And in This Corner

Film: The Iron Claw
Format: Blu-Ray from DeKalb Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

I don’t care at all about sports. I used to, up until about 20 years ago. I lived and died by the Bulls, Bears, and White Sox. These days, though I don’t have time for it. Even when I did care about sports, I was never into wrestling. One of my brothers was for a time, and my wife’s cousin still is to some extent. I understand the appeal of it—it’s theater on a grand scale, and while the matches are scripted, I would never suggest that the people doing the wrestling aren’t athletes. Now that I’ve said all of this, it’s not going to be a surprise that I watched The Iron Claw, which is a wrestling movie, but it’s also a movie about family and about tragedy.

We will begin with Fritz von Erich (Holt McCallany), who is a wrestler coming up in the sporting world. But we’re going to be far more concerned with the sons of Fritz and Doris (Maura Tierney), who will follow in their father’s footsteps. Much of what is going to follow will be what we are told is the curse of the von Erich family—we won’t see the death of the eldest son at a young age, but we’ll hear about it. The rest of the film will be about the near constant tragedy experienced by the family, a large amount of it clearly caused by the wrestling world.

Binge and...

Film: The Purge
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

The Purge is a right-wing fantasy movie. I don’t mean that the political right is specifically thrilled about the idea of 12 hours of lawlessness (although I think a lot of them are). No, what I mean is that pretty much every conservative I know has a closet full of guns and an intense desire to use them on a home invader. The Purge is that fantasy writ large. It’s a world where people are essentially dared to break into your house and you can kill them without consequence. The entire membership of the NRA had to have a hard-on over this concept.

There’s another, more sinister reason that The Purge is the deepest fantasy of the American right, and it is that 12 hours of lawlessness. Essentially, this is the story of a future, far more fascist America, where for 12 hours every year, virtually all crimes are made legal. While it’s not stated outright, after a massive economic crash, a new political party takes over the country. Unemployment is down and draconian policies crack down on crime. However, needing a release, the American people are given a 12-hour period every year to go buckwild and get all of their violence out of their system. And, true to form, this is not a parade of rape and theft, but of the wealthy and fortunate targeting the homeless. It’s open season on “undesirables,” and there’s a reason that the stereotype of conservatives wanting to hunt the homeless and immigrants for sport exists.

Catholic Guilt

Film: Immaculate
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

Immaculate is the second movie about nuns I’ve watched in three days; the other one will show up in the July wrap-up early next month. Neither of the two movies show the church in a positive light. For Immaculate, that lens is going to be one of horror and trauma. It’s worth saying that I am fortunate in my religious past. I didn’t experience any undue religious trauma—nothing more than the typical indoctrinated fear of Hell anyway, and I was also never a Catholic. Immaculate is going to play on the much darker reputation of the Catholic Church, and anyone who has dealt with any Catholic trauma or church trauma in general is going to likely be upset by this.

That said, while the religious trauma aspects of the film aren’t going to trigger anything specific in me, the opening scene certainly is. A young nun (Simona Tabasco) breaks into the room of the Mother Superior of a convent in Italy and steals a ring of keys. She tries to escape but is attacked by four nuns who break her leg and knock her unconscious. When she comes to, she finds herself in a coffin being buried alive. I am claustrophobic, so this was very difficult to watch, although arguably not the most difficult part of the film.

Blood in, Blood out

Film: The Living Dead Girl ( La morte vivante)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

In many movies involving the dead coming back to life, the fact that this is happening is far more important than why it is happening. Sometimes, as in Night of the Living Dead, it simply happens and we don’t get an explanation. Other times, we do, and it doesn’t really matter that much if it matches anything completely ridiculous. Toxic waste, weird bacteria, whatever. It’s toxic waste in The Living Dead Girl (La morte vivante in the original French), which feels unique in the sense that our living dead girl in the title is not a Romero-style ghoul who creates other undead, but more of a reanimated vampire who requires blood to survive.

First things first—we need to get some toxic waste in position to revivify a corpse. We get that from a pair of men apparently delivery toxic waste for disposal. Rather than do their jobs, they stop at an abandoned crypt to put the waste there. While they are there getting rid of the waste and taking a few moments to rob the graves of the people buried in the crypt, a minor earthquake causes the toxic waste to leak, which causes one of the corpses to wake up and attack. Since this corpse, who we eventually learn is named Catherine Valmont (Françoise Blanchard) has been dead for a few years, it’s a bit of a surprise that there is not a bit of decay or decomposition. Must be the favorable atmosphere in the catacombs.

Religious Trauma Syndrome

Film: The Lodge
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

There are a number of topics that split the average horror movie fans. Gore, for instance, is loved by some and shunned by others who look for a more cerebral horror (and of course there are those who accept it when it’s needed). Another is the concept of the slow burn film. Horror that is going for the quick thrill doesn’t do a lot of slow burn. It’s about showing the audience a terrible spectacle. The slow burn is often about the idea of creating something much deeper than mere shock or disgust. The slow burn is about the build of terror and, hopefully, a payoff of something truly terrifying, a lasting scare that seeps into the audience’s bones. That’s definitely the goal with The Lodge.

The Lodge very much plays with an idea I heard Wes Craven bring up in an interview about Scream. According to Craven, if you give the audience a good scare in the first 15 minutes, you don’t really have to scare them again until the end. The film opens with our introduction to Richard Hall (Richard Armitage) and his two children, Aiden (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh). The kids are going through the “separated parents trade-off” and Richard tells his estranged wife Laura (Alicia Silverstone) that he wants to finalize the divorce because he is going to marry Grace (Riley Keough), someone he met while researching his latest book. Laura takes that news poorly; she goes home and shoots herself through the mouth.

The Dirty Half-Dozen

Film: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.

I’ve said before on this blog that I grew up in part on war movies. What I mean specifically is that I watched a lot of World War II movies when I was a kid along with some World War II television like Combat! with Vic Morrow. I didn’t specifically love the war aspects of those movies, but I did like the inherent sense of adventure in them. Propaganda films from the war years were cliched but I loved them, and also the more openly violent films of the 1960s and 1970s. Had something like The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare been around when I was 10, it would have been one of my favorite movies.

