My goal every year is to watch 400 movies, and for the last few years I’ve been coming up short. I came up short again this year, but I’m a lot closer than I normally am. This year I hit 366 movies, which comes out to exactly one movie per day.
I finished the Oscar list from 2023 earlier this month, just in time for the next set of Oscars, which get announced in a couple of weeks.
Sometimes I wonder what story has been filmed the most. Certainly Dracula and variations of it are at or near the top. When the Robert Eggers version of Nosferatu was released, I knew it would be one of those rare occasions when I would make it out to the theater. That said, it’s the fifth Nosferatu-related film I’ve watched for this blog—the silent version, the 1970s remake, Shadow of the Vampire, and The Last Voyage of the Demeter, and now this one. It’s a bit much, and that’s not even including all of the Dracula variants.
Eggers’s film expands on the original Nosferatu by nearly a full hour of running time. The Murnau version clocks in at just over 80 minutes, and this one at about 135, with roughly seven of that taken up as credits. Most of that additional running time is used to show the influence of Count Orlock (Bill Skarsgård) on the area around him and going deeper into the individual aspects of the story. Where the original may have glossed over some things or run quickly through scenes, Eggers takes his time.
There are weird confluences in movies sometimes. Every now and then, two studios release movies that are disturbingly similar at almost the same time. Witness The Sixth Sense and Stir of Echoes being released in consecutive months. Other examples include Dante’s Peak/Volcano, Tombstone/Wyatt Earp, The Prestige/The Illusionist and Friends with Benefits/No Strings Attached. The same thing happened in 2024. Both Boy Kills World and Monkey Man were released in April, and the two movies have a lot of common elements.
Boy Kills World is about a character named Boy who is attacked and left for dead by a corrupt government. He grows up with the goal of killing the people responsible for the death of his sister. Monkey Man follows the story of Kid (Dev Patel), who works in fight clubs and menial jobs. Kid was attacked and left for dead by a corrupt police force, and trains with the goal of killing the man responsible for the death of his mother. The main difference between them, aside from the setting, is that Boy Kills World is in large part a comedy and Monkey Man plays it entirely straight.
For Christmas this year my kids got me a year of HBO Max, which is honestly the only thing I asked for. I’m hoping to be more current on film in the coming year, and having a Max subscription is a part of this. It also gives me access to a number of shows I want to watch. This is also where The Zone of Interest is streaming, and it’s the last film I needed to complete everything for the last Oscars on my list of categories. Naturally, once I got the subscription up and running, it was the first thing I queued up.
There have been hundreds of movies made about the Holocaust, of course, and there will be hundreds more. An evil this huge and terrible needs to be confronted, both to keep it in the public consciousness (especially since Holocaust denial is a constant issue) and to purge it. In a sense, these films are a sort of therapy, a way of lancing the boil and draining the poison. What The Zone of Interest does is look at this terrible piece of history in a completely new way, something that I thought might well be impossible at this point.
I tend to think Ralph Fiennes rarely gets the credit that he deserves. Fiennes makes a really good villain (see the Harry Potter franchise, In Bruges, and Schindler’s List. He’s good in straight dramas—see his run in the James Bond franchise. He can also do comedy, as in In Bruges (again) and The Grand Budapest Hotel. He’s an actor who I will watch when I come across one of his movies almost automatically, so when I saw Conclave streaming on Peacock, I knew I’d get to it sooner rather than later.
My own religious opinions are fairly well known on this blog. I’m not merely someone who is irreligious but someone who is generally anti-theistic, believing that religion does more harm than good. It’s a constant part of my movie watching, though, because so many horror movies rely on religious themes. Conclave isn’t a horror movie, but it very much is a religious one, taking place essentially entirely in the Vatican.
Some movies are important because of the story they tell, the quality of what happens on screen, a break-out role for an actor, or are formative in the career of the director. Then, there are films like The Lost World from 1925, which is important because of technology. While not the first stop-motion film, it is the first one of feature length, or at least the first American feature-length film to feature stop-motion prominently. And how do you appeal to the sensibilities of the early movie-going public? You give them stop-motion dinosaurs, and a lot of them.
The Lost World is based on a story by Arthur Conan Doyle, who appears at the beginning of some prints of the film. This is a film that was considered lost in full—only a number of abridged copies remained, but an almost-full restoration has been created, giving us almost the entire original film. The original running time was about 106 minutes; the version I found runs about 102 with a short intro about the restoration, so maybe a total of 5 minutes missing.
On my list of Oscar movies from 2023, there are two that have been impossible to find for me. I’m going to have to do a trial of HBO to get The Zone of Interest, I suppose. The one that was more problematic until recently was Robot Dreams, which wasn’t even streaming for pay anywhere. But, suddenly, it’s streaming on Hulu, and I finally got the chance to watch it and complete the Best Animated Feature category from last year.
Robot Dreams is fascinating for a number of reasons. The first is that there is no dialogue in the film. There’s music with lyrics and there are some vocalizations, but no one really speaks through the entirety of the film. This isn’t the first time this has happened, of course, but it is pretty unusual. Another interesting part of this film is that despite having anthropomorphized animals for most of the characters, this takes place in the real world. Our characters don’t just go to baseball games, but are Mets fans. They drink Tropicana and read Stephen King books and eat Nathan’s hot dogs with (gasp) Heinz ketchup. This, incidentally, is more evidence that the film takes place in New York; no self-respecting Chicagoan would ever put ketchup on a hot dog.
