Movies I Watched in October 2024

The Great Debaters - dir. Denzel Washington

Historical

Kinda hype during some parts ngl. Pretty obvious crowd pleaser with more radical politics than you’d expect from an Oscar baity movie. Kinda pissed that the final debate was gonna be about capitalism and then they switched it for civil disobedience, but obviously a movie this mainstream could never hinge its climax on a Marxist diatribe… alas. 5/10.

A Nightmare on Elm Street - dir. Wes Craven

Supernatural/Slasher

Probably my favorite Wes Craven film so far. Maybe Red Eye is better. Idk. Don’t know if I have much to say about this that hasn’t been said. Great shots, great ideas, ultimately just a solid slasher. 6/10.

On the Beach at Night Alone - dir. Hong Sang-soo

Drama

Soju is truth serum in the world of Hong Sang-soo, it breaks patterns, surfaces secrets, allows those that partake to give in to their real desires. The catch is that after the truth comes out you still have to go on living. You still have to see the same people every day, and they know what you said and did under the influence of the truth serum. Worse still is that the truth may no longer even be the truth once its effects wear off. Passionate love you made when you were inebriated becomes a specter that haunts you, a ceaseless hangover.

When Hong Sang-soo leaves the camera rolling long enough, the truth of the scene always emerges eventually. Has mundane conversation ever been this sad? In this film it feels as if all human connection is a farce that disintegrates with a few drinks. Peaceful solitude, falling asleep on the beach; this becomes the true nature of the soul.

Watching this put me back in Australia when I was traveling alone. I’d never felt a greater sense of solitude in my life. It was heartbreaking but essential, I think. 8/10.

Marrowbone - dir. Sergio G. Sánchez

Psychological Horror

Zero sauce. Shot like a Netflix original. Very telling that all of the top reviews are horny people. 3/10.

Dead of Night - dir. Bob Clark

Vampire

Pretty much passable. In theory this would be 100% my shit but something kinda didn’t click. Not sure if it was the lackluster compositions or just a mediocre script. 5/10.

Resident Evil - dir. Paul W.S. Anderson

Sci-Fi/Horror

Paul W.S. Anderson coagulates several themes that I hold near and dear to my heart through what I can only describe as pure entertainment. Slick sci-fi corridors, murky, inhospitable setpieces, an atmosphere of dread, bloody video game mutants, the works. At its core, though, Resident Evil is a movie about disregarding your memories, discombobulating yourself from your origins to fight your own fight. The corporation may have created you and your memories, but you can still tear yourself free of the artificial coil. 7/10.

Antichrist - dir. Lars von Trier

Art Horror

Deep anguish through the social role of the woman, wherein her pleasure is denied and suppressed and vilified to the point of self-contempt. Her selfish act of having sex while her child dies causes her mind to break because it is fundamentally at odds with the purpose she’s been ascribed. The caring, nurturing mother is destroyed, so her ego and sense of self is destroyed, and this is compounded by his attempts to “rationalize” and control her grieving process. She does not grieve in the right way, she allows her emotions to control her, etc, etc. Her role is reduced to that of a dependent, he can only love her if she fulfills it, and so he establishes himself as the only answer to her plight. Thus, we cannot be shocked when her psyche inevitably breaks and she plunges both of them into a world of agony.

The torment she inflicts on him and herself is different in nature to the torment inflicted by the standard horror movie male psychopath in that her sadism is not actually sadism but masochism, since her socialization as a woman has taught her that she and her husband are part of the same whole. The man’s sadism is usually a product of power, a desire to exert it and to control his victim through pain, whereas the woman, in this instance, seeks penance, a punishment inflicted on herself. She committed the grievous sin of pleasure, and it came at the expense of her entire self (through her child, which in some ways is a manifestation of the self… God created Man in his image, Woman creates Child in hers).

