Time Off

Film: Nobody 2
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on Fire!

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.

That's What Voicemail is For

Film: One Missed Call (Chakushin ari)
Format: Streaming video from AMC through Amazon Prime on Fire!

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.

Origin Story

Film: The Apprentice
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on massive television.

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.

Now That's an Age Gap

Film: Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb
Format: Streaming video from Plex on Fire!

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.

Sit. Stay. Bite the Ghost.

Film: Good Boy
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

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.

The Neck Bone's Connected to...

Film: The Skull
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

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.

Smash the Mirror

Film: The Boogey Man
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

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.