When the environmental movement really got running in the 1970s, one of the results was the subgenre of environmental horror. Sure, you got all of the nuclear-powered stuff from decades earlier. There’s a whole slew of 1950s irradiated giant bug movies and Godzilla is straight out of this genre as well. But in the 1970s, it was less about nuclear radiation and the results of The Bomb and more about humankind’s purposeful destruction of the environment. The Food of the Gods, Frogs, The Prophecy, Squirm, Grizzly, Phase IV and even some straight science fiction like Silent Running were focused on the idea that mankind had it in for Mother Nature. Few were as directly targeted as Long Weekend, where the idea of Man vs. Nature is taken at its most literal.
There’s not a massive amount of plot in Lost Weekend. In Australia, two people, Peter (John Hargreaves) and Marcia (Briony Behets) head out for a long weekend (hence the title) with John’s dog Cricket. The idea is to get back to nature for a few days—swim and sunbathe on an isolated beach—and perhaps work on the problems in their relationship, which are legion. As the squabbling intensifies, we learn that evidently both Peter and Marcia have had affairs, and recently Marcia has had an abortion after an affair with another man—something insisted on by Peter since he was convinced the child wasn’t his.
It’s often interesting to see the early films of someone who turned into a star. It's fun to see someone who ened up having a great career starring in something kind of trashy. That’s definitely the case with Lady in a Cage, which features the second role and first-ever credited role for James Caan. This is a good half decade or so before Brian’s Song. Seeing him playing a young tough (he’s about 23 in this) is one of the more interesting parts of this film.
The easiest film connection to make with Lady in a Cage is that this is like a salacious and vulgar version of Wait Until Dark. The reality, though, is that Lady in a Cage came first by three years. This is much closer to a sort of “youth in revolt” picture that focuses on the victim instead of the youths. If you’re an old school MST3K fan, think something along the lines of Wild Rebels or The Hellcats, but from the point of view of their victims.
There has been a long fascination with the idea of the end of the world. I’m not specifically talking about the eschatology of Christianity in this case, but more in the literal “the world is going to end” sense, whether through nuclear devastation, climate peril, or disease. There’s a part of us that seems to yearn for the species-wide abyss. Probably my first two encounters with this idea were stories—Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7 and Ray Bradbury’s The Last Night of the World. Roshwald’s book is about a man living in the deepest bunker after a nuclear war while Bradbury’s story is more about the world simply switching off. I bring these up because both stories are far more interesting than Silent Night, and that shouldn’t be the case.
This is an “end of the world” story, and unlike the bombastic 2012, the action-oriented Snowpiercer, or the darkly comic Don’t Look Up, this is a film much closer to The Happening, in a sense. Essentially, humanity has dry-humped the planet so badly that the planet is fighting back. A massive noxious poison cloud has begun engulfing the world, and what everyone is getting for Christmas this year is death.
I need to tell you a story, and I promise it will be relevant to Barbarian. If you’ve seen this movie, you’ll know immediately when I tell you this is a story about what I affectionately called a murder basement. My older daughter moved to St. Louis during the pandemic for an opportunity with a dance company. My wife and I go down to St. Louis when she has shows. The first time we went down, we stayed at an Airbnb and it had a murder basement. I am not kidding.
Here’s specifically what I mean—there was a door in the house that was locked and barred from the inside of the house, and it led to a set of narrow stairs leading down. I certainly didn’t go down at night, but I did the next morning—and the stairs led to an open room that contained a trunk. I did not open the trunk. You couldn’t have paid me to open that trunk. I went back up the stairs and locked and barred the door again, that was my experience with the murder basement. If you’ve seen Barbarian, you know the connection I’m making.
I have to wonder about the creation of the film Dumplings (or Gau ji if you prefer). This film was released in 2004, the same year as what is known in the U.S. as Three...Extremes, an anthology film. The first film in that anthology is also called Dumplings and is also directed by Fruit Chan. It’s the half-length version of this movie, with some differences, at least in terms of the ending. Were they filmed at the same time? The cast is the same and the story is the same and a lot of it looks the same. Was it entirely re-shot? Why put them out in the same year?
That last question is perhaps the most interesting one. A great deal of what makes Dumplings work from the audience’s point of view is what the dumplings in the title actually are. Going into this already knowing didn’t make the film worse in any noticeable way, but it certainly got rid of a lot of the tension that I experienced in the anthologized version. The entire point of the film is to be deeply upsetting—it still is in places—but the shock is gone for most of it if you’ve seen the shorter version. Of course, if you see this version first, it spoils the anthologized story.
I think it’s likely that everyone who is a film nerd has those few actors or directors that they don’t like that everyone else seems to. I’ve long maintained that Quentin Tarantino would be better if he stopped trying to be awesome and instead tried to just be good. I find myself in the same position with Yorgos Lanthimos. Everyone seems to love his work, and I don’t see it. I’ve delayed watching Poor Things for months because of this but simply can’t delay any longer. It’s the last of the 2023 Oscar movies I need to watch that I won’t have to pay for.
The positive news for me, though, is that with Poor Things I’ve figured out exactly what it is that I don’t like about Lanthimos. Seeing this, it seems so obvious that I don’t know why it took me this long to figure it out. Yorgos Lanthimos is the dark, alternate universe Wes Anderson, and now that I’ve typed it, I hate that fact even more.
It’s good to have friends. As I make my way through the They Shoot Zombies list, the percentage of films that I can’t find gets a little bit higher with each film I watch. Up to today, Who Can Kill a Child? (or ¿Quién puerde matar a un niño? in the original Spanish) was the only movie I hadn’t seen in the top-200, and I couldn’t find it. I have a friend who is also a horror nerd and who happens to be a librarian...so she bought a copy for the library and gave it to me to watch even before it was checked in. Like I said, it’s good to have friends.
