What I've Caught Up With, August 2024

August was a difficult month, involving some travel and dealing with my dad, which is always fun. But, no complaints--I knocked out a few from the big list, including a couple that I put up as full reviews. On the television front, I finally caught up on Doctor Who, having completed the first Ncuti Gatwa season. I've also finished Farscape, and watched all of the short Brit-com series Black Books. White Collar is still my workout show for a couple more weeks. It's also worth saying that everyone who told me that Arrested Development dropped off after season 3 was absolutely correct.

But Are You Worth Saving?

Film: No One Will Save You
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

Genre mashups always have the potential to be interesting. That’s especially the case with subgenre mashups, at least in my opinion. No One Will Save You is just such a case. To say that this is a horror/science fiction film is to name it in a group of hundreds and thousands of other films. More specifically, though, this is an alien invasion movie and a home invasion movie. It’s like the final confrontation from Signs mixed with Mike Flanagan’s Hush, with a bit of Invasion of the Body Snatchers tossed in for good measure. That’s a combination that has a lot of potential.

The reality of No One Will Save You is that it lives up to at least some of that potential, although not all of it. There are some really interesting ideas presented in this, but there are some serious questions that are left unanswered. I don’t always mind a few unanswered questions, but in this case, those are very plot-central. Because of this, the film feels oddly unfinished and unsatisfying.

Are All Summer Camps This Dangerous?

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

When a particular genre movie makes a lot of money, it immediately spawns imitators trying to cash in on the formula. Asylum is an American film company that produces what are kindly known as “mockbusters,” films that are clearly derived from major pictures and made on the cheap. Pacific Rim becomes Atlantic Rim for Asylum, and why remake I am Legend when you can just call it I am Omega. Madman is like that, although it wasn’t made by Asylum. This is a film that is clearly derived from Friday the 13th, and it’s not shy about its source material.

That being the case, it’s not a shock that this begins like The Fog, with people around a campfire telling scary stories. However, rather than this being about an important anniversary for a town, we’re at a summer camp, listening to the head counselor Max (Carl Fredericks). What Friday the 13th discovered, either by genius or by chance, is that summer camps are the natural habitat of what Siskel and Ebert used to call “dead teenager” movies. The kids in question are isolated, horny, unsupervised (since they are the counselors), and vulnerable.

Wide Awake

Film: Come True
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!.

I’m one of those people who doesn’t remember his dreams. I can recall glimpses of them now and then, but in general, I recall virtually nothing from wherever my mind goes at night. Dreams are fascinating, though, because it seems like anything can happen in your dreams. You can be back in high school, or chased by a chainsaw-wielding clown…or both. Come True is a movie that explores that place and posits the possibility of things from the real world moving into the dream world, and vice versa. As someone who has struggled with insomnia in the past, that world of dreams is both a desired destination and a little terrifying.

Sara Dunn (Julia Sarah Stone) is a high school student who is essentially homeless. She avoids her mother, but sneaks into the family home to steal food. At night, she sleeps rough in a sleeping back or in the homes of friends. Her situation causes her to frequently fall asleep in class, and when she does fall asleep, she is plagued by dreams of a maze and a shadowy figure with glowing eyes.

Hail! Hail!

Film: Don’t Turn Your Back on Friday Night
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on basement television.

I think I’ve mentioned before that a lot of my musical tastes come from my older brothers. You pick up what you hear, naturally, and I grew up around a lot of prog rock and yacht rock from the ‘70s. What this means, though, is that the artists I discovered on my own are going to in many ways be much more important to me. Ike Reilly, and now the Ike Reilly Assassination, is one of those artists. I first heard him on the big Chicago alt-rock station, WXRT a couple of years after the release of his first album, Salesmen and Racists. I missed the name of the artist and had to call the station to find out who he was, and I’ve loved him ever since.

Ike (Michael) Reilly is one of those artists that has somehow managed to elude fame and popularity outside of a crop of dedicated fans. I have a fondness for songwriters who are storytellers more than anything else. There’s a lot of Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Nick Cave, Woody Guthrie, and Warren Zevon in his work (as well as lesser known writers like Eef Barzelay, Freedy Johnston, and Dan Bern). He’s the type of artist who, if you ask 1000 people if they have heard of him, 999 will look at you with their head cocked like a dog hearing a sound it doesn’t know. But that one person who does know him is going to be someone who knows their stuff. His fans include people like Penn Gilette, David Lowrey from Cracker, and fellow Libertyville, IL alum, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, who is also the film’s executive producer.

Stop Me if You've Heard this One

Film: Count Dracula (Nachts, wenn Dracula erwacht)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on various players.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is one of the great books of the end of the 19th century. Seriously, if you haven’t read the book, seek it out, because it really is fantastic. It’s also a book that has been adapted as much or more than pretty much everything else out there aside from the Bible. The 1970 Count Dracula, also known by its German title of Nachts, wenn Dracula erwacht, which sounds badass in German (and means “Nights, when Dracula awakens”) is, I believe, the 8th adaptation of Dracula I have seen--Nosferatu and its remake from the ‘70s, the Bela Lugosi version and the Spanish language version of the same vintage, Christopher Lee’s first Hammer horror film, the Frank Langella version, and Coppola’s from the mid-‘90s. So yes, this is the eighth one. It’s like a Batman original story; it just keeps showing up.

Because of this, I’m not going to spend a great deal of time discussing the plot. If you really need my take on the narrative, well, there are literally seven other versions of this basic story that I have already written up. Go to one of those.

Bird Brain

Film: The Boy and the Heron(Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka)
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

My original plan was to watch The Boy and the Heron (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka if you want the original Japanese) on Sunday and post the review that night. Alas, I fell asleep about 45 minutes in. My follow-up plan, then, was to skip back a few minutes to the last thing I remembered and watch after my lectures on Monday night. And the same thing happened. I fell asleep again, managing to get to about the 1 hour 15 mark before I had no idea what was happening. I’d try desperately hard to focus, and five minutes later, my eyes would be rolling back into my head.

What does this mean? It means that evidently, despite how much I really wanted to like it, I found The Boy and the Heron to be the movie equivalent of Sominex. I like Miyazaki’s films as a rule, so this came not only as a surprise but as a supreme disappointment.