Lars von Trier’s characters are all doomed in very specific ways. Selma is doomed because of her self-loathing, Jack is doomed because of his obsessive compulsions, and She is doomed because at the end of the day, patriarchy creates villains (or antichrists, if you will) out of women. Doomed to be martyrs of evil. Where Christ was a paragon of virtue, the Woman is an icon of sin. 9/10.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse - dir. Alexander Witt

Post-Apocalyptic/Horror

Not nearly as effective as the first one and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because it’s helmed by someone other than PWSA, maybe it’s because the setpieces don’t stand up to the ones from the original (except for the mutant supersoldier, he was pretty cool).

It was still entertaining, I just wasn’t engaged. 5/10.

The Thing - dir. John Carpenter

Sci-Fi/Horror

An obviously good horror movie. Not much for me to say, or add. I think the opening of the helicopter chasing the dog is terrific. It’s bizarre and eerie and sets the tone of the film quite well. 7/10.

Resident Evil: Extinction - dir. Russell Mulcahy

Zombie

Mostly derivative, still entertaining. By far my favorite setpiece was the one with crows, I won’t go into detail because I think it’s best left unspoiled, but damn that shit was cool.

I had a big zombie phase when I was 13-14, this movie scratched that itch a little bit. Haven’t had this much fun with zombies since I was first getting into TWD. 6/10.

The Wicker Man - dir. Robin Hardy

Cult Horror

Guy walks around and is offended by stuff for an hour

Like most movies it would probably be 10x better if directed by Harmony Korine. Alas

5/10.

Resident Evil: Afterlife - dir. Paul W.S. Anderson

Sci-Fi/Horror

PWSA directs the fuck out of this. The stronger zombies drop coins bro. That’s so dope. Alludes to the film’s video game origins, plus you could read it as the zombies being products of corporate fuckery–hence, they drop money when defeated.

All I can really say is that I’m hyped to watch Retribution. 6/10.

The Fare - dir. D.C. Hamilton

Sci-Fi/Romance

Big student film vibes, but cute. Watched this on Tubi, because of course it’s available on Tubi. 5/10.

Resident Evil: Retribution - dir. Paul W.S. Anderson

Dystopian/Horror

Post-digital death, splicing an identity into myriad parts, then reassembling them into coherence. Put simply, nothing is real but you can still use the non-reality to create reality.

An excellent amalgamation of everything I’ve enjoyed about this franchise so far.

Radically anti-corporate in a way I find refreshing. It didn’t live up to my expectations (thought this was gonna be just as good as Southland Tales, if not better) but it’s still pretty great. 7/10.

Sunshine - dir. Danny Boyle

Sci-Fi/Horror

Stare into the sun too long and your retinas fry, yet the dimmer the sun gets, the dimmer humanity’s fate becomes. The editing becomes far too fragmented towards the climax, I’ve seen Tony Scott comparisons but I feel his style is far more reserved and purposeful. Scott’s cuts reveal everything about his characters’ environments, the cuts here feel disorienting in a way that distracts. The editing in the first hour is perfectly impressionistic, but I digress. This is my favorite kind of genre movie and I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Boyle pivots into horror towards the third act. It worked for me, I can 100% see why it wouldn’t work for others though. 7/10.

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter - dir. Paul W.S. Anderson

Post-Apocalyptic/Horror/Sci-Fi

The first half really pissed me off, but the second half redeemed it a little bit. I was annoyed because Retribution ended with a promising setup–Wesker and Alice team up to fight the AI, the final human outpost goes to war with the entire zombified, mutant monster world, and it ends with Alice ending Umbrella for good. But the first hour ditches any continuation of Retribution and just throws Alice in the middle of nowhere (again), where she has to find a group of survivors (again) and break into an Umbrella facility (again). And unlike PWSA’s previous efforts in the franchise, this one didn’t have freakishly symmetrical geometric cinematography to keep me engaged, it was handheld, ten-cuts-per-second headache-inducing editing instead. For a grand finale, this wasn’t looking good.

Luckily, the second half is good. Not great, but good. It ends in a way I would consider mostly satisfying and it has some of the best fight scenes of the entire series. 6/10.

