Blood In, (Lots of) Blood Out

Film: The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (Blade of the Ripper, Next!, The Next Victim, Lo strano vizio della signora Wardh)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

You know you’re in for a treat when a movie has a half dozen or so release titles. That’s the case with The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, released as Lo strano vizio della signora Wardh in its native giallo-friendly Italian and as Blade of the Ripper, Next!, and The Next Victim in the U.S. Honestly, the first title is probably the best one, because it’s going to call up all of the prurient joys of Italian horror films, which rarely skimp on the nudity or the blood.

And, not to drop a spoiler above the fold, but that strange vice in the title is, in fact, blood. This vice—she is both repelled by and excited by blood—doesn’t really figure into the plot at all. Essentially, it’s there as a way for director Sergio Martino to show sex and nudity. If your title character has a blood fetish and it’s hinted at in the name of the film, you’d better show it. I’m bringing this up as a minor spoiler because the only way to talk about The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh is to dive head-first into spoilers. Consider the rest of this review under a spoiler tag—you’ve been warned.

At Some Point, You Should Just Leave

Film: The Tunnel
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on various players.

Found footage is a very specific type of film, and it’s one that I’m not always that happy to watch, all things considered. The Tunnel is an Australian found footage film that doubles as a pseudo-documentary. What this means is that while a large part of the film is shown to us as found footage, there’s also a considerable amount that is people in the found footage being interviewed. We’re going to go back and forth between the two things, and sometimes we’ll see the footage with voiceover explaining what is happening.

We’re going to get frequent reminders that The Tunnel is set up as a documentary, and nowhere is this going to be more the case than in the opening moments. We learn that during a serious drought in New South Wales, the local government has decided to recycle millions of liters of water currently trapped underground in abandoned train tunnels beneath Sydney. Millions of Australian dollars are earmarked for getting the water and purifying it for human use and then suddenly the plan to reclaim the water is no longer talked about and the government no longer talks about it. At the same time, there are reports that the homeless people in Sydney who are living in the tunnels are going missing.

A Movie so Nice, They Named it Twice

Film: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on massive television.

When a sequel comes out a really long time after the original movie, it feels like a crap shoot. Sometimes, you get something like Mad Max: Fury Road, a movie for the ages. Sometimes you get Psycho II, which is far better than it deserves to be. And sometimes, you get Coming 2 America, which should never have been greenlit. So I went into Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, coming 36 years after the original film, with hope, but with my expectations guarded.

It's also worth noting that we have upgraded our downstairs television. It’s hard to say no to a giant-ass screen when the price drops on it so much that it costs about half of a car payment. I was planning on christening the TV with something like the new Frankenstein film, but this was more my wife’s speed, and so we went with this instead.

What I've Caught Up With, October 2025 Part 2

On the television front, I’ve been pushing toward getting through the MCU shows more out of a sense of completeness than anything else. The biggest of these is Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which I just wrapped up. I also watched Channel Zero as my workout show for October. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s sort of the Hydrox-not-Oreo version of American Horror Story. The seasons are shorter (six episodes each), and a lot more focused. While it doesn’t have the star power, the stories are pretty good, with season 2 being the highlight.

What I've Caught Up With, October 2025 Part 1

So, 2025 continues to be the worst year I’ve had in a long time—my father succumbed to dementia near the end of the month. Honestly, he’d been more or less gone for the past year—this felt more like closing a door that was already swinging shut. I did take out a few films, though—I seem to be focusing more on science fiction right now. I don’t know if that’s a metaphor.

Ten Days of Terror!: Horror Shorts

Film: Dementia; A Warning to the Curious; The Fall of the House of Usher (1928, American)
Format: Various sources, various players.

Fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 are going to be at least vaguely aware of the existence of Bruno VeSota (or Bruno Ve Sota, as he is sometimes credited). Buttery fat dude VeSota appeared in five MST experiments, most notably to me personally as the chubby club owning foil of Daddy-O. He did one or two notable films, though, perhaps none more bizarre than Dementia from 1955, a film that, at 56 minutes, straddles the border of short and feature-length. What is most noteworthy about this film is the fact that there is no real dialogue included.

Dementia is very clearly an experimental film, if the lack of dialogue didn’t already indicate that. To put it bluntly, this film is an exploration of a descent into madness, a sort of fever dream following the experiences of an unreliable narrator and a bizarre and terrifying evening she spends in and around a seedy hotel, reliving her abusive past, and perhaps committing crimes in the present.

Ten Days of Terror!: Antiviral

Film: Antiviral
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

In the documentary Trekkies, there’s a moment where someone who works at conventions talks about the time that he sold a class of the “Q virus,” a glass of water that actor John de Lancie drank from on a panel while he was extremely sick. Someone in the crowd bought the glass and immediately drank the water, knowing that it was likely he would catch whatever illness de Lancie had at the time. That kind of thinking is at the heart of Antiviral, a movie made by Brandon Cronenberg but that could have easily been made by his father David.

The basic conceit behind Antiviral is that in the future, the idea of celebrity worship has metastasized into something far more obsessive and destructive. One of the main ways in which this is expressed is in the dealing of viruses and pathogens that infect celebrities. So, it’s not just that you can get COVID just like Tom Hanks did. You can be injected with the exact strain of the virus that he had, harvested from his cells. You’re not just getting the same thing; it’s like he’s infected you himself.