A Little Dab'll Do Ya

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

I’m not going to virtue signal here, because something I’m about to say is kind of belied by a lot of the films I really love: women and marginalized groups make better horror movies. I say this full in the knowledge that some of my all-time favorite horror movies (28 Days Later, The Thing) are made by white dudes, and Wes Craven is far and away my favorite horror director. That said, for the last decade or so, the really interesting things being done in the genre are being done by women and marginalized people. That brings us to The Substance, a brutal body horror film that was so damned good it got a bunch of Oscar nominations, including a win for makeup and hairstyling.

Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is an aging actress who, Jane Fonda-like, has made a significant portion of her later career working in fitness videos. On her 50th birthday, her producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) fires her essentially for being too old. On her way home from being fired, she sees one of her billboards being ripped down, and loses control of her car. At the hospital post-crash, a young nurse slips a flash drive into her pocket offering her “The Substance,” which promises to create a better, more perfect version of herself.

Check Your Warranty

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

I mentioned yesterday that the They Shoot Zombies list has recently updated. One of the things that happened with the new update is that a couple of movies that I reviewed on my monthly roundups now appear on the list as entries. This means a rewatch, something I’m not really looking forward to in terms of Psycho Goreman, but one I very much looked forward to with Upgrade. It’s been a couple of years since I watched Upgrade, and it’s a film I liked quite a bit the first time through.

It’s also a film that suffers slightly from the fact that it very much plays like a feature-length Black Mirror episode. It kind of speaks to the success of Black Mirror that any dystopic near-future science fiction can easily come across as an episode of the show. Upgrade is a bit more involved than a typical episode, but it wouldn’t shock me if this was at least temporarily conceived of as an episode for an early season.

Our Regularly Scheduled Program

Film: The Last Broadcast
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

The They Shoot Zombies list updated recently, which is always a several day process for me in terms of updating my spreadsheets, blog, and Letterboxd site, since I am the unofficial curator of films that were on the list and have been removed. Typically, the update involves 3-4 dozen movies, most of which will have been on the list in the past with a few new additions. This year was a wholesale change, with 172 changes. Of those, 84 were returns and 88 are new to the list. It was a needed overhaul, though, because the list has been light on modern films, and the update is mainly films from the last 10 years. There are some exceptions, though, including The Last Broadcast, a found footage film that predates The Blair Witch Project by a year.

It's important that The Last Broadcast came first, because it explains the main issue with the film. Blair Witch established a lot of the rules of found footage despite there having been a number of films in the style before that. So, when I say that The Last Broadcast breaks the rules of the style, it’s only fair to point out that those rules weren’t really set in stone until the following year—it’s a sort of ex post facto complaint on my end.

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.

Kinkshaming

Film: Crash (1996)
Format: Loaned DVD on basement television

Crash, the David Cronenberg film and not the maligned 2005 Best Picture winner, is a film I have been looking for for some time. Cronenberg is the king of body horror, and his films are always at least visually interesting. Crash is based on the novel of the same name by J.G. Ballard, who is an author I like a great deal, almost despite his subject matter. I have a fondness for Ballard in no small part because I discussed his books in my comps exam for my Master’s degree. Ballard often deals with human atrocities and physical degradation, a self-destructive impulse that he seems to feel is a natural part of human nature.

Crash is absolutely in the heart of that element of Ballard’s work. Much of his writing looks at people living lives on the extreme edge of existence, barely surviving, but seeing how far they can go while still managing to be alive. Crash specifically is about people who get erotic satisfaction from car accidents, both those that they see or witness and those that they are involved in. It’s as perverse a fetish movie as Salo in some ways, the sort of film you watch with the blinds drawn (not unlike Cruising).

Blood is Thicker than Water

Film: Sinners
Format: AMC Market Square Theater (Theater 8)

I have to think that it’s not easy to try to rework a classic monster into something new. Tell people that you’re making (another) werewolf movie or (another) zombie movie and you’re likely to often get a yawn in response. That’s nowhere more the case than with vampires. Seriously, how many different versions of vampires are there? How many times have I reviewed yet another version of the basic Dracula story on this blog? (Answer—at least six that are based directly on the Bram Stoker novel). So if you can do something really new, you’ve got a chance to get an audience really interested. That’s where we are starting with Sinners.

This is a vampire story, not a Dracula-specific story, though. We’re going to get vampires here that are going to have a lot of similarities to traditional vampires (weakness to garlic, killed by sunlight or a stake to the heart), but these are more of a hive mind of vampires, and while they are certainly sexual in a lot of ways, these are not romantic in the least. These vampires are more feral, and that works to the story’s benefit.

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.

Back Through the Looking Glass

Film: Black Mirror Season 7
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

I don’t talk much about television on this blog, but as streaming services occupy more and more space in media, the dividing line between television and movie continues to blur. Black Mirror is an anthology series, but also has episodes that are essentially feature-length films. Are these short movies? Actual movies? Shows? I tend to think of them as kind of like novellas—they don’t tend to have the heft of a full novel, but they’re more involved than a short story.

The series has had its ups and downs. I didn’t hate Season 6 and it had some clear highpoints, but it also felt badly misdirected, as at least three of the five episodes were very clearly horror-themed rather than centered on ideas of technology, especially technology run amok. Season 7 feels much more on track as far as that goes, something like a return to form. If the series continues, this feels like a good place to continue it from.

All Cops are Maniac

Film: Maniac Cop
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

One of the common ideas in horror is finding something that is supposed to be trustworthy and turning it into a killer. This isn’t turning rabbits into monsters (like Night of the Lepus), but more people and things we think are safe. Consider Chucky from the Child’s Play movies, medical professionals like Dr. Giggles or The Dentist, and babies in It’s Alive. Even Santa Claus gets this treatment in a lot of movies. Maniac Cop does the same thing, obviously with the police.

Maniac Cop is a pretty typical schlocky movie from 1988 as the title suggests. Call your movie Maniac Cop and you’re not going to expect Shakespeare. Add in B-movie king Bruce Campbell and genre mainstays like Tom Atkins and Robert Z’Dar (as well as genuine badass Richard Roundtree), and what you’ve got is a B-movie that at least has the potential to be fun.

What I've Caught Up With, April 2025

It’s probably not much of a surprise that I didn’t actually watch a lot of movies or television in April. My mother’s funeral service was a week ago, and things have been hectic. Watching a movie seems less easy to do right now, but it’s time to get back into things, I think.

Television-wise, the only show I actually completed was the latest season of Reacher. I have been watching Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, The West Wing, and The Critic, but lately, my viewing is pretty much down across the board.