I have a number of goals for 2026, both on this blog, online in general, and in the real world. I’m waking up more and more to what the world feels like it is and what I feel like it should be, and there is a large gap there that, bluntly, I feel the need to do something about.
As we approach the end of the year, I realize that if I’m going to finish my Oscar chores, I need to get on the last couple of movies I haven’t seen. I started to watch Nickel Boys a few months ago, and then dropped off. This has nothing to do with the quality of the film. It has everything to do with the fact that it feels like this country is regressing, and movies that deal with oppression, racism, and similar topics are more overwhelming than normal right now. And make no mistake—this is very much a movie about racism and civil rights.
What’s frustrating here is that in a fair and just world, it wouldn’t be that story. We’re going to spend most of our time with Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse), who is a promising student who appears poised for academic success. He is accepted into a study program at an HBCU, and while hitchhiking to campus, is picked up by a man driving a stolen car. When they are pulled over, Elwood, who is a minor, is accused and convicted of being the man’s accomplice. As a minor, he can’t be sent to prison, so he is instead sent to a reform school called Nickel Academy.
Wes Anderson is one of those directors whose films are immediately recognizable. I was trying to figure out exactly what it is in terms of his composition and characters that makes his film so distinctive and I’ve finally figured it out—it’s the title of this write-up. Everyone in Wes Anderson films is autistic. In his early films, it was only some of the characters, but now, everyone in his films has got a touch of the ‘tism, and they’ve all got the same variety. It wasn’t until I finished The Phoenician Scheme that I finally understood this.
The Phoenician Scheme is mid-level Wes Anderson, and I don’t like having to say that. I tend to like Wes Anderson films pretty well, although I can only take a bit of him at a time. Now that I’ve seen this, I probably won’t watch another of his films for six or seven months. When Anderson is good, he’s really good. When he’s off, even a bit, everything feels like it falls apart. The Phoenician Scheme just never feels like it gels in the way his films normally do. It might be simply because the characters here, almost to a person, are unlikeable.
On another note, it appears that at some point, 15 movies were added to the List, which (according to IMDb) is up to 1260 total entries, so I suddenly have a touch of work to do on that—I’ve seen most of them already. So I’ll be getting through few that I’m missing soon. That being the case, I’m going to suggest my yearly addition of 10 movies. I won’t include anything from 2025, but I will likely touch on 2024. As always, these are not ranked, just in the order I thought of them.
EDIT: It's been brought to my attention that one of my original picks, BlacKkKlansman, has been on the 1001 List before, so I am replacing it.
I am someone who has a lot of hard and fast habits, but not a lot of hard and fast rules. There are a few solid rules that tend to work really well for me, though. One of the rules that does work for me is that if you find something that manopshere podcasters and gym bros hate, it’s almost certainly going to be something great. Case in point: Kristen Stewart. Because of the popularity of the Twilight series among teen girls for years, Stewart, much like Taylor Swift and boy bands, became the focus of intense hatred of guys who seem to do everything specifically to impress other men. So when a film like Love Lies Bleeding shows up, they’re going to hate it by rote without looking.
It's such a weird way to live, and it seems to be only Kristen Stewart who gets this treatment from those films. Robert Pattinson, Michael Sheen, Anna Kendrick, Edi Gathegi, Rami Malek, Graham Greene…all of them emerged unscathed eventually (okay, maybe not Taylor Lautner). But Kristen Stewart has been doing interesting work for the last decade, and Love Lies Bleeding, made by Rose Glass, who also directed Saint Maud, is a great case in point.
One of the issues with Best Animated Feature specifically at the Oscars is that the winner is pretty much always going to be a movie for children. There are movies that are nominated that are clearly for adults, and this is a trend I like, even if I don’t always like the movie in question. It’s how we got nominations of films like I Lost My Body, Anomalisa, and Persepolis (and it doesn’t explain why Waltz with Bashir was robbed). Memoir of a Snail was never going to win this award, but I love that it got nominated, and it certainly partially makes up for the fact that Adam Elliot was denied a nomination for Mary & Max.
Make no mistake—while the Claymation looks like it would appeal to kids, Memoir of a Snail is clearly made for an adult audience. This is not merely for a couple of minor moments of animated nudity, but because of the adult themes—religious abuse, sexual kinks, suicide, and more. This is not a movie to sit the kiddies in front of while you go about your day. The bland color palette might be the first indication of this, but then again, Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie exist.
This might well be the shortest review I have written for this site other than those I do in the monthly wrap-ups. There’s an inherent problem in looking at a movie like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. The problem is that there is an inherent audience for this film, and you are either a part of that audience or you aren’t. Furthermore, you already know if you are in the audience for this movie or not. Did you watch the 1990s Twin Peaks television series? If you did, congratulations—this movie is for you. Have you not watched that series? You won’t have any interest in this.
In fact, the problem is even more significant. If you’ve watched Twin Peaks, you’ve almost certainly already seen Fire Walk with Me. The only reasons you haven’t seen this if you’ve seen the show are that you just finished the first two seasons of the show (I finished them on Thursday), or you were forced to watch the show by someone else and you didn’t like it, so the movie didn’t interest you. In any event, you’ve seen this, plan to see it in the immediate future, or have absolutely no interest in seeing it.
