What I've Caught Up With, August 2025

August was an interesting month, and I didn’t watch a ton of movies. I also didn’t actually get through a full television series. Not a great deal to say, honestly. As the sign says on my office door, I can’t wait until we get back to normal fucked up instead of super fucked up.

It's Mr. Stay-Puft!

Film: Marshmallow
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!

I can’t honestly say that I’ve been getting more and more into obscure movies lately since there’s definitely a part of me that has a sort of hipster mindset with film. Years ago, when I was a lot more involved in music than I am now, I liked looking for little-know bands and artists simply because I got bored with a lot of what was out in the mass market. I love a lot of pop films (Sinners remains a favorite from 2025, for instance), but I love uncovering a gem that most people don’t know. Such is the case with Marshmallow, which is honestly better than its current reviews on sites like Letterboxd (Rotten Tomatoes has it more accurately).

Marshmallow is set up like a classic slasher movie, at least after the first couple of minutes. We’re going to start by being introduced to Morgan (Kue Lawrence), who witnesses his grandfather (Corbin Bernsen) have something like a stroke. Soon after, Morgan is sent away to summer camp, something he’s not very excited about. Morgan is a shy kid and doesn’t look like much of an outdoorsy kid. He’s also plagued with nightmares and has a desperate fear of drowning.

The Dracula Story, Take 25

Film: Dracula A.D. 1972
Format: DVD from Mokena Community Public Library through interlibrary loan on basement television.

There are a lot of basic stories that crop up on this blog over and over. It seems like there’s a Holocaust movie every year, for instance. Nothing shows up here more than Dracula, though, although there may be more zombie films overall. Dracula is probably the most frequently mentioned character, though, and that’s especially the case if you include Count Orlock as essentially the same character. With Dracula A.D. 1972 we are once again diving into the Dracula story, with the only real difference being the setting. If you have to have something to separate your Dracula movie from all of the rest, having cars and 1970s technology is at least a start.

After the original Dracula story where the Count goes ham on Mina Harker, all of the Dracula stories are essentially variations on a theme. Dracula, who was killed in the previous film (or in this case, simply killed in the past) is resurrected in one way or another. He hyper-fixates on a young woman, kills a few others to gain strength, makes a few lesser vampires to assist him, and generally speaking dies just as he is about to turn his obsession into his newest vampiric creation.

ChatGPT

Film: The Artifice Girl
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

I like science fiction and I always have. Sci-fi and fantasy were more or less my introductory genres to reading beyond children’s books. I got Ray Bradbury collections for Christmas when I was 8 and I was hooked. One of the reasons I love science fiction is that the best of it asks a great existential question that really isn’t answered by other genres: what makes us human? The advent of AI has given us this theme more and more, and The Artifice Girl explores it in a way that is interesting and worth the time to consider.

This is a question that has been asked for a long time. It’s come up regarding aliens (The Man Who Fell to Earth, for instance, or Spock’s funeral in Wrath of Khan where Kirk says that Spock was truly human), but it comes up more commonly with robots, androids, and artificial intelligence. Sometimes those intelligences are benign (Her), amoral (Ex Machina), or actively evil (Upgrade), but the question is best asked by presenting us with an intelligence that seems to walk that tightrope between human intelligence and uncanny valley. If we start with the premise that the AI in question can pass the Turing test, then the question of its humanity becomes a real one.

Out for a Bite

Film: Maggie
Format: DVD from personal collection on basement television.

Maggie is a movie that is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it’s very much a zombie movie, but there are only a couple of zombies that appear in it. It’s slow and contemplative, the sort of zombie movie that a horror fan could legitimately show to a non-horror fan with the hope that they might actually enjoy it. The second thing about Maggie is that it’s evidence that Arnold Schwarzenegger can act.

Yeah, I know. Up to this point, Arnie’s best performances were in the first two Terminator movies and a mindless killing machine and then as a mindful killing machine. In Maggie, he’s asked to play a truly emotional role, one that would be difficult for any actor, and he pulls it of surprisingly well. Arnie has some chops, and that’s kind of surprising.

Do I Make You Horny?

Film: Death of a Unicorn
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on Fire!

Remember The Cabin in the Woods? The elevator sequence is one of the better parts of the film. When all of the monsters are released and storm the compound, we get to see a whole bunch of them on the warpath. The one that didn’t really seem to fit was the unicorn, but it’s a great moment when we see it ram someone through the chest with its horn. Well, Death of a Unicorn is sort of what that movie would have looked like if our heroes had dialed up the unicorn instead of the zombie redneck torture family.

It's a fun idea, and clearly one that is going to divert into comedy for at least some of what we’re going to see. A horror movie with unicorns as the creature is, at least on the surface, going to be as scary as the rabbits in Night of the Lepus. What this means is that the film is going to depend on the comedy to work. And, for the most part, it kind of doesn’t. A24 tends to have a better reputation than this, but they can’t all be winners, can they?

A Bird in the Hand

Film: Cuckoo
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

There are times when I’m not sure what to think about a movie going in. Cuckoo is such a film. This is a movie with a positive review score from critics and a negative review score from viewers on Rotten Tomatoes, and it’s below the 3.0 Mendoza line on Letterboxd. But, while that’s true, I heard a lot good about it. It’s a real part of my life now that I find it almost impossible to talk movies with a lot of other people. Most of the time, they have no idea what the movies are that I’m talking about. “What the hell is Cuckoo?” I hear 99% of the people I know in real life saying.

Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) has just lost her mother, and as a teen, cannot really be alone, so she is forced to move to Bavaria with her father Luis (Marton Csokas), hrer stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick), and their daughter Alma (Mila Lieu), who is mute. The family has arrived there to help build a new hotel, which is run by a man named König (Dan Stevens). Needing something to do, Gretchen takes a job at the front desk, but strange things start happening immediately, including women wandering around half-clothed, multiple female guests vomiting, Alma suffering a seizure that appeared to be triggered by a strange noise, and more. Most terrifying, one night riding her bike home, Gretchen is pursued by a woman wearing a hood, an event that is passed off as a prank by the local police.