We had a running joke, calling this “the film we can’t name” until it showed up—it's not the kind of title you want to say out loud around children...or parents...or people. In the defense of the movie, this isn’t a film specifically about child murderers and the question it is asking is not seeking an answer in terms of actually naming people. There is a title drop in the film, and when it happens, the question is essentially a rhetorical one—what kind of person could do this?
I’m going to spoil The Uninvited in this review. I’m going to be nice enough to put that spoiler information below the fold—you'll have to click on “more” to get to it. I do that not out of respect for the movie, but out of respect for you, the reader. This is a movie that deserves to be spoiled because it is not merely a shoddy remake of a vastly superior film, but because the shock ending it utilizes has been used better in every other film I’ve seen that has used it.
In fact, I am not merely going to spoil this movie. In doing so, I will be spoiling a few other movies as well. I’m sorry about that. However, I’m going to be extremely careful in this respect. In the next paragraph, I’m going to mention the main film that this one is aping, mainly because this is technically a remake of that film. This means that if you haven’t seen that film (and you should—it's brilliant), you can avoid having it spoiled by not reading past paragraph #3. The other movies that essentially do the same thing as this one will be much further in the review, and most of those are old enough that they won’t be spoiled, and the one that is more recent is disappointing enough that you’re not losing much.
I’m not shy about dropping the occasional curse on this blog. I tend to do so after the first couple of paragraphs to avoid offending anyone without their consent of opting to read further. That’s not going to be the case with La Bête (The Beast), a French horror film that is legitimately as much erotica as it is horror. You should know what you are getting into with this film. When I say that this is erotic horror, you need to think less “sexy” and more “porn for the artistic crowd.” This borders on In the Realm of the Senses levels of sexual content. If you decide to watch this, make sure your shades are drawn. You’ve been warned.
This is also going to be evident from the jump. La Bête opens with horses fucking, and again, I mean this legitimately. I mean giant horse dicks and pulsating horse vaginas. This is what lies ahead for us, because the “Beast” in the title is both a real beast and a sexual one, and so what’s to come is going to very much be what you’d expect if Penthouse decided to make Beauty and the Beast.
I think everyone, more or less, is affected by ideas of death. You can be repelled by it, fearful of it, anxious for it, curious about it, or compelled, but at some level, we’re all going to have to face thoughts of it at one time or another. It’s healthy to deal with it, but it’s also really easy for it to become an obsession, either faked (like many a goth) or real—and the real obsession can end up getting dangerous. A film like Ab-Normal Beauty (or Sei mong se jun in the original Cantonese) explores that idea, both in terms of fascination with death and dangerous obsession with it.
Jiney (Race Wong) is an award-winning art student, but despite all of the acclaim that she receives, she is unhappy with her work. No amount of praise from fellow student Anson (Anson Leung) will help her feel better about herself, and her roommate/girlfriend Jas (Race Wong’s real-life sister Rosanne Wong) tries to help her get her mind off of her disappointment in her work. When Jiney witnesses a fatal car accident, she uses the opportunity to start snapping pictures and finds herself drawn to these images of death.
When I think about horror movies, there are parts of the world that I don’t really consider that much. Scandanavia is one of those places, and I’m not sure why that is. I’m happy to think of British and French horror, German and Spanish, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Mexican, and more, but Scandanavia rarely comes to mind, even with films like Midsommar. Lake of the Dead (or De dødes tjern in the original Norwegian) is very much an example of folk horror, using a remote cabin and a legend to create a sense of dread in the audience and the characters.
The film takes place in 1958, the present day for the characters involved. Author Bernhard Borge (Henki Kolstad) and his wife Sonja (Bjørg Engh) take a trip with four friends from Oslo. Those friends include psychoanalyst Kai (Erling Lindahl), editor Gabriel (André Bjerke), lawyer Harald (Georg Richter), and Harald’s fiancée Liljan (Henny Moan). The purpose of the trip is to visit Liljan’s brother Bjørn (Per Lillo Stenberg) at a cabin deep in the forest. When they arrive at the cabin, Bjørn is nowhere to be found.
People who read horror either love H.P. Lovecraft’s work or they hate it. I don’t know that there’s a lot of middle ground. One of the problems with Lovecraft’s writing is that, like Ray Bradbury’s writing, it doesn’t always translate well to film. In Bradbury’s case, it’s dialogue—no one actually speaks like Bradbury characters do. With Lovecraft, it’s the fact that his creepy crawlies and monsters defy description. This hasn’t prevented people from trying to film Lovecraft stories, but most of them don’t live up to the promise. The creature at the end of the original Hellboy is probably the closest we’ve seen to a true Lovecraftian horror on film. His story “The Call of Cthulhu” was thought to be unfilmable, but about 20 years ago, a group of independent filmmakers created The Call of Cthulhu as a traditional silent film…and it works.
Like a lot of Lovecraft (and Poe before him), the story is told in flashback, by a narrator who is relating his story to someone, trying to explain exactly what happened. In this case, a man (Matt Foyer) inherits the work of his great-uncle, who was obsessed with a religious cult called the Cthulhu Cult. The nephew pours through the work and becomes similarly obsessed himself. The fact that everyone who encounters or deals with the cult in some way seems to end up dead does not dissuade him. Encounters with the cult itself eventually leads the man to searching for the source of the cult, which leads him to the fabled city of R’lyeh, where great Cthulhu lies sleeping.
