31 MORE Days, 31 MORE Screams: Day 23 (10 Cloverfield Lane)

Say Roseanne one more time and I'll break your other arm.

I had no real plan to cover this... but then again, the diversion into found footage sort of happened. After Cloverfield, I remembered that this movie came out and I hadn't seen it. Curiousity led me to it, and all I knew was the premise. John Goodman locks Mary Elizabeth Winstead in his basement because he thinks there's monsters outside or something. This being a Cloverfield-adjacent film, I expected the reveal at the end to be monsters. Nevertheless, what I got was pretty good! It does have some spooks and a lot of ambiguity, which I like. We can do our thing again and dive on in to what it does well, what weird shit went down outside the movie, and anything else that may cross my mind for the next couple of hundred words. On we go to 10 Cloverfield Lane!


I really love the wordless opening with Winstead which tells us everything we need to know about her leaving a relationship and taking a bottle of some sort of liquor along with her. It doesn't take long for the shit to hit the fan, though. Winstead's Michelle is indeed held down against her will in an underground bunker by John Goodman's Howard, who is convinced that the world's ended and there's some bad chemical fallout shit in the air outside. Most of the film is centered inside this bunker, and as an audience you definitely feel enclosed within this space. There's another survivor, a guy named Evan whose actor I don't know offhand, but he's good in this! We want to see Michelle get out of here, and so that leads us to try and deduce just what in the hell is actually happening here in the bunker. Is the world really fucked? Is Howard full of shit? Howard is definitely a fascinating character, to be sure. Even though he's got two folks in his bunker, he maintains that he did it all out of generosity. You'd like to think he was a brave and compassionate soul who saved two folks from the end of the world... but no. No, he doesn't act like it. Demanding that they be grateful for him saving their lives, keeping the keys himself, exploding at Michelle during dinner for not respecting him. These are not the actions of a samaritan savior. These are the petty actions of a power-hungry man who demands to be in charge. A sick lady outside when Michelle tries to escape somewhat sells the story of the air being bad out there... but at this point I was like Sherlock Holmes. It could have all been a long con from Howard.


Shit only gets worse. It's implied that Howard had a missing girl locked down here before, and Michelle and Evan work on making a hazmat suit in secret. This I really like, because earlier in the movie Michelle shares her passion for fashion design and that's a really neat method of making your own escape. Howard finds out and shows them his goddamn vat of super-acid... and when Evan tries to claim responsibility for it all, HE SHOOTS HIM DEAD ON THE SPOT! Bullshit. From Howard's point of view, this is one of the last three surviving humans. His reaction to "I somewhat betrayed your trust and I'm honestly telling you" is "I WILL NOW MURDER YOU IN COLD BLOOD.". Again. Not the actions of a savior. You almost wonder why he didn't let Michelle go; was it because he didn't want the infection to get in, or because he wanted to control her and kill her on his terms to feel like a big man? Either way, our girl gets out in a tense scene after melting Howard's face with acid. Hey holy shit there's birds outside! He was full of shit, there's no plague! Then a big flying monster attacks. Holy fuck. Surprise, you're watching a Cloverfield movie and there's big scary monsters! Howard was telling the half truth? Either way, the best scene of the film happens when the big flying monster picks up the truck with Michelle in it. Chekov's liquor bottle shows up again and Michelle makes a Molotov cocktail with it and hurls it into the monster's mouth to kill it. Mary Elizabeth Winstead, 2. Aliens, nil. Our film ends with her heading to Houston to meet up with other survivors. 10 Cloverfield Lane is pretty neat, with a villain you love to hate and a bunch of monsters at the end. Also Mary Elizabeth Winstead gets to be a badass and beat up aliens again. What's weird is that, if pals are to be believed, this is in an alternate universe from the original Cloverfield. Really, JJ? Two movies in and we're going to AUs? You haven't even fleshed out the Cloverfield Prime universe beyond "in 2008 a monster fucked up New York"! Now isn't the time to be delving into side stories! Whatever. If Cloverfield is to be a franchise anthology with minor monster interaction, so be it. Just bill it as such. In that regard, 10 Cloverfield Lane works. It's tangentially related to the original, but it still works.