Pretty Woman - dir. Garry Marshall

RomCom

I never really bought the chemistry between them, it came off to me like these were two actors doing a romcom than an actual romance, and for these kinds of movies to work you really need to be rooting for it to work out. Even by the ending I was like “man this shit is not gonna last” lmao.

I gotta be real I just did not buy Julia Roberts as a prostitute in the slightest. Richard Gere seems bored. They have enough charm to keep this movie passable, but it was really testing my patience with the whole business subplot. In no universe should this movie be pushing two hours. 5/10.

Evil Does Not Exist - dir. Ryūsuke Hamaguchi

Slow/Drama

Evil does not exist; only the laws of nature, in their equal parts beauty and bloodshed, only they govern. Serene, frigid, unforgiving, contemplative, these are all words we attribute to the wintry woods, but these are human terms. The elms and the oaks reached high into the sky long before we arrived to categorize them, to chop them up for our firewood, to exploit them for monetary gain. And they will exist long after us, when our last fuel tanks run dry and the final cigarette burns away into the final ashtray, until the last human breath is caught on the morning chill, departed from the dying lungs of someone who thought he knew the trees by heart and by touch.

I watched this and it transported me back to the Winter I spent in Japan and Korea last year. How I miss it. How I miss the snow seeping through my gloves. How I miss drinking bitter, scorching hot matcha in the warmth of an inn. I’ve been privileged to have these experiences, so I understand the desire of the urbanites to try and colonize the forest by force, to use the small town as a vessel in the pursuit of permutation. I think Hamaguchi understands this desire as well, hence the title of his film, which I take very, very literally. Nature is fucking beautiful. Everybody should get to experience it. But not at the expense of nature itself. 8/10.

Body Snatchers - dir. Abel Ferrara

Sci-Fi/Horror

Stuart Gordon wrote this and that alone is probably what makes this good. Gordon is one of the best horror writers, pretty much every single movie of his that he wrote is dope, and when I saw his screenwriting credit I knew I was in for, at the very least, a solid horror movie.

But it also helps that Abel Ferrara is one of the greatest American filmmakers ever.

When I was a kid my dad showed me the 70’s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Apparently it scared the living hell out of my dad when he was a kid so I guess he wanted to recreate that trauma in me. It was a good enough movie but it never scared me, not really, and later in life I found its anti-communist red scare ideology archaic.

What Abel Ferrara does here, basically, is update the antidote. He takes the premise to suburbia, in a specific context; a military base. Conformity and losing your humanity to the military machine, the apparatus of the state. BOOM. Stroke of fucking genius, I tell you. A lot of people didn’t like the voiceover but I think it added an emotional spark to this, a feeling of teenage angst, rebelling against society’s absorption of the adult self. I shit you not there are hints of Gregg Araki here. This movie is insanely atmospheric. Ferrara turns a military base into ground zero of the apocalypse.

The first time one of the plant people screams… CHILLS down my spine.

I know the green screen in that one scene is pretty bad, but I’m not gonna lie, it hit me hard. You know what I’m talking about.

Just an incredible horror movie. 9/10.

We Live In Time - dir. John Crowley

Romance

Really hecking wholesome. 2/10.

Bones and All - dir. Luca Guadagnino

Road/Horror/Romance

As far as I can tell, there aren’t a lot of directors working in the US and Europe that get at the fundamentals of human experience the way Guadagnino does. I’ve had trouble writing about Challengers and Call Me By Your Name because they almost insist upon themselves, in the sense that their thematic purpose is just… it’s almost foundational. It’s like trying to define the color red. Bones and All is similar. I like that it’s a horror movie that isn’t transparent about what it’s converting into overwrought metaphor; you could just as easily read this as a story of addiction as a story of flowering sexuality. As a genre film it just works insanely well. 7/10.