We’re at the time of year where people are starting to put together their year-end movie lists, both in general and in terms of specific genres. For some people, it’s also the time of year to put together lists of movies they were disappointed in. For whatever reason, it’s become quite trendy to list Zach Creggar’s Weapons on the list of disappointments for a lot of horror movie bloggers and commentators. I have to think that while some of that is likely honest, some of it genuinely feels like rage farming. Weapons goes in an unusual direction, certainly, and it might not be what people expected, but the seeming outrage I’ve seen from a couple of streamers really feels unbalanced.
The basic story is that one day, in the town of Maybrook, PA, 17 of the 18 children in the third grade classroom of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) don’t show up for school. Only Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher) shows up for class. The 17 children are missing; parents of some of the houses check on their cameras and all of them confirm that at 2:17 in the morning, their children got up, left the house, and ran out into the street, all running off in the same direction, arms wide, not unlike Naruto.
There are times when I watch something, and I realize I am not the target audience. I felt this significantly with a number of Blaxploitation films from the 1970s. I felt it culturally when I watched Celine and Julie Go Boating. In a lot of cases, these are movies that I liked, but I felt like there was something there that was preventing me from fully getting the sense that the filmmaker intends. That’s definitely the case with I Saw the TV Glow.
What is the deal here? This is very clearly and very obviously a movie about someone coming to term with (allegorically in the sense of the movies) with being transgender. The film is very much about living a lie and living your own personal truth regardless of the consequences and despite the risks. I certainly have felt this way in some respects, like the world that we live in is broken and that I was supposed to be something other than what I am, but at least I feel at home in my own body. Because of this, while I can appreciate and understand I Saw the TV Glow, I don’t know that I can fully understand it at its deepest level.
If you are me and you start watching The Brutalist, you take a step back when you hear the name of the main character, Lázsló Tóth (Adrien Brody). For most people, that name doesn’t mean a lot, but for me, there’s an immediate connection. Comedian Don Novello, best known for his character Father Guido Sarducci, wrote a couple of books where he played a character named Lazlo Toth. This version of Lazlo Toth wrote earnest (and ridiculous) letters to companies and famous people. Seeing someone with essentially the same name in a serious movie was a bit jarring.
It took me several days to get through The Brutalist. The version on HBO is truncated only in the sense that instead of a 15-minute intermission, there’s a 1-minute intermission. It’s still more than 200 minutes with the shorter intermission, and that’s a lot to ask from an audience for any film in one sitting. I do wonder about the necessity of the length. Film critic Mark Kermode tends to reference 2001 in a case like this—in that film, Kubrick takes use from the birth of humanity to the birth of a new species in about 2 ½ hours. In The Brutalist, we take nearly 3 ½ hours to look at the story of a fictional architect.
I genuinely enjoy the regularity of the Knives Out franchise. Based on the past decade, we’ll get a new film in the franchise around the end of 2028. The latest one, called Wake Up Dead Man hits all of the points that we got from the original Knives Out. The script is dynamite, the mystery is a good one and yet completely solvable (I guessed right), and the cast is a who’s who of modern Hollywood.
This time, and for the first time in three films, the person who is being falsely accused of a murder is a man, and a priest, no less. Former boxer and new Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) has been relegated to a backwater parish in upstate New York as his first official appointment as a priest. He is in the position of assisting Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). Wicks is prickly and demanding, abusive and rude. He’s also heading a cult of personality of local parishioners, all of whom have their own foibles and dependence on Wicks.
I can’t say that Black Mirror has ruined science fiction, but it has certainly changed the perception of it a great deal. Modern science fiction that touches on themes of the dangers of technology and near-future cyberpunk feels like a Black Mirror episode. That’s definitely the case with Companion. This is a near-future story that is absolutely about AI and promised technology and exactly how it can go wrong.
This is also a case where some of the major plot points are clearly revealed in the trailer. Josh (Jack Quaid) and his girlfriend Iris (Sophie Thatcher) go for a weekend get-together with friends. Included are couple Eli (Harvey Guillén) and Patrick (Lukas Gage), Josh’s friend Kat (Megan Suri), and Kat’s boyfriend Sergey (Rupert Friend). It’s clear that Kat is not a fan of Iris, and also that Sergey is someone who doesn’t treat her very well. Sergey hints that he has connections to some dark and unsavory people; the amount of money he clearly has backs this up.
The trailer for Together from 2025 doesn’t really hide what is going to happen in this film, or at least it hints pretty heavily toward a particular main plot. Even the cover art on the disc combined with the name are going to lead your thoughts in specific directions. For someone like me, who frequently likes to analogize, I’m in a quandary. There are so many different allusions and connections I can make to books, music, and other movies that I was at least temporarily overwhelmed by the possibilities.
That said, if I can find a way to both reference my earliest prog rock musical roots and a more obscure Greek myth, I’m a happy dude. The issue here for me was the fact that I knew where the film was going before I put the disc in the spinner. The trailer gives it away, as does the cover of the DVD. That being the case, this becomes more about how the story is told rather than where the story is going.
I’ve long had a sort of love-hate relationship with Dario Argento and the giallo style in general for years. Argento’s films are all about the style and often light on substance. My knock against him has been, for years, that it feels like a lot of his films come from his visualization of a couple of outstanding scenes, and the rest of the movie is made to connect them. For as good a visual masterpiece as Suspiria is, it does seem like it started from the stabbing/hanging death and the barbed wire room and went from there. This is much less the case for Tenebrae (Tenebre in Italian, evidently), where there is an actual plot. That’s a low bar, but for gialli it’s a necessary one.