This movie, which for convenience I’m going to call TMoUW, tells something like a true story of Operation Postmaster, undertaken shortly after the entrance of the U.S. into World War II. The problem at the time was the German U-boat command. Massive shipping losses prevented the Americans from sending troops to Europe by ship, and air travel was not at a stage where it was feasible for large troop movements. Subs needed to be shut down, but the Germans were smart enough to keep their resupply ship in neutral Spanish waters. Desperate and on the verge of surrender, Churchill (Rory Kinnear) rolled the dice on a secret mission that violated the accepted practices of war. Essentially, send in an expert, but disposable, crew and destroy the ship.

Dissociative Identities

Film: Split
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

There was a period of three or four years when I collected comics. It started when I had a couple of college roommates who were active collectors and ended about six months after I got married and needed to start saving money to buy a house. Suddenly, $30-$40 per week no longer made sense. I say this because during that time, one of my favorite series was called The Badger. It featured a superhero who also had about eight distinct personalities, one of which was a world-class martial artist who went toe-to-toe with demons, aliens, and more. I say this because it’s relevant when looking at Split from a few years ago.

I don’t know if it’s unique in movies, but Split is a sort of parallel film with Unbreakable. What I mean is that the film Glass is a direct sequel to both Unbreakable and Split. This odd trilogy is an exploration by M. Night Shyamalan (who I tend to call M. Night Shame-about-your-last-film) into the idea of superheroes and the supernatural. At least that’s what I presume it’s about; I haven’t seen Glass.

What I've Caught Up With, June 2024 Part 2

On the television front, I finished some shows in June. I made it to the end of The Boys, but I haven’t started the fourth season yet—I’m waiting until it’s all posted, so it’s likely I’ll watch the whole thing in July. I got through Gen V as well, mostly to stay current with The Boys. I also finished Red Dwarf, as mentioned yesterday. I watched Fallout, which was fun and finished the Peter Capaldi seasons of Doctor Who. I’m still watching Farscape, but now more or less when I want; White Collar is my new workout show.

What I've Caught Up With, June 2024 Part 1

If there's a theme to the bonus movies I watched in June, it's that most of them have a longer-than-average name for some reason. I don't know why it worked out this way (and it's not all of them, as will be evident tomorrow), but once I started, it just became sort of the thing that was happening. Some good stuff this month. While there were a few that I didn't love, there were plenty that I enjoyed a great deal. More coming tomorrow.

Sub-Mission

Film: Below
Format: DVD from Lena Community District Library throught interlibrary loan on basement television.

Submarine movies are their own particular little subcategory of war films. Most submarine movies have an element of horror to them in the sense that they are almost inherently claustrophobic. So, while “horror” might be a stretch in a lot of cases, at the very least, there’s an element of fear involved in them. That makes a film like Below an interesting proposition, as it is both a war/submarine movie and overtly a horror film. It essentially billed itself as “Poltergiest on a submarine,” and honestly, there’s no way it could live up to that hype, and it frankly doesn’t. There’s a story here, but in large part, this functions like a long episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

In 1943, in the dead middle of World War II, the submarine USS Tiger Shark is patrolling the Atlantic and, due to its position, is ordered to pick up survivors spotted by a British plane. There are three survivors of a British hospital ship recently sunk, and because we need some tension right away, one of the survivors is a woman. The survivors, who have been in the water for a couple of days, are brought on board just as a German destroyer shows up, so we’re going to get a little cat-and-mouse and the sub will take some depth charge damage before escaping. During that attack, the sub gets targeted specifically because a record player starts up out of nowhere. After the encounter, the sub’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Brice (Bruce Greenwood) discovers that one of the rescued people is a German, and he shoots him.

Original Sin

Film: Drag Me to Hell
Format: DVD from personal collection on basement television.

Sam Raimi wants you to know that he’s not playing and Drag Me to Hell is serious. It’s not easy to make a genuinely scary horror movie with a rating lower than R, but Raimi pulls out as many of the stops as he can to give genuine scares in a PG-13 movie. In the first couple of minutes, we meet a young boy who feels as if he is being pursued by a dangerous entity. It turns out that he stole a necklace from a Romani cart. Moments later, we see the young boy literally dragged to Hell—this is a kid, maybe about 10, being dragged down to eternal, unending torture for that crime.

Jump to the film’s present, and we’re introduced to Christine Brown (Alison Lohman, in one of her last major roles before she effectively retired from acting), a loan officer at a bank. Christine is in competition with coworker Stu Rubin (Reggie Lee) for an assistant manager position, and Stu seems to be in the lead, thanks in large part to his ruthlessness. Wanting that promotion and everything that comes with it, Christine decides to be more aggressive herself, and denies an extension to Sylvia Ganush (Lorna Raver), an old Romani woman who has fallen behind on her loan payments. Offended by this and humiliated, the old woman attacks Christine, something that is repeated much more violently in the parking lot at the end of the day. The upshot of this is that Christine finds herself the subject of a curse placed on her. After three days of torment, a spirit called Lamia will drag her down to Hell.

Calling Sam Raimi

Film: Evil Dead Trap (Shiryo no Wana)
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

Sometimes, horror movies are just about the thrills and not at all about the plot. That’s certainly the case with Evil Dead Trap (or Shiryo no Wana if you prefer). As the name implies, this is a film that is influenced by Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films. One of Raimi’s signatures in his films is the first-person monster camera swooping through the woods, and we’re going to get a lot of that here.

There’s also going to be a lot of influence of Italian horror. There’s a sense in Evil Dead Trap of set pieces that have been created first and then the rest of the movie built around them. A lot of the music use seems to come from Argento, and the penchant for eyes feels straight out of Fulci’s playbook. What all of this means is that Evil Dead Trap is going to feature a lot of gore and not a lot of plot. The gore, more or less, is the point. You watch Evil Dead Trap because there are topless Japanese women getting killed in various ways.

My Pafology

Film: American Fiction
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on rockin’ flatscreen.

There are times with a directorial debut comes as a surprise. I was shocked that Get Out was Jordan Peele’s first movie, and still have trouble wrapping my mind around the fact that the Coen Brothers’ first movie was Blood Simple. There are other times when you can see the clear talent in the director but it’s equally evident that they are coming in unseasoned and undisciplined. Boots Riley lost track of the narrative in the third act of Sorry to Bother You, for instance. This is exactly the feeling I got with Cord Jefferson and American Fiction. Jefferson has talent, but right now doesn’t seem to have full control over the storytelling aspect of the film.

