"Bustin' makes me feel good." -Gary Grooberson

Several years after the events of Afterlife, the Spengler family and Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) have moved to New York City and reopened the Ghostbusters. The new and old Ghostbusters have to work together when a demonic god arrives to put the Big Apple into a deep freeze.

What Works:

This movie has some problems, but one thing that absolutely isn't a problem is the cast. While I think the cast is too big, everyone is at least very likable. I didn't find any of them to be annoying, which is always my worry in a movie like this. Everyone is trying their best even if they don't have a ton of material to work with. It's a charismatic bunch which helps get the movie over some bumpier areas.

Paul Rudd is one of the highlights of the film, as he usually is. His character is just so darn likable. His role in the movie is about trying to find his place as a step-dad figure to Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), which is one of the stronger storylines of the film.

The other interesting storyline is Phoebe's. She ends up befriending a ghost named Melody (Emily Alyn Lind). This is something the movies haven't really done before and it's actually a really interesting storyline. It isn't as fleshed out as it could have been and really should have been the focal point of the movie, but the characters have good chemistry and I was very invested in watching this play out.

Finally, the tone of the movie really worked for me. I know not everyone has been a fan of it, but I liked it. It's definitely the darkest Ghostbusters movie and the movie actually has a body count, but I also found the movie pretty fun and I thought it got the balance between the darkness and the comedy right. Your millage may vary with that. I know that I frequently enjoy movies with tonal whiplash a lot more than most people, but this is a more mild example.

What Sucks:

The big problem with this movie is that it's bloated. It has a huge cast and a lot of them don't have much to do. You probably could have cut two-thirds of the cast or at least combined some of the characters. There isn't any reason for Lucky (Celeste O'Connor) or Podcast (Logan Kim) to be here. Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) has absolutely nothing to do. Just send his character off to college. The new characters, played by Kumail Nanjiani, James Acaster, and Patton Oswalt, all could have easily been cut. Even Bill Murray and Annie Potts don't add anything to the story. Cut most of the characters and give the ones you don't cut something to contribute.

Ultimately, this is a movie that needed to be more focused. I think the best move would have been to make this more of a family drama. Phoebe feels alienated from her family as they try and figure out the new dynamic and forms a connection with a ghost. That's an interesting plot for a Ghostbusters movie. How do you bust a ghost that you like? What are the moral implications of busting ghosts? Is there a better way to do the job? Could they help ghosts move on to the afterlife instead of just putting them in a containment unit? All of that is interesting. This movie touches on that stuff, but needed to focus more on that. You could even keep Wolfhard's character in the movie this way. Maybe he tries to use his status as a Ghostbuster to impress girls. That's something Venkman would have done. That way you can keep some of the humor of the original movie while still doing something new.

Verdict:

While I enjoyed what we got from Frozen Empire, the movie could have been much better. It has some interesting storylines and likable characters, as well as a enjoyable tone, but the movie is bloated with too many character with not enough to do. It's much better than the 2nd movie and the remake, but not as good as Afterlife or the original, but it's a decent enough cinematic experience.

7/10: Good

I recently went down a rabbit hole (thanks tiktok) I seen a video about the Angela chapters from lucifer valentine and I went to YouTube to see if I could find someone that reviews these movies and sure enough I did. I also watched this guy's reviews on the guinea pig series. Which leaves me questioning, who watches these things willingly and why? I thought the saw movies were extreme (I lasted like 1 minute into the first one because someone was already chopping a leg off) these 2 series made that seem like nothing (still won't watch because I can't handle gore, the reviews I watched he censors the gore and gross stuff)

I do want to note this is not intended to be judgemental to anyone that does enjoy vomit gore or extreme gore horror genres, more curious as to why someone likes it? What draws you to that level of gore? Maybe you're someone that's unbothered by it or squeamish to these things.

"He's not imaginary. And he's not your friend." -Alice

Jessica (DeWanda Wise) moves back into her childhood home along with her husband and two stepdaughters. The younger stepdaughter, Alice (Pyper Braun), soon makes an imaginary friend, Chauncey. However, Chauncey has a dark connection to Jessica's childhood.

Spoilers Below. I can't talk about this movie without getting into the 3rd act, so spoilers below. This movie is mostly bad and boring, so I would not recommend watching Imaginary.

What Works:

The three main leads of this movie are Jessica and her two stepdaughters. I think all three actresses; DeWanda Wise, Pyper Braun, and Taegen Burns, do a good job with the material they are given to work with. They're trying their best and mostly succeed.

The 3rd act of the movie takes place in the imaginary world and I like the production design of the scenes that take place here. They could have gone further, but the look of the sequences here is cool and they were able to get fairly creative with it considering the budget of the movie.

Finally, there is a nice twist near the end of the movie. We get through what feels like the climax of the film and our heroes seem to escape. We get a nice happy ending and everything is resolved, but then the twist hits. Jessica is still trapped in the imaginary world and none of the ending was real. This allows the real climax of the movie to begin. I was genuinely caught off guard by the twist and I think it worked well.

What Sucks:

My main problem with this movie is that it doesn't go far enough with anything interesting. Like I mentioned above, the production design of the imaginary world was good, but they don't do enough with the premise. One of the characters says that anything they can imagine can exist in this world, but they don't explore that much. The filmmakers could have gotten really fun and creative with this, but the end result is lackluster and not overly interesting.

We also don't fully explore everything that happened to Jessica when she was a kid. Her parents were profoundly affected by what happened and it's mostly glazed over. More could have been done there.

A large chunk of the movie is mostly uninteresting. Chauncey doesn't terrorize too many people until the end of the movie and it feels like the movie missed out on some fun opportunities.

Finally, Betty Buckley plays the eccentric, old lady who lives down the street and knows about Jessica's backstory with Chauncey. I'm not sure what was going on with her performance. It was all over the place and sometimes it felt like the editor used outtakes. Her performance just doesn't work.

Verdict:

Imaginary has some nice production design, decent acting by the leads, and a well-executed twist, but the movie feels like a missed opportunity and suffers from a lack of imagination. There are interesting elements that aren't fully explored, it takes way too long for the movie to get interesting, and Betty Buckley's performance is bizarre and doesn't work. Don't waste your time or money with this one.

3/10: Really Bad

Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

Rated PG-13 for sci-fi violence, brief sexuality and language

Score: 3 out of 5

Eight Legged Freaks is a self-conscious throwback to '50s monster movies that does the job it sets out to do perhaps a little too well. It's the kind of movie you'd imagine American International Pictures themselves (the Blumhouse of the '50s and '60s) would've made back then if they had a big budget and modern CGI technology to spare, a film that gets right up in your face with all manner of icky arachnid goodness that it takes every opportunity it can to throw at the screen, and even though the effects may be dated now, it still works in the context of the lighthearted B-movie that this movie is trying to be. It's a movie where, as gross as it often is, going for an R rating probably would've hurt the campy tone it was going for. Its throwback to old monster movie tropes is a warts-and-all one, admittedly, especially where its paper-thin characters are concerned, such that it starts to wear out its welcome by the end and could've stood to be a bit shorter. That said, it's never not a fun movie, especially if you're not normally into horror, and it's the kind of film that I can easily throw on in the background to improve my mood.

Set in the struggling mining town of Perfection, Arizona, the film opens with an accident involving a truck carrying toxic waste accidentally dumping a barrel of the stuff into a pond that happens to be located right next to the home of a man named Joshua who runs an exotic spider farm. He starts feeding his spiders insects that he sourced from the pond, and before long the spiders start growing to enormous size, eating Joshua and eventually threatening the town, forcing its residents to start banding together for survival. I could go into more detail on the characters, but most of them fall into stock, one-note archetypes and exist mainly to supply the jokes and the yucks, elevated chiefly by the film's surprisingly solid cast. David Arquette's oddly disaffected performance as Chris, the drifter whose father owned the now-shuttered mines and returns to town in order to reopen them, manages to work with the tone the movie is going for, feeling like he doesn't wanna be in this town to begin with and wondering what the hell he got himself into by returning to the dump he grew up in. Kari Wuhrer makes for a compelling action hero as Sam, the hot sheriff who instructs her teenage daughter Ashley (played by a young Scarlett Johansson) how to deal with pervy boys and looks like a badass slaughtering giant spiders throughout the film. Doug E. Doug got some of the funniest moments in the movie as Harlan, a conspiracy radio host who believes that aliens are invading the town. Every one of the actors here knew that they were in a comedy first and a horror movie second, and so they played it broad and had fun with the roles. There are various subplots concerning things like the town's corrupt mayor and his financial schemes, the mayor's douchebag son Bret, and Sam's nerdy son Mike whose interest in spiders winds up saving the day, and they all go in exactly the directions you think, none of them really having much impact on the story but all of them doing their part to make me laugh.

The movie was perhaps a bit too long for its own good, especially in the third act. Normally, this is the part where a movie like this is supposed to "get good" as we have giant monsters running around terrorizing the town, and to the film's credit, the effects still hold up in their own weird way. You can easily tell what's CGI at a glance, but in a movie where the spiders are played as much for a laugh as anything else, especially with the chattering sound they constantly make that makes it sound like they're constantly giggling, it only added to the "live-action cartoon" feel of the movie. The problem is, there are only so many ways you can show people getting merked by giant spiders before they all start to blend together, and the third act is thoroughly devoted to throwing non-stop monster mayhem at the screen even after it started to run out of ideas on that front. There are admittedly a lot of cool spider scenes in this movie, from giant leaping spiders snatching young punks off of dirt bikes to people getting spun up in webs to a tarantula the size of a truck flipping a trailer to a hilarious, Looney Tunes-style fight between a spider and a cat, and the humans themselves also get some good licks in, but towards the end, the film seemed to settle into a routine of just spiders jumping onto people. It was here where the threadbare characters really started to hurt the film. If I had more investment in the people getting killed and fighting to survive, I might have cared more, but eventually, I was just watching a special effects showcase. The poster prominently advertises that this movie is from Dean Devlin, one of the producers and writers of Independence Day and the 1998 American Godzilla adaptation, and while he otherwise had no creative involvement, I did feel that influence in a way that the marketing team probably didn't intend.

The Bottom Line

Eight Legged Freaks is a great movie with which to introduce somebody young or squeamish to horror, especially monster movies. It's shallow and doesn't have much to offer beyond a good cast, a great sense of humor, and a whole lot of CGI spider mayhem without a lot of graphic violence. Overall, it's a fun throwback to old-school monster movies.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/03/review-eight-legged-freaks-2002.html>

This is my first review and constructive feedback is welcome.

"Christmas Bloody Christmas" is directed by Joe Begos.

The movie features Riley Dandy as Tori, Sam Delich as Robbie, and Abraham Benrubi as Santa.

"It's Christmas Eve, and Tori just wants to get drunk and party, but when a robotic Santa Claus at a nearby toy store goes haywire and begins a rampant killing spree through her small town, she's forced into a battle for survival."

Have you ever seen the movie Small Soldiers? You know—the one where this completely idiotic toy manufacturer decides to put military munition chips into children's toys and carnage ensues?

This movie takes that premise a step further.

What happens when we put munition chips inside robotic mall Santas?

Well, first of all, two loathsome, insipid morons swear at each other incessantly for 45 minutes while also making fun of other (better) movies until someone reminds the film's director that he's supposed to be making a horror movie.

Our morons are Tori and Robbie, two record shop employees who have all of the charm and likeability of a pair of dead hippopotami who like shouting the word cunt for literally no reason.

These two are on a heroic quest to... try and get drunk and bully each other into having sex.

We spend a lot of time with these "delightful" individuals as they wander from location to location, slagging off other movies, music, and casual acquaintances while also swearing like the only vocabulary they have comes from a "word of the day" calendar written by Rob Zombie.

Occasionally, the movie will cut away from these two characters to show us ten to fifteen seconds of an evil robot Santa moving around town before we cut back to Pinky and Perky yelling at each other.

We get about fifteen seconds of Santa for every 8–10 minutes of Tori and Robbie.

There is no tension or scares in our scenes with the evil Santa because they are too short and choppily put together. Sadly, with Santa's scenes being so short, most of his victims have little to no characterization beyond the insults our heroes sling at them, so I found it really hard to care about any of them.

Whenever a kill happens, it's competently filmed but marred by the use of prosthetic effects that are just slightly lacking.

So we spend almost an hour of this movie with Tori and Robbie as we slowly develop a migraine and dream of a decent killer Santa movie, and then

-SPOILER-

suddenly Robbie gets his melon split and the movie becomes actually bearable.

Tori is alone with this unstoppable yule tide nutter and finds herself involved in a desperate struggle (with mercifully less dialogue) for her life.

She's still insufferable, but she has fewer characters to be insufferable with, and her desperation almost endears her to us.

-END SPOILERS-

The Santa bot gets to shine at this point as well.

He has a lot more screentime and gets to really occupy his time as a red-clad Terminator/Michael Myers tribute act.

Props to the actor playing Santa for taking a character that could easily have been quite goofy and instead lending him a real sense of power and threat.

The movie has an 80s slasher vibe to it, both musically and visually, which isn't surprising when you consider that it started life as an idea for a "Silent Night, Deadly Night" remake.

This film definitely improves with its third act.

We are given more action, more ambitious fight scenes, and much better makeup for Santa.

Unfortunately, all of these improvements come much too late to make up for us having to deal with the first two acts and our main characters.

My (Christmas) wishlist for this movie:

I wish Santa had had more of a presence in the film's first half.

I wish that the film had had some more story included in it to explain why Santa was after Tori because his pursuit of her made little to no sense.

I mean, if I'd been in Santa's boots and had to put up with her and Robbie, I would have ran so far away in the opposite direction that I doubt I'd be home in time for next Christmas.

Christmas Bloody Christmas has been judged.

It just wasn't a very fun Christmas present, and left me dissapointed, it can have 3 stars out of 10

Lisa Frankenstein (2024)

Rated PG-13 for violent content, bloody images, sexual material, language, sexual assault, teen drinking and drug content

Score: 3 out of 5

Lisa Frankenstein is a vibes movie. Despite having been heavily marketed on the fact that it was written by Diablo Cody, the writer of Jennifer's Body (who has said that the two films take place in the same universe), her screenplay is actually one of the film's weak links, falling apart in the third act as the plot starts to get weird and disjointed in a way that left me wondering just how many scenes got rewritten or left on the cutting room floor. No, it's the cast and director Zelda Williams (daughter of Robin) who put this movie over the top, crafting a film that feels like if a young Tim Burton directed Weird Science in the best possible way. (In the interview with Cody that the Alamo Drafthouse showed before the film, she cited both Weird Science and Edward Scissorhands as inspirations, alongside Bride of Frankenstein and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and I'm not surprised.) It's at its best as a pure comedy, one that sends up its nostalgic '80s setting to the point of farce and pushes the PG-13 rating as far as it can go. I'm not surprised that, much like Jennifer's Body did in its initial run, this movie failed to find its audience in theaters (though releasing it on Super Bowl weekend probably didn't help), but while I don't think it'll be treated as an outright classic in ten years' time, I do believe it'll follow a very similar trajectory of being rediscovered on home video and streaming.

Set in suburban Illinois in 1989, our protagonist is Lisa Swallows, a teenage girl who's been moody and morose ever since her mom was killed by an axe murderer two years ago, followed by her father Dale remarrying the obnoxious jackass Janet and thus gaining a stepsister in the cheerleader Taffy. She likes to hang out at the old cemetery, where, one night after going to a party where she accidentally takes hallucinogens and subsequently gets sexually harassed, she runs off and tells one of the men buried there that she wishes she was "with him" (i.e. dead). Something must've been miscommunicated, because that night, that grave is struck by lightning and its occupant rises from the dead, trying to find Lisa and be with her. Lisa is initially horrified, but soon realizes that, beneath this creature's rotten exterior, there's actually a romantic soul who longs to be human again. And after tragedy strikes, Lisa decides to find a way to make her new boyfriend's dream a reality... no matter who gets in her way.

The first two acts of this film felt like they were building to something very interesting. The thing about the best takes on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, not least of all the 1931 Universal classic, is that they recognize that the real "monster" is in fact Dr. Frankenstein himself, the creature's creator, and this film leans heavily in that direction with its depiction of Lisa. She eagerly starts killing people in order to build the perfect boyfriend, getting sucked into darkness as she's blinded by love, and Kathryn Newton completely steals the show playing her, starting the film as a dowdy, depressed dweeb but eventually developing a gothic fashion sense and, with it, a catty diva-like attitude while channeling a young Winona Ryder in both Beetlejuice and Heathers. There were many places that this film could've gone, most of them involving Lisa becoming a full-bore villain while Taffy suddenly finds herself in her stepsister's path, with the creature either serving as Lisa's partner in crime from start to finish or perhaps slowly gaining a sense of morality as he becomes more "human" and realizing that Lisa is evil. All the while, the Frankenstein metaphor becomes one about somebody who'd do anything for love, including that, and loses herself in the process. And at times, it seemed to be going in that direction, especially as Taffy grows increasingly traumatized over the course of the film.

Unfortunately, whether it was the PG-13 rating or a desire to make Lisa more sympathetic (and Taffy less so), the film won't commit to the bit. Lisa's characterization does a near-total 180 in the third act as the film asks us to side with her as, at the very least, a sympathetic anti-villain with good intentions. Lisa should've been the bad guy that the film was building her up as, no ifs, ands, or buts -- a sympathetic and compelling one like Jennifer Check, but still somebody who crossed the line miles ago and never looked back. It would've given Liza Soberano, who plays Taffy and will probably be the breakout star of this film, more to do instead of making her a supporting player in Lisa's story who plays only a minor role in the third act. Instead, it felt like I was watching a whole new character entirely that just so happened to share Lisa's name and face. I highly suspect that there's a lot of alternate material here, either in earlier drafts of the screenplay or deleted scenes, because the sudden tonal shift in the third act feels like a product of a completely different movie.