Thelma & Louise - dir. Ridley Scott

Road/Western

I envy women on some level, not because I perceive them as having it better than me, but because there’s just something about womanhood that I find beautiful. Not in a heterosexual way, but also kind of? But also not really. Most of all I think I’m envious of female friendships, they seem so much more real, down-to-earth, raw… Thelma and Louise argue but their friendship is so sincere.

I know that this film is ultimately about how dangerous it can be to live as a woman. It’s a neo-western that depicts America as a skeevy, dangerous land of outlaws, scum, and brigands, but it’s sweeping, romantic, it elicits awe, it makes me feel like they’ve got the world at their feet. They decide their fate. They get away in the end, together into the great beyond. The danger is always there, the law is never far behind to punish these women for their independence, but their joy is not any less real for it.

This is the kind of movie that I don’t feel exists anymore, and I truly mourn it.

Shaun of the Dead - dir. Edgar Wright

Comedy/Zombie

If I’d seen this when I was 13 I guarantee this would’ve been an all-timer for me. At that age it would’ve been the perfect intersection of quirky dialogue and zombies. That said even around that age I found Baby Driver painful to sit through… so maybe not. Still, this is probably the best thing I’ve ever seen from Edgar Wright. I actually chuckled a few times while watching this, which is crazy. One snort per half hour is really good for Edgar Wright, so major props to him. 5/10.

Twixt - dir. Francis Ford Coppola

Gothic Horror

For better and for worse, this is a highly personal film from Coppola, one that I don’t think demands an audience or really rewards an audience in the same way a traditional movie would. This feels like a movie fully for the filmmaker, and while I didn’t love it as much as I wish I would, I can never entirely tune out a Coppola film.

I am a big fan of Coppola’s formal experimentation in the 21st century, the way his films almost implode on themselves, and Twixt is no exception. The digitality of the frame lunges at the viewer, mawkish and coarse. The dream sequences are absolutely bizarre in the same way that much of Megalopolis (and to a lesser extent, Tetro) are.

What I wanted from this, more than anything, was sentimentality. I never felt a sense of closure from the images, a real sense of human presence in the narrative, and thus the emotional beats lacked punch to me. There’s a great film hiding here somewhere though. 6/10.

Bug - dir. William Friedkin

Psychological Horror

I would be doing a disservice to anyone who reads my review before watching the movie by spoiling it, so I’ll keep the overall plot close to the chest for my “analysis”.

It seems to me that many of the New Hollywood titans found themselves at a crossroads coming into the 21st century. I am speaking in broad observational strokes, because frankly I am not a film historian or a film student, or even remotely close to an expert of any kind. But a pattern can be sensed looking at the filmographies of Friedkin and Coppola, and to a lesser extent Scorsese, where they recognize on some level that their classics represent a metatextual bedrock for film as an art form, and that in order to push themselves as artists they had to formally evolve.

I see Bug as a post-digital response to the neo-noirs of the 70’s and 80’s, a sort of reimagining of the noir as a schizophrenic paranoia in the Bush years. It’s seriously empty, not a hint of light or warmth escapes Friedkin’s cold, claustrophobic camera. Minimal cast, minimal setting. As I said before, the masters had to push their art through formal evolution, and the natural progression from creating large-scale, foundational texts to the medium is to dial it back–work as an independent artist, in a sense. These early 21st century works feel very strange, because although Tetro is visually luscious it has a stripped-back feel to it. It is oceans away from The Godfather or Apocalypse Now, and Bug feels the same way to me; an auteur returning to their primal form to create something raw.

The script is cruel, too cruel for me to fall in love with this movie on a personal level, but I find it way too interesting to not be gobsmacked by what it communicates artistically. 8/10.

Tenebre - dir. Dario Argento

Giallo/Slasher

I’m officially giving up on Dario Argento. Maybe the entire slasher genre. Ugh.

Tedious. Stiff. Unexciting.

If a director is influenced by Hitchcock, nine times out of ten I have to run like the wind. If you like this stuff, that’s cool, I just can’t stand it. It’s so pedestrian. Like watching an ant trying to crawl out of a vat of milk. 4/10.