There is rumored to be a Final Destination 6 in the works, but until that happens, Final Destination 5 is the end of the series, and it means that I can put this series behind me, at least for now. Final Destination 5 seems like the end of the series that we deserve, though, or at least one that ties things up, regardless of whether or not it starts up again. On my end, I’m happy just to be done with it, even if that’s temporary.
By this time you know the setup. There’s going to be an inciting accident of which someone will have a terrible premonition. They will freak out, a group of people will follow them off whatever they are on or out of whatever they are in, and the accident will happen as foreseen. Death, having had his victims taken away, will then stalk the survivors and kill them via Rube Goldberg contraption in the order they were supposed to die. Eventually, our main character, the person who had the original premonition will figure out what is happening and will do some research on how they might survive what is happening, but Death will always win out in the end. The real question is always simply how the next person is going to die, since a) we know they will, and b) we know the order it’s going to happen.
You do this long enough, you learn a few lessons. I watched We Need to Talk About Kevin some time ago and never want to see it again, but I didn’t bother to write it up. Now it’s on the They Shoot Zombies list, so I’m going to have to watch it again. What does that have to do with The Final Destination, a.k.a. Final Destination 4? It’s the only film in the Final Destination series that isn’t on the list. I’m reviewing it in self-defense. I don’t think it’s ever going to show up, but I sure as hell don’t want to sit through it again. This is entirely proactive.
The Final Destination is the low point in the series. There’s a reason it hasn’t shown up on the They Shoot Zombies list. While most of them have a sub-3.0 rating on Letterboxd, this one is the lowest by nearly a full point. There are reasons for this. In addition to me not wanting to have to watch this again, I’m hoping to prevent you from wasting the 82 minutes it takes to get through this one.
I like the conceit of the Final Destination movies. The idea that a couple of people have cheated death then become targets of Death in the literal sense and wind up dying in a series of Rube Goldberg-style accidents is a fantastic hook for a film. The problem with the series is that it reached its highpoint in the open scenes of Final Destination 2. Not a single person I know who has seen that movie will willingly drive behind a log truck. What that means for the rest of the films in the series is that the car crash sequence is always hanging over the films. Final Destination 3 tries desperately to match this and can’t.
The way the films work is that the opening sequence sets up the idea that someone has a terrible premonition of an accident, freaks out, and leaves the situation along with a few other people. Then the accident happens exactly like the premonition suggested it would. The people who managed to avoid their terrible fate in the freak accident are then picked off one by one, essentially in the order they would have died in the premonition. Where the first film used a plane crash and the second used a massive highway accident, Final Destination 3 opts for a freak accident on a rollercoaster.
I knew going into the original version of The Town that Dreaded Sundown that I had seen it before. There’s a moment or two that are nearly impossible to forget, not in a good way but in a weird horror/comedy way. What I forgot about this movie was how much of it is ridiculous and odd. I didn’t like the movie the first time I saw it and I didn’t like it this time, either, but this time, I can articulate the reasons I find the film lacking far better. I suppose this is the benefit of having done this for more than a dozen years.
One of those things is being a little more aware of who is making the movies in question. In this case, our auteur is Charles B. Pierce. Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans may remember Pierce as the director and star of Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues. There are a lot of similarities between this film and that one, and since Pierce’s 1985 sasquatch-adjacent film is one that appeared on a show specifically made to mock bad movies, this isn’t a good thing.
Were I another person, I would say that the films of William Castle are a guilty pleasure for me. The truth, though, is that I don’t subscribe to the idea of guilty pleasures; I like the movies I do for reasons that I am happy to articulate, and that includes movies that are generally disliked or, in the case of Castle’s films, are pure gimmick. I love how audacious Castle could be. His films were goofy and silly, and he gained audience with tricks like in-seat vibrators, glasses that revealed “ghosts” on the screen, and having people sign a waiver that they couldn’t sue if they died of fright. The gimmick for Homicidal was a timer that appeared at the film’s climax—patron’s too scared to continue could get a full refund, but were forced in a humiliating walk of shame. The truth is that Castle’s films were never really scary enough to force anyone to do this, but the idea is a dandy one.
However, the plot that drives Homicidal forward is one that needs to be fully discussed. There is a solid shock moment at the end that the film builds up to, but to really understand what is happening, that needs to be talked about. That being the case, the rest of this review should be considered to be under a spoiler warning. If you don’t want a movie that’s close to retirement age spoiled for you, you may not want to click the link to continue.
A bunch of the stuff that I had reserved to watch on Tubi left the service all at once, which put me in a bit of a bind—I had to watch a bunch of stuff as quickly as I could before it disappeared. That meant watching movies I knew I’d get to eventually much sooner than I planned. One of those movies was Eden Lake, a film with shades of torture porn and living as a close cousin to the home invasion genre, two areas of horror I’m not a huge fan of.
What’s more significant, though, is that from the opening moments I had the feeling that I’d seen this before. In fact, I felt it so strongly that I had to check through my records (yes, I keep records of the lists I’m pursuing) to see if I hadn’t already watched this and just forgotten to cross it off. It turns out I was both right and wrong--Eden Lake is very much a remake of the French Extremity film Ils.
There are a lot of classic tropes in movies in general, and there are genre expectations in terms of plot. There are also set-ups that we see over and over again because they work. For the horror genre, one of the most classic of tropes is the idea of a group of teens or 20-somethings heading out to the middle of nowhere and then something terrible happens. The “people in the middle of nowhere” trope goes back to the silent era, or at least the earliest talkies. In later years and with the rise of more gonzo horror, it happened more and more. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, and Evil Dead wouldn’t exist without this trope. The Hole takes this basic idea and attempts to do something a little different with it.