What saved this film in the end were the style and the humor. Much like Karyn Kusama on Jennifer's Body, Zelda Williams imbues this film with a ton of gothic flair, Lisa's outfits being just the start of it, inspired by Tim Burton and, by extension, the German expressionism that he in turn drew from. The bright pink suburban house that Lisa and her family live in is almost cartoonish, and draws a sharp contrast to the world around it. The moment we're introduced to Carla Gugino as Lisa's stepmother, a hilariously over-the-top parody of an '80s suburban mom who needlessly antagonizes Lisa every chance she gets, and Joe Chrest as her spectacularly inattentive father who looks the part of a wholesome suburban dad but otherwise can't be bothered to look up from his newspaper, we see exactly the kind of people who'd happily live in a house like that. There are multiple animated sequences that liven up the film throughout, most notably the prologue/opening credits showing us the creature's backstory in life. The soundtrack is filled with great retro '80s needle drops, especially once the creature regains the use of his hands and can play the piano again. Cole Sprouse as the creature had no dialogue barring grunts, moans, and screams, but he still made for a compelling presence on screen as the other half of the film's central romance, proving that seven years on Riverdale was a waste of a lot of young actors' talents. This was Williams' first feature film, and if this is indicative of her skill behind the camera, I can see her going far. And most importantly, this movie is hysterical. The entire theater was laughing throughout, and I was right there with them. There are jokes about everything from "back massagers" to the creature's physical decay, and more broadly, its campy gothic tone is played far more for laughs than frights, most notably in one death scene that would be the most brutal in the film on the face of it but is instead one of the most hilarious scenes in it as the film shows us just enough to let us know exactly what happened and wince while still remaining PG-13. Cody's grasp of storytelling may have been shaky here, but her knack for getting me to laugh my ass off remains fully intact.

The Bottom Line

Lisa Frankenstein should've had more care put into its screenplay, especially once act three comes around, but it's still a very funny and watchable movie that, much like Jennifer's Body, I can see enduring as a cult classic. If you're not into the Big Game, check it out.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/02/review-lisa-frankenstein-2024.html>

Hmm, how do I begin this one? This has been a long time coming. I definitely should have gotten to this one a lot sooner than I did. That’s certainly a recurring theme on this blog. This one was a major part of my journey into the world of audio drama. So, without further ado, here it is at long last. We’re taking a look at Campfire Radio Theatre.

Welcome, friend. Have a seat by the fire. Make yourself comfortable. Campfire Radio Theatre is a horror anthology audio drama created by John Ballentine. I first became aware of it when Jordan Harbour mentioned Campfire Radio Theatre on an episode of his podcast Twilight Histories. I figured that Campfire Radio Theatre must be good if Jordan was recommending it. Sure enough, I discovered a wonderful horror anthology. Campfire Radio Theatre is proof that good things come to those who wait. What it lacks in frequency of uploads it more than make up for in quality. John Ballentine has assembled a very talented team of voice actors. Keven Hartnell, the series composer, always produces some excellent spooky music. And, of course, the writing is almost always fantastic.

So, a bit about how I’m going to approach this review. I’m not actually going to review all of the episodes in one go. I’m going to treat this as though I were reviewing an audio drama such as The Program Audio Series or The TEMP. I will give it a good start, and then periodically update it with more reviews. Anthologies always take more out of me than serialized shows do. I have to analyze and weigh the merits of each individual episode. This can take a fair bit of time, and you might imagine. I will also not be reviewing the episodes in chronological order. One of the beauties of anthologies is that you can listen to the episodes in any order that you please. As such, I apply the same principle to this review.

Now that we've got all of the housekeeping out of the way, let’s start the review in earnest.

The first episode that we’ll be looking at is “Death and Alchemy.” This episode takes place in London during the Victorian Era. We follow a scientist who has developed a serum that he claims can restore the dead to life. He wishes to test the serum on the corpse of a recently deceased girl. He is sure that this experiment will put him in the history books. Little does he know how terribly correct he is, but not for the reasons he thinks.

This was the very first episode of Campfire Radio Theatre I ever listened to. Jordan Harbour recommended this episode in particular. John Ballentine returned the favor and ran a promo for Twilight Histories at the end of the episode. “Death and Alchemy” is based on the short story “The Doctor in the Dungeon” by Patrick Moody. I quite enjoyed this episode, so I’ll have to track down the original short story. “Death and Alchemy” really captures that feeling of a gothic horror story from the Victorian Era. The horror coming from a scientist probing into things man was not meant to know.

Getting to see a zombie apocalypse unleashed upon Victorian Britain was certainly fun. I’m an alternate history enthusiast, and this episode certainly appealed to that side of me. I also liked how it drew a bit upon real history as well. Real medical schools in the Victorian Era often acquired corpses, via illicit means, for their dissection classes. There was quite a lucrative trade in grave robbing.

All in all, and excellent introduction to Campfire Radio Theatre.

Next up, we’re taking a look at “The Dentist.” This episode follows a woman named Sandra who has become a dental assistant for a dentist named Dr. Stewart. He offers his services at a very reasonable rate. In fact, he’s still the most popular dentist in town. But there’s something a bit odd about him. Dr. Stewart always insists on using gas to relax his patients for their procedures. All of his patients seem a bit off after they’ve received their procedures. The secretary is also very secretive about patient files. Dr. Stewart is hiding something, but what could it be?

This episode is another adaptation. Specifically, it was adapted from the episode of the same name from the Canadian radio series Nightfall. It was a horror anthology from the CBC that ran during the 1980s. You can find all the episodes on YouTube, and I certainly recommend that you do. Nightfall is an excellent series, and I’m glad that Campfire Radio Theatre introduced it to me. This episode was an extremely faithful adaption. I listened to the Nightfall version, but I think I prefer the Campfire Radio Theatre version. Not that the Nightfall version was bad, but I found myself comparing the performances to the Campfire Radio Theatre version.

Again, they weren’t bad, I was just used to the Campfire Radio Theatre version. John Ballentine actually got permission from Bill Gray, the writer of the Nightfall episode, to adapt “The Dentist.” I personally don’t consider dentists to be scary, but I know that many people do. Still, the big revelation of the episode certainly managed to send a chill down my spine. It was also lovely to hear Julie Hoverson from 19 Nocturne Boulevard as Eveline the receptionist.

Another excellent adaptation, and another excellent episode.

For our third offering we’re examining “Demon Eyes.” We follow an FBI special agent named Sara Gowan. She must locate the victims of a serial killer named Wesley Morrow. Morrow is slated to be executed soon, and Sara is racing against the clock. However, Morrow has given Sara a pair of glasses, but not just any glasses. These glasses allow those who wear them to see the demons that walk among us disguised as humans.

This was the first episode of Campfire Radio Theatre ever produced. It was certainly a strong start to the audio drama. John Ballentine has admitted to being a big fan of John Carpenter. I bring this up because I can definitely see some influences from the movie They Live in this episode. Still, John Ballentine manages to put his own spin on things. For example, there isn’t really any commentary on social issues like consumerism. And the antagonists are demons, not aliens. Then there was the big reveal at the end of the episode…which would be major spoilers if I were to talk about that. I will say that I did not see it coming, but I absolutely loved it.

We have bowled a turkey as far as great episodes of Campfire Radio Theatre.

Our fourth fearsome offering is “The Rites of Autumn.” We follow a grandfather teaching his grandson all about various Halloween festivities and traditions. It starts off innocently enough, but there’s clearly something sinister lurking just beneath the surface.

This one is kind of hard to talk about without spoiling the ending. True to the title, this one does have a very autumnal feel to it. Makes for good listening during the Halloween season. Then again, so does the rest of Campfire Radio Theatre. The actor who played the grandpa did a fantastic job. You could tell there was something sinister about him, but he never tips his hand until the big reveal. Although, during the pumpkin carving scene, I certainly had a feeling that knife was going to be carving more than just pumpkins. Oh, and be sure to stick around after the credits. There’s a fun little gag segment at the very end, along with a very catchy song. Not much more spoiler-free stuff to add here. Well, beyond to say give this one a listen.

Our fifth freighting episode is “The War of the Worlds.” This one adapts H.G. Wells’ classic novel, but with Campfire Radio Theatre’s own unique twist. It takes the form of a series of cellphone recordings. We follow a young lady as she tries to survive the Martian invasion of Earth, and avoid their dreadful war machines. She thinks that she has found temporary refuge from the invaders. Little does she know that aliens aren’t the terrors she should be looking out for.

This episode really surprised me. I was not sure how John Ballentine was going to pull-off “The War of the Worlds” in only thirty-seven minutes. John took the right approach here. This isn’t a straight adaptation of The War of the Worlds. Rather, it is a story that happens to be set in that particular world, for lack of a better way of putting it. I also really loved the angle this episode went with. Sure, the Martians are a threat, but it is your fellow humans that you really have to watch out for. The War of the Worlds has been a big part of the audio drama world ever since Orson Wells’ famous broadcast back in 1938. That is why October 30th is World Audio Drama Day. I’m glad to see Campfire Radio Theatre paying its own homage to that famous broadcast.

This episode was certainly a pleasant surprise. It is also certainly one you should listen to.

The sixth episode that we’ll be examining is “Monster’s Game.” It follows a young man named Rob who has been struggling with schizophrenia. He has been listening to true crime podcasts, with Monster’s Game being his favorite. However, he’s been hearing something strange lately. There’s a voice in his headphones calling itself Mathias, and it claims it can save Rob’s sanity. There’s just one small catch: Rob has to commit murders, particularly strangulations, under the guidance of Mathias. Is Rob just hallucinating, or might Mathias be more than just a voice in Rob’s head?

Ah, so we’re getting metafictional with this one. Sometimes it can be hard to remember that the voices in my head from podcasts have faces that go with them. In a way, this episode almost seemed to be about what happens when those parasocial relationships go a bit too far. Well, there is also the wrinkle of the main character’s mental illness. It was kind of funny, I kept thinking about how everything reminded me of Son of Sam. Then, the characters all started talking about Son of Sam. I also sense themes about true crime podcasts. Specifically, the ethics of them, and the questions how far some podcasters are willing to go for a good story.

Of course, I’m hardly a true crime aficionado. So, I can’t comment on this particular aspect too much. Also, this episode was kind of retroactively amusing. Rob is voiced by Bobby Gaglini, who is now far more famous as Will and Otto from Spaceships. Don’t worry, this does not undercut his performance in the slightest. “Monster’s Game” is another winner.

Our seventh dervish delight is “Desecrate.” It follows Jen, Brent, and Holly. Jen and Holly have been best friends since childhood, and Brent is Holly’s boyfriend. Holly is into all things occult, and wants to contact the spirit of Philomena Tillman; a woman accused of witchcraft. Holly plans on doing this using an ouija board in the graveyard Philomena is buried in. She hopes to uncover the truth behind Philomena’s story. However, Jen and Brent have a few secrets of their own. They’ve been having an affair, and they fear that Holly will find out. Specifically, how she will react.

This one is a little hard to review. Oh, it is an excellent episode, make no mistake of that. However, this is really one of those episodes it is best to go into knowing as little as possible. There are a lot of twists, turns, and revelations in this one. I will say that all of the actors did a fantastic job. The actress who played Holly did a particularly good job. Holly is described as being Goth Barbie, and certainly sounds the part. There’s some other bits of acting I could mention, but that’s getting into spoilers. The point is, “Desecrate” is another excellent episode. You should listen to it as soon as possible.

Our eighth aural offering is “The Master’s Hungry Children.” This one is set in Romania during World War II. We follow a group of Nazi soldiers who have arrived in a rural Romanian village. The villagers are wary, but not because of the Nazis. They speak of movement in the shadows, and creatures that stalk in the night. In particular, the villagers warn of one known as The Master, and his vicious children. The Nazis scoff it of as merely the ramblings of ignorant peasants. However, it soon becomes clear that these are no mere superstitions. The Nazis will soon come face to face with vampires.

I get the feeling that some people might not like this episode. It does have a certain campy quality to it. The set-up of Vampires vs. Nazis sounds like something out of a B-Movie. But you know what? I like B-Movies, I like vampires, and I enjoy camp. It was fun to have an episode set during World War II. Also, the actors make the smart choice to play the premise completely straight. This episode, despite its B-Movie feel, certainly had way better writing than a typical B-Movie. “The Master’s Hungry Children” won’t be to every listener’s liking. However, I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I encourage you to give it a try as well.

And so that is every episode of Campfire Radio Theatre that I have reviewed thus far. Like I said, this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list. I wanted to start us off with a good foundation, and I will periodically review more episodes as the mood strikes me. I hope that it is clear by now that Campfire Radio Theatre is a frighteningly fantastic horror anthology audio drama. John Ballentine and his team have created something special. Proof that good things truly do come to those who wait. I certainly hope that you will give Campfire Radio Theatre a listen as soon as possible.

Link to the original review on my blog: https://drakoniandgriffalco.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-audio-file-campfire-radio-theatre.html?m=0

Piranha 3D (2010)

Rated R for sequences of strong bloody horror violence and gore, graphic nudity, sexual content, language and some drug use

Score: 4 out of 5

There's really no way to describe Piranha 3D as anything other than a guilty pleasure. A loose remake of the shameless 1978 Jaws ripoff Piranha, it is an 88-minute parade of sleaze and excess that not only got the Eli Roth stamp of approval (he has a cameo as the host of a wet T-shirt contest) but was directed by one of his "Splat Pack" contemporaries, Alexandre Aja, and is filled with so much gore and nudity that merely having the Blu-ray in the same room as a child is enough to get you put on some kind of registry. In case you couldn't tell by the title, it was a 3D movie originally, and it throws that in your face constantly with all manner of objects jumping out at the screen. It's a movie where a man gets his dick bitten off, two piranha fight over it, and then the winner of that fight coughs up the tattered pieces of that dick right into your face. It knows exactly what it is, and like the spring breakers getting devoured on screen, it says "fuck it, YOLO" and delivers the most ridiculous, over-the-top version of itself it can possibly think of, this time without the constraints of budget or good taste that held back its '70s predecessor. It's a frankly superior film to the original, and the kind of splatterfest that never once takes itself seriously, and likely would never have worked if it even tried to. But work it does, and while its faults are plainly visible, the vibes here are just right for it to overcome them.

Moving the setting to the resort town of Lake Victoria, Arizona (a fictionalized version of Lake Havasu City where this was filmed), the film starts with an earthquake opening a fissure at the bottom of the town's namesake lake, where a horde of prehistoric piranha from a species thought extinct turn out to have survived, millennia of cannibalism and natural selection having turned them into the ultimate aquatic predators. Those piranha escape and become a threat to every living thing in the lake -- and unfortunately, it just so happens that Lake Victoria is a massive spring break destination whose beaches are currently awash in thousands upon thousands of debauched, drunken college kids and the gross, lecherous sleazeballs there to exploit that sea of fine, moist pussy.

And this movie's already turned me into one of them with the way I'm now talking. There's no (pardon the pun) beating around the bush here. The sex and nudity in this movie are copious and gratuitous, whether we're on the beach surrounded by women in various states of undress or on the boat of the softcore porn producer Derrick Jones. One of the highlights of the film is a lengthy, nude, underwater erotic dance between Kelly Brook and porn star Riley Steele that leaves nothing to the imagination and has no illusions about being anything other than the gleefully shameless exploitation it is. It's 2000s Ed Hardy/Von Dutch bro culture at its most lurid and trashy, and while the film is undoubtedly a parody of that culture where a lot of the entertainment comes from watching these idiots get slaughtered, it's the kind of parody that's chiefly interested in broad farce rather than deeper satire, jacking up the most extreme elements of it to their logical conclusion and letting them run wild from there.

And you know what? I loved it. It was a version of that culture that had just enough self-awareness to feel like it was in on its own joke instead of serving it all up completely straight. The protagonists, tellingly, aren't douchebro jackasses and their airheaded eye candy girlfriends cut from that cloth, but people who have to put up with all that nonsense in their backyards because it makes them money, and are the only ones afforded much dignity once the piranha reach the beach. The sheriff Julie and her deputy Fallon, Julie's teenage son Jake and her little kids Zane and Laura, Jake's girlfriend Kelly, the scientists Novak, Paula, and Sam studying the earthquake, these characters are all treated mostly seriously even if they're all pretty two-dimensional. The main representative of the spring breakers, Derrick, is the most antagonistic human character in the film, somebody with no redeeming qualities who melts down and turns into a petty tyrant aboard his boat as everything starts to go wrong for him and his production. Others among that crowd wind up getting themselves and others killed with their own dumb decisions, whether it's refusing to listen to the warnings of impending doom, climbing over each other to get out of the water, flipping over a massive floating stage that wasn't designed to hold so many people, or stealing a boat and running over numerous people in an attempt to escape. The deleted scenes and unused storyboards get even more vicious. This feels like a movie that hates spring break culture and everything it represents, one that I can easily picture proving quite popular among locals in places that get lots of rowdy tourists, a graphic depiction of what they'd love to see happen one day.

