Drilling Down

Film: The Loved Ones
Format: DVD from Rock Island Public Library through interlibrary loan on gigantic television.

I don’t enjoy the torture porn subgenre of horror, and I don’t seek out gore for the sake of gore. My preferences in the horror genre are more psychological than anything else, and while I don’t tend to shy away from gore, for me, it works when it’s plot-necessary. I think it works better when it’s used in small amounts and when it’s implied. So movies that involve any amount of torture are always going to be ones that I hesitate to watch. It’s one of the reasons that I’ve waited this long to see highly acclaimed Aussie horror film The Loved Ones. I knew enough of what I was getting into to wonder if this was going to be extremely troubling.

The Loved Ones is a film that contains some gore elements but also tends to keep the most brutal aspects off camera. It’s also a film where the torture is extremely plot-relevant. In fact, that torture is very much the point of the film. Normally, this would be a reason for me to wonder what I was doing through the entire short run time, but in this case, what happens is surprisingly tasteful for a horror movie from a first-time feature-length director.

The Title is the Review

Film: Honey Don’t
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

Someone needs to tell me what the hell happened to Ethan Coen. I consider myself a fan of the Coen Brothers. I’m not any kind of superfan—I haven’t seen their entire catalog, but I’ve seen more than I haven’t. When the Coens decided to separate artistically for a bit, Joel made The Tragedy of Macbeth, a film that earned three Oscar nominations. Ethan Coen made Drive-Away Dolls and then Honey Don’t, which are the two lowest-rated movies of his career. Like I said, I haven’t seen everything attached to Ethan Coen’s name, but I certainly understand why Honey Don’t sits under everything else of his I’ve seen, and in fact below pretty much everything he’s directed.

Honey Don’t was written by Coen with his wife, Tricia Cooke. It’s their second writing collaboration, and also the second in a proposed “lesbian B-movie trilogy.” Since neither of the two movies in the trilogy have been well-received, it does bring up the question of whether or not this will be completed.

Cold as Ice

Film: Dead of Winter
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on gigantic television.

Every now and then, an actor who has made their bones in traditional roles starts making action movies. It happened with Liam Neeson did Taken and it happened when Colin Firth did Kingsmen. It happens to comedians sometimes, too—Bob Odenkirk and the Nobody films, for instance. With Dead of Winter, it appears that it is now Emma Thompson’s turn. And let me tell you, if Emma Thompson is now going to be doing thrillers and action movies, I am 100% here for it.

Dead of Winter is a high concept movie in the sense that you can run down the plot in a couple of sentences. Barb (Thompson) is a recent widow who is traveling to a remote lake in northern Minnesota to scatter her husband’s ashes. On her way to the lake, she discovers that a couple has kidnapped a young woman (Laurel Marsden) for some unknown reason. Since the area is incredibly remote, has just survived a blizzard, and there is no good cell phone service, Barb realizes she is the only hope the young woman’s survival.

Hombre Secreto

Film: The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto)
Format: Streaming video from Hulu on Fire!

There were times when I was watching The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto in the original Portuguese) when I felt like I had seen this movie before. The reason is that it feels like it covers a lot of the same territory as I’m Still Here from the previous year. Both films deal with the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 1970s and with the lives that were devastated or lost under that regime. I’m Still Here deals with a woman looking for what happened to her husband. The Secret Agent deals much more with the direct victim of the violence. The stories are different but similar, and feel united even though they take place years apart and concern different people.

Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura) is a dissident in a Brazil that has been under military rule for more a decade. He travels to Recife where his in-laws are taking care of his son Fernando (Enzo Nunes) ever since Armando’s wife Fátima died. He finds his way to a sort of commune of dissidents and takes the name Marcelo as an alias. He is placed by the group in a job at the city office that creates identity cards. This allows him the opportunity to look for information on his mother, who he knows very little about.

What I've Caught Up With, March 2026 Part 2

I had planned to finish the show Evil by the end of the month as my workout show, but an injury kept me out of the gym for a couple of weeks, so I’m still a week or so away from finishing. I did cross off a few large shows in March, though. I got through The Ray Bradbury Theater, a show that had some significant high points and a few low points. I also finished The Good Wife, all 156 episodes, a show I’ve been watching for months. And, on the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of speed, I burned through The Dragon Prince on NetFlix—a show that has some interesting similarities to Avatar: The Last Airbender. Strong recommend.

What I've Caught Up With, March 2026 Part 1

My stated goal every year is to watch 400 movies, and every month I fall a little more behind on that goal. Hitting that goal looks like 34 movies in March and I watched 30, which puts me at an average of a movie per day exactly right now. It seems like fate that I set that goal and always fall a little short of it. Still, it was a good month and I watched a lot of pretty good films and a few real stinkers.

Apex Predator

Film: Predator: Badlands
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on gigantic television.

The original Predator movie is a classic and the second one is at least interesting, if not that great. And from there, the franchise tanked and it stayed tanked until it was handed to Dan Trachtenberg with Prey. Since this film, the franchise is on an upswing. The animated Predator: Killer of Killers was a great addition to the series, and then came Predator” Badlands. And while it’s not quite at the level of Prey, it really feels like the third movie in the franchise in a row that really gets it.

What’s different this time is that for the first time in the franchise, the film in the main will come from the perspective of the predator (the species refers to itself as “Yautja”) rather than the hunted prey. A young Yautja named Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is the runt of his family, and because of this, desperate to prove himself. For his hunt to bring him fully into the clan, he decides to travel to the hell world of Genna and hunt a creature known as the Kalisk, thought to be unkillable.