Meat Puppets

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

One of the more interesting stories, at least potentially, that crops up now and then is about the connection between art and artist. The idea of creation as a sort of insanity is a common theme, and it’s one that is easily understood by anyone who has tried to create anything more complicated than a cheeseburger. In this case, as the name Stopmotion suggest, the act of creation here will be a stop motion film that will more and more blur the lines between sanity and insanity.

Before we get too far in terms of the narrative of Stopmotion, we do need to talk about the actual animation of the film. Most of the film is not animated, but because of what is being created, a great deal of it will consist of stop motion work. Opinions on the film have been varied and run the gamut, but the actual animation is top notch, as good as you’ll find anywhere. If you are at all interested in this kind of animation and don’t mind some upsetting gore, this is a film you will want to watch at least for the way in which the story is told.

What I've Caught Up With June 2025 Part 2

On the television front, I knocked out a few bigger shows. I finished Detroiters—not a long show, but one filled with cringe, so sometimes difficult to get through. I caught up on the latest season of Doctor Who, and also finished Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, including the final movie. I’ve also finished a full watch of the original Star Trek series, a couple of episodes at a time on Saturdays. The biggest show I completed, though was The West Wing—I found the final season a slog to get through, but I did finally get through it.

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

I didn’t knock a lot of movies off the giant list in June (although I did finally get the number down to three digits, at least temporarily). For whatever reason, the movies I did watch, almost to a film, had long names, forcing me to break this up into two posts. On the personal front, I’ve gotten through all of the scanning of my mother’s photographs and slides. Now I have all of the scrapbooks. It never ends.

Trust is Hard to Come By

Film: Black Bag
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on Fire!

As I spend time catching up on several decades of television, I’ve come to realize that I really like a good legal drama. I’m not necessarily keen for cop shows, but give me a bunch of people in a courtroom (aside from the show Suits—I hated Suits), and I’m usually happy to keep watching. This is interesting to me because if you asked me what kind of shows I like, I probably wouldn’t list legal dramas. When it comes to movies, I am much the same way with espionage thrillers. I can’t say it’s a genre/subgenre that I think about a lot, but I’m always really happy to watch a good spy drama. This is relevant, because Black Bag from earlier this year is a very good spy drama.

The key to a good espionage story is essentially the same as a good thriller in general. We have to have multiple possible outcomes. We have to never really be sure of who we can or should trust. Every decision our main character makes needs to feel as if it is potentially lethal, either for themselves or for someone else. Black Bag gives us this with the added drama of the espionage taking place in the context of a marriage and several other relationships.

Stay Calm

Film: Rammbock (Rammbock: Berlin Undead; Siege of the Dead)
Format: Online video on Fire!

It does often feel like the zombie subgenre of horror films is played out, and then you run across something that does a couple of things different. Such a case is that of Rammbock, also known as Rammbock: Berlin Undead, and sometimes as Siege of the Dead. I was unable to watch this in the best of circumstances—I could only find a dubbed version online, and I would imagine that it being fully in its native German would only help it. Rammbock (which translates to “battering ram”) has its issues, but it’s pretty solid for what it is.

The basics of the zombie film were set in place with Romero’s film in 1968. Zombies, more technically ghouls, are the recently dead returned to unlife, mindless and craving the flesh of the living. Anyone bitten will turn into a zombie, since the virus/bacteria/whatever that creates the zombies in the first place is guaranteed to be eventually fatal. This is a reality that is included in zombie-adjacent films like 28 Days Later, where the “zombies” aren’t actually undead, but are otherwise the same as the standard cinematic zombie.

No, Not the Show

Film: The Walking Dead
Format: Internet video on Fire!

Some actors give every role their all no matter what. Even if the movie is terrible, poorly thought out, filled with holes, or just not very good, these actors put their heart and soul into every role they take. It’s one of the reasons I love about Boris Karloff. To be fair, Karloff made a ton of great early creepers, but a lot of them were low rent and low budget and filled with weird science and even weirder mysticism. Regardless, Karloff treated each role like Shakespeare. All of this brings us to The Walking Dead from 1936. This is technically an old-school zombie movie (in that it involves literally the walking dead), but we’re not going to be dealing with flesh-eating ghouls.

At its heart, The Walking Dead is a sort of revenge picture combined with Karloff’s classic Frankenstein role with mob ties to boot. The difference is that rather than being made up of a bunch of stitched-together body parts, Karloff is going to play a man fully resurrected by Science! and seeking revenge on those who had him killed in the first place.

Liquid Evil

Film: Prince of Darkness
Format: DVD from New Lenox Public Library through interlibrary loan on basement television.

For whatever reason, we have decided that when it comes to horror, the only real religion is Catholicism. Protestants, Hindus, and Muslims can all take a back seat, because it’s the holy celibates who have the real ability to hold back evil. If I had to guess, I would say that this comes from the fact that huge parts of the Catholic faith are hidden and kept secret. Tell someone that there is a secret Presbyterian library that holds secret lore and they’ll roll their eyes at you. Tell them that there are secret Catholic scriptures, and they’re right on board. This is, more or less, the starting place for Prince of Darkness (or John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness if you like that stamp of approval).

The secret lore in this case is a completely unknown Catholic sect of priests called the Brotherhood of Sleep. Centuries ago, the story says, the order found a container of swirling green liquid. The container, which can only be opened from the inside, is millions of years old, and we will eventually find out that the liquid itself is, essentially, the essence of Satan. The Brotherhood of Sleep has existed to keep this container sealed—and hidden even from the Vatican—but the last of the Brotherhood has died before passing on the secret.