"Graphic" is the operative word here, too. If the first half of this film is a parade of T&A, then the second half is devoted to watching all those choice cuts of meat get served up and torn to shreds. This is an absolute gorefest, and Alexandre Aja is a master of the craft. Everything you can picture piranha doing to somebody gets done, and probably some other stuff you never dreamed of. The big, brutal attack on the beach is one that this movie builds to for half its runtime, and when it arrives, it is one for the ages, a carnival of carnage that lasts for several minutes and keeps coming up with creative new ways to kill people. Boobs and blood are combined with reckless abandon, such as in the paragliding scene, a gag involving breast implants, and one highlight moment involving a high-tension wire. While the piranha themselves were created with CGI, the actual gore was almost entirely done practically by the KNB EFX Group, and it is the kind of gross shit that they've made their name with, a vividly detailed anatomy lesson as you get to see all the ways a human body can come apart. At times, it felt like the only thing keeping the film from an instant NC-17 rating was that the water was too clouded by blood (roughly 80,000 gallons of fake blood were used on set) to see the worst of it. Even though this movie isn't particularly scary and never really tries to be, the sheer scale of the bloodbath is harrowing in its own way, like watching a terrorist attack, accident, or other mass-casualty event and its aftermath. The film's darkly comedic tone was the only thing keeping it from turning outright grim, and it was not through lack of effort from Aja or the effects team.

The humans aren't the only ones who get torn up, either, as the protagonists give as good as they get. Ving Rhames as Fallon has a great scene where he goes to town on a swarm of piranha with a boat propeller, and Elisabeth Shue makes for a likable action heroine as Julie, one who manages to say a lot with just the look on her face and the tone of her voice, especially when she realizes how badly her son Jake fucked up in more ways than one. When they reunite, there's a sense that she's gonna fuckin' kill him for what he did long before she outright says it. Christopher Lloyd steals the show as the marine biologist on land, one whose only role is to deliver an infodump on the piranha but does it so well that he felt like he had a much larger role than he did. The actors playing the kids and the teenagers were mostly alright, but their section of the film is seriously livened up by the presence of Jerry O'Connell as Derrick, a parody of the infamous Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis. O'Connell plays him as a guy approaching middle age who peaked in high school and college and has spent the rest of his life reliving and trying to recapture his youth, an absolute scumbag who doesn't seem to know or care about the definitions of words like "consent" or "age of consent". He was like a more comedic version of Wayne in X, a pervert who represents everything wrong with "adult entertainment", but whereas that film was a gritty and grounded one about how mainstream beauty standards and the porn industry fetishize youth and objectify people, this is a Grand Guignol orgy of mayhem where depicting him as a bastard who constantly causes problems throughout the film chiefly means setting him up to die painfully in a way designed to make the crowd roar.

It was that tone that really carried this movie through rough spots that would've sank other, more serious films. There's a minor character, Derrick's cameraman/boat pilot Andrew, who disappears without explanation, implied to have been killed but his death scene cut from the film (it appears in the deleted scenes). The actors are good, but barring Derrick, their characters are all pretty shallow archetypes. Some of the CGI, especially during Richard Dreyfuss' cameo/death in the opening scene, could be pretty dire. I'm not surprised to learn that work on the CGI for this was, by all accounts, an absolute shitshow to the point that Aja threatened to have his name taken off the credits unless Dimension Films ponied up some more money to finish the effects work. It may be parodying the Four Loko spring break culture of the time, but it also feels like it wants to have its cake and eat it too with how much the first half lingers on nudity. Christopher Lloyd really should've been in it more. But I was able to put all of that aside for one simple reason: I was just having too much goddamn fucking fun watching this.

The Bottom Line

This is a "hell yeah!" movie, one you throw on when your friends are over, there are no kids around, and you just wanna spend an hour and a half goofing off and having a blast with a sick, mean-spirited, yet incredibly fun horror/comedy.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/01/review-piranha-3d-2010.html>

Episode 3 Tapeworm

Tapeworm is a cautionary tale on the consequences of fatphobia. The episode stars Laura Kariuki as an upbeat and chipper young woman named Vivian, who is auditioning for Vogue. The actress is beautiful and I love that we see a dark-skinned black woman in this leading role of a young woman looking to be a supermodel. Miss Kariuki gives a ton of charisma to the role and makes Vivian genuinely positive, likable, and easy to root for.

Vivian gives a sublime performance to an agent of Vogue for a modeling gig but is told that she has immense talent but is too fat, despite being a size 4. This leads to her taking a drug that makes her rapidly lose weight but that has dangerous side-effects. Soon after, Vivian’s back-alley doctor prescribes her a tapeworm as an alternative which makes things even worse. My biggest takeaway from the episode is how janky of a doctor this man is and how he shouldn’t have a job even on the black market.

Vivian not only physically changes as she loses weight, but her personality is altered as well. This episode is reminiscent of the Natalie Portman-led Black Swan as we watch Vivian deteriorate from a radiant woman into a grotesque dark incarnation of her former self. Objectively speaking, Vivian looks remarkably better than she did after her crash diet. This entire episode uses her deterioration as a metaphor for how unrealistic beauty standards ruin women both physically and psychologically; transforming them into women they were never meant to be.

Vivian gives a monologue early in the episode on how she wants to be an example of empowerment and self-love which she of course contradicts herself on. I don’t think that this is meant to portray her as a hypocrite but rather to examine how the American beauty standards coerce women into

decisions that they don’t truly want to make and force them into roles that they don’t want to play. Whether this is anorexia, bulimia or even being a mean girl – this episode is a metaphor on how society’s pressures can rob women of their intrinsic light and replace it with something much darker. I enjoy the vehicles that the episode uses to deliver these messages. It never feels hammy, but rather poignant and unfortunately, still necessary for women and young girls.

The episode leans more into the grotesque instead of traditional frights to provide horror, as we watch in disgust as Vivian gorges herself to satiate the tapeworm inside of her. This is both physically gross but also saddening as we know that Vivian is quite literally feeding her demise. The showdown is somewhat traumatic to watch as it feels as if Vivian is being deeply violated by the tapeworm as it is expelled out of her. Kariuki does a stellar job of depicting this event as an episode that her future self would need therapy from. I felt deeply uncomfortable and in pain with her throughout. This is strong acting and I hope that I can see more work from this actress.

This is a very strong episode and bounces back from a dip in the previous. There are lessons to be gleaned from it but even on a more elementary level, it’s simply entertaining to watch. Leaving us with a message just further adds to a very solid episode.

4/5

Episode 4 Organ

Organ is trying to say and do a lot all at once, but it falls flat. This is an example of an episode of a horror anthology being too ambitious. Organ bites off way more than it can chew and ends up making a mess on the floor. This episode could have been stellar had it devoted its energy to going in one direction instead of trying to touch every base all at once.

Organ follows Toby, a sexist man who dehumanizes women. He is heavily incel-coded and regurgitates manosphere talking points. Toby is an amalgamation of every modern sexist trope. The episode gives the impression that it will be some sort of parable on the pitfalls of misogyny, but it fails to do so. Natessa almost gets us there when she says that “guys like him are the easiest”, however, this is later negated when it’s confirmed that it could have been anyone. Toby being boorish to women wasn’t his demise, but it was rather bad luck that did him in. This is a letdown because a salient point could have been made had the writers not cut their legs out from under themselves.

Organ doesn’t take itself too seriously, living somewhere in between camp and satire. A satirical critique of incel/manosphere/red-pill men, etc., could have been powerful, yet it decided not to fully lean into it despite hinting that it would. This is a disappointment. The episode is still fun, although it fails to reach its potential.

Raul Castillo nails the awkwardness of incels, but I don’t buy at all that his character would be some sort of player. I’m unsure if it was the direction or the acting, but Castillo comes off stiff. This works when he’s awkward and unsettling but not as a guy who is a womanizer. Toby sleeps around but he acts like a guy that doesn’t get play. The character would have worked better if the writers decided what exactly they are trying to say with Toby because his incel persona doesn’t match his womanizing. I understand that womanizers can ironically still hold incel-coded views, yet Toby’s characterization comes off as more paradoxical than complex.

This is an example of how Organ is overextending itself and is unsure of what it wants to be. The episode criticizes men who use women as objects to masturbate, but the character has the attitude of a man who is angry at women for his lack of sexual success. The writers may be highlighting the cognitive dissonance of these men, but this point comes off as more contradictory than anything else. Toby’s characterization is confusing, and it may have been more worthwhile to use two characters; one for each point that they are trying to make. The first, one that dehumanizes women and sees them as nothing above conquests, and the second, as an angry man who blames women for his shortcomings. Organ merges these points, and although there are men who simultaneously hold these views, this character needed more fleshing out to fully explore this dualistic mindset.

The ending leaves a lot to be desired. There are hints throughout that the episode will leave you with some sort of parable about the perils of mistreating women, but it ends with the women of the episode running an organ-stealing operation simply for profit and not to teach a lesson. This entire episode seems for naught. Toby didn’t get his comeuppance for his misogyny but rather for matching with the wrong woman, making the first act and his entire characterization irrelevant.

Organ is indicative of its mother franchise as it reeled us in with an intriguing premise that had a wonky ending that didn’t deliver what it pitched us on. A ton of runners were left on base with Organ, but it is still a decent watch, nonetheless. I’m critical of Organ because there were potentially profound points that could have been made that AHS has never touched on, yet they ultimately went another direction. Young men and boys becoming indoctrinated into this Red Pill rhetoric is currently a highly relevant topic that Stories could have been at the forefront of critiquing , yet they wasted this prime opportunity.

---2.5/5

Episode 1 Bestie

American Horror Stories has been maligned by me and others, but this is a strong righting of the ship if this is the level of quality that we will see for the remainder of the season. I’m getting ahead of myself but Bestie had the first great ending of the American Horror Story franchise in a long time. AHS is infamous for its struggles with endings, so a strong ending was refreshing to watch. Bestie follows a troubled middle school-aged girl, Shelby, following the loss of her mother to cancer. Shelby is bullied at school due to her glasses and physical appearance. She in turn becomes distant from her father and instead finds companionship with an online user, BFF43VA, in the comments from her favorite YouTube Channel, Anna Rexhia, a drag performer.

BFF4EVA, is highly deformed yet this goes unexplained. BFF quickly bonds with Shelby over their shared loss of their mothers. This is likely a lie contrived by BFF to reel Shelby in, but being 12 or 13 years old, and longing for kinship, keeps her from questioning this veracity. BFF is a retched influence on Shelby and turns the normally demure girl into a monstrosity. She becomes disrespectful to her father and cruel to her teacher and peers. It’s never stated what the end game is for BFF but it’s apparent that she is an agent of chaos.

The writers picked the correct age for our lead because it is feasible that a young girl would be swept into the web of a manipulator, especially if said manipulator fills an emotional need which BFF does for Shelby. There are moments in which logic cracks BFF’s code, but it’s not until Shelby is manipulated into breaking her wrist that she is irrevocably freed from the spell. This doesn’t go well as Shelby’s ghosting turns BFF into a cyber stalker.

The episode flips the script and becomes a love story as Shelby meets a kindred spirit in River, a disabled classmate. I love the diversity as River is both disabled and black. The tone switches as the story briefly becomes an adorable romance between the two. River is everything BFF isn’t, and I found myself rooting for the couple. Things, however, switch again and we later find that River isn’t who he says he is and is acting on behalf of BFF. I didn’t foresee this twist; however, in hindsight, there is a pretty clear clue.

River ends up being BFF’s bff and kills Shely on her behalf. This was a gut punch that I don’t often see, if at all from this franchise. The direction was stellar. Max Winkler deserves praise for the storytelling. The episode lulled me into a false sense of optimism that the episode would end on a happy note. Shelby’s murder was sad to see but ironically gratifying from a horror-lover’s perspective.

American Horror Stories has been shaky but Bestie is a strong opening to its third season. This is a very fine episode that for the first time in a while nails its ending. It does gymnastics with your emotions while also telling a relevant story. It might seem extreme but it’s a cautionary tale for foregoing real-life relationships in favor of online ones because you never quite know who is on the other side.

4.5/5

Episode 2 Daphne

Daphne feels more like an episode of Black Mirror than American Horror Stories. This episode focuses on an Alexa-like home technology named Daphne who becomes jealous and goes haywire. This story felt pretty familiar outside of the unlikable lead. That made the episode slightly less trite but none the more interesting. It was difficult to view because the main character was a jerk and not the entertaining kind.

I do like that the ending left room for interpretation. The ending is ambiguous, although, I think our lead hallucinated the events. The ostensible conversation between Daphne and Will’s mother is a clue that things aren’t what they seem. This worked for me as either a hint or as a Red Herring.

This episode was pretty mediocre. I have seen this trope before and nothing new was added to warrant an episode. I would have liked Daphne more and found it more unique if the story played with reality throughout. There was an opportunity for us to question what’s real and what’s not, but it instead decided to go for a twist ending. The twist salvaged a trite story, but a better decision would have been to play mind games with us from the jump and keep us guessing what’s real versus what’s not. This would put a new spin on something that I have seen before and would have had me more invested in figuring out.

2/5

Jennifer's Body (2009)

Rated R for sexuality, bloody violence, language and brief drug use (unrated version reviewed)

Score: 4 out of 5

At this stage, pointing out that critics and moviegoers in 2009 were completely wrong about Jennifer's Body is about as much of a hot take as saying that they were completely wrong about The Thing back in 1982. The story of how 20th Century Fox's short-lived youth-focused genre label Fox Atomic screwed over this movie's marketing because they had no idea what to do with it, and how their strategy of selling a very queer, very feminist horror-comedy as trashy softcore erotica aimed at the Spike TV fratbro set (as seen with the poster above) predictably backfired, is a long and sordid one that doesn't bear much repeating at this point. It's a movie that bombed badly when it came out and did lasting damage to the careers of both its lead actress Megan Fox and its screenwriter Diablo Cody, but went on to build its reputation on home video and streaming such that it's now talked about as one of the greatest horror movies of its time, and one of the greatest teen horror movies ever made. Lisa Frankenstein, a new horror-comedy written by Cody that comes out next month, is currently being explicitly marketed as "from Diablo Cody, acclaimed writer of Jennifer's Body," whereas if it had been made ten years ago, the trailers would not have even dared to mention her name.

I was one of the people who did see it when it came out, and even back then, I recall enjoying it and wondering why so much hatred was being hurled at a movie that was, at worst, pretty decent. Watching it again now, in 2024? It's a movie that it feels like it predicted every anxiety of young Americans, and especially teenage girls and young women, in the fifteen years to come, an incredibly smart, dark, gothic, stylish, and twisted movie whose comedic streak does little to take away from its scares and which is buoyed by a standout performance from Amanda Seyfried. Yes, it has its flaws. The jokes about Cody's too-cool-for-school dialogue at times becoming downright cringeworthy have been long since run into the ground (even if I think the problem is a bit overstated), and Fox was always a fairly limited actress even if this movie plays to her strengths. But on the whole, its problems, while real, are minor and not debilitating, and I had a blast watching it as both a straightforward teen fright flick and as a movie with more on its mind.

The plot is broadly similar to Ginger Snaps, a film with which this makes a great double feature, on a bigger Hollywood budget. Two teenage girls, Jennifer Check and Anita "Needy" Lesnicki, in the small podunk town of Devil's Kettle, Minnesota have been best friends since childhood, but while Jennifer has grown up into a beautiful cheerleader and the most popular girl in school, Needy has grown up into a dorky outsider who it seems is only still friends with Jennifer because they've always been friends (and perhaps... something more). One night, while heading down to a local bar to see an emo band called Low Shoulder, a fire breaks out and kills scores of people, with Needy and Jennifer escaping and Jennifer accepting an offer from the band to head home in their totally sweet, not-at-all-creepy van. Later that night, Jennifer comes to Needy's house looking like a bloody mess, eating rotisserie chicken straight out of her fridge, vomiting up black bile, and attacking her... only for her to suddenly come to school the next day looking no worse for wear and, if anything, both more beautiful than ever and an even bigger asshole than she was before. Needy suspects that something is up, and as it turns out, she's right: that night after the concert fire, Low Shoulder took the classic route to rock & roll superstardom and sacrificed Jennifer to Satan. Unfortunately, their victim wasn't a virgin like they believed she was, and so Jennifer came back from the dead possessed by a succubus who seduces her male classmates before eating them.

Both then and now, most of the discourse around this film has concerned its literal poster girl, Megan Fox. Having seen her in quite a few movies over the years, I've come to have a mixed opinion of Fox's acting. Hollywood did do her dirty for bluntly calling out the problems she encountered working in the film industry as an "it girl", but at the same time, she doesn't have much range, and even without the backlash, her career trajectory likely would've been less Margot Robbie or Scarlett Johansson than Jessica Alba (minus the business career that made her far more money than she ever did as an actress) or Bo Derek: a sex symbol whose roles would've slowly but surely dried up once she turned 30. However, while she is a fairly limited instrument as an actor, she isn't wholly untalented, and this film makes the absolute best use of those talents. It doesn't really ask much of her except to play a villainous version of her stock screen persona, a gorgeous, kinda haughty young woman who uses her body to get ahead in (un)life, and occasionally mug for the camera, and she absolutely nails it. Jennifer is a creative twist on the standard possession movie plot, one where the demonic shift in the possession victim's personality manifests in the form of her turning into a grotesque caricature of a high school "queen bee" like Regina George in Mean Girls, an utter shitheel who laughs at the suffering of her classmates even as they grieve the deaths of their friends. She may literally eat teenage boys alive, but the actions of hers that best reveal the depths of her monstrosity are those that feel all too human. Fox owns the part and makes it her own, such that I'm not surprised at how many of her scenes in this have been immortalized as gifs on Tumblr and clips on TikTok.