We start with the rescue of boarding school student Liz (Thora Birch), who is the only survivor of a group of four who have been missing for nearly three weeks. Through a series of interviews with a psychologist (Embeth Davidtz). The story we get from Liz is that her friend Martin (Daniel Brockelbank) has discovered a fallout shelter in the middle of the forest nearby and has a key for it. Liz wants quality time with the school stud, Mike (Desmond Harrington), and arranges for her friend Frankie (Keira Knightley) and her mancrush Geoff (Laurence Fox) to go with them during a school field trip. Their parents think they are on the trip; the school thinks they are with their parents.
The Ritual is one of those movies that feels like you’ve seen in pieces before. There are moments that are directly reminiscent of other films, places where other films have borrowed from it, and allusions to films that don’t on the surface have a lot to do with this one. Among the films that I could see shining through in The Ritual are The Blair Witch Project, King Kong, The Grey and The Descent. I also recognized films like Annihilation, Antlers and Midsommar, but these were released after The Ritual, making this a potential influence more than anything else.
We start out with a group of five guys in a pub deciding what they want to do as a group vacation. Every suggestion eventually gets shot down. The last one under discussion is a hiking trip through Sweden suggested by Rob (Paul Reid). Shortly thereafter, as Rob and Luke (Rafe Spall) go into a liquor store to buy wine, Rob is killed in a robbery gone wrong.
I sometimes have a movie on while I’m working. I find more and more, though, that this only really works for me if it’s a movie that I’ve seen a lot. It’s there mostly for background noise more than anything else. There are a few things I can do while watching a movie, though, depending on the movie. Foreign films and anything else that requires that I read subtitles is always going to be a harder sell in that respect. What this means is that I actually watched a large chunk of Sheitan (Satan for the more English-minded) at the gym, on my phone, while on the treadmill. And I learned a lesson; R-rated movies probably aren’t the best choice for public areas.
Bluntly, there’s some nudity and sex in this. Normally, I don’t care that much, but watching the beginnings of a threesome in public isn’t necessarily something that I was comfortable with doing, so it’s something I won’t be repeating in the future. It’s also why the next time I watched a movie in part on the treadmill, it was a silent film, which felt a lot safer in that respect.
Sometimes I wonder if the Satanic Panic of the 1980s was fueled in part by the Satan-infused movies of the previous decade. The ‘70s appeared to be rife with cinematic stories of people turning their life over to Satan. Sometimes you get The Touch of Satan, which ended up as one of the better late-MST3K episodes. Sometimes you get The Devil’s Rain, which featured a surprisingly robust cast for a B-movie fueled by the devil. And sometimes you get The Brotherhood of Satan, a movie that is absolutely bonkers for part of it, but still manages to bring in some real evil and a few decent surprises.
This is also a film that features the talents of L.Q. Jones, a character actor whose career spanned 40+ years, and who named himself after the character he played in his first movie. Jones is virtually unrecognizable in this without his full, giant mustache. Jones is also an uncredited co-author of the screenplay. He plays the sheriff in this, and one of the reasons he’s hard to spot is that he genuinely looks about 10 years younger than his actual age—quite a feat for the early 1970s. He also wrote the follow-up book adaptation.
If you’ve never read The Divine Comedy, I recommend it. It’s pretty accessible for 14th Century literature, and a good translation makes for a really fun read. Well, at least for two-thirds of it. In the Ancient Greek tradition, a “comedy” is a story that starts with the characters at a low point and ends with them at a high point. Since this story begins in Hell and ends in Heaven, it is the ultimate comedy in that Greek sense. In Inferno, Dante witnesses the tortures of the damned. In the second book, Purgatorio, he sees the punishments inflicted on those who might still someday be purified to reach Heaven. In the final book, Paradisio, Dante sees Heaven. Bluntly, in Dante’s vision, Heaven is boring. That’s why the 1911 film adaptation focuses much more on Limbo, Hell, and Purgatory. The version I watched featured a prog-rock soundtrack that would have felt very much at home with Peter Gabriel in the cast and Tony Banks on the keyboards.
The film follows the trials of Dante’s Inferno pretty well, although it does leave out some specific areas of the various levels of Hell. The poet (Salvatore Papa) is denied entry to Paradise by being blocked by a trio of demons—Greed, Pride, and Lust. His idealized woman, Beatrice (Emilise Beretta, I think—the film isn’t clear), descends from Heaven and invokes the poet Virgil (Arturo Pirovano) to guide the poet through Hell.
I find myself exhausted by the Saw franchise. Don’t get me wrong; the first movie is genuinely good and unique in a lot of ways. It looks like it’s going to be a torture porn movie, but it is actually a disturbing psychological horror. From that first movie, though, the franchise has devolved into little more than excuses to put people in terrible situations and murder them for the thrill of the audience. That’s great if that’s all you want, but I get tired of it pretty quickly. So when Saw IV showed up on the They Shoot Zombies list, I knew eventually I’d have to dip my toes back into this particular sewage plant, and here we are.
If you’re unfamiliar with the basics of the franchise, the story is that a cancer patient named John Kramer (Tobin Bell), nicknamed Jigsaw, who finds people who he thinks no longer appreciate the gift of life that they have been given. He traps them and puts them into deathtraps where they have to fight to stay alive, typically having to go through something terribly painful (and often nasty) to survive. Those who live now have (he says) an appreciation for the life they have. Those who fail have a puzzle piece-shaped bit of skin removed from their body, representing that “missing piece” of the person—a survival instinct.