I haven’t read the book on which the film is based, so I don’t know how much of this comes from the actual story being told and how much of this is the lack of experience of Jefferson. American Fiction wants to do something very different with the story that it is telling, but the ending dives hard into levels and levels of meta that it can’t quite sustain as well as it wants to. Because of this, the last 15 minutes or so feel flat and a bit of a letdown after the bulk of the movie.

Religion is Cancer

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

My position on religion has not been a secret on this blog. I mention it when it’s relevant, because my opinions are always going to come from a position of someone who is not merely irreligious but who is anti-religious. Movies that glorify religion are going to naturally be viewed by me in a particular way. This is also going to be true of movies that are critical of religion. Such is the case with Four Daughters (also called Les Filles d’Olfa), a movie that is very much centered in the damage that religion can cause.

It’s worth saying that when it comes to religious belief, I am an equal opportunity heretic. I a, probably more concerned on a day-to-day basis with Christian nonsense than any other religion, but that’s because I live in the U.S. where Christian nationalism is a genuine threat and a genuine existential threat. But on a worldwide scope, Islam is almost certainly a much more serious problem. Four Daughers is concerned with Islamic extremism, and specifically with ISIS, which makes it a difficult topic. No one, or almost no one, is going to go into this film completely unbiased.

Inyeon

Film: Past Lives
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

My default genres are science fiction and horror more than anything else. This blog is testament to the fact that I don’t shy away from much and definitely don’t from any specific genre, but most of my comfort movies are in those genres. Because of that, I don’t spend a lot of time watching what amounts to a fairly melodramatic Korean drama like Past Lives. Still, this was nominated for two Oscars that I care about, so I knew I would be getting to it sooner or later. I found it at a local library and I’m right on the edge of some off-time, so I figured now was a good time to give it a watch.

This is not a complicated movie. That doesn’t mean that it’s not a good one, but it’s worth saying that it is a very simple story, one that is easy to follow and understand, and importantly, one that is very easy to relate to. Anyone who has any level of introspection in their life at all has lived through some level of plot, even if only mentally and emotionally.

The Best Offense is to Be Offensive

Film: Terror Firmer
Format: Streaming video from Plex on Fire!

I’m not necessarily a highbrow guy. Oh, I like an art film now and then, and two of my favorite movies aren’t in English, but this blog has long held the opinion that everyone’s taste in movies is very much their own and not something to ridicule. I’m not a “so bad it’s good” person and I don’t have “guilty pleasures”; the movies I like I like because there’s something about them I enjoy. So when I tell you that Terror Firmer is dangerously offensive, I’m not doing so with my nose in the air.

Terror Firmer is a Troma film, the same film studio that gave us such hits as The Toxic Avenger and Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D.. It’s also the place where James Gunn got his start, so I’m not knocking them. Terror Firmer, though, goes places for its comedy to places that are potentially triggering for a number of people. I’ve never put a trigger warning on a discussion of film—I didn’t do it with Salo or Martyrs or L’Interieur, but I’m doing it here. This is not because of the subject matter specifically, but because the film goes to these places in the name of comedy.

All Cops are Bodies

Film: Dead Heat
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Horror movies are great for genre mash-ups. Science fiction is a common choice, and a lot of science fiction movies have horror elements in them. There are plenty of horror-comedies as well. That said, there aren’t a lot of horror comedies that work really well; they either play too hard into the comedy or lean too hard into the horror. The right blend is difficult to find. Dead Heat opts for more than just horror-comedy, though. This is, and I struggle with the fact that I’m actually typing these words, a horror-comedy/police procedural action movie. It’s also a movie that stars Saturday Night Live alum-turned bodybuilder-turned political nutjob Joe Piscopo, for whatever that’s worth.

Cops Roger Mortis (Treat Williams) and his partner Doug Bigelow (Piscopo) respond to the robbery of a jewelry store. The two perps seem to be shrugging off the bullets they are being hit with, and are eventually stopped by a combination of hand grenade and being rammed by a car. They discover that the perpetrators were bullet resistant for a good reason—they were already dead. In fact, the coroner (Clare Kirkconnell) performed autopsies on them in the past.

Die Historic

Film: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Format: Sycamore Theater, Theater 2

There’s a huge problem with prequels, and nowhere is that more evident than in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (which I’m going to call Furiosa from this point forward). Actually, there are multiple sets of problems with prequels, and Furiosa exemplifies exactly one set of such problems nearly perfectly. One type of sequel has the problem of technology. We see Prometheus and the technology is amazing. Alien, the film it leads into, has technology from the late 1970s. It looks off, and no one seems to have figured out that if you’re going to make a prequel like this after huge real-world technology upgrades, it would be better to make the prequel a lot more retro to fit the universe.

No, Furiosa is the epitome of the other set of prequel problems—the audience knows the story. We know going in that this is going to be the backstory for Charlize Theron’s Furiosa character from Mad Max: Fury Road, and because of that, we know a lot going into the story. Because of this, and because this is something that needs to be talked about in detail, you can consider the rest of this mildly spoiler-y for both of the recent Mad Max-iverse films.

What I've Caught Up With, May 2023 Part 2

I watched a lot of television in May, but didn't actually get through an entire show. I've seen virtually all of The Boys, just in time for Season 4 to drop. I've also made it into the 8th season of Red Dwarf. My new workout show is Farscape, which I watch on the treadmill--it's one episode/day, so that one is going to take a long time to get through. Finally, I've managed to complete the second Peter Capaldi season of Doctor Who.

What I've Caught Up With, May 2024 Part 1

For the first time in awhile, I watched more movies than there were days in the month, although not by much. Essentially, in terms of watching 400 movies for the year, I basically broke even; didn't lose ground, didn't catch up. In terms of the gigantic list of to-watch movies, I got through enough that I can't fit them all in a single post, so that feels good. The biggest movie event for me in May was the update of the They Shoot Zombies list, something that took up a couple of days of my time to readjust all of the lists, and all for just a handful of new movies to watch.

Dracula Made Dull

Film: The Return of Dracula
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

It doesn’t happen often, but there are times when I wish I had created this blog around shorter reviews. Were I writing 500 word reviews, I’d probably post a little more often. Even if that were the case, though, even if I was writing 300 word reviews, I’d be struggling with The Return of Dracula in terms of having things to say. This is a movie that leaves almost no impression. It plays exactly like a typical Dracula movie. Even now, typing this while the movie is literally still playing, I’m struggling to think of things that are worth talking about.