And it was watching the effects of that monstrosity flow through the lives of the people who knew Jennifer's victims that something clicked. One of the big things that retrospective analyses of this movie have focused on is its treatment of rape culture, especially as represented in Nikolai Wolf, the frontman of Low Shoulder. But watching the film again in 2024, I noticed something else. It's the feeling of helplessness that slowly but surely comes over the school, with everybody growing numb and fatigued to tragedy as the "cannibal serial killer" claims more victims right on the heels of the massive concert disaster while the adults are unable to stop any of it -- everyone, that is, except the one who treats it as one big joke and relishes in it like a troll. This may have been a movie made in 2009 about children of the 2000s, but even with its extremely MySpace-era emo aesthetics, it felt like a movie about children of the 2010s raised in a world of rampant mass shootings, religious extremism, resurgent bigotry, raging sexism, shrinking economic opportunity, and countless other social ills while nobody seemed to know how to fix it. Jennifer may be an iconic, catty, and sexy villain who gets many (though not all) of the best lines and scenes, but if you ask me, it's Needy, the one who finally says "no" and resolves to do what nobody else will no matter what it costs her, who's the reason this movie endures. Watching her fight Jennifer was like watching somebody throw down with every wiseass troll who thinks that school shootings, beheading videos, and tiki torch rallies are awesome as their sick way of telling the world that it's "cringe" to care about anything. Yes, it's clear watching this that Cody doesn't really know how teenagers speak, but she managed to capture how they think remarkably well.

When it came to Needy, this movie needed a world-class actress, and fortunately, it found one in Amanda Seyfried. The film practically acknowledges the ridiculousness of trying to frame her as "unattractive", but she manages to pull it off anyway. Watching the intro flashing forward to her locked up in a psychiatric hospital (letting us know early on that this is not going to end well), then jumping back to two months prior when we see her as a meek, bespectacled nerd looking longingly at a still-living Jennifer during a pep rally to the point that one of her classmates thinks she's a closeted lesbian (which, as we later see, may very well be the case), it's hard to believe that they're the same person, but Seyfried manages to make Needy's transformation from a cute girl next door who looks awkward in "alternative" clothes when heading to the concert to a hardened, shell-shocked survivor feel genuine. With Jennifer serving mainly as a monster and a symbol more than a character after she dies and comes back, it's largely on Needy to carry the film's emotional core, her heartbreak at watching one of her closest friendships turn toxic, and I bought every minute of it. This, as much as Mamma Mia!, was the movie that should've indicated that Seyfried was going places as a gifted and genuinely fearless actress, and I'm not surprised that her career would ultimately outlast the hype she first received in her youth.

Most of this film's comedy comes from its supporting cast, a who's who of both contemporary teen stars and older comedy actors. J. K. Simmons plays the science teacher Mr. Wroblewski about as far from his iconic J. Jonah Jameson performance as he can but still managed to make his dry, stern authority figure amusing. The clique of goth kids led by Kyle Gallner's Colin is a hilarious parody of the "edgy" youth counterculture of the era, a group of kids whose obsession with the aesthetics of death and misery seemingly makes them better suited than anyone else to live in the hostile world Jennifer creates with her murders, only for it to create some serious blind spots not just in their interactions with Jennifer but also in their sense of good taste. In the unrated cut that I watched, Bill Fagerbakke steals the show playing the father of one of Jennifer's victims, utterly devouring the one scene he's in where he mourns his son's death and swears vengeance on his killer in one of the most creatively graphic ways I've ever heard -- all while using the same voice he uses when playing Patrick Star on SpongeBob SquarePants. Johnny Simmons (no relation to J. K.) makes for a likable romantic partner to Needy as her boyfriend Chip, enough to make up for a fairly underwritten part, less like a character and more like a gender-flipped version of the stock "girlfriend" characters you see in movies with male heroes. Chip and Needy get what may just be the cutest and most awkward sex scene I've ever watched, one where neither of them really knows what they're doing but each of them wants to make sure that the other is having as much fun doing it as they are. There's definitely a sense of idealization in his character, like Cody was writing the kind of boyfriend she wished she had in high school.

Finally, we come to Adam Brody as Nikolai, the film's secondary villain and the man responsible for everything that goes wrong. In hindsight, the idea of a sappy emo musician who, behind the scenes, is as much a depraved rock star as any classic metal god, which originally came off as a joke, is one that turned out to be shockingly prescient of what a lot of Warped Tour emo, pop-punk, and scene bands were actually like behind the scenes. Not only do he and his band kill Jennifer after they're initially presented as "merely" rapists (and even after, the metaphors aren't exactly subtle), he ruthlessly exploits the aftermath of the concert fire to ever-greater heights of fame and fortune, implicitly the work of the Devil holding up his end of the bargain, all while casually insulting the town where it happened and, by extension, the memories of the victims. Low Shoulder's hit song "Through the Trees" is heard throughout the film to the point where it feels like it's taunting Needy, the one person who knows the truth about their "heroism" during the fire, how they in fact left dozens of people to die instead of trying to save them and how it's implied that the fire was, in fact, their fault (whether it was negligence or malice, it's never stated). Jennifer may have been evil, but the things that had been done to her to turn her into a monster made her a tragic villain nonetheless. I felt no such pity for Nikolai, with Brody playing him as a swaggering and spiteful bastard who I wanted to see suffer.

Karyn Kusama's direction, when paired with the visual design and the 2000s aesthetics dripping off this film, gives it a tone that I could perhaps best describe as gothic. Not just in the fashion sense of certain characters, but also in the heightened, old-school approach it takes to staging many of its scenes. It felt like she had been very informed by classic horror in a manner almost akin to Tim Burton at times, albeit with his brand of whimsy swapped out for black comedy. This is an incredibly moody film even in its funnier moments, serving to underline the grim nature of a lot of the humor here and lend it a dark edge. It feels sexy without feeling sleazy, perhaps best evidenced by the famous lesbian kiss scene, which puts the focus squarely on the characters' faces and plays the situation as something disturbing. Yes, you're watching Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried passionately making out for a good solid minute or so, but you're also watching Jennifer manipulate Needy and exploit the feelings she has for her in order to torment her that much further. At every step of the way, this is a film that knows what it's doing, and it does it well.

The Bottom Line

It does have its minor annoyances, but this is still a movie that deserved the reevaluation it's received, and one that stands the test of time as a classic of teen horror, queer horror, and feminist horror even if its fashions and soundtrack are carbon-dated to 2009.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/01/review-jennifers-body-2009.html>

Cloverfield (2008)

Rated PG-13 for violence, terror and disturbing images

Score: 4 out of 5

Sixteen years after it premiered, to the month and almost to the day, I decided to rewatch Cloverfield in a very different context to that in which I first saw it. When it premiered, it did so at the climax of a hype campaign in which the spectacular and chaotic first trailer, attached to the 2007 Transformers movie, didn't even reveal the film's title, just a release date and the fact that J. J. Abrams was producing it. Six months of speculation, fueled by a complex alternate reality game filled with Easter eggs, clues, and a backstory involving a Japanese corporation's deep-sea drilling activities, left audiences buzzing as to what it might be about. People speculated that it was a new American Godzilla remake, a Voltron adaptation, a spinoff of Abrams' hit sci-fi show Lost, or even an H. P. Lovecraft adaptation. The first one turned out to be the closest to the truth, in that, while it didn't feature the Big G himself, it was still a kaiju movie cut from a very similar cloth, one that used the idea of a giant monster attacking a city to comment on a recent tragedy in a manner I've always found fascinating long after I saw it. It was a hit, big enough to spawn two spinoffs (one of which was a good movie in its own right, the other... not so much), and people still talk about doing a proper sequel to this day.

All of that, of course, was peripheral to the film itself. Watching it again in 2024, I had only vague memories of its viral marketing campaign, most of which was hosted on long-forgotten websites (some of which are now defunct) and very little of which is actually referenced in the movie unless you know what you're looking for. The question of whether or not the movie actually held up on its own merits as a movie was the important one this time, not whether it answered questions about the Tagruato corporation or what's really in the Slusho! beverages they sell. And honestly, if it wasn't a good movie all along, even without Abrams' "mystery box" marketing, I don't think we'd still be talking about it today. Make no mistake, there are elements that don't hold up today, especially the slow first twenty minutes and anything involving T. J. Miller's character, and not just because of his real-life scandals. But those are mostly fluff on an otherwise very well-made film, one that takes a monster movie and puts viewers in the shoes of the people on the ground running like hell from the monster. Much as the original 1954 Godzilla movie was the kind of movie that could only have been made by Japanese filmmakers after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this is the kind of movie that could only have been made by American filmmakers after 9/11, one that lifts a lot of its visual shorthand from the attacks to depict a kaiju rampage as 9/11 on steroids. It's a movie that starts slow but immediately starts ratcheting up the tension once the mayhem starts and only rarely lets up, one whose special effects and thrills are still spectacular years later despite a fairly low budget. In the pantheon of kaiju movies, Cloverfield still holds up as not only one of the best made outside Japan, but one that matches and rivals some of its inspirations.

The initial hook of this movie is that it's a found-footage take on Godzilla, one where a giant monster attack is shown from street-level through the eyes, and specifically the video camera, of somebody running for his life. Here, that person is Hud Platt, a guy whose first name (as in, "heads-up display") says it all: he's less a character than he is the viewer's avatar filming the real main characters. Those guys are the brothers Rob and Jason Hawkins who Hud is friends with, Jason's fiancé Lily Ford, Rob's estranged girlfriend Beth McIntyre, and Marlena Diamond, an actress who Hud has a crush on. The film starts with all of them at a going-away party at Rob's apartment in Manhattan to celebrate Rob getting a promotion that will see him move to Japan, one where Rob and Beth's relationship drama threatens to ruin it before something far bigger comes along to do that: a sudden earthquake, followed by an explosion in Lower Manhattan caused by something that's come ashore from the ocean and is big enough to throw the head of the Statue of Liberty roughly a mile. As the city plunges into chaos, Rob, his life shattered, vows to do the one thing he possibly can for himself: find Beth.

The first twenty minutes at times were largely an exercise in watching a group of rich twentysomethings talk and argue about their frivolous issues. In the context of the broader film, especially with its many, many 9/11 allusions and how it developed these characters later on, it worked to set the mood, that these were not heroes but a group of ordinary people whose lives are suddenly upended by tragedy and horror. As I was watching those first twenty minutes, however, I came to find the characters grating, not least of all Hud. He's your stock 2000s bro-comedy goofball and the film's main source of comic relief, and I quickly grew to despise him. A lot of the first act is built around his awkward attempts to hit on Marlena and his spreading stories to the rest of the party about Rob and Beth's sex life, the latter of which causes no shortage of problems. The other characters all get room to grow as the film goes on, but Hud remains the same obnoxious dick that he was in the beginning, such that some of my favorite moments in the film were when the other characters told him to cool it after his jokes got too much even for them. T. J. Miller may have been playing exactly the character he was told to, and he may have done it well, but the film as a whole didn't need an annoying asshole as the cameraman constantly interjecting. Hud should've been somebody who gets killed off to raise the stakes, let us know that things are serious, and give us a bit of catharsis after all the problems he caused for Rob at the beginning of the film, while the camera is instead carried by either a flat non-entity who doesn't act so annoying or one of the other characters.

(If I may indulge in fanfic for a bit here, there's a version of this movie in my head where Marlena, the outsider to the main friend group, serves as the camerawoman and basically swaps roles with Hud. What's more, she would have had her own secrets that would've tied into the ARG viral marketing, creating an aura of mystery around her and the sense that she can't be trusted -- and since she's the one with the camera, the question of whether or not we're dealing with an unreliable narrator would've come up. Even without that subplot, though, I still think she would've made a better cameraperson than Hud, if only because she was less annoying.)

Once the monster attack begins, however, everything not involving Hud is gold. The actual monster is a beast, and while the film loves to keep it in the dark for long stretches, its presence is never not felt once it shows up. The 2014 American Godzilla remake tried to do something similar in showing us its monsters only sparingly, but there's a difference between having their presence felt even when they're not actually on screen and having them appear so little that you start to forget you're watching a Godzilla movie. Here, while most scenes, especially early on, give us only brief glimpses of "Clover" (as the production team called the monster) as it hides amidst New York's skyscrapers, the viewers, by way of the characters and their video camera, are never not in a situation where they can't notice its presence, whether they're escaping from plumes of smoke and debris when it topples the Woolworth Building, scrambling to get off the Brooklyn Bridge before it tears it in half, hiding in the subways and encountering its nasty offspring, crawling through a skyscraper that it's partly toppled over onto another one, or wandering through trashed city streets and hastily-constructed emergency service tents in scenes lifted straight out of post-9/11 news reports from Lower Manhattan. Reeves shot the action incredibly well, in a way that constantly had me on the edge of my seat afraid for the main characters' lives and, because the found-footage perspective put me right in there with them, even my own life for a bit. (The recent Japanese Godzilla movies definitely feel influenced by this film in how they approach showing the monster from a street-level perspective.) The shaky cam may have become a meme after the movie came out, but it's actually not nearly as bad as its reputation suggests, used in exactly the right ways with the film knowing when to have the camera held steady to give us a good look and when to use it to convey the panic that the main characters are facing. The look for the monster that Reeves and the film's effects team came up with is also a unique and creative one, especially once we finally see it in full view, in all its glory, towards the end. When we see the military fight Clover, it feels like a struggle that they're losing, and I completely bought that this thing was able to stomp them the way it did. This is a disaster movie played not as an action flick, but as a horror movie, and it's an approach I'm surprised more disaster movies haven't taken.

The cast was comprised largely of unknowns and TV actors, quite a few of whom have gone on to bigger and better things since, and I'm not surprised given how good they were. Michael Stahl-David was the centerpiece as Rob, a man whose seemingly stupid decision to go back into the city starts to make a surprising amount of sense once you see the grief that's come over him over everything he's lost by the end of the first act of the movie. He's a man whose old concerns with work and moving now seem like nothing in the face of an eldritch abomination like Clover that took almost everything from him, and who now only cares about making things right with Beth, the love of his life, the one thing he has left. He's almost a Lovecraftian protagonist, somebody who loses it in the face of unspeakable horrors from beyond, albeit one whose spiral into madness is less overt than you normally see in explicitly Lovecraftian works. Jessica Lucas, Mike Vogel, Lizzy Caplan, and Odette Annable (credited here by her maiden name Odette Yustman) all made for good sidekicks to Rob as Lily, Jason, Marlena, and Beth, all of them scared out of their minds as they're trapped on an island with a monster and nowhere to run, even if I thought that Caplan unfortunately got short shrift in the film despite having a bit more depth to her character than she let on. (See: my proposed story idea above.) This was the kind of monster movie that needed interesting, well-rounded, and well-acted human characters to anchor it, and it had them in spades.

The Bottom Line

Cloverfield wasn't just a fluke of viral marketing, but a legitimately outstanding monster movie even on its own merits, one that knows when to cultivate a veil of mystery and when to drop that veil and let loose with an all-American take on classic kaiju mayhem. Even sixteen years, two excellent Japanese Godzilla movies, and one MonsterVerse later, it still holds up.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/01/review-cloverfield-2008.html>

Night Swim (2024)

Rated PG-13 for terror, some violent content and language

Score: 2 out of 5

Night Swim is the quintessential "fuck you, it's January" movie. Hollywood loves to ring in the new year by dumping into theaters the garbage they had no faith in at any other time of the year, because January is when kids are in school, theaters in half the country can get shut down by blizzards, there aren't many holidays offering extended three-week weekends (save for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which isn't universally celebrated as a day off), and prestige films given limited release in the fall are expanding their theatrical runs in anticipation of the Oscars. And lately, a tradition has been to give the first weekend of the new year over to a low-budget horror movie. While Blumhouse struck rare gold last year with M3GAN, a sci-fi horror film that actually turned out to be far better than its release date suggested it would be, this year January returned to form with Night Swim, a ho-hum ghost story adapted from a 2014 short film where the worst thing about it is that it's not completely wretched. There were seeds of a good movie buried in here, with all-around solid acting and production values, some effective sequences, some cool cinematography, and a nifty central conceit behind its evil pool, and there was a brief moment when it finally started to get good. Unfortunately, as with many movies that were adapted from short films, there's not enough to carry it, resting on the most generic haunted house story possible (but with a haunted pool this time!) to stretch a four-minute short to feature length. It's not the worst January horror film ever made, or even in the Bottom Three (I assure you, the competition is stiff), but it's otherwise completely generic, disposable, and at times unintentionally funny #content that would've been thrown into the wasteland of the direct-to-VOD/streaming market if not for January.

Stop me if you've heard this one: a family called the Wallers, comprised of the father Ray, the mother Eve, the teenage daughter Izzy, and the adolescent son Elliot, has moved into a big, luxurious house whose price is too good to be true, only for them to soon learn why it was so cheap. Namely, it's haunted. Or rather, the swimming pool is. And much like every poor sucker who's ever lived in the Amityville house, the mother Eve and the kids Izzy and Elliot start experiencing supernatural forces when they come in contact with the pool, while the father Ray, a former Milwaukee Brewers player whose baseball career was tragically cut short by multiple sclerosis, sees his illness miraculously cured and starts behaving in increasingly erratic fashion.