The original The Return of the Living Dead did the seemingly impossible. It was a spoof of a horror classic (the George Romero Living Dead classics) and actually made not only a watchable film, but added to the lore in a significant way. The trope that zombies like to eat brains comes from this series, not Romero’s. The second movie in the RotLD series was a huge step down in quality, mainly because the comedy didn’t work. The third film, Return of the Living Dead III (or Return of the Living Dead Part III if you prefer) is kind of a return to form. There are a lot of changes, though, the biggest being that this third and final film in the series doesn’t really attempt the comedy.
We do have to stick with the series, though, so we’re going to pick up five years after the previous film. Young Curt Reynolds (J. Trevor Edmond) and his girlfriend Julie (Melinda “Mindy” Clarke) steal his father’s access key card to the military base he works on, and the two go exploring. While there, they discover that Curt’s father (Kent McCord) is in charge of experiments that involve re-animating the dead. However, the experiment goes wrong, and because of this, Curt’s father is reassigned.
Horror movies always reflect the fears of the time and of the culture. It’s not shocking that post-9/11 a lot of American horror films were like Hostel and Turistas: extremely xenophobic. A great deal of Japanese horror was of the atomic variety (Gojira and the like) for obvious reasons, but a lot of Japanese horror is ghost-based as well. Japanese horror stories have involved ghosts for centuries; often the ghosts are there to impart morality lessons to the living. Modern Japanese ghosts, though, are often about bringing up the sins of the past—the people of the present are still paying for the crimes that happened years ago. That’s certain the them of the Ju-on films, and it’s the major throughline of Ju-on: The Grudge 2 (or just Ju-on 2 if you prefer).
While this does tell a particular story, it does so in a non-linear structure that isn’t easy to follow. It jumps around a lot and we see the same thing from several different perspectives at different times. The conceit of the original movie is continued here. That original conceit is that when someone dies in extreme sorrow or extreme rage, those emotions linger, generating a curse. Anyone who encounters that curse dies from it and lingers themselves, continuing and expanding the curse in an ever-widening circle. That’s where we started in the first movie, where we ended when the first movie ended, and where we will pick up here.
Years ago, when I reviewed Paranormal Activity 2, I commented that I was one day going to have to watch the third installment because it had been added to the They Shoot Zombies list. I don’t like this series at all, so I was dreading this and putting it off. But, eventually, you have to take the plunge, and so here we are with Paranormal Activity 3.
The first movie in the series was a fantastic example of a very smart filmmaker filming very stupid characters. The second movie at least gave us characters whose motivations could be understood. They did the wrong thing over and over, of course, but at least it was understandable. It was also a prequel to the first movie. This, the third installment in the series, is a pre-prequel, dipping further back into the history of the characters from the first movie, going all the way back to the 1980s.
I don’t go out of my way to reference Mystery Science Theater 3000, but there are times when I find it necessary. The Devil Bat is one of those cases. This movie didn’t actually appear on MST3K, but it definitely feels like it could have. Movies very much like it did appear on the show. I am put in mind of a Bela Lugosi clunker called The Corpse Vanishes that has a fairly similar plot in a lot of respects. The Devil Bat is no worse than that one, and certainly not a whole lot better.
This is yet another in a series of films that gives us Bela Lugosi as a respected scientist of some sort who is secretly completely insane. Lugosi in this case is Dr. Paul Carruthers, a chemist who lives in a small town called Heathville and who works for a cosmetics company. What we will learn eventually is that the company has made a fortune off of the formulas of Carruthers for which he took a $10,000 payoff (it’s worth noting that in today’s dollars, that’s close to a quarter million). Anyway, now that the company has made bank from his ideas, Carruthers decides he is being disrespected and wants revenge.
In The Bride of Frankenstein, there’s a section where we learn that the doctor that Frankenstein has thrown in with is obsessed with making tiny people. Tod Browning might have taken a page out of the screenplay for The Devil-Doll, a film that is virtually entirely based on the idea of miniature people doing bad things. There are a surprising number of films that feature this idea to the point that there’s a Wikipedia page devoted to films that feature miniature people.
The Devil-Doll starts with a prison break. Marcel (Henry B. Walthall), a mad scientist and Paul Lavond (Lionel Barrymore) escape from Devil’s Island. Marcel wishes to get back to his wife and experimentation while Lavond is looking for revenge. A former banker, he was convicted of robbing his own bank and killing a night watchman, and has served 17 years of a life sentence. However, Lavond is innocent; his partners Coulvet (Robert Greig), Matin (Pedro de Cordoba), and Radin (Arthur Hohl) framed him after stealing the money themselves.
I do love horror movies, and while there are plenty of modern horror movies that I enjoy a great deal, there’s a part of me that is drawn to the classics, the pre-gore films that have that Gothic flair to them. Despite the name, Corridors of Blood is exactly this sort of film. It’s arguably terribly misnamed, because there’s not a great deal of blood here, and perhaps not even that many corridors. The truth is, though, that if it were actually named for what the film is about, a film called The History of Anesthesia isn’t going to put a lot of butts in the seats.
It really is what the film is about, though. Dr. Thomas Bolton (Boris Karloff) works in a hospital in the 1840s in London. Dr. Bolton is frustrated, not because he lacks skill. In fact, he is noted as being a very good and successful surgeon because of his speed. No, what frustrates him is that the common expression of the time suggests that the surgeon’s knife and pain in the patient are inseparable. His goal is to find a way to prevent pain in the patient during surgery—too many of his patients lose their minds or die from shock thanks to the pain. He begins experimenting with ways to handle thing, mildly assisted by his son Jonathan (Francis Matthews) and his niece Susan (Betta St. John).