True to the style, Tenebrae is a horror movie in the guise of a mystery. Horror author Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) has come to Rome on his latest book tour, promoting a book called Tenebrae. Coming with him on the trip are his assistant Anne (Daria Nicolodi) and his agent Bullmer (John Saxon). He will eventually discover that his ex-fiancée Jane (Veronica Lario) has followed him to Rome as well. What Neal doesn’t know is that just before he arrived, a young shoplifter named Elsa (Ania Pieroni) has been brutally murdered.
I spent far more time catching up on TV shows, although I only finished a couple. I did a rewatch of the NetFlix/Disney Daredevil since I realized I had never seen the third season. I also watched Helstrom, which is the one Marvel-based show you can easily skip if you decide to watch all of the Marvel content. My wife decided she wants to watch the new Dexter, so we temporarily have a Paramount account; I’m using this as an opportunity to finally watch Twin Peaks.
Movies like Him present a problem for me. I generally only do a full review of a movie from the last few years if I think it’s worth the time and effort, and Him isn’t. But I also know that the They Shoot Zombies list is still being updated pretty much every year, and there’s a non-zero chance that this will show up on it in the future. It shouldn’t, but it is better than some of the movies that have made that list. And, honestly, it’s not a movie I necessarily want to watch a second time. I don’t say this to dissuade anyone from watching on their own. Him has a lot of promise; it just doesn’t fulfill that promise.
This is very much a sports movie, and it’s one that revels in the idea of football as a sort of religion. That’s a fair position to take. It is close to a religion for a lot of people, and as someone who still lives in the shadow of Chicago where the Bears are resurgent, it feels like a lot of people are seeing the light. But it’s not just “football as religion” that makes the film go. This is football as cult, and it gets into some pretty culty places.
One of the issues with modern action movies is that they have expanded in length over time. The genre used to be pretty straight forward. You could sit down with The Terminator or Predator and be out in under 2 hours, or go with Die Hard for a bit longer than two hours. The John Wick series is a solid example of what I’m talking about. The first film runs 101 minutes, the second is 122, the third is 131, and the fourth is a whopping 169. And why? Nobody 2 is a return to normalcy. It’s a tight 89 minutes including credits, and actually a touch shorter than the original film.
It helps to know the basics of the original film. Seeming average guy Hutch (Bob Odenkirk) has what seems like an average life but is distant from his family. In reality, he’s a former assassin, who gets dragged back into the life when he beats the snot out of someone who turns out to be connected. Mayhem ensues, and it is a glorious 90 minutes or so of absolute ass kicking. So here’s the sequel.
Takashi Miike is a legendary horror director, but not every good or great director gets a hit every time they step up to the plate. I knew going in to One Missed Call (or Chakushin ari) the basics of the story. Essentially, people get a cell phone call from themselves that they invariably miss. The call they get is from the future, and essentially that call predicts their death. When the time arrives from when the call came, they die horribly, and someone from their list of contacts is called, and the cycle begins again.
I also knew about the American remake from a few years after Miike’s film. The American version of One Missed Call is legendarily bad. It’s remake of Pulse/The Wicker Man/The Uninvited levels of bad, scoring a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Honestly, the best thing I can say about Miike’s original is that it’s not the remake, but few movies are.
I’m desperately behind on finishing up the Oscar movies from 2024, having five to knock out in the next 31 days if I’m going to get them all done by the end of the year. It’s more than I’d like, and I will admit that a part of this is that I’m dreading the length of The Brutalist and I’m not that interested in Anora. But of the films I need to finish, it’s The Apprentice that I have dreaded the most. The last thing I want to spend time with is watching some sort of attempt to reform the character of Donald Trump. I have no interest in offering him any sympathy.
This is a movie where the title is doing double duty. The Apprentice, of course, is the name of Trump’s old television show, and arguably the one that truly made him accessible to the masses, and more than anything paved the way to his misbegotten presidencies. The real meaning of the title, though, is that this is essentially the origin story of Trump (Sebastian Stan, who was Oscar nominated for this, and the reason I’m watching it), who was essentially taught to be the man he is by Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). Essentially, Trump learned at the feet of Cohn, who is almost certainly in the top-5 of the most genuinely evil people from the 20th Century.
There’s a part of me that gets a little bit excited when I choose a horror movie to watch and it turns out to have been produced by Hammer. Not every Hammer film is good, of course, but a lot of them are and most of them are fun at the very least. Their vampire movies are probably their best, but I genuinely love it when they go wacky. Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb is very much in that wacky area. This is not really a mummy movie, but a movie where the mummies are more mummy in theme rather than shambling and wrapped in bandages.
An Egyptian expedition locates the tomb of Tara (Valerie Leon), an evil queen. How do we know she is evil? Well, in the opening sequences, Tara is forced to undergo a ritual by a bunch of priests who lop off her hand. This doesn’t stop her hand from being animated, though, and Tara’s powerful magic appears to kill all of the priests. The man leading the expedition, Julian Fuchs (Andrew Keir) has become obsessed with Tara, and has brought all of her artifacts back to England along with her body and has recreated her tomb in his house.
I am a dog person. With a movie like Good Boy, I think it’s important to put that out at the top of the review. I’m fine with animals in general, but dogs are absolutely the animals I feel the most connected to, and I’ve had a bunch—cats, rats, hedgehogs, a snake, a gecko, frogs, turtles, doves and other birds, guinea pigs (both hairy and hairless) and more. But it’s the dogs who are central to me. George Carlin once said that life is a series of dogs, and he’s not wrong. Good Boy is a movie from the perspective of a dog, which makes it pretty close to unique in the film world in general and the horror world in specific.