It starts out with at least a little bit of promise. A Czech artist named Bellac Gordal (an uncredited Norbert Schiller) is heading to America to spend time with some cousins. At the same time, a group of vampire hunters is looking to kill the corporeal body of Count Dracula (Francis Lederer). Dracula turns out to be missing; he’s on the train, and it just so happens that he’s in the same train car as our artist. So, no shock when our vampire takes over the artist’s identity after draining him of blood.

Jonestown

Film: The Sacrament
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!

I am not a believer in the supernatural and I am not merely irreligious but antireligious. While I don’t address every film I watch from the perspective of antitheism, there are times when it becomes relevant. The Sacrament is one of those times. This is a film that very clearly wants the audience to think of instances like Jonestown in Guyana and the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. The connection is obvious, but this doesn’t in any way detract from the story. It’s very clear where this is going to go, and once it starts, there’s no getting off that rollercoaster.

Fashion photographer Patrick (Kentucker Audley) gets a letter from his sister Caroline (Amy Seimetz), a recovering addict. Caroline is now living in Eden Parish, a religious community completely off the grid in an unknown location accessible only by helicopter. Patrick takes this information to his coworkers at Vice, reporter Sam (A.J. Bowen) and cameraman Jake (Joe Swanberg). The group agrees that there might be a story in this, and all three head down to the commune to see what is happening.

Age Gap

Film: May December
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on various players.

I have never been shy about the fact that age gap relationships in film really bother me. I don’t understand why Hollywood still seems to believe that having women in their 20s and 30s actively pursuing relationships with men in their 50s and 60s. This comes with the knowledge that I know of several relationships like this in real life. My wife’s cousin is married to a woman who is several decades older than he is, and that is the kind of relationship that we’re going to be investigating in May December. The difference is that my wife’s cousin met his wife when he was in his 30s and she was in her 50s. In May December, we’re looking at a relationship that began when she was in her 30s and he was…13.

And that is the story of May December. Actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) goes to Savannah, Georgia to research an upcoming role. That role is as Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), a woman caught having an affair with a 13-year-old boy named Joe. Gracie was sent to prison for this clear abuse of a child, and while in prison gave birth to that boy’s child. And, then when she was released from prison, she married him, and 23 years later, is still married to Joe (Charles Melton).

In the Gallery

Film: Velvet Buzzsaw
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

It’s not easy to interact with the art world as an average person. So much of the art world is an evident scam. Even if the entire tax dodge may or may not be reality (and there’s some evidence that the “buy a piece of art, have it appraised, donate it for a tax write-off” scam isn’t that easy or that common), wealthy art collectors do frequently buy art, talk it up to others, and hope that the artist catches on. At the same time, there is truly vital, important art in the world. The works of Ai Weiwei, Banksy, the recent portrait of King Charles by Jonathan Yeo, and more are important and make serious commentary on the world around us. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than the 2010 film Exit Through the Gift Shop. It’s this world we’re going to dive into with Velvet Buzzsaw, a film that decides the art world needed a horror movie.

Before we get going, it’s worth saying that Velvet Buzzsaw is from the heart of the “NetFlix is doing the best work” period, and because of this, could get pretty much anyone they wanted for any projects. Among the cast are Rene Russo, Jake Gyllenhaal, John Malkovich, and Toni Collette.

Don't Forget the Bloody Corsage

Film: Prom Night (1980)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Jamie Lee Curtis got her break in Halloween, which was the first movie she ever did. Now, certainly there was some nepotism involved in her landing the role, and evidently John Carpenter considered hiring her to play Laurie Strode was an homage to her mother’s role in Psycho. Nepotism or not, Curtis definitely has the goods, but her early career is littered with low-budget slashers, making her one of the premiere late-‘70s/early-‘80s scream queens. There are some gems in the mix, but Prom Night isn’t one of them.

We start with young kids playing a version of hide-and-seek in an abandoned building. When another kid joins, the four playing the game essentially turn on her and scare her, which leads to her falling out of a window to her death. The four kids—Wendy, Jude, Kelly, and Nick—make a pact not to ever tell anyone. Flash forward six years and those kids are now seniors in high school, getting ready for their prom. Wendy (Eddie Benton), Kelly (Mary Beth Rubens), and Jude (Joy Thompson) are figuring out their dates, while Nick (Casey Stevens) is dating Kim Hammond (Jamie Lee Curtis). To tie all of this together, Kim’s father (Leslie Nielsen!) is the principal of the high school. It also turns out that the girl who died in the open sequence was Kim’s younger sister. Also worth noting that Kim has a twin brother named Alex (Michael Tough).

Destroyer of Worlds

Film: Oppenheimer
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

I don’t think anyone was surprised when Oppenheimer cleaned up at the most recent Oscars ceremony. I hadn’t seen the film until today and I would have picked it to win more than the seven it did. Christopher Nolan was due to win an Oscar, as the best working director without one in the minds of many people (although I’d pick either David Fincher or Greta Gerwig). But it was Nolan’s year and nothing was going to knock this movie and Nolan off of that pedestal. It’s been one that I’ve been looking to watch for some time, but the last few months have been disturbingly busy, and this film is a good three hours long. As it is, it took me a couple of days to watch it.

This, of course, is the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the man most credited with the creation of the first atomic bomb and the Manhattan Project. As befits a movie that is a good three hours long, Oppenheimer turns out to be a lot more complicated than we might think. The film has the good taste not to be hagiographic, although I wouldn’t call this a “warts and all” biography, either. Oppenheimer is painted as at least a sympathizer of communist sympathizers (his brother, his wife), as well as a womanizer. So, we’re going to be led to seeing him as brilliant, but flawed, which is probably the best we can expect.

I Might Roll a Brand-New Car

Film: The Fall Guy
Format: Market Square Theater (Theater 3).

So we went out to the movies tonight. I just finished grading for a few classes and needed a break and she’s going to be out all day tomorrow (she spends Mother’s Day with our younger daughter), so I thought I’d see what was playing. She showed interest in The Fall Guy, so we went. It would have been cheaper to go one town over, but the seats aren’t as nice, and what the hell? So we went.