There’s a part of me that realizes Vincent Price had a career before he started doing horror movies in the mid-‘50s. If memory serves, House of Wax was his first true horror movie, which makes The Mad Magician from 1954 his second. It’s interesting to see him this early in his career, still clearly the great Vincent Price, but also still feeling his way in the genre. To be fair, The Mad Magician is barely a horror movie. Additionally, while it conjures up thoughts of magician suffering from insanity, in truth he’s really just angry.
Price plays Don Gallico, who makes a living creating illusions for other magicians. He’s gotten an itch to perform on the stage, though, and calling himself Gallico the Great, he decides to put on a show featuring a new trick. This trick is a version of sawing a lady in half, but features a huge buzzsaw set up to behead the assistant.
There’s a certain art to naming a movie or a book, or really any project. The right name piques interest while the wrong name puts people off or doesn’t get anyone thinking about anything. Case in point is The Cursed. I struggle to think of a more generic title for a horror movie; there certainly can be one, but I don’t know off-hand what it would or could be. This is especially true when you discover that the original name of this project was Eight for Silver, which is at least evocative of something, or has the potential to get the audience thinking.
The curse in this case is going to come from a group of Romani people (called “Gypsies” throughout the film as a slur, because it is one), and the cursed of the title are going to be the men who slaughter them and their families. We’re going to start in the future, though, at the battlefield of the Somme in World War I, where a man is treated for bullet wounds—and an additional bullet of non-German design is found in his body.
I grew up in the church. It was a liberal church, to be sure, but still in the church. I have long since given up religion as well as religious belief. It’s my position that religion, as a rule, makes things worse, a notion probably put into my head by the title of a Christopher Hitchens book, but one that I stand by. I’m in mind of Hitchens as I look at Medusa, a recent film out of Brazil. This is a film that is clearly referencing Jair Bolsonaro in a lot of respects, at least in terms of its approach to the effects of extreme belief.
Hitchens tells an anecdote of an interview with right-wing whackaloon Dennis Prager where Prager asks him if he were in a foreign city and was approached by a group of young men, would he be more or less nervous if he knew they had just come from a prayer meeting. Hitchens responds by saying that, staying only with the letter B, he’s had that experience in Baghdad, Belgrade, Bosnia, Bombay, and Belfast, and if you were ever in any of those cities and you saw men leaving a prayer meeting, you knew exactly how fast you had to run in the other direction. Thanks to Medusa, we can add Brazil to the list.
It’s not easy to do horror-comedy. Most fall into the trap of being comedy-forward instead of dealing with anything that genuinely approaches horror. There are some solid exceptions, of course. Shaun of the Dead is the template for solid horror-comedy as it should be done. It’s actually funny and there are some genuine horror elements in it. Let the Wrong One In, clearly meant to reference Let the Right One In, attempts to do for vampires when Shaun did for zombies.
Average Dubliner Matt (Karl Rice) deals with his mother (Hilda Fay) and his drunken, junkie brother Deco (Eoin Duffy) as best he can. What he doesn’t know is that Deco was recently attacked by a vampire named Sheila (Mary Murray), who was turned at her bachelorette party near Transylvania. Deco is persona non grata at home, but, guilted into helping him, Matt invites him into the house to keep him safe from the sunlight. Wanting to help, he calls for a doctor, but instead gets Henry (Anthony Head), Sheila’s fiancé, who has sworn vengeance against all of the vampires in Ireland, all of which are being created by Sheila and her bridal party.
Sometimes, an actor falls in love with a character and they can’t walk away from that character. Kenneth Branagh appears to have become entranced with the character of Hercule Poirot. A Haunting in Venice is the third Branagh Poirot movie; he got through the two classics in A Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. In that respect, A Haunting in Venice is treading a little bit of new ground. It’s nice to see some new Poirot stories on the big screen rather than the same two over and over. That said, it’s probably inevitable that Branagh will eventually adapt Evil Under the Sun.
Right now, there are two mystery franchises that have large budgets and attract a good number of stars. Branagh’s Poirot films are one of them; the second is the Knives Out series with Daniel Craig. Branagh’s films are period pieces and are adapted from Agatha Christie stories. If you’re going to adapt a mystery, you could do a lot worse than the grande dame of whodunnits. Rian Johnson’s Knives Out films are modern and original. Both include a star actor who clearly loves the role. And if you ask me to put my money on one, I’m going with Knives Out.
When I was a kid, I was given a collection of H.G. Wells stories. It’s hard to call them actual novels because of the length; they are more or less novellas. These are classic stories, though, and they have been made into excellent movies more than once. Included in the collection are The Time Machine, The Food of the Gods, The First Men in the Moon, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Dr. Moreau. All six of these stories run less than 700 pages combined. What this means is that they are easy to adapt accurately. This doesn’t, however, mean that they are easy to adapt well. The 1977 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau is evidence enough of that.
My guess is that you know at least the basics of the story—a man named Braddock (Michael York) is shipwrecked on a faraway island where he meets the mysterious Doctor Moreau (Burt Lancaster) and his assistant Montgomery (Nigel Davenport). Also on the island are a number of bestial men who seem sub- or half-human. There is also a woman named Maria (Barbara Carrera), who claims to have been brought to the island by Moreau.
