What I've Caught Up With, June 2025 Part 1

I didn’t knock a lot of movies off the giant list in June (although I did finally get the number down to three digits, at least temporarily). For whatever reason, the movies I did watch, almost to a film, had long names, forcing me to break this up into two posts. On the personal front, I’ve gotten through all of the scanning of my mother’s photographs and slides. Now I have all of the scrapbooks. It never ends.

Trust is Hard to Come By

Film: Black Bag
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on Fire!

As I spend time catching up on several decades of television, I’ve come to realize that I really like a good legal drama. I’m not necessarily keen for cop shows, but give me a bunch of people in a courtroom (aside from the show Suits—I hated Suits), and I’m usually happy to keep watching. This is interesting to me because if you asked me what kind of shows I like, I probably wouldn’t list legal dramas. When it comes to movies, I am much the same way with espionage thrillers. I can’t say it’s a genre/subgenre that I think about a lot, but I’m always really happy to watch a good spy drama. This is relevant, because Black Bag from earlier this year is a very good spy drama.

The key to a good espionage story is essentially the same as a good thriller in general. We have to have multiple possible outcomes. We have to never really be sure of who we can or should trust. Every decision our main character makes needs to feel as if it is potentially lethal, either for themselves or for someone else. Black Bag gives us this with the added drama of the espionage taking place in the context of a marriage and several other relationships.

Stay Calm

Film: Rammbock (Rammbock: Berlin Undead; Siege of the Dead)
Format: Online video on Fire!

It does often feel like the zombie subgenre of horror films is played out, and then you run across something that does a couple of things different. Such a case is that of Rammbock, also known as Rammbock: Berlin Undead, and sometimes as Siege of the Dead. I was unable to watch this in the best of circumstances—I could only find a dubbed version online, and I would imagine that it being fully in its native German would only help it. Rammbock (which translates to “battering ram”) has its issues, but it’s pretty solid for what it is.

The basics of the zombie film were set in place with Romero’s film in 1968. Zombies, more technically ghouls, are the recently dead returned to unlife, mindless and craving the flesh of the living. Anyone bitten will turn into a zombie, since the virus/bacteria/whatever that creates the zombies in the first place is guaranteed to be eventually fatal. This is a reality that is included in zombie-adjacent films like 28 Days Later, where the “zombies” aren’t actually undead, but are otherwise the same as the standard cinematic zombie.

No, Not the Show

Film: The Walking Dead
Format: Internet video on Fire!

Some actors give every role their all no matter what. Even if the movie is terrible, poorly thought out, filled with holes, or just not very good, these actors put their heart and soul into every role they take. It’s one of the reasons I love about Boris Karloff. To be fair, Karloff made a ton of great early creepers, but a lot of them were low rent and low budget and filled with weird science and even weirder mysticism. Regardless, Karloff treated each role like Shakespeare. All of this brings us to The Walking Dead from 1936. This is technically an old-school zombie movie (in that it involves literally the walking dead), but we’re not going to be dealing with flesh-eating ghouls.

At its heart, The Walking Dead is a sort of revenge picture combined with Karloff’s classic Frankenstein role with mob ties to boot. The difference is that rather than being made up of a bunch of stitched-together body parts, Karloff is going to play a man fully resurrected by Science! and seeking revenge on those who had him killed in the first place.

Liquid Evil

Film: Prince of Darkness
Format: DVD from New Lenox Public Library through interlibrary loan on basement television.

For whatever reason, we have decided that when it comes to horror, the only real religion is Catholicism. Protestants, Hindus, and Muslims can all take a back seat, because it’s the holy celibates who have the real ability to hold back evil. If I had to guess, I would say that this comes from the fact that huge parts of the Catholic faith are hidden and kept secret. Tell someone that there is a secret Presbyterian library that holds secret lore and they’ll roll their eyes at you. Tell them that there are secret Catholic scriptures, and they’re right on board. This is, more or less, the starting place for Prince of Darkness (or John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness if you like that stamp of approval).

The secret lore in this case is a completely unknown Catholic sect of priests called the Brotherhood of Sleep. Centuries ago, the story says, the order found a container of swirling green liquid. The container, which can only be opened from the inside, is millions of years old, and we will eventually find out that the liquid itself is, essentially, the essence of Satan. The Brotherhood of Sleep has existed to keep this container sealed—and hidden even from the Vatican—but the last of the Brotherhood has died before passing on the secret.

Declaring Your Major

Film: Thesis (Tesis)
Format: Streaming video from AMC+ through Amazon Prime on Fire!

There seem to really be only two things required to make a good thriller film. You need to put your character or characters in legitimate danger, and you need to make sure that what that character or characters need to do to survive isn’t obvious. A part of the danger has to be that we don’t know who to trust—that anyone could end up being dangerous or the cause of the terror. Thesis (or Tesis in the original Spanish) is a master class in creating this kind of tension. That it happens to be the debut feature-length film from Alejandro Amenábar makes it only that much more impressive.

A large part of the tension in Thesis comes from not just the way the film is set up, but the subject of the film itself. Thesis is very much a film that dives head-first into the idea of snuff films, following from Mute Witness from the previous year and followed by 8MM a few years later. It’s a subject that has always been of some dark fascination for many horror fans—films that touch on the subject feel dangerous, and Thesis, while it never feels at all like a snuff film, definitely does feel dangerous.

Step Right Up

Film: The Funhouse
Format: Internet video on Fire!

Like any genre, horror movies have evolved over time. One of the ways in which they have evolved is in how the protagonists encounter and deal with the danger. These days, most of our protagonists are pulled into something through accident, bad luck, or a poor but understandable decision. We don’t fault the couple in The Strangers for being home, for instance. Early horror films, though, especially those of the 1970s and ‘80s, feature teens who make really stupid decisions and essentially set themselves up as a buffet for the killer. Such is the case with 1981’s The Funhouse, a film where it genuinely feels like our endangered teens don’t really deserve to remain in the gene pool.

As the name of this film implies, we’re going to be spending some time with a carnival, and a lot of that time is clearly going to be spent in the carnival’s funhouse. This is because of a monumentally stupid decision made by our endangered teens, one of whom is the cause of all o the problems that happen to them. Seriously, if you have a friend like this guy, you should rethink the relationship.