If you've ever seen a movie about a family stuck in a haunted house, you've seen this movie. Virtually every plot beat was visible from a mile away, from each family member having their own encounter with the supernatural to the mother doing research on the pool's dark history to somebody getting possessed by the spirit causing all of this. There are random plot threads about the Wallers' neighbors perhaps knowing more about what's happening than they let on, and Izzy's hunky swimmer love interest Ronin being a devout Christian, but the film does nothing with them. Every single plot point here is standard haunted house movie boilerplate, like writer/director Bryce McGuire had a cool idea for a cool scene that he turned into a cool short but never thought about how to turn it into a 90-minute movie until Jason Blum and James Wan decided to give him a lot of money to do just that. The worst part is, once we find out what's actually going on with the haunted pool, a glimpse at a far more interesting movie is had, one focused on Ray as he grapples with how his illness destroyed his life and how whatever's in the pool seems to have given him a second chance -- but one that comes at a terrible cost. As it stood, however, while Wyatt Russell played his stock Horror Dad character well, he never had much of a chance to do anything more beyond play a stock Horror Dad, nor did anybody else in the cast have the opportunity to play the stock Horror Mom, Horror Teen, and Horror Kid. The film wanted me to care about the Wallers as a family, but they were such a thinly-written family that, even when they were in peril, the Eight Deadly Words were ringing in my head: I don't care what happens to these people.

(I will, however, give the film points for having a sense of humor enough to have Izzy's high school be named after Harold Holt, an Australian Prime Minister who infamously disappeared when he went out for a swim on the beach.)

The scares, too, don't really do much to excel. Using a swimming pool as a setting gave some fun opportunities for cool aquatic cinematography that the film readily took advantage of, meaning that, at the very least, this was a pretty nice-looking film. Any sense of originality stopped there, however, as what followed were all the scares you've seen in a dozen other haunted house movies: jump scares ahoy, characters seeing things that aren't there, you name it, all of it done in ways that have been done better before. Characters make stupid decisions constantly, especially the young son Elliot, and while I could at first justify it by saying that at least it was a dumb kid acting stupid around the pool, by the end he really should've known better than to even think about doing what he did. The teenage daughter Izzy had no real purpose beyond recreating the scene from the short film, because that featured a young woman who looked good in a bikini, which meant the movie had to have someone who fit that description. The design of the ghost is a bloated, half-rotted corpse that probably sounded good on paper, but its execution in the movie is almost laughable, leaving a lot to be desired and not coming across as scary in the slightest.

The Bottom Line

Night Swim isn't a movie I'd personally push into the pool, but if somebody did, I'd probably have a good laugh at its expense. It's competent, but beyond the idea of a haunted pool, everything about it is the sort of thing that's been done better before, and worst of all, I can easily see how a better movie could've been made out of the same material. I wouldn't even bother waiting for Netflix.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/01/review-night-swim-2024.html>

Mild spoilers, nothing big revealed beyond the first half of the movie but still I suggest you watch it first, as it is definitely a movie best enjoyed without knowing any spoilers.

Imdb link for Old Man

The film begins with a panning shot of a rudimentary one-room cabin before zooming in on its sole occupant--the titular Old Man. He wakes up suddenly, gasping for breath from some quickly-fading nightmare, and starts searching for "Rascal", who the dialog leads us to believe is probably his dog. As the Old Man searches his cabin for Rascal, his calls show his confused and not-entirely stable mental state.

Suddenly, there is a knock at his door, but it is not Rascal. A young adult stands before him, whom the Old Man immediately threatens with a gun and pulls inside to interrogate. "Who are you?" (Joe) "Why are you here?" (I got lost in the woods) "Did my wife send you?" (Who? No) And, most important of all, "Are you a salesman?" (No).

From here, the atmosphere remains tense. First, we are concerned whether the Old Man will shoot Joe, who tries to escape but is forced back inside at gunpoint. The two talk, and we soon lose our fear of the Old Man somewhat (but never entirely), as he is shown as an odd person who is more confused than dangerous. He tells a "funny" story of when he tortured a door-to-door salesman before kicking him out of the cabin, making Joe visually uncomfortable. Joe talks about the troubles he has been having with his wife, shifting the tension to one connected to his relationship. The Old Man comments that his own wife was similarly shrewish, but pointedly refuses to say what happened between them or why he is alone now.

The salesman story is the first one that lets us know that something is not quite right here. Why would a salesman visit a cabin miles away from civilisation, not connected to the electricity grid or water supply? Any visitors, if any, would surely be lost hikers. The story's flashback shows the Old Man offering a slice of cake, which looks delicious and was clearly made and decorated with skills and ingredients that the Old Man does not possess. This story is embellished at best, but considering how well the Old Man quotes the salesman, it is unclear whether the story's impossibilities are due to his poor memory, mental fog, or purposeful lying. While he tells this story, Joe compulsively fiddles with his wedding ring.

Finally, Joe tells of how he got lost in the first place--a big fight with his wife caused him to want to refresh in the forest where he spent some time as a child. However, he left the track to follow an eerie noise. Both him and the Old Man simultaneously label the noise as "a moan"; the Old Man has heard the same sound himself.

The story continues to unfold, letting us know the stories of both Joe and the Old Man and the troubles that plague them. The tension shifts but never leaves, keeping audiences hanging on the heavy dialogue. There is very little action, but always a strong hint that it could come at any moment, thanks to the Old Man's twitchy and unstable mannerisms. His stories continue to show wider and wider holes in them, and we slowly begin to understand why, and what really happened. By about half-way through the film, the ending was a little predictable, but nevertheless well executed.

The camerawork is well done, with several shots done extremely close-up, making the audience uncomfortable by really emphasizing the lack of safe distance between Joe and the unstable old man. The protracted shot of the huge trunk in the centre of the room, as well as multiple close-ups of the taxidermied cat's lingering, judgemental eyes, are nicely done but perhaps overstated. The final shot, showing the complete version of the first one, is a simple but very satisfying way of tying everything together at the end.

The movie has the feeling of a stage play, almost entirely limited to dialogue between two characters in a single setting. Space and camera angles are used very skillfully, as is the pacing of the story--just as the tension begins to thaw between our two main characters, the Old Man playfully pokes Joe in the stomach while holding a gun, reminding us that although he seems nice enough, he is still too mercurial for comfort and not entirely of sound mind.

The themes of death and beauty are repeated throughout, and we are made to understand that to the Old Man, these both come together, as different sides of the same coin. His want for beauty drives him to violence. Joe, also, seems like a well-mannered young man, but slowly opens up, revealing that he feels a crushing anguish at having followed all the rules and done everything right yet still has to endure serious problems with his wife, making his blood start to boil and something ugly begin to come to life inside him. Other themes, such as misogyny, possessiveness, religion, and native mythology, come up, although not as significantly.

Stephen Lang is incredible, as always. The movie is, if nothing else, an excuse to showcase his talent. Unlike his other recent horror film, "Don't Breathe", his character in "Old Man" does not exude the competence of a stalking predator, but instead is constantly changing, impossible to really pin down until the very end. Our opinions of the Old Man shift from thinking he is a danger to crazy to well-meaning to pitiable, but never competent or even fully aware. Likewise, the film is set up such that we initially think that the objective is for Joe to escape the cabin and flee the Old Man, but this also changes as the film progresses and we become more invested in their backstories.

The cast has not even a handful of characters, but frankly all of them play their roles superbly. The story is predictable but still fun to watch, keeping you on the edge of your seat. I've heard some people say it should be shorter, or explain less, whereas others have complained that the story is too impenetrable and ought to be longer and explained more, so I feel that is probably strikes a happy medium to appeal to most people. Obviously, you cannot satisfy everyone. For people who read or watch a lot of horror, it may be more predictable than for others, but even so it is very enjoyable to see how it plays out.

I was expecting something similar to "Don't Breathe" but quickly found this to be an entirely different kind of movie, and one which I thoroughly enjoyed. Less horror and more thriller/mystery. For what it set out to achieve with its story, it did it superbly, with very little room for improvement.

https://youtu.be/tjVS2m5p3Rw?si=Gw2qbItQu1tqgK8z

Godzilla Minus One (Gojira Mainasu Wan) (2023)

Rated PG-13 for creature violence and action

Score: 5 out of 5

The Godzilla movies, at least in their original Japanese flavor, have never been subtle. The 1954 original being a plain-as-day metaphor for nuclear weapons is a central part of the mythos and folklore of not only the character, but also, by extension, all of the giant monster movies that emerged in its wake. Over the years, the series has used Godzilla and his foes as metaphors for environmental destruction, the world's reactions to Japan's postwar economic ascent, and (in the recent Shin Godzilla) the devastation of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. This is something that I've always felt even the better American Godzilla movies missed, that their main message was always "giant monster battles are awesome (and us puny humans should respect nature more)," and conversely, why I still love Cloverfield as a better Hollywood take on this kind of monster movie than any of its official cracks at the Big G.

And the latest Godzilla movie continues the tradition, and in doing so produces one of the best movies in the entire franchise. This time around, the message is about love of one's country, specifically the difference between its vices and its virtues. It is a distinctly anti-government, and particularly anti-military, film that depicts blind faith in one's leaders to the point of being willing to die for them as a foolish endeavor that gets one killed, one born from a distinctly postwar Japanese mindset on the subject -- but at the same time, it's no Randian tract, but a film in which the heroes are ordinary people who unite around a common cause for the benefit of all. It's a film that celebrates Japan and its people while condemning the "great men" who had led the nation to ruin in the imperial era, courtesy of a filmmaker, Takashi Yamazaki, whose previous film The Great War of Archimedes was a historical drama about the construction of the Yamato battleship that portrayed the entire project as a mess of graft, bloat, and outdated thinking on warfare for the sake of a narrow vision of national prestige. It's a movie that's as interested in its human characters as it is in the monster mayhem central to any Godzilla movie, and it provided a great protagonist who I not only rooted for, but one whose arc and ultimate fate remained in doubt up until the very end in the best way possible.

But it's still a Godzilla movie, too. And while the monster is used sparingly, the film makes no bones about what a terrifying beast he is, with every appearance he makes delivering grand-scale carnage resembling something out of a Hollywood blockbuster with ten times the budget. It's a kaiju movie dropped into a historical drama, and the film's two sides elevate one another, not only providing a unique environment for Godzilla to stomp around in (and one replete with homages to the original film) but also adding a new spin on the message of the original movie. This is easily one of the finest films this series has ever produced, and it's in the running for my list of the best films of 2023.

The film takes place in Japan in 1947, less than two years after the nation surrendered at the end of World War II. Tokyo, firebombed by the Americans during the war, still has many neighborhoods that look as though Godzilla had graced them with his presence, most notably the one where Kōichi Shikishima and Noriko Ōishi live in a glorified shack, hastily assembled with what little money and resources they could gather. Kōichi is a veteran, specifically a kamikaze pilot in the last days of the war who got cold feet and turned back to Odo Island for "repairs", where he watched a fifty-foot, dinosaur-like sea monster, known to the island's locals as "Godzilla", tear apart the small Japanese garrison on the island -- a monster that he's spent the rest of his life wondering if he could've stopped. Noriko, meanwhile, is a young woman orphaned in the bombings who is raising a little girl, Keiko, who also lost her own birth parents, and who moves in with Kōichi so that they can both support each other.

From the introduction on Odo Island, we see Godzilla presented not so much as a representation of the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but one of the nation that dropped them. The soldiers could've easily hid and let Godzilla pass, but one of them just had to start shooting and drawing it to fight back, even commanding Kōichi to hop into the cockpit of his plane and try to shoot Godzilla with its 30mm cannons -- a move that, as we see later when much bigger guns are turned on Godzilla, probably would've just gotten him killed (which, apparently, the novelization explicitly states). Kōichi being a failed kamikaze pilot isn't just an incidental detail here. It's used to paint Godzilla as the Americans after Pearl Harbor, a pissed-off, seemingly unstoppable force that, unlike prior animalistic portrayals of the monster, seems to outright enjoy laying waste to Tokyo. Its terror, moreover, was invited by Japan's cocky, foolhardy leadership as they picked on someone way more than their own size and threw away the lives of their people in the name of preserving their honor, telling them that their deaths in battle would be glorious. Even as an American, I didn't need much of a history lesson to figure out the parallels between Godzilla's rampage in the opening scene and Japan finding out after fucking around in 1941, 82 years ago today.

And even after the war, with the totality of Japan's defeat, many people's first instinct in the face of a threat is to simply give up, preoccupied more with their own survival than anything. Men like Kōichi who fought in the war can barely look at themselves afterwards, shamed by their neighbors back home for having "failed". If only they'd fought harder, if only they hadn't been cowards, the war could've been won, many seem to think, all while those veterans are gripped by PTSD, night terrors, and panic attacks. This, too, is no way to live, the film argues, especially once the Americans, after its nuclear tests inadvertently turn Godzilla from a "mere" fifty feet tall into the fire-breathing mega-monster we know and love, abandon Japan to its fate because sending the full force of the US military to fight it might provoke the Soviets. In the end, this is a story about Japan, and more importantly the Japanese people, learning to stand up for themselves when nobody else -- not the Americans, not their own ineffective government -- will. With emphasis on "learn", because here, Godzilla is defeated not by fighting harder, the strategy that led Japan to catastrophe in the war, but by fighting smarter, figuring out its weaknesses and then exploiting them to the fullest. (Am I detecting a bit of admiration for how, to paraphrase Mr. Takagi from Die Hard, Japan ultimately got us with tape decks after Pearl Harbor didn't work out?)

Beyond just the plot and characters being top-notch, especially by the standards of a Godzilla movie (a series that's kind of infamous for being very "screw the plot, get to the monsters," for better or worse), there's also the matter of Godzilla itself. The monster is smaller this time around, bucking the trend of escalation that this series has long gone for in favor of scaling it down to its size from the 1954 film, but as your insecure best friend in high school always said, it's not the size, it's how you use it. Even a monster that's "only" 150 feet tall is still a monster that's 150 feet tall, and this film shows it tearing up naval warships, chasing a minesweeping boat, tossing train cars and boats like ragdolls, smashing buildings into rubble, and using its atomic breath in a manner that calls to mind an atomic bomb more than ever. It's easy to forget that there are only really four major scenes where Godzilla is on screen, because in each and every one of those scenes, the monster was so impactful and terrifying that it always hung over the rest of the film. I've seen a lot of people impressed by how this film cost only $15 million to make and wondering why Hollywood can't pull off the same with comparable budgets, and while I would like to remind people here that Cloverfield cost no more than $30 million and delivered just as much grade-A monster mayhem (short version: big-name stars tend to devour your budget, and there's a lot of bloat beyond that in blockbuster filmmaking), that doesn't take away from the accomplishments of Yamazaki or the effects team. This movie is beautiful, raw, and terrifying.

The rest of the production values are also outstanding. I can't really judge line delivery in another language, but I will say that Kōichi's actor Ryunosuke Kamiki was outstanding. He felt like a guy who'd seen some shit on Odo Island and still hadn't let go of it. His reaction to seeing Godzilla destroying Tokyo, without spoiling anything, was the kind of thing that made me not want to see Godzilla destroy Tokyo, a moment that took the human toll of the awesome carnage that these kinds of movies are built on and made it personal. The rest of the cast was also excellent, as was the set design that captured not only the historic time and place of late '40s Japan but also the feeling of deprivation. Kōichi and Noriko's home and community reminded me of shantytowns in Latin America, Africa, and India, a far cry from the nation that Japan would reemerge as, and it did a lot to sell me on the idea that these two, and the Japanese people as a whole, had lost everything in the war and been thrown back to "year zero" when it came to their development, the film's title implying that Godzilla will somehow find a way to throw them back even further. From top to bottom, and not just in the special effects, this was a movie that looked and felt alive.

The Bottom Line

Godzilla Minus One is one of my favorite films of the year and one of the best movies of its kind ever made. I'm glad that it found its audience in the US and is getting a wide theatrical run this weekend, because it is just a wonderful movie that I can't recommend highly enough.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/12/review-godzilla-minus-one-2023.html>

I’ve finished most of my outstanding obligations for reviews, at least for the moment. Well, that’s going to not be the case for too long, but I do have a brief respite. As such, I am able to talk about one particular audio drama. Now, I admit I was prepared to be disappointed, but this one surprised me in the best way possible. It utilized Egyptian Mythology while remaining incredibly faithful to the original myths. So, what is this audio drama? Why, we’re taking a look at Long Night in Egypt.

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Long Night in Egypt follows four college students named Mo, Kayla, Jorden, and Pia. They are on vacation in Egypt to visit Mo’s aunt and uncle; a pair of renowned Egyptologists. It’s sure to be a trip filled with relaxation, visits to archeological sites, and maybe even a bit of partying. Then, Mo’s cousin Samira comes up with the idea to visit the Pyramid of Unas at night. Mo’s aunt and uncle are very firm that the Pyramid of Unas must never be entered at night. However, the students sneak into the pyramid anyway. They will soon discover that the myths and legends of Ancient Egypt might just be true after all. They will have to navigate their way thought the Egyptian underworld, and face numerous challenges, if they wish to survive their long in Egypt.

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I had known about Long Night in Egypt for a while. It had the word Egypt in the title, and a pyramid on the title card. What can I say? I was sold. However, other obligations kept me from listening. Then, I got a chance to listen, and I was blown away by what I heard.

I’m a lover of mythology, but I have trouble deciding which particular mythology is my favorite. I’m reminded of what Neil Gaiman wrote in the introduction to his novel Norse Mythology. He said that picking a favorite mythology is a bit like picking a favorite cuisine. Variety is the spice of life, and your favorite often depends on what mood you’re in at the moment. However, there’s always those dishes and stories that you always come back to. Given the title of the book, it should come as no surprise that Norse Mythology is that for Neil Gaiman. But what about me?

I always find myself returning to the gods and stories of Egyptian Mythology. I love the weird and wonderful animal-headed gods. I love reading about all of the spells and incantations Egyptian magicians created. I love the way that real Ancient Egyptian historical figures sometimes factor into the stories. I love Egyptian Mythology. The stories of Egyptian Mythology took me on magical adventures away from my mundane world.