The Fall Guy is loosely based on the television show of the same name. In the show, from about 40 years ago, a stuntman (played by Lee Majors, who shows up for a cameo at the end) also acts as a bounty hunter between movie gigs, usually using his stuntman prowess to capture bad guys. That’s not the case this time. In fact, while we’re still in the realm of stunt performers, this is going to take a much more literal, albeit slang meaning of the title.

The Shadow Over Point Dune

Film: Messiah of Evil
Format: Streaming video from AMC+ through Amazon Prime on Fire!

Paying homage to something without duplicating it or spoofing it is a fine line to walk, and it’s rare that a movie does it really well. When one of those movies pops up, it’s a rare treat. Messiah of Evil, despite its Satanic Panic-worthy name, is one such film. This movie has a lot going on in it, and it feels like it’s making reference to a lot of other tales. It still manages to tell its own story, though. So, while there are definite elements that are calling out to other films, the experience of this one is wholly its own.

When I say that there is a lot going on in this movie, I’m not really selling it hard enough. There is a definite connection to Romero’s zombie films in the storyline and the Italian homages to Romero in the visual aspects. If it had come out a year later, I’d suggest a connection to Romero’s The Crazies as well. There are aspects of the tone and feel of the film that are strongly reminiscent of Carnival of Souls. There is also a very strange sense of H.P. Lovecraft to this as well. While the film is set in California, it might as well be set in Innsmouth or Arkham. There’s also allusions to the Wendigo myth and the Donner Party. It also features cameos from Elisha Cook Jr. and The Warriors director Walter Hill.

What I've Caught Up With, April 2024

I was on the road a lot in April, which meant I didn't really spend a lot of time watching films. Total, I watched maybe a dozen or so just because I ran out of time. Family wedding, trip to St. Louis to visit my older daughter, and a few other day-long trips or events took their toll. Television was a lot easier for me last month because I could divide out show episodes a lot more easily. I finished (and reviewed) a couple of Mike Flanagan shows from NetFlix. I also watched Guillermo del Toro's The Strain and the very entertaining Russian Doll.

Succession?

Film: The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

I’ve been going through Mike Flanagan’s multiple NetFlix miniseries. With The Fall of the House of Usher, I have now seen four out of the five, and mentally, I think I need a little break from Flanagan before I watch the one I haven’t seen. The reason is simple: Usher, despite being shorter than both The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, takes a much bigger toll on the viewer. This is angrier than Flanagan’s other series, and perhaps that’s a function of the way the story went.

Unlike Hill House and Bly Manor, The Fall of the House of Usher is not focused specifically on a building. In this case, “house” is referring to the family or lineage of a family called Usher. The story is vaguely based on the Edgar Allen Poe story of the same name (no surprise), but with a substantial amount of license taken. In Poe’s story, the Usher family is down to a couple of members who are preparing for their demise. In this version of the story, the Ushers are fabulously wealthy, connected to a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, and also preparing for their ultimate demise.

Water Nymph

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

Of all of the Best Actress movies I have to watch for the last set of Oscars, Nyad is the one that I was probably the least interested in seeing. This has nothing to do with the subject matter; Diana Nyad is a certified badass and I won’t hear anything different. The main reason is that I’m generally less than enthused about Annette Bening. I don’t specifically dislike her, but I also don’t tend to choose much that has her in it. But Nyad is on the list, and so I figured it was worth watching.

Nyad is the story of Diana Nyad, arguably the greatest distance ocean swimmer in history and her shattering swim from Havana to Key West, more than 100 miles of open ocean. Naturally, she had a full team of people assisting her—coaches, navigators, pilots, crew whose job it was to keep sharks away from her, and more—but the rules of the actual swim were that no one could actually touch her and that she could have nothing like a shark cage around her. The swim itself was unassisted. Even feeding and water had to be given to her off the boat but without actual physical contact.

HMS Dracula

Film: The Last Voyage of the Demeter
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.

When I heard that The Last Voyage of the Demeter was in the works, I was excited; it’s one of the major parts of the Dracula story that hasn’t gotten a great deal of treatment in the various movies based on Stoker’s original work. Nosferatu probably covers the time on the Demeter more than any of them, and it still feels like short shrift. It really is a great set up for a horror film. Dracula travels from Romania to England on a ship, which turns up in port completely abandoned and derelict. So what happened on the voyage?

The problem, of course, is the moment you start thinking about it, the answer becomes clear: the ship ends up derelict, which pretty much means that everybody on board serves as provisions for Dracula during the crossing. What that means is the film that we’re going to see is going to essentially be that—it’s a vampire-based slasher film, where we count down the crew and work under the assumption that the person who is the closest thing we have to a sympathetic main character will be the equivalent of our final girl.

Country House

Film: The Haunting of Bly Manor
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on various players.

Horror, in general, is a short-form genre. It’s hard to maintain fear for a long period of time in media. As long as we care a little bit about the characters and they are in danger, we’re going to have something at stake in the way the story plays out. There’s a reason, though, that the longest horror movies tend to be anthologies, and a lot of them are 90 minutes or shorter. That makes the idea of a horror miniseries (like American Horror Story) kind of anathema, and it’s one of the reasons I find AHS to be vastly overrated in general. Mike Flanagan seems to have found the formula, though, and The Haunting of Bly Manor is a solid entrant into the genre.

The biggest knock against The Haunting of Bly Manor is that he hasn’t ever matched the power and the horror that he managed from his first mainstream horror miniseries, The Haunting of Hill House. Flanagan also did Midnight Mass, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Midnight Club. I haven’t seen the latest two of those, but I almost certainly will. While Hill House is his best work (that I’ve seen) in this genre, it’s also the best work anyone has done (that I’ve seen) for a horror miniseries. That this is a step down is no insult; almost anything would be.

Down the Tubes

Film: Creep (2004); Death Line (Raw Meat)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Sometimes, a horror movie is just a variation on a theme. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a horror movie that is about some sort of subterranean humanoid or critter that hunts humans for one reason or another. Creep from 2004 is yet another entrant into this particular category of horror movies. The location here is the London Underground and the creature is some form of mutated human. This is a pretty standard entry in this genre; if you’ve seen Death Line, you’ve seen this in large part.