I admit that I am someone who puts a lot of stock into verisimilitude in movies. I need to be able to see that something could happen in the world that is shown to us for me to be involved in the story. I can accept magic, and spaceships, and laser guns. I can even accept all of those in the same movie if I’m given a consistent world. When a film breaks with that, when it breaks the rules of the world that it presents, it tends to lose me a little bit. Samuel Fuller’s White Dog, a film so notorious that it was not officially fully released for more than two-and-a-half decades, is a rare exception to this. In this case, the message is more important than the fact that the people involved act in ways that don’t specifically make sense.
The notorious nature of White Dog is enough that it makes sense for me to offer a trigger warning on it: this is a movie that is directly about racism. This is not sanitized “racism is bad” like Driving Miss Daisy or even the “racism infects everything” of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. This is vicious and brutal, and while the film isn’t remotely pro-racism, it is shocking and unflinching and brutal. So, this being the case, you’ve been warned. Click on the link to continue reading if you’re up for it. If you’re not, no shame.
Certain directors do certain things really well. Hitchcock did suspense like no one else, and early Spielberg is rife with absent fathers. In the horror world, backwoods psychopaths come in a lot of flavors, and you have to give some credit to directors like Wes Craven for films like The Hills Have Eyes. But no one really does true hillbilly psychopathy like Tobe Hooper did. Don’t get me wrong; Craven wrote and directed a good psycho, but there’s a real touch of nastiness to Hooper’s work. You can see it in a film like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where it genuinely feels like he found a family of inbred mutants. Eaten Alive has the same feeling. There’s something about this film that feels legitimately dangerous, like we’re seeing people who aren’t acting.
Eaten Alive is not long on plot, but it doesn’t really need to be. It’s not the sort of movie that trades on its plot in general. It trades specifically on the idea of the audience wanting to see people get eaten by a crocodile. We’re going to ignore the fact that this takes place in Texas so it should be an alligator. To the person being dined upon, that difference is going to be pretty low on the list of concerns.
It’s a legitimate question to ask who had the bigger fall from grace, Ray Milland or Joan Crawford. Before sliding into a number of television appearances, Milland appeared in both Frogs and The Thing with Two Heads in 1972. Joan Crawford’s storied film career ended with her starring role in Trog, playing an anthropologist who tries to connect with a cave-dwelling troglodyte. I think this is a competition that could go either way. I bring it up only because I watched Frogs today, and it’s something truly unlike anything I expected. The be fair, I had no idea what to expect.
Amazingly movie-named Pickett Smith (an un-mustachioed Sam Elliott) is a wildlife photographer taking pictures around an unnamed island in an unnamed (but clearly Southern) part of the country. He discovers a significant amount of evidence indicating pollution probably stemming from their use on the island plantation owned by the Crockett family. His canoe is swamped by Clint Crockett (Adam Roarke) and his sister Karen (Joan Van Ark). As a sort of reparation, they bring him to the family home where a celebration is soon to be taking place.
I don’t typically watch a movie twice before writing a review, but I found that it was necessary for The Diabolical Dr. Z (or Miss Muerte if you prefer). There is a plot to this movie, but it goes in a lot of directions, and a lot of what is happening feels like it’s here specifically to get the running time to feature length. Co-screenwriter and director Jesús Franco has a story that he wants to tell here, but seems to have needed an editor to trim out some of the fat.
The truth is that The Diabolical Dr. Z should be called Dr. Z’s Diabolical Daughter. Our titular character, Doctor Zimmer (Antonio Jiménez Escribano) doesn’t make it all the way through the first act. We see him doing some experiments on an escaped felon. Eventually we come to learn that Zimmer’s experiments are in mind control, a process that appears to involve pushing large nails into people’s temples and spines. From here, Zimmer and his daughter Irma (Mabel Karr) arrive at a conference on neurology. Zimmer makes the claim that he can find the genetic roots of good and evil and that he should be permitted to experiment on human subjects (although he’s already been doing so). Rebuffed by a trio of doctors, Zimmer suffers an attack and dies.
There’s something about the gross out movie that is both repellent and fascinating. That’s exactly what Body Melt is, and there’s no other way to categorize it. This is an Australian movie very much in the same vein as Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste, but there are going to be a lot of other influences from the 1980s tossed in here as well. There are going to be elements that feel like Videodrome, The Stuff, Society and even a direct reference to The Thing at one point.
Body Melt, in addition to making reference to all of those other films, is another in the long list of movies about an evil corporation. In this case, the company makes a dietary supplement called Vimuville. They’ve been putting these supplements in the mailboxes of a neighborhood called Pebbles Court in Melbourne as a sort of test run of what the supplements can do. These are designed to produce people who are perfectly healthy, but of course there are terrible side effects. These start with hallucinations and end with, well…body melt.
There are times when the order in you see something affects the way that you understand them. The 1930s film Mad Love is a remake of the silent film The Hands of Orlac, trimmed down, sexed up, and starring Peter Lorre. I saw that remake before seeing the original, which means that while watching The Hands of Orlac (Orlacs Hände if you prefer the original German), I had to remind myself that what I remember from Mad Love was done her first. The things that felt derivative were, in fact, not so at all.
The basic idea of The Hands of Orlac involves a sort of super-science that smacks of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel. Concert pianist Paul Orlac (Conrad Veidt, a silent horror staple) is in a terrible train accident and his hands are crushed. Knowing that his hands are his entire life, the doctor transplants new hands onto Orlac. Naturally, those hands didn’t just come from anywhere or anyone. They are the hands of Vasseur, a recently executed murderer.
