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?

I Put a Spell on You

Film: The Love Witch
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Camp, when it’s good camp, is almost always unintentional. Quality camp is something that happens, not something that is specifically created, although there are certainly some exceptions. The Love Witch, from 2016 is possibly an exception to that basic idea, but it may not be. This is a film that is very much an homage to horror films from the 1970s. There’s a lot of The Stepford Wives lurking here, and a good amount of giallo in the mix. As a part of that, a lot of the acting is very stilted, and I can only think this is intentional. While most of the film looks like it’s taking place in that era (including some antique cars and a lot of retro furniture), everyone seems to have a cell phone, so the confusion is clearly intended.

We’re going to be spending most of the movie in the company of Elaine Parks (Samantha Robinson), a witch who is both remarkably lucky and remarkably unlucky in love. Recently widowed, and the more we see the more she is clearly implicated in the death of her husband, Elaine moves to the town of Aracata, CA, a place that accepts witchcraft. Elaine is going to set up shop, looking for a new man. She meets Trish (Laura Waddell), who is happily married, which causes some jealousy in Elaine, and yes, that’s eventually going to pay off.

Not Grabboids, but Close

Film: Grabbers
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

Comedies often play into stereotypes as a shortcut to a laugh. What this means is that if we’re going to have an Irish comedy (or horror/comedy in the case of Grabbers), there’s going to be a lot of drinking. In fact, drinking is going to be plot-central for this movie. It’s a film that simply doesn’t work unless the characters are boozed up. Despite the stereotype, it’s also a film that works in large part because of the fact that many of the characters are boozed up through the third act.

As the name of the film implies, Grabbers is also a creature feature. While I have a difficult relationship with horror comedies, I do love a good creature feature. When they’re taken seriously, you can get something like The Host, and when they’re more on the comedic side, you get something more akin to Tremors or Slither. Grabbers is much more on this side of things. This is definitely a monster movie, and it has some clear scares, but it’s also genuinely funny in places.

Ain't They Cute?

Film: Cooties
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on Fire!

The lesson that I need to constantly relearn in attacking lists of movies is that when I watch something that might show up on a list, I need to review it. I’ve seen Cooties before, but never actually reviewed it, and suddenly it’s shown up on the TSZDT list of zombie films and here we are. I didn’t hate this movie the first time I watched it, but I also didn’t love it, so I figured knocking it out as soon as I could would be a good idea. I don’t like things hanging over my head in the way that I’ll eventually have to rewatch We Need to Talk About Kevin currently is.

With any zombie movie, you either have to do things as perfectly as you can (see: Train to Busan) or do something really different with the subgenre. The X-factor in Cooties is that our zombie plague is only going to affect children. Anyone who has gone through puberty is going to get some flu-like symptoms, but the kids are going to go feral, infect each other, and straight up murder adults and eat them. They are zombies, after all.

Reboot

Film: Mickey 17
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on Fire!

The best science fiction asks interesting questions that can’t really be answered by non-genre fiction. One of those questions that gets asked is how we define ourselves as human beings. Star Trek explored this with characters like Spock, Worf, and Data, for instance. Mickey 17 asks this question in the title character. Our title character Mickey (Robert Pattinson) is essentially a clone, someone who in the context of the film has been basically 3D printed. Is he human? Depending on who you ask in the movie, you’re going to get a different answer.

Going into Mickey 17, I figured there was going to be a lot of similarity to Moon, and there is some surface similarity. But where Moon is about deep, existential questions, Mickey 17 is much more visceral and also much more political. In today’s climate, it’s hard not to see this through a political lens, whether that was intended or not. However, since this was written in part and directed by Bong Joon Ho, looking at this politically is going to more often than not be the right way to do things.

Why You Gonna Call?

Film: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

What are we to make of the Ghostbusters franchise? The original film is still a classic and still holds up—iconic cast, iconic lines, and moments that will go down as some of the best in horror/comedy ever filmed. The sequel is a bit of a mixed bag, again having some fun moments, but not living up to the original. The female cast reboot tanked, sadly, because I think it’s a better film than its reputation. Then we got Ghostbusters: Afterlife that really wanted to carry on from the original film. It was good, and it spawned the sequel, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, and this movie doesn’t know what it wants to be, and it’s going to make that a problem for everyone watching it.