We start with Arthur (Ken Campbell) and George (Vas Blackwood) working in the sewers under London. They find a tunnel in one of the walls and Arthur goes to explore it. George eventually follows him and discovers Arthur injured and in shock. Moments later, a woman appears, screaming for help, only to be dragged off into the darkness.

Unreliable Narrator

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

I think it’s easier to be a hypochondriac today than it was a few decades ago. We have the internet now, and we have WebMD that tells us that every set of symptoms we type into it is indicative of cancer. Hypochondriac, from a couple of years ago, is honestly less about this sort of desperate fear of illness and belief of severe illness than it is about severe mental and emotional trauma. This is not a fun and cuddly horror film, but one that descends into those depths of mental illness unflinchingly.

It's also worth saying at the top that Hypochondriac is very much a gay movie. If you are going to watch this, you’re going to have to be very comfortable with not just gay characters but with full-frontal male nudity, and a baby step away from gay porn. I say this not in judgment, but as a sort of warning for people who are going to be upset by this. If that’s going to bother you, Hypochondriac is going to be a movie that you will not get through.

What I've Caught Up With, March 2024

In terms of watching 400 movies by the end of the year, I dropped back a little in March, but I’m very much on pace to average a movie per day for the year. I also knocked out some of my Oscar list, including the longest film in the queue. Television-wise, I finished all 14 seasons of Archer and also managed the Wheel of Time series on Prime…and I might be done with that one. I genuinely don’t like the characters, even if the world building is spectacular.

They Did the Mash

Film: The Monster Squad
Format: DVD from Bourbonnais Public Library through interlibrary loan on basement television.

There aren’t a lot of kid-friendly horror movies. There are a few that are rated so that kids can see them--The Haunting is rated G and Poltergeist is evidence that it’s possible to make a genuinely scary PG movie, but these are not movies I’d put in front of a sixth grade kid. Even ParaNorman and Monster House have some genuinely upsetting moments. This is where a film like The Monster Squad comes in, at least in theory. There’s a reason that this is very much a cult movie, though. The true market for the film is a pre-teen audience, and the film is rated PG-13.

This is admittedly a hard line to walk, which is why this didn’t hit the PG mark. There’s some swearing (including a five-year-old girl being called a bitch) and references to sex as well as the sort of violence that is necessary when dealing with creatures like Dracula and the werewolf. Honestly, there may not be a legitimate way to have done this and kept it PG. The fact that’s it’s PG-13 is due entirely to the fact that this was at least partially from the pen of Shane Black, who is always reliable.

The Music, Man

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

Bradley Cooper appears desperate for validation. The man has 12 Oscar nominations, five for acting, but no joy yet. One has to imagine that there’s a part of him that is struggling mightily to live down his early years in front of the camera in some desperate attempt for legitimacy, but it’s not like other actors haven’t had to do this. Tom Hanks won consecutive Oscars, and the guy did Bachelor Party and The Money Pit. Maestro is Cooper’s latest attempt for Oscar glory, and while I’ve liked some of his work in the past, I’m unimpressed in general with this one.

The biggest reason for this is a variation of the reason I was so disappointed in The Theory of Everything. If someone is going to do a biopic of Stephen Hawking, you’d think that the focus would be on the man’s work—on the incredible things he was able to accomplish and the jumps forward he made in theory, but the film focused on his marriage. In much the same way, the biopic of Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) should focus on the man’s music—he redefined the American musical in significant ways—and it instead focuses on the fact that despite his marriage and three children, he evidently couldn’t get over his craving for “the d.”

Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?

Film: House of Whipcord
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!.

There was a time in the 1960s when a particular brand of movie fan wanting a thrill looked for a particular genre known as the “nudie cutie,” which is exactly what you think it was. Those who didn’t get enough of a thrill from basic titillation went for the similar but different subgenre known as “roughies,” which featured all of the nudity with a lot more violence. What we get in a film like House of Whipcord is essentially a roughie with a lot less nudity. The plot, though, is essentially a “beautiful women behind bars” story, but without the sex. After all, we still need to be mildly respectable for the British public.

House of Whipcord will be about the plight of Ann-Marie Di Verney (Penny Irving), a At a gallery showing, she is shocked to discover that her photographer boyfriend is displaying a photo of her being arrested for public nudity, a crime for which she had to pay a small fine. Embarrassed by this, she dumps her boyfriend, but then immediately finds herself attracted to another partygoer, a guy named Mark (Robert Tayman).

His Hair was Perfect

Film: Wolf
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!.

There’s something very teenager-y about a lot of the classic movie monsters. Nowhere is that more the case than with werewolves. Werewolves are the ultimate teenagers—they get filled with urges that they can’t control and they sprout hair all over their bodies. The fact that in Wolf it happens to a late-50s Jack Nicholson is beside the point. The fact that he becomes more or less a creature of his urges like the average horny 16-year-old boy is what makes it a classic werewolf story.

New York book editor Will Randall (Nicholson) is driving in New England and hits a wolf with his car. This is very much out of the normal range for wolves, and when he gets out to check on the animal, he is bitten. In a movie called Wolf, you can pretty much bet that the wolf that bit him wasn’t a normal wolf, and of course that’s going to be the case. We also discover that the publisher he works for has just been purchased by a billionaire named Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer), who is making some changes. One of those changes is offering Will a significant demotion or no job; Will is being replaced by his protégé Stewart Swinton (James Spader). This is also where Will meets Laura Alden (Michelle Pfeiffer), Raymond’s wayward daughter.

Dropping In

Film: Anatomy of a Fall (Anatomie d’une Chute)
Format: Streaming video from Hulu on rockin’ flatscreen.

Sandra Hüller had a really good 2023. She was one of the stars of The Zone of Interest, dwhich was nominated for Best Picture and won Best Foreign Language Feature. She also starred in Anatomy of a Fall, which was also nominated for Best Picture. In 2017, Michael Stuhlbarg was in three of the nine Best Picture nominees—a damn solid year. I think Hüller might have had the better year. While she was in 20% of the Best Picture nominees rather than 33%, she also managed a Best Actress nomination.

The inciting incident here is the fall of the title. Novelist Sandra Voyter (Hüller) has to postpone an interview with a student because her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) starts playing music extremely loud. Their vision-impaired son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) takes his dog Snoop out for a walk. When he returns, he finds his father’s body on the ground, evidently having fallen from the third story of their chalet.

Osage, Can You See

Film: Killers of the Flower Moon
Format: Streaming video from Apple TV on basement television.

