbooks of incriminating photos) by the truckload, and one look at the smiling, kindly face of the home's resident physician Dr. Sabian (character-actor great Bruce Altman) is all you need to know that unspeakable medical evil is afoot. But Davidson is quite good here – except in one tricky scene near the end that requires more emotion than the star is willing or able to provide. Those playing Max's parents and the Green Meadows denizens, some of them Tony-winning and -nominated theatre mainstays, are universally superb, among them the radiantly beautiful 85-year-old Peil, Ethan Phillips, Victor Williams, the endlessly dynamic John Glover, and Jessica Hecht, who manages to steal an entire scene with one ultra-chipper, perfectly unsettling “Hi-i-i-i!!”

And while I can't, in good conscience, say anything about the blood-soaked lunacy of the climactic scenes, you should probably be grateful, because I'm also reasonably sure I can't say enough. Not every piece of the puzzle might hold together. But if you're the sort who instinctively enjoys trying to figure out the eventual surprises in these types of things, pay special attention to Max's increasing sleeplessness, the fourth-floor draining process, Dr. Sabian's compliment about Max's eyes, and Glover's assertion that maladies don't kill the elderly so much as boredom does. Then watch, astonished, as this sick, sick movie goes to town. If it seemed odd that Davidson – who, of course, is primarily a comedian – would sign up for a dour chiller in which he rarely cracks a joke, you'll undeniably get why he did in The Home's final minutes. That's when this so-so effort goes into full-scale Bizarro World mode, and Pete, drenched in blood, looks happier, more awake, than ever before.

HOUSE ON EDEN

Written, produced, and directed by Canadian TikTok sensation Kris Collins, who also stars, the “found footage” horror trifle House on Eden begs a question that many of my 55-and-older demographic might frequently ask and (in my case, at least) always hate asking: Are we getting grumpier, or are the youths of today more irritating than youths of the past?

In 1999, when The Blair Witch Project debuted, 31-year-old me thought the indie smash worked in large part because of how much we collectively liked the trio of intrepid, doomed amateur filmmakers played by Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams. Their mostly improvised, early-20-something banter was predictably filled with F-bombs and general crudeness. But the kids themselves were funny and relatable, and so honest in their terror that it genuinely hurt when Josh went missing, and when Heather made her last video-diary entry, and when Mike met his ultimate fate staring into a corner. Despite its deliberately scrappy nature, the filmmaking was rock-solid, and the performances went a long way in convincing us, as the early marketing insisted, that what we were seeing was real. At the very least, it sure felt that way.

For all intents and purposes, Collins' first feature is Blair Witch revisited, albeit with the multi-hyphenate and fellow Canadians Celina Myers and Jason-Christopher Mayer trekking into the woods to reveal, for their social-media followers, the untold “truth” behind an abandoned house that may have been a murderous one. Even at a mere 78 minutes, the film is absolutely intolerable, and not just because this was all done with considerably more artistry 26 years ago. Without getting too “Get off my lawn!” about it all, the House on Eden kids are the worst. They're not funny, they're not charming, they're not empathetic. And they spend so much time regurgitating the same adjectives that everything they swear is “terrifying” and “insane” and “crazy” about their dry-as-dirt supernatural experience becomes less so … which is kind of incredible given that terror, insanity, and craziness were nonexistent from the start.

Collins is to be commended, I suppose, for her ambitious incorporation of the legend of Lilith, a figure from Jewish and Mesopotamian mythology (notoriously Adam's “first wife” before Eve) whose exact purpose in the plot is sketchy at best. But cast as “themselves” in the manner of Heather, Josh, and Mike, Kris, Celina, and Jay are thoroughly dismal screen company, and I completely understood why the only two other patrons at my Thursday screening – a pair of youths roughly the age of our protagonists – appeared to ignore the empty, repetitive House on Eden entirely. These two were sitting a few rows behind me, audibly chatting and laughing about things not remotely involving the film itself. My guess is they were on their phones. Perhaps, for good reason, watching TikTok videos instead.