We have had several audio dramas adapt or reinterpret Greek Mythology, but not really any takes on Egyptian Mythology. In fact, Long Night in Egypt is, thus far, the only audio drama I’ve encountered that utilizes Egyptian Mythology in a major way. Now, this was certainly an exciting discovery, but I had my apprehensions. I’ve had to endure far too many movies and television shows that played way too fast and loose with real mythology. Hey, I’m just saying. If the source material you’re incorporating is a hindrance to the story you want to tell, then perhaps you should write a different story. That, or find a mythology more agreeable to the story you want to make.

Sorry, I got a little distracted there. Getting back on track, I was cautiously optimistic, but I was fully prepared to be disappointed. I was combing through every episode with a fine-toothed comb. I was prepared to pounce at the slightest slip-up. I was particularly worried that Anubis and/or Set would be portrayed as Ancient Egyptian Satan. However, much to my pleasant surprise, I couldn’t find a single mythological misappropriation. In fact, I even learned a few things as a result of listening to Long Night in Egypt.

So, let’s talk about all the great mythological stuff in this podcast. The main inspirations for this audio drama are The Pyramid Texts and The Egyptian Book of the Dead. The Pyramid Texts is one of the oldest surviving religious texts in the world. It is inscribed into the walls of the pyramids and burial chambers of Saqqara. And yes, that includes the Pyramid of Unas. The texts are a series of spells, incantations, hymns, and utterances that help the pharaoh to navigate the afterlife and ascend to godhood. The Egyptian Book of the Dead is much the same, but with different spells and writings. Also, the Book of the Dead was written on papyrus, not carved into stone.

The Pyramid Texts were completed in the Old Kingdom era, while The Book of the Dead wasn’t completed until the New Kingdom era. The characters do discover inscriptions from The Book on the Dead on the walls of the Pyramid of Unas. However, they do acknowledge this discrepancy, and wave it off as The Book of the Dead being older than previously believed. The Book of the Dead does drawn heavily upon The Pyramid Texts, so, this isn’t all that implausible.

We frequently hear characters, both mortal and divine, quoting passages from both The Pyramid Texts and The Book of the Dead. Oh, and that part where Unas consumes some of the gods to increase his power? Believe it or not, that is directly from The Pyramid Texts. That particular section is even called The Cannibal Hymn. See, this is why I’m such a big advocate for being accurate to the mythological sources. Oftentimes, the actual sources are way wilder than anything a modern writer might come up with.

We also get a few fun facts about modern Egypt sprinkled in. For example, Mo has a book that was written by Ahmed Kamal. He was the first Egyptologist to actually be from Egypt. There’s also a scene where the characters are at a club, and it is offhandedly mentioned that the drinking age in Egypt is twenty-one. I looked it up, and it is indeed twenty-one, just like in America. Also, you can apparently buy alcohol in Egypt.

Long Night in Egypt is a horror audio drama, and I like the approach it took to that. Unas isn’t portrayed as some monster who is bent on world domination. The main characters were warned not to go into the Pyramid of Unas at night, and they paid the price. Granted, they probably wouldn’t have believed the real reason they were to stay away. Still, their troubles are self-inflicted because they ran foul of ancient traditions, and disrespected the pyramid. Even without the undead pharaoh and the magic, it probably wasn’t the smartest idea to go into a pyramid at night. It is bound to be dark, and you can get easily hurt if you don’t know what you’re doing.

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. I was particularly thinking about that during the scene in the Halls of Judgement. Ancient Egypt was a foreign culture with a foreign value system. You might consider yourself a good person by modern standards, but how well would you stack up to Ancient Egyptian standards? Though, thankfully, an important part of the Weighing of the Heart is remembering the correct incantations from The Book of the Dead. Of course, even the things the Ancient Egyptians viewed as a great reward/honor for the afterlife could be potentially unpleasant by modern standards. What do I mean by that? Oh, that would be spoilers, but let’s just say you’ll see.

On a related note, I loved how the horror comes from the characters finding themself in a story straight out of mythology. I’m a big fan of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, as well the wider Riordanverse. Yes, that includes The Kane Chronicles. Naturally, I love mythology, and I do tend to fantasize about going on urban fantasy mythology adventures. On the other hand, perhaps I should be careful about what I wish for. Such things might be fun to read about, but it might not be so fun to actually live though. Especially if you don’t have magical powers.

But hey, maybe I’d get some moments of awe between my terror. Terrifying or not, it would be kind of cool to discover that Egyptian Mythology is real. That’s why Kayla was my favorite character. She constantly geeks out over archeology and mythology. This does cause some friction with Mo during the journey through the underworld. However, all the other characters would have been seriously screwed without Kayla’s encyclopedic knowledge of The Book of the Dead. Granted, Mo is certainly no slouch either, but he does need occasional prompting and reminders. I really loved the part where Kayla geeks out over all the obscure gods in the Hall of Judgement.

And speaking of the characters, we need to talk about the voice acting. I find it endlessly amusing that Mo is voiced by Amr Kotb, but Mo’s cousin Amr is voiced by Amro Mahmoud. I was excited when I heard that Roshan Singh would be voicing Jordan. He is the creator of the audio drama Temujin, and we’ve interacted a bit on Twitter. He didn’t really have a lot to do. Jordan is kind of…I believe himbo is the term the kids say these days. Still, he did the most with what he had to work with. Alice Pollack does an amazing job capturing Kayla’s endearingly nerdy personality. Asil Moussa is clearly having a lot of fun playing Samira.

Karim Kronfli has a brief cameo as a BBC newscaster. Always great hearing him, and amusingly, this isn’t the only Ancient Egyptian themed project he’s part of. He was also part of the voice cast for the video game Total War: Pharaoh. The music and sound effects are also really great. This is a show that’s being distributed by Realm Media. So, of course it’s going to be a cinematic audio drama. And I wouldn’t have Long Night in Egypt any other way.

Hmm, do I have critiques? Well, the image on the title card is not the Pyramid of Unas. It is the Great Pyramid of Giza, but I get why the production team did that. The Pyramid of Unas isn’t very photogenic. In fact, it kind of looks like a giant dirt mound. The Pyramids of Giza scream Ancient Egypt a lot better, and get the point across. And hey, it is a very nice looking title card regardless.

Switching gears, I’m not sure how I feel about the way Anubis was voiced. I know the voice actress. She’s the announcer from We Fix Space Junk. It would have been nice if there was an easily accessible cast list for Long Night in Egypt. Anyway, I know she tried to give Anubis an otherworldly voice, but it came across as a bit too feminine. Not what I would have gone for if I’d been casting. I got used to it, but it was a bit of a sour note in an otherwise great voice cast. The other gods had excellent voice casting

Those are really the only critiques I can think of. Long Night in Egypt was an absolutely fantastic podcast. I won’t give away the ending, but suffice it to say, there’s no way we’re getting a season two out of this. I’d be genuinely surprised if we do. On the other hand, there are a lot of other mythologies out there. There’s plenty of other myths that could be given the Long Night in Egypt treatment. Hint, hint, Violet Hour and Realm.

Long Night in Egypt was an amazing audio drama from start to finish. It really shows the great things that can be accomplished when you make the effort to be accurate to mythology. This is the Egyptian Mythology audio drama I was hoping we might have someday, and it did not disappoint in the slightest. Do yourself a favor and listen to it today. Especially if you love Egyptian Mythology or all things Ancient Egypt.

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Link to the original review on my blog: https://drakoniandgriffalco.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-audio-file-long-night-in-egypt.html?m=0

GRAVY OR STUFFING?a review of THANKSGIVING (2023)

A year after a deadly "Black Thursday" riot at a Plymouth Big Box store, someone dressed in puritan garb is knocking off various individuals involved, theming the killings around the titular holiday...

It feels weird to be old enough to now be living through the THIRD slasher film wave. While SCREAM VI has devolved from snarky meta commentary to "All these CW-styled teens are awful people who are awful to each other - which one is so awful they're killing the others?", and TERRIFIER works the combo of supernatural killer and ultra-gore cruelty, Eli Roth's THANKSGIVING seems almost quaint in its desire to simply make a modern version of an 80s slasher (just a little slicker, with a better budget, and more grotesque).

And while I, personally, have always felt conflicted about the slasher film (and find myself, approaching senior citizenry, as far less interested in - or tolerant of - violence for violence's sake. Much more of a Gothic/Creep fan) I will say that this is a perfectly fine film for what it's trying to do. Roth, while no great filmmaker, succeeds by staying in his own FANGORIA-bro lane (so none of the high-school juvenile "point scoring" of THE GREEN INFERNO - the closest this has is a weepy football player who gets all the girls by pretending to care about Native Americans... because, yeah, Eli Roth...). Better, while replicating the approach/tone of an 80s slasher, this isn't an exercise in meta-commentary ("look how smart we are about stupid things") or nostalgic recreation (set in modern times, the film - for example - finds smart ways to incorporate the ubiquity of cell phones into the Slasher formula).

You get exactly what you're expecting - an 80s styled slasher film themed on the holiday. Thus, in that mode, it's a whodunnit peopled with numerous red herrings but, honestly, despite the scripts dogged insistence that all the "characters" have backgrounds and motivations, they are JUST there to die or survive (depending) while the killer is given a motivation (the "inciting incident," in this case, is well-handled and nicely modern as well) but no explanation as for the fixation on the holiday (because, y'know, it's a slasher film! - that's all the reason you need). And the film also succeeds in being as grotesque as promised without being nearly as grotesque as the GRINDHOUSE trailer that presaged it. Roth's strongest detail is that he does a decent job capturing the season (lots of snowy, gray skies), setting (lots of Boston accents) and that peculiar ambience of 80s slashers that wrings anxiety and creepiness out of long, empty hallways and semi-darkened rooms. The extended climax, though, is thoroughly contemporary, with a budget no poverty-ridden slasher could ever afford. Put country simple: if you hate slasher films, you have no reason to see this, if you love slasher films you should enjoy this and, if you tolerate them, it's not a bad night at the movies. Gravy or stuffing? The correct answer is cranberry sauce.

https://letterboxd.com/futuristmoon/film/thanksgiving-2023/reviews/

"Last Christmas still haunts me." -Winnie Carruthers

A year after stopping the killing spree of a psychotic masked killer, Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop) hasn't fully recovered, but the rest of the town seems to have moved on. Despondent and depressed, Winnie believes everyone would be better off if she never existed. Soon, Winnie finds herself in a world where she never existed and no one else stopped the killer. Now a stranger in her own town, Winnie has to find a way to stop the killer again and take back her life.

What Works:

I love the premise of this movie. I've been really enjoying the recent trend of retelling classic movies, but throwing in a slasher villain. Happy Death Day and Freaky are both awesome and It's a Wonderful Knife fits under the same umbrella. While this movie has flaws, and a lot of them, I still enjoyed the concept and story enough that I was entertained the entire way through. I really hope we get more movies like this.

Winnie is an excellent protagonist and very relatable. Jane Widdop does a great job in the role. After the opening sequences killings, we cut to a year later and we see that Winnie's family and the town have moved on, but Winnie hasn't. The movie does a great job of putting you in Winnie's headspace and its very frustrating to see things from Winnie's perspective, but that's how the movie wants you to feel. That section of the film really works for me.

Justin Long is phenomenal as Henry Waters, the town's most prominent businessman. He's so smarmy and cartoonish that you can't help but hate him. It's Justin Long, so he manages to be charming and endearing in his own way, but Henry Waters sucks and Long makes him easy to despise.

What Sucks:

The biggest problem with the movie is the writing. The script is messy and feels like a first draft. A few more passes would have been good. A lot of the dialogue needed work and scenes needed to be fleshed out more.

On the same note, the beginning of the movie introduces us to a lot of characters, but most of them are skimmed over and some aren't properly introduced. I didn't even realize that one of the characters was Winnie's boyfriend until much later. It's rushed. A few more early scenes establishing these characters were definitely needed.

Finally, I don't think the movie does enough with its premise. The movie has some fun with no one knowing Winnie for a while, but we move away from that and focus on the relationship between Winnie and Bernie (Jess McLeod). I like their dynamic and that's fine, but the movie kinda forgets what it is for awhile. Some more Christmas murder-sequences would have been fun.

Verdict:

It's a Wonderful Life has a great premise and good performances from Widdop and Long, but the execution is definitely lacking overall. The script is a mess, most of the characters are poorly developed, and it doesn't do enough with its premise. It's entertaining, but could have been much better.

6/10: Okay

Hi everybody!

Today, I want to share with you an authentic cult book: “The Werewolf of Paris.” This is the quintessential lycanthropic bible. Most of the werewolf archetypes frequently seen in movies originate from this forgotten novel by Endore. This paperback, like almost any other gothic tale, begins with the discovery of an accursed manuscript, which tells us the tragic story of Bertrand Caillet.

Bertrand was the product of a non-consensual sexual encounter, and also he was born on December 25 overshadowing Christ’s birth. For this reason, he will be cursed with the werewolf metamorphosis. Bertrand is adopted by Aymar Galliez (who is the manuscript owner). Aymar realizes that Bertrand poses a threat to humans, and he attempts to control his killer instinct. Eventually, Aymar fails in his duty, and the beast breaks out of his home to move to Paris and torment humanity. In Paris, Bertrand takes advantage of the bloody context to act with impunity, because he arrives in Paris during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and the establishment of the Paris commune of 1871. The characters’ most critical moments coincide with the most awful events of the war, the subsequent social revolt and the future counter-revolution. In fact, as we read the novel, we meet worse “wolves” than Bertrand in this Parisian society: bourgeois, aristocrats, the clergy, and even commoners.

I could not speak about this novel if I do not speak about its author, Guy Endore (1900-1970) an American writer, screenwriter of Hollywood movies, and activist. He lived his childhood between New York and Vienna, and when he reached adulthood, he moved to Hollywood to write movie scripts. Endore could be ranked among the great American horror writers, alongside Washington Irving, Edgar A. Poe, Ambrose Bierce, R.W. Chambers, H.P. Lovecraft, Anne Rice, Stephen King and Joe Hill. However, his novel, The Werewolf of Paris, never received a successful movie adaptation that would have brought him global recognition.

Critics and specialists in literature, translation, and demonology, such as Brian Stableford or Jacques Finné, have said that Endore’s opus magnum, “The Werewolf of Paris”, is for the lycanthropes myth what Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” is for the vampire’s myth. The lycanthrope and the vampire, together with Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, make up a trilogy of dream chimeras that have fascinated, then as now, the human collective unconscious.

Vampire Circus (1972)

Rated PG

Score: 3 out of 5

One of the last good films made by Hammer Film Productions during the famed British horror studio's latter period, Vampire Circus delivers exactly what it promises: a creepy circus run by vampires. It makes smart use of its premise, it has an engaging and alluring villain, and it has exactly the mix of bloodshed, sex appeal, and period glamour that make Hammer films at their best feel dangerous and classy, at least to me. Is the supporting cast a mixed bag? Are there way too many unfortunate stereotypes of Romani people in how the circus is portrayed? Yes and yes. But when the finished product works as well as it does, I can push all that to the side and enjoy what is still an entertaining vampire flick.

The film takes place in the Eastern European village of Stetl in a vaguely 19th century time period where, fifteen years ago, the locals, led by the schoolmaster Müller, murdered the nobleman Count Mitterhaus after learning that he was a vampire responsible for the disappearance and death of numerous local children. Before he died, he cursed the town, telling them that their children will die to bring him back to life. Meanwhile, his mistress Anna, Müller's wife and a willing servant of the Count, escapes into the night to meet up with the Count's cousin Emil, who runs a circus. Now, a plague is laying waste to Stetl, which has caused the local authorities to block all the roads out of it. Somehow, the traveling Circus of Nights got through the blockade to come to the town; the locals aren't too inquisitive about how they made it through, not when they're eager to just take their minds off of things. The circus has all manner of sights to show them, and what's more, the beautiful woman who serves as its ringmaster looks strikingly familiar.

This isn't really a movie that offers a lot of surprises. Even though she's played by a different (if similar-looking) actress, the movie otherwise makes it obvious that the ringmaster is in fact an older version of Anna even before the big reveal. I didn't really care, not when Adrienne Corri was easily one of the best things about this movie, making Anna the kind of (pardon the pun) vampish presence that it needed to complete its old-fashioned gothic atmosphere. She made me buy the villains as a dangerous force but also as a group of people and vampires who would seduce the townsfolk into ignoring their crimes, enough to more than make up for Anthony Higgins playing Emil, her partner in crime and the main vampire menace for much of the film, far too over-the-top for me to take seriously. The circus itself also made creative use of how the various powers attributed to vampires in folklore and fiction, from animal transformations to superior strength and senses, might be used to put on a flashy production of the sort where those watching might think that what they're seeing is all part of the show. And when push came to shove in the third act, we got treated to the circus' strongman breaking down the doors of people's homes, the dwarf sneaking around as a stealthy predator, and the twin acrobats (played by a young Robin Sachs and Lalla Ward) becoming the most dangerous fighters among the villains. It exploited its premise about as well as you'd expect from a low-budget film from the '70s, which was more than enough to keep me engaged.

