Back Through the Looking Glass

Film: Black Mirror Season 7
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

I don’t talk much about television on this blog, but as streaming services occupy more and more space in media, the dividing line between television and movie continues to blur. Black Mirror is an anthology series, but also has episodes that are essentially feature-length films. Are these short movies? Actual movies? Shows? I tend to think of them as kind of like novellas—they don’t tend to have the heft of a full novel, but they’re more involved than a short story.

The series has had its ups and downs. I didn’t hate Season 6 and it had some clear highpoints, but it also felt badly misdirected, as at least three of the five episodes were very clearly horror-themed rather than centered on ideas of technology, especially technology run amok. Season 7 feels much more on track as far as that goes, something like a return to form. If the series continues, this feels like a good place to continue it from.

All Cops are Maniac

Film: Maniac Cop
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

One of the common ideas in horror is finding something that is supposed to be trustworthy and turning it into a killer. This isn’t turning rabbits into monsters (like Night of the Lepus), but more people and things we think are safe. Consider Chucky from the Child’s Play movies, medical professionals like Dr. Giggles or The Dentist, and babies in It’s Alive. Even Santa Claus gets this treatment in a lot of movies. Maniac Cop does the same thing, obviously with the police.

Maniac Cop is a pretty typical schlocky movie from 1988 as the title suggests. Call your movie Maniac Cop and you’re not going to expect Shakespeare. Add in B-movie king Bruce Campbell and genre mainstays like Tom Atkins and Robert Z’Dar (as well as genuine badass Richard Roundtree), and what you’ve got is a B-movie that at least has the potential to be fun.

What I've Caught Up With, April 2025

It’s probably not much of a surprise that I didn’t actually watch a lot of movies or television in April. My mother’s funeral service was a week ago, and things have been hectic. Watching a movie seems less easy to do right now, but it’s time to get back into things, I think.

Television-wise, the only show I actually completed was the latest season of Reacher. I have been watching Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, The West Wing, and The Critic, but lately, my viewing is pretty much down across the board.

How Many Roads?

Film: A Complete Unknown
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

I used to be a music nerd. Before I was a movie nerd, I was very much the sort of person who would name a bunch of obscure bands. And, honestly, then I grew up and I stopped caring about knowing more about stuff than other people. I’m old enough that there’s a lot of music that I like that’s gone past the category of “oldies.” I’m a huge Beatles fan, I love Steely Dan, and most of my musical roots are in ‘70s prog rock and early ‘80s punk. I’m also a fan of Bob Dylan for his lyrics and because of, not despite, his voice. There’s a part of me that seems to love singers who can’t really sing. Anyway, A Complete Unknown just started streaming on Hulu, so I figured I’d give it a watch.

Like any biopic, or at least like most of them, this is going to cover a period of the person in question. For Dylan (Timothée Chalamet), this means from his beginnings in 1961, his rise to folk music prominence, and his controversial move to electric instruments at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. I mean, I get why folk fans were angry about the move to an electric guitar, but a ton of Dylan’s best songs were played on electric guitars.

IHQC

Film: In a Violent Nature
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

I’ve been thinking about the idea of a Myers-Briggs categorization for slasher killers. Right now, my thinking is Mortal/Immortal (M/I), Huge/Small (H/S), Quiet/Talkative (Q/T) and Covered/Uncovered (C/U, and this means basically masked or unmasked, but the “M” was already taken). So, Jason Vorhees would be IHQC—he’s immortal, huge, doesn’t talk, and has his face covered. Freddy Kruger would be ISTU—he’s also immortal, but normal sized, spits out one-liners, and doesn’t wear a mask. Leatherface is MHQC; Chucky is ISTU, and on and on. Johnny, our killer from last year’s In a Violent Nature, would be another in that classic vein—IHQC. Johnny can’t be stopped, is gigantic, never talks, and despite being unmasked initially, hunts down a mask after his first couple of kills.

Just like you can give the killer a type, you can also rank slasher movies in a variety of ways. You can look at the killer’s origin story, the number of kills, the style/gruesomeness of kills, the quality of the mask, etc. Leslie Vernon from Behind the Mask has solid kills and a great mask, but a weird origin. Freddy’s origin is horrifying, but he has panache and a fantastic signature weapon. Johnny, once again, is going to go for the classic. Johnny was a developmentally-delayed child who lived with his father at a logging camp. A bit of a pest to the other workers, he was tricked into climbing a fire tower, where someone waited at the top to scare him. Johnny fell off the tower to his death, and then his father was killed in the resulting brawl.

Everyone Needs a Helping Hand

Film: Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant)
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

Sometimes, the title of a movie tells you everything you need to know about the plot. Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (or Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant is one such film. There’s not going to be a lot of surprises here in terms of who the main character is or who the main character is going to find. This is a story of a vampire who doesn’t want to kill anyone, and figures that it would be better to find someone who wants to die. Honestly, it takes a page out of the movie Byzantium, but it’s a good page to crib notes from.

Sasha (Lilas-Rose Cantin as a child, then Sara Montpetit for most of the film) is traumatized when her vampire family kills and drains the blood from a clown hired to perform at her birthday party. Because of this, she decides she doesn’t want to kill. Because of this, her fangs never come in, and she survives because her mother (Sophie Cadieux) and father (Steve Laplante) hunt for her, providing her with bags of blood for her to drink. Sasha is something of a scandal in the family, of course, since everyone else in the family is clearly a predator. To solve her problem, she is sent to live with Denise (Noémie O’Farrell), her cousin.

Salo Lite

Film: In a Glass Cage (Tras en cristal)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

There are times when I know I’m going to get hurt by the movie that I am watching. Sometimes, this is an experience that, as rough as it is, is something that is worth doing. Come and See is a film like that. I don’t want to watch it again, but I’m happy I watched it. Sometimes, I’m there to tick a box, as was the case with Salo, a film that scarred me enough that I remember pretty much everything about that viewing. Rarely, I get something like In a Glass Cage (Tras en cristal, a film that is unpleasant in terms of topic and characters, but felt as middle of the road as any film I’ve seen in some time in terms of quality.

There are some connections that In a Glass Cage has with other media. I’d be shocked if you told me that the film’s writer/director wasn’t familiar with the Stephen King novella Apt Pupil. While the stories aren’t identical, they are certainly similar in a lot of respects. There’s also a great deal of Salo in this movie, oddly. There’s nothing as overtly disgusting as the coprophagia scenes in that movie, but the destructive, awful hedonism is certainly in both films. It took me a bit to make that connection, but it’s definitely there.