My latest quarter in school ended Friday and my grades are due tomorrow, but I finished them this morning. It seemed like a good time to knock out the longest movie on my list, Martin Scorsese’s latest magnum opus Killers of the Flower Moon. I went into this expecting something like a mystery. Turns out that that’s not the case; Killers of the Flower Moon is a gangster movie. It’s just a gangster movie that takes place in 1920s Oklahoma, involves the Osage people, and is about oil. Still, it’s very much a gangster movie.

After World War I, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) shows up in Oklahoma at the behest of his uncle, William King Hale (Robert De Niro). King Hale runs a ranch, aided by Ernest’s brother Byron (Scott Shepherd). The ranch is in Osage country, and in previous years, oil was discovered on Osage land, making the people fabulously wealthy. And this is the problem—the Osage have the oil rights, but because they are native, they don’t have any real power. And so they start dying, and their deaths are not investigated.

Christmas Breakdown

Film: The Holdovers
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on rockin’ flatscreen.

As my current quarter winds down, I’ve decided I need to start hitting the Oscar movies from the latest year rather than just thinking about it. There are a bunch I still can’t find (yet), but it’s worth knocking a few out. There are a few I’m looking forward to, but I figured I would start with The Holdovers, only because I got a late start tonight and I didn’t have time for anything much longer. This is one I’ve been wanting to watch since it showed up on Peacock, and tonight I finally got the chance.

The Holdovers takes place at the end of 1970 in the environs of Barton Academy, a New England boarding school for the scions of wealthy families. As the year winds to a close, the school takes a two-week break and most of the students go home to family. Five students are left behind—there were supposed to be only four, but the fifth, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), gets a last minute call from his mother, who wants a proper honeymoon with her new husband. The teacher being left in charge is Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti). The only other person left at the school is Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school’s cook, who has just lost her son in Vietnam.

Boris the Spider

Film: Tarantula
Format: Internet video on Fire!

There’s an entire genre of giant monster movies, many of which appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Movies like The Killer Shrews, The Deadly Mantis, The Giant Leeches, The Giant Gila Monster and more were all over the 1950s. Them! is one of the original greats, taking a normal creature and growing it to gigantic proportions. Even humans got into the act with The Amazing Colossal Man and Attack of the 50-Foot Woman. Tarantula is naturally in the same vein, and the monster in this case is not a surprise.

It’s also worth noting that Tarantula feature the talents of one John Agar in the main role. Agar originally made what bones he had playing second fiddle to John Wayne in films like She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Sands of Iwo Jima and by being married to Shirley Temple for a few years. On his own, as a leading man, Agar was typically in B-movies, often as a scientist who knew everything and, more often than anything else, spouted a bunch of nonsense. Bluntly, most of his movies were terrible, or at least dumb. It’s hard to take someone seriously when the sweet spot of his career includes films like The Mole People and Attack of the Puppet People.

May Thy Knife Chip and Shatter

Film: Dune: Part Two
Format: AMC Market Square 10

I was doing very well keeping up with a pace of 400 movies on the year, and then this past week happened. Work was an absolute beast this last week and among other things included a presentation to about three dozen people who, at least in part, are higher up in the food chain than I am. It was terrifying, and in the busiest week of my quarter, I lost about a full day preparing for it. I try to be done working by noon on Friday each week, and yesterday, I worked past 8pm. So, as a treat, I went to see Dune Part Two tonight with my wife’s cousin Jon.

I don’t go to the theater that often. In fact, I think you can probably count the number of movies I have seen in the theater since Dune Part One on one hand. Regardless, because of my bizarre connection to the Dune-iverse, I knew I was going to see this when it came out, albeit a week or so after it opened. I’ve been looking forward to this since last year, when the release date was moved from November of last year to this March.

What I've Caught Up With, February 2024 Part 2

I caught up a lot on television in February as well. I finally finished 30 Rock, and I also finally go through the end of The Blacklist (because I had to wait for it to show up on NetFlix streaming). I've been watching Archer lately, which is wildly inappropriate but also ridiculously funny. Let's see where March goes.

What I've Caught Up With, February 2024 Part 1

I ended February with a total of 65 movies watched on the year, which is one short of the pace to hit 400 for the year. Based on the last couple of years I’ve had, that’s actually surprisingly good. I took a bunch of films off the list in February—there’s a solid dozen that will be reviewed today and tomorrow, but a few of the full reviews I’ve put up this past month have been from the big list as well. Additionally, there are a few more that are likely to show up around Halloween. Honestly, I’m surprised I got this many watched. Look for more tomorrow.

Incursion of the Torso Grabbers

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

I get the desire to play with the ideas of an established story. You can connect to your audience by giving them something they already have a connection to. You have to do a lot less work because you are already playing with not merely established tropes but with established plot points and concepts. And, importantly, you can feel like you’ve added something meaningful to an established piece of fiction. Look at The Lion King picking the corpse of Hamlet, for instance. This brings us to The Changed, a movie that desperately wants to play with the ideas of Invasion of the Body Snatchers without saying it’s doing so in so many words.

I’ve seen multiple movie versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and I’ve read the book a couple of times. I recommend the book; it’s fantastic, and the audiobook is a great version of it, too. There’s a sequence in the book as well as the original film where the pod people confront the doctor and his girlfriend and more or less explain what has happened and the reality of the invasion. It’s a great scene because it shows the insidiousness of what is happening and the new reality of those who have been converted. Now, imagine that scene blown up to the length of a feature film. That, friends and neighbors, is The Changed.

Broke(n) Back Mountain

Film: The Spine of Night
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I loaded up The Spine of Night today, but whatever my expectations were, they weren’t what I got. I don’t know if there’s a clear way to describe this except to suggest that it is as close as possible to a sequel to Heavy Metal as you can get without actually being a sequel. It feels exactly like a much more violent version of the Tarna story at the end of the film. If you’ve seen Heavy Metal, you know exactly how violent the final story is, and it’s not a patch on what happens in The Spine of Night.

There’s a lot here that reminds me of Heavy Metal starting with the rotoscoped animation. Traditional rotoscoping runs at 12 frames/second, so it always looks a little jittery. It also, while it tells a specific story, feels episodic in nature. We start with Tzod (Lucy Lawless), a new swamp priestess climbing up huge mountain to find a man called the Guardian (Richard E. Grant). She confronts the Guardian about a magical plant called the Bloom, one that he is sworn to protect, but she reveals that she has the same flower.