Todd (Shane Jensen) has a chronic lung ailment that is causing him to pass out and cough up blood. He movies with his dog Indy (also named Indy), a Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever out to a family home in the country in the hopes of healing. His sister Vera (Arielle Friedman) worries about his health and his isolation in the family house, in particular because a number of people have lived there for a short time before dying. It’s Vera’s opinion that the house is haunted and that Todd will not survive there for long.
So much of old-school horror is a collection of Gothic tales. You have to think that at some point, part of the fun of making horror movies wasn’t specifically trying to scare people but getting to dress up in fancy costumes. The Skull is a film that takes place in the present of when it was made, but has some fun flashbacks to the past. We’re also going to be dealing with people who have a good deal of money, which means many of the trappings of Gothic style and a lot of Peter Cushing walking around in a smoking jacket.
The Skull is also a film in the long subgenre of “cursed item” horror. In this case, that cursed item is the skull of the Marquis de Sade, the guy for whom the term “sadism” was coined. The conceit of the movie is that de Sade was possessed during his lifetime and that this possession has carried on after his death, the skull being the focus. Essentially, everyone who comes into possession of the skull (at least most of the time) will end up themselves possessed by it.
Ask someone who the worst film director is of all time, and you’re going to get some pretty standard answers in a lot of cases. Names like Michael Bay, Uwe Boll, Ed Wood, and Tommy Wiseau are going to be high on the list. You have to actually know something to come up with the name Ulli Lommel. A trip through Lommel’s filmography is going to show you a collection of films with titles intended to shock and to capitalize on the worst of human experience. Lommel’s films include things like Black Dahlia, Zodiac Killer, BTK Killer, Green River Killer and plenty more of that same ilk. Lommel’s best-known film is 1980’s The Boogey Man, which doesn’t have a lot of new ideas but does have at least a few interesting shots.
We start in the past, with young Willy and Lacey (Jay Wright and Natasha Schiano) witness their mother (Gillian Gordon) engaging in some kinky pre-sex play with her boyfriend (Howard Grant). When she spots them, she gets angry, and the boyfriend sends Lacey to her room, but ties Willy to his bed. Lacey lets her brother out and Willy grabs a knife and kills the boyfriend, something Lacey witnesses reflected in the mirror in her mother’s bedroom.
I wasn’t surprised when Disney decided to produce Inside Out 2. The first movie received a ton of acclaim, including an Oscar, and there were certainly going to be more stories to tell here. And with sequels, the idea is always going to be bigger, better, faster, more. We had five emotions in the first movie, let’s ramp that up. Just like the first superhero movie in a series gives us one villain to fight, the sequels bring in more bad guys. Inside Out 2 does the same by handing us four new emotions to gum up the works.
If you don’t remember the first movie, much of the action takes place in a sort of stylized control center in the brain of a young girl named Riley (Kensington Tallman). Our five initial emotions are Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (new voice Liza Lapira), and Fear (another new voice in Tony Hale). As the film begins, things are normal—Riley is hanging out with friends and playing hockey, just like the first film. And then all becomes chaos as puberty hits. A new control panel is installed and four new emotions arrive to help take control: Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), and Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos).
You know you’re in for a treat when a movie has a half dozen or so release titles. That’s the case with The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, released as Lo strano vizio della signora Wardh in its native giallo-friendly Italian and as Blade of the Ripper, Next!, and The Next Victim in the U.S. Honestly, the first title is probably the best one, because it’s going to call up all of the prurient joys of Italian horror films, which rarely skimp on the nudity or the blood.
And, not to drop a spoiler above the fold, but that strange vice in the title is, in fact, blood. This vice—she is both repelled by and excited by blood—doesn’t really figure into the plot at all. Essentially, it’s there as a way for director Sergio Martino to show sex and nudity. If your title character has a blood fetish and it’s hinted at in the name of the film, you’d better show it. I’m bringing this up as a minor spoiler because the only way to talk about The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh is to dive head-first into spoilers. Consider the rest of this review under a spoiler tag—you’ve been warned.
Found footage is a very specific type of film, and it’s one that I’m not always that happy to watch, all things considered. The Tunnel is an Australian found footage film that doubles as a pseudo-documentary. What this means is that while a large part of the film is shown to us as found footage, there’s also a considerable amount that is people in the found footage being interviewed. We’re going to go back and forth between the two things, and sometimes we’ll see the footage with voiceover explaining what is happening.
We’re going to get frequent reminders that The Tunnel is set up as a documentary, and nowhere is this going to be more the case than in the opening moments. We learn that during a serious drought in New South Wales, the local government has decided to recycle millions of liters of water currently trapped underground in abandoned train tunnels beneath Sydney. Millions of Australian dollars are earmarked for getting the water and purifying it for human use and then suddenly the plan to reclaim the water is no longer talked about and the government no longer talks about it. At the same time, there are reports that the homeless people in Sydney who are living in the tunnels are going missing.
When a sequel comes out a really long time after the original movie, it feels like a crap shoot. Sometimes, you get something like Mad Max: Fury Road, a movie for the ages. Sometimes you get Psycho II, which is far better than it deserves to be. And sometimes, you get Coming 2 America, which should never have been greenlit. So I went into Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, coming 36 years after the original film, with hope, but with my expectations guarded.
It's also worth noting that we have upgraded our downstairs television. It’s hard to say no to a giant-ass screen when the price drops on it so much that it costs about half of a car payment. I was planning on christening the TV with something like the new Frankenstein film, but this was more my wife’s speed, and so we went with this instead.
Fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 are going to be at least vaguely aware of the existence of Bruno VeSota (or Bruno Ve Sota, as he is sometimes credited). Buttery fat dude VeSota appeared in five MST experiments, most notably to me personally as the chubby club owning foil of Daddy-O. He did one or two notable films, though, perhaps none more bizarre than Dementia from 1955, a film that, at 56 minutes, straddles the border of short and feature-length. What is most noteworthy about this film is the fact that there is no real dialogue included.
Dementia is very clearly an experimental film, if the lack of dialogue didn’t already indicate that. To put it bluntly, this film is an exploration of a descent into madness, a sort of fever dream following the experiences of an unreliable narrator and a bizarre and terrifying evening she spends in and around a seedy hotel, reliving her abusive past, and perhaps committing crimes in the present.
In the documentary Trekkies, there’s a moment where someone who works at conventions talks about the time that he sold a class of the “Q virus,” a glass of water that actor John de Lancie drank from on a panel while he was extremely sick. Someone in the crowd bought the glass and immediately drank the water, knowing that it was likely he would catch whatever illness de Lancie had at the time. That kind of thinking is at the heart of Antiviral, a movie made by Brandon Cronenberg but that could have easily been made by his father David.
The basic conceit behind Antiviral is that in the future, the idea of celebrity worship has metastasized into something far more obsessive and destructive. One of the main ways in which this is expressed is in the dealing of viruses and pathogens that infect celebrities. So, it’s not just that you can get COVID just like Tom Hanks did. You can be injected with the exact strain of the virus that he had, harvested from his cells. You’re not just getting the same thing; it’s like he’s infected you himself.
Most film anthologies are horror anthologies. I think the reason for that is that horror movies are easier to do in short form. Oh, you can do a comedy this way, and I’ve seen a Western anthology as well, but horror movies are really about the scare. We don’t need to know a great deal about the person beyond the fact that they are in danger for us to care, and we don’t really need more than something creepy to give us the scares. Ghost Stories is a British anthology that gives us a framing story that connects the stories much more firmly that normally happens in this kind of film. It’s a fun premise, even if the ending is one I found very frustrating.
The framing story presents us with Philip Goodman (co-writer/co-director Andy Nyman) lives a lonely life despite having success as a professor and a television presenter who debunks spiritual claims and psychics a la James Randi. In truth, Goodman is more inspired by a Randi-like character named Charles Cameron, who was a debunker in the ‘70s. Goodman is invited to meet with Cameron and discovers that his childhood hero is essentially living in a mobile home, impoverished and ill. Cameron tells him that his life’s work is a joke because there are three cases he could never fully debunk.
There is a thin line between what makes a movie a horror movie versus a thriller. In my own head, I tend to think of thrillers as films based more in the real world, while horror films tend to have more of a supernatural element. Of course, that’s a line that gets blurred a great deal, more on the horror side of things. There’s nothing supernatural about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Silence of the Lambs (or Hostel for that matter), yet these are clearly horror films. The Nameless (called Los Sin Nombre in the original Spanish, and the copy I watched had the title as the Catalan Els sense nom) is a film that straddles the line between thriller and horror. There are hints of supernatural here, but are they real? Or is it just something that feels like the supernatural because we’ve been manipulated to think that way?
The film begins with the discovery of the body of a young girl. The body is found in a manhole by Spanish police, mutilated beyond recognition. The belief is that everything done to the body was done to mask her identity, but several clues—a bracelet with her name on it and the fact that one of her legs is shorter than the other—leads to her being identified as Angela Gifford. Her parents, Claudia (Emma Vilarasau) and Marc (Brendan Price) are naturally overcome with grief
One of the constant problems of watching movies based on a list is that some of the movies will be incredibly difficult to find. I only got through the 1001 Movies list thanks to the fact that NetFlix was still sending out discs in the mail at the time, the catalogs of multiple local libraries, and the assistance of other people working on the same list of movies. While there are more streaming outlets these days, there are fewer other options. And, to be fair, a lot of movies would be easier to find if I was willing to pay to stream them. So, when I find something free on YouTube or DailyMotion, I’m going to watch. In this case, alien science fiction/horror movie Altered showed up on YouTube, so I took the opportunity to cross it off the list.
Altered has some real connection to any film that features any sort of alien attacker, but to me, it felt a great deal like Fire in the Sky. This isn’t aliens invading, as in Signs, but people dealing with abduction and a significant amount of body horror. This is far more a horror movie than it is a science fiction movie. There wouldn’t be a huge difference in how this film works if you turned the alien into a werewolf.
Here we go again. When you have a touch of the ‘tism, there are things beyond your control that guide at least some of your actions. In my case, it’s a necessity of being complete on things, which is one of the reasons (honestly, probably the reason) that I watch movies based on curated lists. The They Shoot Zombies list has a sublist of, not surprisingly, zombie movies, most of which I have seen, but it felt like another fun list to pursue, and here we are. It’s why I’ve been watching Resident Evil movies against my better judgment, and why I’m now getting through the fourth one, Resident Evil: Afterlife. For this installment, Paul W.S. Anderson has returned to the director’s chair, not that it’s going to make that much of a difference.
It won’t be surprising to hear that Resident Evil: Afterlife has the exact same problem as its two predecessors. Picking up from the previous film, Alice (Milla Jovovich) and her clones attack the main Umbrella Corporation facility in Tokyo, wiping out everyone aside from the chairman, Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), who has injected himself with the T-virus. The original Alice has stowed away on Wesker’s escape craft, but naturally he’s going to continue to survive, and in this case, he’s going to inject Alice with an anti-virus that removes all of her supernatural abilities. This doesn’t seem to remove her ability to survive their plane crashing into a mountain, an accident from which she walks away essentially unscathed.