Right off the top, there’s a massive issue with Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, and it’s one of the biggest issues from Ghostbusters II. In both films, we have protagonists who have essentially saved the world from a massive influx of ghosts are now essentially running on a shoestring and essentially maligned by everyone. I get that heroes sometimes fall, but we’re not given that story. It’s just that suddenly the people who saved the city now have a target on their backs and they’re barely making ends meet.

Does Nazareth Get a Cut for Naming Rights?

Film: Love Hurts
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on Fire!

Some people are natural action stars and some people aren’t, and it’s not always clear who works and who doesn’t. When Bruce Willis did Die Hard, it was seen as a huge misfire until people actually saw the movie. Who would have believed Bob Odenkirk as a movie badass before Nobody came out? Love Hurts attempts to do the same thing for the recently career-resurrected Ke Huy Quan, and sadly, the whole thing feels like an error. The action sequences are fun, but the movie itself is a huge miss.

It's a shame, too, because I really like Ke Huy Quan. He’s easy to like, and that’s one of the problems with Love Hurts. We’re presented with real estate agent Marvin Gable (Quan), who is evidently a very good real estate agent and who has signs up all over town. Someone is defacing those signs, though, giving him mustaches and sideburns, which seems like a harmless prank and the sort of thing that typically happens to real estate agents.

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.

This is What I Expect from the G7

Film: Rumours
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.

Guy Maddin makes some crazy-ass movies. When I came across Rumours, I knew it was one I would want to get to eventually, and when a copy essentially fell into my lap, I figure it was better now than later. I had to watch this over a couple of days just because of life, but I think taking a break in the middle actually helped me. This isn’t a deep movie, but it’s one that you need to soak in for a bit to try to make some sense of.

Rumours is generally being classified as a horror comedy, and that’s probably the closest we’re going to get to an actual genre/sub-genre choice that makes sense. In reality, this is an absurdist film. It makes a certain bizarre sense, but only by forcing yourself to make some sense of it. It feels like a dreamscape that shows up after you’ve been eating a tray of brownies that you didn’t know had been altered by the baker, and, inconsolably high, you decide to sleep off the drugs. There’s a kind of through line of story, but all of this feels like dream logic and it doesn’t actually make a great deal of sense.

Family Ties

Film: A Real Pain
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

I’ve decided to be a little more proactive on watching Oscar films (and 2024 films in general) this year, so I figured diving head-first into A Real Pain would be a good place to start. I tend to like Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg. A running joke I have is that the easiest way to tell the difference between Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera is to remember that Eisenberg is the one with talent. A Real Pain is evidence of this, even if you haven’t liked his previous work; in addition to starring in it, he also wrote and directed it.

The film tells the story of David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin), a pair of cousins born less than a month apart. David is a fairly normal, responsible person with a wife and child, and a job selling advertising banners online. He is very concerned with appearance, and with being on time for things, correct and not causing a scene. Benji is the complete opposite, someone with strong ideas and opinions, but who is otherwise aimless. They are wildly different, and have decided to take a trip together to Poland to visit their heritage, the house where their grandmother grew up, and the concentration camp that she survived.

Feathers McGraw

Film: Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

I love Wallace & Gromit, and I have for years. I was first introduced to them by a friend who gave us a VHS of the short The Wrong Trousers more than 25 years ago, and I’ve been a fan ever since. There’s a lot of good animation out there, and a lot of good stop-motion, but Aardman is the king of stop-motion work. It’s been too long since we’ve had a new W&G film. Curse of the Wererabbit is from 2005 and the short A Matter of Loaf and Death came out in 2008. It’s been 16 years since Wallace & Gromit have been in a new adventure, so when I learned about Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, it moved to the top of the list quickly.

This is a film where it genuinely helps to have some knowledge of the Wallace & Gromit canon. The second W&G short, The Wrong Trousers, which is the highpoint in my opinion, is going to be important as backstory. If you haven’t seen it, the 30 minutes it takes to watch is highly recommended; you can find it on Prime as well as free on DailyMotion, and in terms of plotting, animation, and story, you’re not going to find much that beats it.

Sacre Blech!

Film: An American Werewolf in Paris
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on Fire!

Sometimes, when someone drops a sequel years after the original movie, it turns out decently. Sometimes, you get An American Werewolf in Paris. This is a movie that very clearly wants to capitalize on the vastly superior first film that is more than a decade and a half older. Honestly, it feels like a cheat. If you’ve seen An American Werewolf in London, you’re likely to go into this with expectations. Those expectations are not going to be met. This is equally true if you thought it was instead a riff on An American in Paris.