Among Us

Film: Werewolves Within
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

I’ve seen an interview with Joe Dante talking about The Howling specifically as a film that he had to more or less hide the subject matter from the public on. If people knew it was about werewolves, he said, they would think it was hokey. Of course, The Howling is actually a pretty great werewolf movie. We’ve gotten past that “It would be hokey” mentality, because Werewolves Within is clearly not hiding the fact that it is indeed a werewolf movie. It’s also a comedy, and it manages to walk the line between the two genres pretty well.

In the small town of Beaverton, VT, Finn Wheeler (Sam Richardson) is appointed the new ranger. He shows up to his new position and is soon introduced to pretty much the whole town. Not unlike the town of Perfection in Tremors, Beaverton has about a dozen or so residents, each of them nuttier than the last. Finn is walked around town by Cecily (Milana Vayntrub), the new mail carrier. The biggest news in the town isn’t the arrival of the new forest ranger, but the controversy over a new pipeline set to run through the town. Some of the townsfolk are desperate for the pipeline to go through because they’ll make a good deal of money from it. Others want to preserve the town as it is. This is a tension that will continue throughout the film.

Super Mario Shortcut

Film: How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

I don’t tend to talk politics a lot on this blog because there’s no real reason to do so. It comes up now and then, and there are films I will refuse to watch because of their source, but other than that, this blog is mainly apolitical. It’s impossible to be apolitical when discussing How to Blow Up a Pipeline, though. This is a film where you will either throw in your sympathy wholeheartedly for the group of young people attempting to, well, blow up a pipeline, or you will do the opposite and want to see them thrown to the wolves. Just to make it clear at the top, I’m 100% on the side of the people blowing up the pipeline.

We’re going to get a main narrative of a group of people meeting up, creating explosives, and conspiring to destroy pieces of an oil pipeline in west Texas. Along with this, we’ll get a few side stories introducing us to the people involved. There are a number of intertwined stories here. Xochitl (Ariela Barer) is frustrated with the slow speed at which activism moves and argues for more direct action. This catches the attention of Shawn (Marcus Scribner), who is in the same environmental campus group. Xochitl’s best friend is Theo (Sasha Lane), who is dying of cancer most likely contracted because of oil spills and pollution. Theo is in a relationship with Alisha (Jayme Lawson), who objects to this kind of action. Meanwhile, in the course of making a documentary, Shawn meets Dwayne (Jake Weary), a rancher who has lost some of his family’s land to the pipeline thanks to eminent domain statutes. We’re also going to meet Michael (Forrest Goodluck), a native American who has learned to make explosives, and Logan and Rowan (Lukas Gage and Kristine Froseth), a hippy-like pair who have been recruited for a reason that isn’t immediately apparent.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 2022

The Contenders:

All Quiet on the Western Front
Avatar: The Way of Water
The Banshees of Inisherin
Elvis
Everything Everywhere All at Once (winner)
The Fabelmans
TÁR
Top Gun: Maverick
Triangle of Sadness
Women Talking

Don't Miss the Butter Cow

Film: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!

When we dive into the stranger end of the cinematic swimming pool we have to be prepared not just for things to be strange, but for a lot of what we’re seeing to be metaphorical. That’s certainly the case with We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a film that has been suggested to be about, essentially coming out, something confirmed by the writer/director Jane Schoenbrun, who is nonbinary. There are also potentially themes of gender dysphoria in this, and that’s not too hard to see.

There’s plenty in this movie that is going to pick the bones of some other classic horror. Specifically, this plays in part with the Bloody Mary myth or, movie-wise, Candyman. No one is looking in the mirror and saying the name five times, but there is something very similar happening here, and once it starts, we’re going to go on a very strange ride.

That's an Unusual Doorbell Noise

Film: The House that Screamed( La Residencia)
Format: Streaming video from AMC on Fire!

It’s not a shock that there would be some similarities between Italian horror and Spanish horror. The House that Screamed (originally La Residencia) is a film that makes that connection very clear. The film takes place at a girls’ boarding school in France where a series of grisly murders are going to take place. In a sense, this feels like a Spanish Suspiria in large part. It’s a lot more sexually charged, though, with elements of women in prison movies, young girls showering (while clothed, which is oddly more sexual), and some lesbian overtones. I wasn’t sure what to think going into this one, but the reality of the film is very different from what I expected.

Before I talk about this, I need to talk for a moment about where to find the film. It’s currently available on Tubi TV, but the transfer is terrible. It’s grainy and hard to watch, and more importantly, there is a noticeable and terrible hiss. It’s barely watchable. I got about 30 minutes in before I looked for a better version of it, which is available.

And So We March

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

I tend to try to be more proactive with Oscar nominations once they are announced, but I’ve been slacking off for the past few weeks. It’s time for me to try to get at least a couple done per week since the ceremony is now exactly four weeks away. A lot of the movies aren’t available yet, which means I have to be a lot more selective how what I’m seeing. I figured Rustin, a biopic about Civil Rights organizer Bayard Rustin, would make a good place to start. No need to dive head-first into Best Picture just yet.

On the surface this is a biopic, but it’s much more of a memoir. The way Capote was a film about the writing of In Cold Blood, Rustin is about the creation and execution of the March on Washington, where a quarter of a million people converged on the capital and, among other things, listened to the I Have a Dream speech, arguably the most important and effective oratory of the last 100 years, at least in the U.S.

Feedback Loop

Film: You Hurt My Feelings
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television

Some actors get typecast, or get known for a specific role and can’t seem to get away from it. Julie Louis-Dreyfus is, for almost everyone in the world, Elaine Benes from Seinfeld. That’s got to be a little frustrating, to have a career that for almost everyone in the world boils down to a single role. I don’t feel sorry for her, mind you—she’s clearly going to be able to live off the residuals if she lived to be 200. But I would imagine that she’s got to want to break away from that sometimes, which is how we get to You Hurt My Feelings.

or High concept movies tend to be action films, but this is a comedy/drama that can be easily summed up in a single sentence. An author working on her second book discovers that her husband doesn’t actually like her book. And really, that’s it. The film is an exploration of that event, but also the idea of honesty and how relationships work.