I’d love to say lots of nice things about Resident Evil: Extinction, but that’s not the world that we live in. As much as I am personally and oddly fascinated by the career of Paul W.S. Anderson and as much as I will apologize for a lot of his films, I can’t bring myself to say a lot nice about this film, which was written and produced by him. There is a sense to this film that the story isn’t really that important, and even the franchise doesn’t matter much. Instead, the entire point of the film is about spectacle for its own sake.
I promise I’m going to go into some detail on this, but I want to set a sort of general idea of what I’m talking about first. Resident Evil: Extinction is a collection of scenes that are connected to each other, and there is a semblance of plot here, but very little sense of the larger story or the reality of the world that the film wants to exist in. It’s an odd little snapshot that exists for its own sake without a sense of anything larger. Things happen because they would “look cool” on screen. Stupid decisions are made for the sake of spectacle with no sense of reality, even the reality projected by the film series.
There is a part of me that is fascinated with the career of Paul W.S. Anderson. He’s certainly earnest in what he does; he’s just not very good at it that often. Then again, our boy Paul has managed to stay married to Milla Jovovich for 16 years, starting after he directed her in Resident Evil. He took a break from directing in that film series, but he wrote pretty much the entire series. So, while he’s not on the hook for everything in the first sequel, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, he’s certainly on the hook for some of it.
The problems with this film are legion, and we can start with the name. This is the second film in the franchise and we’re already at the Apocalypse stage? In another medium, this is where I would cue the “That escalated quickly” meme from Anchorman. It would certainly feel like there should be something in between. Instead, the title really goes to the biggest issue with the film.
There are some lessons that I am slow to learn when it comes to this blog. The They Shoot Zombies list is a cast in point. Sometimes I will watch a horror or horror-adjacent movie and won’t write up a full review or any review at all, and then it shows upon the Zombies list, and I’m forced to rewatch it. Some time ago, I watched a documentary on Ozploitation films that included some highlights of Aussie horror films. One of the ones discussed at length was Next of Kin, a film that I watched and then didn’t review. Well, now it’s on the Zombies list, and here we are.
Next of Kin has a pretty standard set-up for a horror movie, albeit with a twist or two. Linda (Jacki Kerin) inherits the estate of her estranged mother, but it’s not just a simple ramshackle mansion that Linda has inherited. The structure, called Montclare, is a retirement community, so Linda hasn’t just inherited a house, but has a bunch of elderly boarders there on the day she moves in. On that same day, an old woman named Mrs. Ryan moves in as well, brought in by her son Kelvin (Bernadette Gibson and Robert Ratti). Shortly thereafter, one of the elderly residents is discovered drowned in a bathtub.
I tend to write somewhere between 750 and 1000 words for these reviews, give or take. Sometimes I write a little less, but not much, and sometimes I have a lot more to say. The problem with writing longer reviews is that sometimes I come across a movie that doesn’t really have a lot that I can say about it. Just Before Dawn is that kind of movie. This is a slasher movie from the early eighties. Have you seen a late-’70s/early-’80s slasher before? If the answer is yes, you’ve seen probably 90% of this movie. That’s not an exaggeration.
A slasher like Just Before Dawn needs to start us with a kill or two to get things going. To that end, we are introduced to Ty (Mike Kellin) and his nephew Vachel (Charles Bartlett), who are drunk and at least pretending to hunt. They investigate what looks like an abandoned church. Suddenly, their truck appears to have its parking brake release, and it careens down the hill, sending Ty after it. In the church, a mysterious shape appears and stabs Vachel in the junk. When that shape walks out of the church, Ty runs off.
I’m always a little suspicious of remakes. Sure, there are a number of remakes that are better than the original film (the version of The Maltese Falcon that everyone knows is the third version of that story, for instance). I’m still wary, though, because even when the remake is good, it’s usually not as good as the first one. I like the idea of filmmakers doing remakes of movies that were bad but had good ideas rather than remaking classics. This is especially true of formative films in a genre. All of this is to say that I watched the 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes, and I have some things to say about it.
The basic premise of this remake is essentially the same as the original film. A family on vacation is driving through the American southwest, specifically through the desert around where the nuclear tests were done and find themselves stranded and attacked by a family of mutants who have been affected terribly by the radiation from the bomb tests around Alamogordo.
Halloween changed the horror movie industry in a lot of ways, and popularized the slasher subgenre. It also created the scream queen career of Jamie Lee Curtis. It had some real negative effects as well. For a few years in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a teen slasher movie that put her in the role of the final girl or at least final girl-adjacent. Sometimes, you got something fun like The Fog or Road Games. Sometimes you got derivative garbage like Terror Train.
In the nearly 16(!) years I have written this blog, I have watched a lot of garbage. I’ve seen a lot of embarrassing movies, some of which have been forced on me by others as challenges, some from my old podcast, and more than a few from various lists I’ve pursued. There are clearly worse movies than Terror Train that I have watched and written about, but there aren’t a lot that feel this lazy. That, more than anything is what is disappointing about this movie. Terror Train is unquestionably not a good movie, but it’s a far greater sin that it feels like it was written over a weekend by someone who was simultaneously distracted by the television.