In terms of the set-up, you don’t really need more than the title of the film and the knowledge of the London version. This time, there’s a trio of Americans, and this time, they’re not walking across the moors but instead find themselves in the City of Lights. Andy (Tom Everett Scott), Brad (Vince Vieluf), and Chris (Phil Buckman) are touring Europe and attempting extreme thrills. Andy, who we are going to be following here, is behind on points, but plans on upping his total by (sigh) bungee jumping off the Eiffel Tower, because that’s something that you won’t get caught doing.

Electric Sheep?

Film: Robot Dreams
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on various players.

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.

Frankenstein's Baby

Film: Poor Things
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on various players.

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.

Ten Days of Terror!: Sheitan

Film: Sheitan
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on various players.

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.

Ten Days of Terror!: Let the Wrong One In

Film: Let the Wrong One In
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

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.

In Russia, Victim Murders You

Film: Botched
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

A lot of horror movies have given us protagonists who are criminals, either intentionally or forced to be so as the premise. Crime movies are a pretty easy sell in general, as are horror movies, so it makes sense to combine them. The entire premise of a crime/horror movie is that the criminals end up trying to commit a crime in a place that is cursed or haunted or against someone who is worse than they are. From The People Under the Stairs to this year’s Abigail, a criminal plot is an easy transition to horror. And so we have Botched.

Richie (Stephen Dorff) is a thief working for Mr. Groznyi (Sean Pertwee), a Russian mob boss. Richie works for him because Groznyi smuggled Richie into the U.S. years before, which means that Richie is in his debt. The film opens with a diamond heist that goes well until a freak car accident followed by another one causes Richie to lose the diamonds. Now, with nothing to show for his work, Richie needs to pull off a new heist to repay his boss.

Chaos Gremlin

Film: Nimona
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

Of all of the Oscar categories that I actively pursue, none seems more willing to go off the beaten path for a nomination than Best Animated Feature. While a NetFlix movie is not “off the beaten path,” Nimona feels a great deal like it is. This is a movie that I haven’t actually heard a great deal about, and I’m kind of surprised. Based on the story that we get and the way that story unfolds, I struggle to believe that this wasn’t the subject of a series of protests from dudes wearing mirrored sunglasses while recording vertical videos in the cab of their oversized trucks.

What do I mean by that? I mean that Nimona is gay, and I mean that in the literal sense, not in the sense that grade school kids used it 20 or 30 years ago. Our main character, Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed) is in an openly same-sex relationship with the ridiculously-named Ambrosious Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang). There are also implications that our title character Nimona (Chloë Grace Moretz) is female-presenting but essentially genderless and attracted to women. So, like 60-70% of the main characters are somewhere in the LGBTQIA+ continuum, which is similarly true of the cast.

The Real Dracula's Daughter

Film: Abigail
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on Kid #1’s TV.

Sometimes, you see a trailer and you know you’re going to watch the movie in question. That was certainly the case with Abigail, a movie that ruins the big surprise in the trailer, and demonstrates that it ultimately doesn’t matter. To be fair, the big reveal in Abigail doesn’t happen at the end of the film, but is the driving force of the second act, so it’s not that much of a loss. So, I’m going to naturally talk about that reveal. Since it’s something that literally shows up in the trailer, this is not going to be anything like a spoiler.

As the film begins, we see a young girl performing ballet. Meanwhile, there is a group of people who are clearly planning something and that something is clearly kidnapping the girl. It all goes off without a hitch. The team of six kidnappers takes the girl to a huge secluded house with the plans to wait for a day for what will be a huge payout of millions for each person. All of this comes from the direction of a man named Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito).

Steam Heat

Film: Elemental
Format: Streaming video from Disney Plus on various players.

I usually am pretty good about the animated features from each Oscar year. It’s often the first category I finish. The movies tend to be easy to watch, not terribly long, and easy to access. That hasn’t been the case this year, where two of the films aren’t available to me streaming, at least not yet. For whatever reasons, I haven’t been able to pull the trigger on animated Oscar films this year, so I decided to finally bite the bullet and watch the Pixar entry, Elemental.

The truth is that there’s nothing particularly wrong with Elemental, but that’s not really a lot of praise for something that came out of Pixar. We’ve come to expect great things from that film studio even though they’ve had some clear missteps. As much as I would love to heap praise on Elemental, I can’t. It’s fine, but that’s all it is. It’s just fine, and in a different year, or coming from a different studio, there’s no way this gets a nomination.