Beyond the circus, however, the townsfolk generally weren't the most interesting characters. Only Müller had much depth to him, concerning his relationship with his lost wife Anna that grows increasingly fraught once he realizes who the ringmaster really is. With the rest of the cast, I was waiting for them all to get killed off by the vampires, as none of them left much of an impression otherwise. It was the circus that mostly propped up the movie. I also can't say I was particularly comfortable with the old-timey stereotypes that this film relied on in its depiction of the Roma. Notice how I'm calling Anna the "ringmaster" throughout this review. The film itself never uses that word, but instead uses a rather less polite anti-Romani slur to describe her, and it only gets worse from there, with the villagers using that word to describe the circus as "vermin" who need to be exterminated. This is why I've never been a fan of modern vampire fiction that, in trying to portray its vampires sympathetically, invokes the real-life history of persecution of marginalized groups (True Blood being one of the more famous examples). Given the history of both vampire legends and bigotry, especially that of real-life blood libels, pogroms, and hate crimes, it is a subject that can easily veer into suggesting that certain groups really are preying on people in unholy ways, especially when you bring children into the equation as this film does. Yes, Anna originally came from Stetl and isn't actually Romani, and for that matter, neither is the Count. But it's a subtext that this film, by invoking those parallels with a decidedly villainous portrayal of vampires, lays bare, and it had me feeling queasy at points in ways I'm sure the film didn't intend.

The Bottom Line

It's a movie that's very "of its time" in a lot of ways, and has problems fleshing out its supporting cast. Fortunately, it's buoyed by some great villains and that trademark Hammer horror mix of sex appeal and gothic flair. It's easily one of the better films to come out of their late period.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/10/review-vampire-circus-1972.html>

The Funhouse (1981)

Rated R

Score: 2 out of 5

Where classic slashers from the genre's golden age are concerned, The Funhouse stands out as a serious disappointment. It had Tobe Hooper returning to the slasher genre seven years after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, it boasted a carnival setting that promised some thrills and chills, and the killers were legitimately compelling in ways you don't normally get from slasher villains, so the parts were there for a great movie. What went wrong? A lot, if I'm being honest, but the biggest problems start with the characters and the pacing, which are both terminal. Throughout the film, I was constantly annoyed by the group of four teenage friends who served as this movie's focal point, and waiting for them to finally get killed. I'll give the film points for trying to develop its main characters and present a portrait of backwoods, trailer-trash Americana on the skids in the form of the sleazy carnival they go to, but when the people you're supposed to be rooting for are either loathsome or one-dimensional in such a manner that the Eight Deadly Words ("I don't care what happens to these people") have kicked in about twenty minutes into the film, all of that goes to waste. Both of the guys are sleazy horndogs, the "hot" girl of the group is a vapid airhead, and the heroine is one of the flattest, most boring, and most useless final girls I've ever seen in a horror movie, somebody who survives almost by pure luck with how many stupid mistakes she makes during the last act as she tries to fight the killer.

Having such a terrible cast made it that much more insufferable how the film stretched the obligatory twenty minutes of first-act character development into roughly half the movie. Until the main characters enter the titular funhouse, there are barely any horror elements in this film barring a fake-out opening parodying Psycho, and the first kill happens around the 45-minute mark. This meant that half the movie was spent watching these jackasses run around a carnival acting like jackasses and doing nothing to endear themselves to me, all while I was constantly checking the runtime wondering when they were finally gonna get hacked to pieces. What's more, there's an entire subplot involving the heroine's little brother that contributes absolutely nothing, feeling like it was there solely to pad the runtime without any payoff. The kid is briefly in danger at one point, but any tension fizzles out soon after as that is quickly resolved. The intent of the subplot felt like it was to give the protagonists hope for a rescue only to snatch it away, but again, I cared nothing about their fate, and consequently wound up more interested in the kid's own peril instead, a subplot that ultimately didn't go anywhere. In a film with better-written protagonists, spending that much time developing them so we come to care more about their deaths would've been a laudable creative decision. Here, however, it meant that the film simply dragged.

The worst part is, there were moments when a much better film was peeking through here, moments that were themselves connected to its characters -- specifically, the killers. The clown with the axe on the poster never shows up in the film, but fortunately, we do get a pair of very interesting villains, a father-and-son duo who run the titular carnival dark ride. The son is a malformed, mentally disabled freak whose father employs him as a worker on the ride while wearing a mask to cover up his hideous face, and who has a habit of killing locals in the towns the carnival travels through, with the father covering up the murders and growing increasingly frustrated having to raise him. These two could've made for the villain-protagonists of a much better movie, one about the two of them traveling with the carnival and working with all the other colorful characters who are part of it (who are all far more interesting than our actual main characters from what we see of them), all while a trail of corpses follows them with each new town they visit. Rick Baker's effects work made for a very scary-looking monster, while Kevin Conway was by far the best actor in the movie as the killer's undeniably evil yet multilayered father.

The Bottom Line

Rob Zombie should remake this movie. No, seriously. His sensibilities line up perfectly with the mood this film was trying to go for, and he'd likely avoid a lot of its worst pitfalls. As it stands, though, Hell Fest is a better version of this movie, which just has too many problems with its boring characters and sluggish pacing for me to recommend it to anyone other than the most diehard '80s slasher aficionados.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/10/review-funhouse-1981.html>

Frankenstein (1931)

Approved by the Production Code Administration of the Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America

Score: 5 out of 5

Frankenstein. What else is there to say? It's the original mad scientist movie, adapted from the novel by Mary Shelley that invented modern science fiction and, by extension, sci-fi horror. One of the biggest changes it made from the book was to make the monster a lumbering brute rather than give him human intelligence, and in doing so, it foreshadowed the zombie as an iconic monster of horror cinema and later gaming. It's a film that not only left an indelible mark on its source material and how it's perceived, but also, together with their adaptation of Dracula earlier that year, enshrined Universal Pictures' status in the '30s and early '40s as Hollywood's masters of horror who shaped the genre's contours in ways that are visible to this day. Nearly every scene in this 70-minute film is now iconic. It's been imitated, homaged, parodied, dissected, and simply ripped off so many times over the years that one might think it would lose some of its impact watching it in 2023, ninety-two years after it premiered.

One might think.

I decided to finally watch this film for the first time last night, and while so far I've enjoyed my trip into the classic Universal monster movies, this one has easily been the standout for me. It moves at a surprisingly brisk pace that builds a constantly escalating tension as the consequences of its protagonist's crime against nature become clear to everyone involved, Boris Karloff's take on the title character's monster is iconic for a reason, and the cast and production values all around remain impressive even after nearly a century of advances in special effects technology. It's a film that's at once beautifully gothic, larger-than-life, and treads close to camp, yet remains distinctly grim and melancholy throughout, without ever feeling slow or plodding. So far, I'd easily rank this as not only my favorite of the Universal monster movies, but as one of the all-time great horror films in general and sci-fi horror films specifically.

While this film may have a literal monstrous creature at the center of its plot, there's a reason why, as generations of pedantic nerds have pointed out, he's not the title character. No, that would be his creator, Dr. Henry Frankenstein (swapping first names with the supporting character of his friend, who is here named Victor), who's played brilliantly by Colin Clive and, despite being perfectly human, may well be the film's metaphorical monster. Henry is guilty of many sins, the big one being pride. He's nakedly out to prove himself as the greatest scientist who ever lived and the man who conquered death, not least of all to his former professor Dr. Waldman, his father Baron Frankenstein, his friend Victor (with whom he swaps first names from the book), and his fiancé Elizabeth. He compares himself to God in the mother of all blasphemous boasts shortly after he brings his creature to life, one that several state censorship boards ordered to be cut. He genuinely cares about the life of his grand achievement, but chiefly as a trophy of his accomplishment, and soon finds that he is in no way ready to care for him. He's an egomaniac high on his own supply, one who's set up for a terrible, well-deserved fall in the third act as the consequences of his creation come back to bite him and the horror of what he's done starts to sink in.

Even here, however, rather than swallow his pride and admit he made a mistake, he sets out to salvage it instead, not merely joining the mob of angry villagers but insisting on leading it. Whereas once he made the bold claim that he now wielded the power of creation in his hands (just don't ask about how he was too careless to check the quality of the brain his assistant Fritz gave him), now he insists that only by those same hands can this horrible creature be destroyed. After all, only Dr. Henry Frankenstein, the most brilliant man who ever lived, knows how to stop the monster he made! At risk of getting sidetracked into a rant, watching Henry's transformation I couldn't help but be reminded of the far more recent phenomenon of tech gurus who made their fortune with advanced technology, from social media to self-driving cars to AI, insisting that their expertise as the creators of these technologies leaves them uniquely qualified to manage their deleterious consequences on society. Watching this movie today, its portrayal of Henry was one of the most frightening things about it, a shockingly prescient portrait of what a lot of the boy wonders of Silicon Valley who convinced everyone around them, not least of all themselves and each other, that they were saving the world and uplifting humanity were actually like. He may mean well and have a ton of technical knowhow, but outside his area of expertise, he's a fool. I'm specifically reminded of Larry Fessenden's recent Frankenstein homage Depraved, which I saw four years ago at Popcorn Frights' 2019 festival, and which updated the basic plot to the present-day world of Silicon Valley biohackers but otherwise hewed very closely to this movie's themes.

A great monster isn't enough to make a great monster movie, though. And that brings me to the other monster. If Henry is a self-serving jackass with a bloated head, then his creation is a different story entirely. Boris Karloff's performance brought to mind nothing less than a dog, specifically one who's been mistreated for so long that he can't help but be violent and has no idea that he's doing anything wrong. Drs. Frankenstein and Waldman horribly mistreat him, Fritz the assistant hates him and tries to kill him, and it's no wonder when he starts to lash out like a chained-up junkyard dog with the strength of ten men. Even when he tries to be friendly, such as when he escapes his creator's castle and meets a little girl on a farm, his lack of knowledge of how human beings operate has terrible consequences. Make no mistake, Frankenstein's monster is just that, a monster who, at the end of the day, needed to be put down and never should've been created in the first place, much like the rest of the Universal Monsters. But if Jack Griffin was the trollish monster and Imhotep was the sexy monster, then Frankenstein's creature is the tragic monster, one whose entire brief existence on Earth was practically engineered for suffering and whose ultimate fate may as well be mercy after everything he's gone through. Even after what he does, you can't help but root for the monster, if not to prevail than simply to find peace.

The look and feel of the film are exactly what you'd expect from a classic, classy 1930s monster movie. The sets are lavish, and director James Whale incorporates a lot of clear influence from German expressionism into the film, giving many locales a heightened, creepy, and unreal feel to them of a sort that Tim Burton would become famous for decades later. The film is short, and it moves briskly, focusing on building up a situation that slowly but surely spirals out of the control of everybody involved due to their own hubris. It gets moving early, and scarcely lets up from there, with only a brief lull in the middle after the monster escapes and everything suddenly starts to sink in for Henry just as his wedding to Elizabeth is about to get going. Whenever the monster was on screen, I knew in my heart that he didn't mean any harm, but that didn't change the tension in the air at the knowledge that he could still snap and turn on the characters around him at any moment, as he often did. This wasn't really a slow burn, but it wasn't a "jump scare" movie either; a lot of the frights were built around the characters and the mood, and Whale pulled them off.

The Bottom Line

Even now, Frankenstein is a film with no less power to frighten and amaze, its themes still relevant to this day and the performances by Colin Clive and Boris Karloff crafting a pair of legendary monsters. It's a must-see not just for fans of horror interested in its history, but anybody who wants to watch a sci-fi horror classic that still holds up.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/10/review-frankenstein-1931.html>

Totally Killer (2023)

Rated R for bloody violence, language, sexual material, and teen drug/alcohol use

Score: 3 out of 5

Totally Killer is a film where you can see the marks of Happy Death Day written all over it. That movie, which has grown in my estimation over the years, set a template for a kind of horror-comedy that Blumhouse has since come to specialize in, one that combines a slasher movie storyline with a big, high-concept hook straight out of a classic retro comedy (in Happy Death Day's case, it was Groundhog Day). In this case, director Nahnatchka Khan and writers David Matalon, Sasha Perl-Raver, and Jen D'Angelo not only put a slasher twist on the basic plot of Back to the Future and the Bill & Ted films, they went the extra mile and set large parts of the film in the '80s as well, having its modern-day protagonist confounded by the values of the decade as much as Marty McFly was by the '50s. The result is a film I enjoyed, but wanted to like more than I actually did given the wild ride that the trailers promised. On one hand, it nailed the comedy side of the equation and had a cool-looking killer, a great co-lead performance by Olivia Holt as an '80s mean girl, and a story that seemed to be going in some interesting directions, but on the other, the horror side was fairly rote, it held back on some of the ideas it leaned towards, and its leading lady Kiernan Shipka didn't do much to elevate the material. Ultimately, I'd sooner rewatch The Final Girls as a film that did a superficially similar story more effectively, but I can't deny that there's still a lot to like about this one, and I don't regret having watched it.

The film starts on Halloween in 2023, thirty-six years after Pam Hughes survived a killing spree where three of her friends were murdered by the "Sweet Sixteen Killer", a masked murderer who stabbed each of his victims sixteen times on their sixteenth birthdays in late October. Now, Pam is a soccer mom with a teenage daughter named (what else?) Jamie -- and tonight, she herself gets murdered by the Sweet Sixteen Killer, who was never caught and seems to have come back to finish the job. Jamie, distraught over her mother's death, suddenly receives two leads, first from a local true crime podcaster named Chris who tells her that Pam had received a note from the killer reading "you're next, one day" that she had kept secret, and second from her best friend Amelia, a science whiz who's trying to enter the science fair with a time machine that her mother Lauren designed but which she can't get to work. Thanks to some accidental intervention by the killer, Jamie somehow manages to figure out how to make the machine work, and gets sent back in time to 1987 on the day of the first murder. With a heads-up from the killer, she sets out to not only solve her mother's murder in the present, but also save her mother's friends in the past.

The comedy side of the film was clearly where Khan and the writers were most invested in the material. A lot of humor is mined from Jamie's reactions to not only how different the adults in her life were when they were her age, but also how the '80s were a very different time when it came to everything from politics to permissiveness, and not necessarily for the better, a rather appropriate perspective to take given how much of the film's plot concerns Jamie realizing just how much of a bitch her mother was back when she was her age. And on that note, Olivia Holt as young Pam was this film's heart and soul, not only looking like a perfect dead ringer for a young Julie Bowen (who plays her grown-up self) but understanding the assignment and feeling like nothing less than a more mean-spirited (if still heroic) version of the characters that her idol Molly Ringwald plays. Whenever Holt was on screen, which was fortunately often, this movie sparkled to life. The supporting cast, too, served as capable accomplices for Holt, whether it's their job to act frightened or make you laugh, and occasionally do both at the same time. (One kill in particular late in the film stands as one of the funniest "comedy" deaths I've ever seen.) The horror side of the film was a fairly boilerplate whodunit slasher that would be familiar to anyone who's seen Scream (a film that this one namedrops) or any of the films that followed in its wake. However, it was elevated by a killer whose look alone was creepy, wearing a Max Headroom-inspired mask that feels right at home in this movie's darkly comic sendup of the '80s and giving a twisted sort of edge to him. It may have just been aesthetics rather than substance, but those aesthetics were really damn cool, and given how much this movie is powered by a love of the visual and sonic landscape of '80s pop culture, it was exactly what the movie needed.

It was fortunate that this movie had Holt and its totally killer (sorry) style propelling it, because there were otherwise a lot of weak links here -- and unfortunately, they were some big ones. For starters, while I liked Kiernan Shipka on Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, I found myself very disappointed with her performance here, a problem given that she was supposed to be the main character. She acquitted herself well enough with the scares and as the "straight man" to the humor, but this film was built around Jamie's relationship with her mother, and while Holt carried her side of that story well enough, Shipka fell flat and couldn't get me interested in the character. What's more, the writing missed some very interesting and incisive directions that it could've gone in, tying Jamie's shock at her mother's awful behavior as a teenager to the jokes poking fun at the political incorrectness of the '80s and using both to craft a broader theme about how our memories of the past are all too often colored by selective nostalgia that glosses over the uncomfortable sides of the things we love. It's a dramatic throughline that was practically right there, waiting to be tapped, and yet the film barely even seems to think about how two of its primary elements might connect to one another. Finally, the reveal of the killer's identity was telegraphed almost from the moment we're introduced to one particular character, and the film did nothing to play around with it, resulting in a flat, uninteresting villain with a motive that's been done many times before and often better.

The Bottom Line

Totally Killer is goofy to a fault, seeming to actively avoid finding any deeper meaning in what it's saying in favor of delivering a sugar rush of '80s nostalgia. On that front, it delivered exactly what it set out to, a mix of retro aesthetics, lots of funny jokes, and a performance by Olivia Holt that ought to be a stepping stone to bigger and better things. If you wanna have some fun, check it out, though I do wish it got a bit meatier than it wound up being.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/10/review-totally-killer-2023.html>

Unfortunately I was one of the few who couldn’t watch Masters of Horror when it first aired. I had to wait until it was released on DVD. I did however hear about the controversy of Imprint and how it wasn’t aired. Despite that, Imprint is a very good installment in the Masters of Horror series.

There’s about 3 kills in Imprint (not counting the fetus we see). None too graphic (except the fetus). The torture scenes of Komomo were more disturbing than anything else. There’s also the special effects for “Little Sis”.

The two leads, Billy Drago and Yuki Kudo, do a great job in acting. Billy Drago (known for Vamp, Mirror Mirror 3 & 4, Tremors 4, and The Hills Have Eyes [2006]) plays Christopher, an American looking for his lost love. Yuki Kudo plays the Woman. The prostitute who tells Christopher what happens to Komomo and her own sad story. I do have to give props to Michie, who plays Komomo. Some of the contortions she did were terrifying.

Imprint opens on Christopher, making his way to an island where the prostitutes were living. He is in search of one specific prostitute but she is not there. He does start talking to one called The Woman, whose face is half disfigured. She first tells him a sad story about herself and then what happened to Komomo. Though part of it was a lie. She eventually tells the real truth about herself and Komomo. The stories are horrifying.