In an interview, discussing his career and specifically Scream (if I remember correctly), Wes Craven said that with a horror movie, if you give your audience a really good scare in the opening of the film, you don’t really have to scare them again like that until the end of the film. The first of the Fear Street movies, Fear Street Part One: 1994, has taken this lesson to heart. We have a very solid slasher movie opening, and that really does carry us all the way through to the end, which matches the energy of the opening sequence.
Obviously, based on the name, this is a film that takes place in 1994, and we’re going to really hit that hard in the opening bit, which takes place in a shopping mall at closing time. It’s a cultural snapshot that really sells the time period. No generation was more acclimated to mall culture than Gen-X, and director Leigh Janiak is tail-end of Gen-X. If you were in high school in the ’80s or ‘90s, there’s a better than average chance that you worked in a mall at some point, and you know that feeling of being one of the last people to leave, walking through that empty place, feeling like there’s something waiting for you around the next corner as you head out to your car.
When I started this blog, the biggest genre/style of film that I struggled with was musicals. I have definitely softened on musicals a great deal, and while a musical is rarely going to be my choice, there are plenty that I like. These days, the style I struggle with the most is found footage. There are certainly some found footage movies, or movies done in real-time online (a rough equivalent of found footage) that I think are great. The problem is that it’s also the style that is most accessible to lazy filmmakers. This being the case, I tend to go into them wary, even when they come with a lot of acclaim, like Noroi: The Curse.
Noroi (which is how I will refer to this from this point forward) is absolutely a found footage movie, but it has the benefit of being a found footage movie with the conceit of having been edited. That sounds like a contradiction, but it truly is not. What we have is a documentary filmmaker noted for explorations of the paranormal and his final work. So we have an edited story that doesn’t have to simply work in real-time or be filmed in order, but with the feel of a found footage movie.
Like it or not, George Romero is going to be forever associated with his zombie movies. To be fair, they are his greatest cultural legacy for a reason. He did more than rewrite the world’s concept of zombies, though. Romero made some other oddball movies like Knightriders and The Crazies as well. Hungry Wives (also called Season of the Witch is one of those oddball movies. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was another zombie movie, given the word “hungry” in the title.
This is a Romero movie, though, given the amount of social commentary that is at play here. Hungry Wives is about ennui, about feeling disaffected and disconnected from your own life. The film follows the sort of awakening of Joan Mitchell (Jan White), who is dissatisfied with her life as a housewife, her lack of connection to her daughter, and her unhappy, unpleasant marriage to her husband Jack (Bill Thunhurst). Looking for something more, Joan starts to explore witchcraft, which turns out to be more true and more effective than she would have thought.
There are times when I am frustrated with myself for writing as much as I do on these reviews. It’s great when there’s a lot to say about a particular movie, and in fact writing 800-1000 words on a movie is sometimes a little restrictive. But then there are times when I don’t have a great deal to say. That’s not always a bad thing in terms of what it means for the film. In this case, We Are Still Here is a movie that deserves to be talked about for all of the right reasons. There’s just honestly not a lot that has to be said about it.
The main issue going in is that this is going to be a list of tropes. This is very clearly a haunted house movie for starters. It’s also a movie where outsiders move into a small town and end up in the town’s creepy haunted house, filled with terrible lore of the former occupants. And, naturally, the house is going to be filled with some unquiet ghosts. That’s the set up, and in truth, the film isn’t going to deviate from this much, but it’s going to play within those constraints surprisingly well.
I do have a fondness for Gothic horror movies. I’m not sure if it’s the setting and the costuming, the stateliness and relative genteelness of the stories, or the presence of Christopher Lee in so many of them. While it’s certainly not the entirety of the genre, it’s hard not to view horror from the ‘60s without feeling that all of them took place a century previous in castles somewhere in Europe. That’s not the case, of course, but there are a hell of a lot of films that involve fancy people living in castles in the 18th or 19th century. A film like The Whip and the Body (or La frusta e il corpo if you prefer) certainly fits that whole Gothic idea, but certainly puts the idea of genteelness in question.
As you might get from the title, The Whip and the Body is very much a film about sadomasochism. Kurt Menliff (Christopher Lee) returns to his family’s castle after many years ostensibly to congratulate his brother Christian (Tony Kendall) on his marriage. Christian has married Nevenka (Daliah Lavi), who was a former lover of Kurt’s. The truth is that Kurt is a known sadist and no one in the castle is happy with his return. Particularly enraged are Kurt’s father Count Menliff (Gustavo De Nardo) and Giorgia (Harriet Medin), the family servant who blames Kurt for the suicide death of her daughter.
Old Gothic horror movies are very much their own thing. There’s a sense that they desperately want to be scary and while they often come with a weird sense of torture behind the scenes with a soupçon of Poe-style necrophilia, but they’re not really scary in the modern sense. There may not be a more gothic-y Gothic horror film than Nightmare Castle (Amanti d’Oltretomba, if you prefer, sometimes called The Faceless Monster, and for some reason called The Night of the Doomed on Tubi), in large part because of the presence of the great Barbara Steele, the queen of the 1960s Euro-trash castle-based horror film.
We’re going to dive head-first into the illicit sex angle with this one. Scientist Stephen Arrowsmith (Paul Muller) has a loveless marriage with his wife Muriel (Barbara Steele). He plans a trip away from their estate, but actually doubles back to catch Muriel making the beast with two backs in the greenhouse with the gardener David (Rik Battaglia). Not willing to stand for such treatment, Arrowsmith tortures both of them and eventually kills them, only to discover that he has not been named the heir to Muriel’s fortune. The actual heir is Muriel’s step-sister Jenny (also Barbara Steele). Needing a new plan, Stephen takes the opportunity to remove the hearts of Muriel and David (for, honestly, plot reasons). He also uses their blood to create a serum to rejuvenate his servant Solange (Helga Liné).
Some movies have a plot and some movies are Italian-style horror. Of national horror cinemas, Italian is, in my opinion, the most overrated. As I have said many a time before, a lot of Italian horror films appear to have been created by someone coming up with a couple of scenes (like the stained glass hanging scene and the barbed wire room in Suspiria) and then loosely tying them together with scenes that may or may not have an actual plot connected to them. With Beyond the Darkness (or Buio Omega if you prefer), there’s not really even that. There’s more an idea of what a couple of characters could be like as a starting point and then, well, that’s it.
I mean this pretty much literally seems to be the case with this film. Someone had an idea for a couple of characters (almost certainly not more than two of them), and then just…built something around them. Rich dude Frank (Kieran Canter, and the character was Francesco in the original Italian) lives a life of wealth and privilege, one he inherited after the death of his parents when he was young. He lives with his wet nurse Iris (Franca Stoppi), who clearly wants more than a nursing relationship with Frank, since he’s young, wealthy, and attractive. Frank, however, wants to marry Anna (Cinzia Monreale). Desperate to prevent this, Iris hires a witch to kill Anna with a voodoo doll, and it works.
One of the things that made Peeping Tom such a transgressive movie is the fact that we know immediately who the killer is. The rest of the movie then attempts to get the audience to sympathize with someone who they know to be a murderer. Hatchet for the Honeymoon does half of this. It tells us exactly who the killer is in the opening few minutes, and then honestly doesn’t care if we sympathize or not. It’s more about how things play out than it is about us caring about whether or not the psychotic killer survives or gets what he wants.
So it’s absolutely not a spoiler when I tell you that when we are introduced to John Harrington (Stephen Forsyth) and he immediately tells us that he is a psychopath responsible for the murder in the opening scene of the film. What he tells us is that he suffered some terrible childhood trauma, and for some reason, when he murders a bride with a cleaver (and it’s definitely a cleaver and not a hatchet), he gets a glimpse of that trauma and gets closer to remembering exactly what happened.
Some movies need to be seen not in the context of when they were made, but at the right moment in life. See The Breakfast Club as a senior in high school, and you’ll likely love it. See it when you’re 40, and you wonder why those kids are so whiny. That’s definitely the case with Hocus Pocus. If this had existed when I was a kid, I would have probably loved it. Had I seen it in 1993 when it came out (unlikely), my opinion would have been different. Seeing it now? I get the appeal, but the appeal is not for me.
This is a Disney movie, of course, so it’s not going to be terribly threatening for the audience, although it goes darker in places than I would have guessed going in. It’s also clearly played for a great deal of comedy, which I did expect. My issues with it are neither of those aspects of it, but because it very much feels dated in its characters. There is a particular type if Disney movie kid that existed in this era, and Hocus Pocus might well be the apotheosis of this persona. I promise that we’ll get there.
Because I feel like I am always catching up on movies, there are always movies that “everyone” watches, especially on streaming services, that I don’t see for a few years. Such is the case with the Hulu movie Fresh, which released about three years ago. This is a movie pushing a half million reviews on Letterboxd, but I’m just getting to it now.
I’m honestly surprised that this movie exists as a movie on Hulu and not a dedicated horror platform like Shudder. Fresh is a deeply upsetting movie for a lot of reasons. With a few minor changes, this is straight out of the French Extremity movement. All that’s lacking here is a lot of gore, and Fresh makes up for that in a number of other ways. So, while we’re not specifically going to see the sort of things you might in Martyrs or L’Interieur, there’s still plenty of stomach churning joy to come. It’s worth noting that it’s impossible to talk about this movie without spoiling it, so consider everything after this point to be under a spoiler tag.
I love horror movies, but there are two subgenres of horror that I tend to struggle with. I have a long history of being frustrated with anthology films, since they don’t really provide enough depth to genuinely care about the characters, and I stand by the idea that horror works best when we actually care about the characters. The second subgenre is horror/comedy. Most horror/comedies either aren’t scary, aren’t funny, or both. I actually love a good horror comedy, but the good ones are so rare that I’m always a little nervous going in. Deathgasm, though, had solid bona fides, so I was prepared to enjoy it.
The joy of Deathgasm is that it does exactly what you want a horror comedy to do. While it’s not particularly scary in the sense that you’ll sleep with the light on or something like that, there are plenty of gross out moments that feel like an homage to Dead Alive. It’s also genuinely funny in places. It gives us characters that we can like, and while there are moments where people act like idiots, most of them aren’t completely over the top. It’s funny in the way Shaun of the Dead or Slither was funny, and that’s a good thing.
There’s an interview with Joe Dante talking about The Howling, one of the better werewolf movies around. In that interview, Dante says that they had to hide the fact that it was a werewolf movie in advertisements because people would have thought it was corny and trite. How times have changed. Werewolf movies are cool when they’re done well, and they are surprisingly ripe to be done as horror comedy. The Wolf of Snow Hollow has embraced all of these facts. It’s not hiding that this is a werewolf movie, and it shouldn’t.
One of the things that most werewolf movies have going for them is that they really turn on the idea of isolation. An American Werewolf in London, putting a lycanthrope into the middle of a big city, is the exception to the rule. Werewolves do better in the middle of nowhere, where anyone can be the monster, but the list of suspects is relatively small.