I really liked the dark tones in the movie, contrasted with the red wigs of the ladies. Also, the atmosphere was dark and creepy. A kind of ethereal feel to it. I found the story pretty interesting as well as good acting. A good fit in the Master of Horror franchise. I would definitely recommend this if you are into Takashi Miike movies and if you don’t mind some graphic images of fetus and torture.

Let’s get into the rankings:

Scary/Creepy: 5/5

Sex/Nudity: 2/5

Kills/Blood/Gore: 5/5

My Enjoyment: 5/5

My Rank: 4.2/5

Imprint Review

"I didn't actually witness it, you know. The exorcism." -Chris MacNeil

Two girls go missing for three days, but are luckily found alive and mostly unharmed. However, they soon begin exhibiting strange and demented behavior. Their parents start to suspect the girls are demonically possessed and turn to all sorts of religious leaders for help, as well as Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), who knows a thing or two about exorcisms.

What Works:

The best part of this movie is the performances from the actors. They are all trying their best and it isn't their fault the movie around them doesn't work. Leslie Odom Jr. is the main highlight as he gives a really sympathetic and relatable performance as the main protagonist.

This movie has a few neat ideas. I like how the movie begins with the girls going missing. I think that could have been a whole movie of parents looking for their missing girls only to find the disappearances to be supernatural in origin. I also like the idea of the exorcism involving priests from a wide variety of faiths working together. That could have been a whole movie. Unfortunately, neither idea is fully realized, but they had potential.

What Sucks:

I spent most of this movie either bored or annoyed. That's about as bad as it gets for me when I'm watching the movie. I had a hard time getting invested and I simply didn't care. I was mostly preoccupied with all of the easy fixes that could have been made to make this a good movie. Like I mentioned above, this movie has two solid ideas that each could have been their own movie if they had focused. We could have had a supernatural version of Prisoners following the parents looking for their missing girls. That could have been really creepy.

The other story is the exorcism itself. We are introduced to a bunch of characters in this movie from a wide variety of faiths and they have to work together to defeat the demon. This could have worked if we spend time developing each character and what their faith means to them. Take a little bit from each faith and combine it to defeat the demon. Easy. Unfortunately, only two out of the eight characters involved in the ritual are developed at all, and one of those two is on the sloppy side. If the movie had made the exorcism a larger part of the movie and focused on the characters' emotional journeys through the ritual, this could have been a nice and creepy character-focused horror movie. Instead, it's a mess.

Chris MacNeil is a great character in the origianl movie, but she's actually barely in this movie. Cut her out from the movie completely. She didn't really add anything. Or give her more to do! Let her be at the final exorcism. She's taken out of the movie quickly after being introduced and her inclusion felt pointless.

I'm not a religious person and a lot of the dialogue was very annoying as various characters spend the movie trying to jam religion down the throat of Odom Jr.'s character, Victor. I was getting pretty fed up with all of the supporting characters and maybe if they had been better developed it would have been less annoying. There's a whole second family involved in all of this and it's shocking how underdeveloped they are. It's just bad writing.

Verdict:

This movie has a couple of neat ideas and talented actors and manages to waste all of them with terrible writing. The characters are undeveloped and the story doesn't fully explore any of the interesting ideas. The whole things feels like a waste. I was bored and annoyed for most of the movie and the more I think about this movie, the angrier I get. What a wasted opportunity. It's better than the 2nd Exorcist movie, but not by much, and it's significantly worse than all of the other films in the series.

2/10: Awful

Carrie is one of those kinds of movies that has the right balance of blood, kills, great acting, and a decent storyline. I would say it’s one of my favorite Stephen King adaptations. It's the kind of movie that should make you be nice to people in high school. You never know what they are going through and what they could end up doing.

There’s no doubt there are a LOT of kills in Carrie! And all with differing styles of kills. Unfortunately the lamest kill, in my opinion, is Tommy’s. A bucket. Really? I wish Chris had a better death though. And by better I mean gruesome. She was horrible. For best death there is no doubt Margaret White’s death. Very creative and justified. As far as blood, we all know that scene with the pig’s blood at the prom. So there will be blood.

This is your warning if you are an animal lover or don’t like animal kills in movies. There is a scene where a pig gets killed. You don’t see the animal die but you understand what is happening. And then the blood at the prom. You’ve now been warned.

The acting in Carrie is great. With the likes of Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving, John Travolta, William Katt, Nancy Allen, and P.J. Soles.

Starting with Sissy Spacek (also known for The Man with Two Brains, The Ring Two, An American Haunting, and a lot of non-genre movies) as Carrie, the bullied teen who discovers her telekinetic powers at the worst possible time. Spacek did a great job convincing the viewers that she was going through a lot (with a domineering, religious mother and some very mean fellow classmates who constantly bullied her). When she loses it, she LOSES it.

Next we have Piper Laurie (also known for Twin Peaks, The Faculty, and a lot of non-genre movies and television shows) as Margaret White, Carrie's very religious and abusive mother. We see her descend into madness when Carrie decides to go to the prom. I did feel a little bad for her when she explains how her husband raped her and that’s how she conceived Carrie. But that doesn’t excuse the abuse she inflicts on Carrie.

We also have Amy Irving (known for The Fury, The Rage: Carrie 2, and Hide and Seek) as nice girl Sue who feels bad for Carrie, and P.J. Soles (known for Halloween, , Halloween 2018, Uncle Sam, The Devil’s Rejects, and The Tooth Fairy) as mean girl Norma.

As far as the guys go, we have John Travolta (known for Pulp Fiction, Battlefield Earth. But do I really need to name his movies?) as Billy, the boyfriend of Chris who kills a pig. And William Katt (known for House, House IV, Alien Vs Hunter, and Mirrors 2) plays Tommy, Sue’s nice boyfriend who takes Carrie to the prom.

Finally, I’m mentioning Nancy Allen (known for The Philadelphia Experiment, Robocop, Poltergeist 3, and Children of the Corn 666) last. She plays Chris, one of the main bullies. She goes above and beyond in her torment of Carrie. She comes up with the plan for the pigs blood. But, she’s worse than the typical high school popular kid bully. She’s just evil. When Chris, Billy, and his friends break into the pig farm she shows her true colors. When Billy kills the pig, Chris is gleefully urging Billy to kill the pig, with this psychotic look on her face. Yep, she is evil. I have no doubt if she didn’t die in the end she would have ruined a lot more people’s lives.

We start Carrie at a low point in school. The volleyball team she was on loses because of her. Then in the locker room she gets her first period and doesn’t realize what it was. All the girls start teasing her and throwing tampons at her. We next see her at home and realize her home isn’t much better. Her mother locks her in a closet and she must pray and read the bible. Overall, Carrie has a sucky life.

One of the girls feels bad for her and talks her boyfriend into asking Carrie to go to the prom. Eventually she agrees to go. What starts off as a good, ends in horror. One of the girls who bullies her, is told she can’t go to the prom now and she vows revenge. This revenge causes Carrie to go on a murderous rampage.

Overall, this is a really good movie on how a young bullied teen can descend into madness when she doesn’t have good people around her to stop or even help her. There’s an overly long shower scene at the beginning which will give you all the full frontal nudity you would want. Add in the copious amount of blood (mostly pig blood) and religious horror and you are set with a good movie in Carrie. I definitely would recommend this movie if you haven’t seen it.

Let’s get into the rankings:

Kills/Blood/Gore: 4/5

Sex/Nudity: 2/5

Scare factor: 4.5/5

Enjoyment factor: 5/5

My Rank: 4/5

https://butterfly-turkey-rw8h.squarespace.com/blog/carrie

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The Mummy (1932)

Approved by the Production Code Administration of the Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America

Score: 4 out of 5

The second classic Universal monster movie I was able to check out at Cinema Salem this October, The Mummy is one of the few such films where the classic 1930s version isn't the definitive example these days. In 1999, Universal remade it as an Indiana Jones-style action/adventure flick starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, and if I'm being perfectly honest, having now seen both movies I kinda prefer the '90s version. The original still has a lot going for it even more than ninety years later, but the remake's pulpy, two-fisted throwback style is just nostalgic for me in ways that hit my sweet spot. That said, I will argue that this was a better and more self-assured film than The Invisible Man, having a monster and effects just as memorable but also remembering to keep a consistent tone and, more importantly, have a compelling non-villainous character for me to root for in the form of its female lead. It is, shall we say, of its time in its depiction of Egypt and its people, but there's a reason why Boris Karloff is a horror legend, and here, he made Imhotep into a multilayered villain and a compelling presence on screen -- rather appropriately given how he's presented here as ominously seductive. At the very least, both it and the Fraser version are a damn sight better than the 2017 Tom Cruise version.

The film starts in 1921 with a tale as old as the first exhibit at the British Museum of ancient Egyptian artifacts, as an archaeological expedition in Egypt led by Sir Joseph Whemple discovers the tomb of a man named Imhotep. Studying his remains and his final resting place, they find that a) he was buried alive, and b) a separate casket was buried with him with a curse inscribed on it threatening doom to whoever opened it. Sure enough, Joseph's assistant opens that casket, reads from the scroll inside, and proceeds to go mad at the sight of Imhotep's mummified body getting up and walking out of the tomb. Fast-forward to the present day of 1932, and Joseph's son Frank is now following in his father's footsteps. A mysterious Egyptian historian named Ardeth Bey offers to assist Frank and his team in locating another tomb, that of the princess Ankh-es-en-amun. It doesn't take much for either the viewer or the characters to figure out who "Ardeth Bey" really is, especially once he starts taking an interest in Helen Grosvenor, a half-Egyptian woman and Frank's lover who bears a striking resemblance to the ancient drawings of Ankh-es-en-amun.

Let's get one thing out of the way right now. Lots of modern retellings of classic monster stories, from Interview with the Vampire to this film's own 2017 remake, often throw in the twist of making their monsters handsome, even sexy, as a way to lend them a dark edge of sorts. In the case of the Mummy, however, doing so is fairly redundant, because Karloff's Imhotep is already the "sexy mummy", if not in appearance than certainly in personality. He is threatening and creepy-looking, yes, but he is also alluring and erudite, his hypnosis of Helen presented as seduction and Frank becoming one of his targets because he sees him as competition. He may be under heavy makeup in the opening scene to look like a mummified corpse, but afterwards, Karloff plays him as an intimidating yet attractive older gentleman, the famous shot of him staring into the camera with darkened eyes looking equal parts like him peering into your soul and him undressing you with his eyes. And if it wasn't obvious when it was just him on screen, his relationship with Helen feels like that of a predatory playboy, especially in the third act when she's clad in a skimpy outfit that would likely have never flown just a couple of years later once they started enforcing the Hays Code. He's a proto-Hugh Hefner as a Universal monster. I couldn't help but wonder if Karloff was trying to do his own take on Bela Lugosi's Dracula here, perhaps as a way to make this character stand out from Frankenstein's monster; if he was, then he certainly pulled it off.

Zita Johann's Helen, too, made for a surprisingly interesting female lead. As she's increasingly possessed by the spirit of Ankh-es-en-amun over the course of the film, she's the one who directly challenges Imhotep on what he's doing to her, pointing out that, even by the standards of his own ancient Egyptian morality, his attempt to resurrect his lost love is evil and in violation of the laws of his gods, reminding him why he was entombed alive in the first place. It's she who ultimately saves herself, the male heroes only arriving after everything is all said and done, which was well and good in my book given that I wasn't particularly fond of them. Not only was the romanticization of British imperialism in their characters kind of weird watching this now (the fact that they can't take the artifacts they collected to the British Museum and have to settle for the Cairo Museum is presented as lamentable), but they didn't really have much character to them beyond being your typical 1930s movie protagonists. Frank is the young boyfriend, Joseph and Muller are the older scholars, the Nubian servant is... a whole 'nuther can of worms, and there's not much to them beyond stock archetypes. This was one area where the Fraser movie excelled, and the biggest reason why I prefer that film to this one.

Beyond the characters, the direction by Karl Freund was suitably creepy and atmospheric. I was able to tell that I wasn't looking at Egypt so much as I was looking at southern California playing such, but the film made good use of its settings, and had quite a few creative tricks up its sleeve as we see Imhotep both assaulting the main characters and observing them from afar. The direction and makeup did as much as Karloff's performance to make me afraid of Imhotep; while this wasn't a film with big jump scare moments, it did excel at creeping dread and making the most of what it had. The reaction of the poor assistant who watched Imhotep get up and walk away struck the perfect note early on, letting you know that you're about to witness seemingly ludicrous things but at the same time making you believe in them despite your better judgment. This very much felt like the kind of classiness that we now associate with the original Universal monster movies, a slow burn even with its short runtime as "Ardeth Bey" spends his time doing his dirty work in the background, either skulking around or manipulating people from his home through sorcery.

The Bottom Line

The original 1932 version of The Mummy still stands as one of the finest classic horror movies. Not all of it has aged gracefully, but Boris Karloff's mummy is still a terrifying and compelling villain, and the rest of the film too has enough going for it to hold up.

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/10/review-mummy-1932.html>

The Invisible Man (1933)

Approved by the Production Code Administration of the Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America

Score: 3 out of 5

Having just moved to Boston, a natural destination for a horror fan like myself has been the city of Salem, Massachusetts about 40 minutes north. I have indeed, like a dirty tourist, partaken in many of the attractions that have made Salem famous, but one place I imagine will be a repeat destination for me is the Cinema Salem, a three-screen movie theater that not only hosts the annual Salem Horror Fest but also, this October, is running many classic Universal monster movies all month long. For my first movie there, I decided to check out The Invisible Man, the most famous adaptation of H. G. Wells' 1897 novel, and I was not expecting the movie I got. Don't get me wrong, it was a good movie, albeit an uneven one. But if your understanding of the Universal Monsters is that they're slow, dry, classy, and old-fashioned, you'll be as surprised as I was at just how wild and funny this movie can get. What would've been just a passable horror movie is elevated by Claude Rains as an outstanding villain who may be literally invisible but still finds a way to hog the screen at every opportunity, one who singlehandedly made this film a classic and part of the horror canon through his sheer presence. It has a lot of rough spots, but I still do not regret going out of my way to see this in a theater.

The film opens in an inn in the small English village of Iping, where Jack Griffin, a man clad head to toe in a trench coat, hat, gloves, bandages, and dark goggles, arrives in the middle of a blizzard. We soon find out that he is a scientist who performed a procedure on himself that turned him invisible, and shortly after that, we find out that this procedure drove him murderously insane as he came to realize that he could now commit any crime and get away with it because nobody will even know how to find him, let alone arrest him. Immediately, we get a sense of what kind of man Griffin is as he attacks the inn's owner for trying to get him to pay his rent, then leading the police on a merry chase when they step into try and evict him, his crimes only escalating from there.

Rains plays Griffin as a troll, somebody for whom the ultimate real-world anonymity has enabled him to let out his inner jerk, and he relishes it. He frequently drops one-liners as he harasses, assaults, and eventually outright murders the people who cross his path, and packs an evil laugh with the best of them. At times, the film veers almost into horror-comedy as it showcases the more mischievous side of Griffin's crime spree, such that I'm not surprised that some of the sequels to this that Universal made in the '40s would be straight-up comedies. That said, Rains still played Griffin as a fundamentally vile person, one who forces his former colleague Dr. Kemp to act as his accomplice knowing he can't do anything about it, kills scores of people in one of the highest body counts of any Universal monster movie, and clearly seems conflicted at points about his descent into villainy only for his power to seduce him back into it -- perhaps best demonstrated in a scene where he talks to his fiancée Flora about how he wishes to one day cure himself, only to slip into ranting about how he could then sell the secret of his invisibility to the world's armies, or perhaps even raise one such army himself and take over the world. The Invisible Man may be the most comedic of Universal's "classic" monsters, but the film never forgets that he's a monster. What's more, while the seams may now be visible on the special effects and chromakey that they used back in the day to create the effect of Griffin's invisibility, a lot of it still works surprisingly well. Already, as I dip my toes into the classic Universal horror movies, I've started to notice why the monsters have always been at the center of the nostalgia, discourse, and marketing surrounding them, and it's because they and the actors playing them are usually by far the most memorable parts of their movies.

It's fortunate, too, because I've also started to notice a recurring flaw in the Universal monster movies: that the parts not directly connected to the monster usually aren't nearly as memorable. I've barely even talked about Griffin's fellow scientists, and that's because they were only interesting insofar as they were connected to him, which made Kemp the most interesting non-villainous character in the film by default simply because of how Griffin uses and torments him. Flora, a character original to the movie who wasn't in the book, felt almost completely extraneous and had next to nothing to do in the plot, feeling like she was thrown in simply because the producers felt that there needed to be at least one token female presence and love story in the film. When the film was focused on Griffin, it was genuinely compelling, whether it was building tension (such as in the opening scenes at the inn, or Kemp's interactions with Griffin) or in the more madcap scenes of Griffin's mayhem. However, when the film diverted its attention from him to the scientists and police officers searching for him, it quickly started to drag. This was a pretty short movie at only 70 minutes, but it still felt like it had a lot of flab and pacing issues.

The Bottom Line

The monster is the reason why people remember this movie, and what a monster he is. Claude Rains and the effects team took what could've easily been a cheap and disposable adaptation and made something truly memorable out of it, even if the rest of the film doesn't entirely hold up today. I still think the 2020 version is a far better movie, but this was still an enjoyable, entertaining, and surprisingly wild time.

<Link to original review: https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/10/review-invisible-man-1933.html>