A Bay of Blood - dir. Mario Bava

Giallo/Slasher

Another lame giallo slasher.

Doesn’t even have the eye-candy of something like Blood and Black Lace. There’s some cool cosmetic shit but idk man… maybe I’m boring as fuck… 4/10.

35 Shots of Rum - dir. Claire Denis

Drama

Could it be that all the magic in the world lay dormant in our gaze? In the embrace I gave my father before we parted ways? The pitter patter of soft rain on the windowpane? Pushing the car down the road only to take the train?

Claire Denis does this thing, this ethereal thing that only happens in film, where she will marry sound with image and it’ll somehow transcend any epistolary attempt I make to categorize the experience, to tabulate it and write it down, to explain it. I’ve wracked my brain for hours trying to make sense of why this movie hit me like a ton of bricks and I just can’t do it. I can’t even promise that it’ll hit you the same way.

Something that must be emphasized again and again with Denis is that her films do not communicate through words, or even images, necessarily, but through physical language. It makes sense, then, that some of the most powerful moments in her filmography are expressed through dance, whether that be the ending of Beau Travail, where Denis Lavant unleashes a full film’s worth of pent-up anguish onto the dance floor (aka the greatest ending to any movie ever. Period.) or Jo and Noe’s magnetic display of young love.

I watch the scene where Josephine and Noe dance while Nightshift plays, and Lionel watches, and I just feel overwhelmed. This is what life is. Yeah. I’m convinced of it. This is what life is, I’m watching it, Denis has found some transmutational way of converting image to feeling and I feel it, baby, I fucking feel it. I feel the community, I feel the fatherhood, I feel the sex, passion, I feel the romance in the air, the reckless abandon of youth, the melancholy concession of old, the understanding that your daughter is no longer yours but her own, the unbearable reckoning of time passing you by, the overwhelming sensation of first love, the desire that licks at your lips as you lean into your first kiss, the discovery of purpose, the transitory fighting with the sedentary, the colonialism at war with the culture, THE LIFE. IT’S ALL LIFE. 10/10.

Spree - dir. Eugene Kotlyarenko

Digital/Slasher

This movie made me feel really bad. It’s a feel-bad movie. It’s funny but man I felt shitty watching it, to its credit.

I am now very curious to see Eugene Kotlyarenko’s other work, as at a casual glance he seems to be a filmmaker interested in exploring digital spaces. 7/10.

Gladiator - dir. Ridley Scott

Ridley Scott paints a revisionist history of Rome, where myth supersedes fact and the gladiator has the power to singlehandedly restore the Republic. The scope is dope, it had me feeling like I was 14 again obsessed with Roman history. What a wild phase that was. Never again will I pick up a copy of Cicero by Robert Harris (can’t remember what happened) for the sole purpose of inflating my historical knowledge. Used to be a time in my life when I inhaled historical fiction like coke, and Gladiator tickled that.

There’s some Malick in here too, specifically the opening shot of Maximus brushing his hand through the wheat. 7/10.

The Happening - dir. M. Night Shyamalan

Apocalyptic

Subzero on-screen chemistry between Wahlberg and Deschanel. You could keep ice cream cool indefinitely with the lack of passion there. I actually don’t hate Mark Wahlberg, he has this dopey vibe to him that I appreciate on some level, but wow did I not care about any of the characters in this film. And this is unique for Shyamalan, who I find is quite good at finding pathos in high-concept premises. The premise here delivered, to an extent, it just needed to be grounded in better actors. 5/10.

Cria! - dir. Carlos Saura

Coming-of-Age

Just wasn’t clicking at all.

Crank - dir. Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor

Action

I like that Chellios is still mortal. Even if the stuff he accomplishes is superhuman he still feels like a real tangible guy in a way that many modern action movies seem to forgo. He is a guy who falls asleep after he nuts, he is a guy who is kinda racist, he is a guy who screams and destroys his TV when he finds out he’s going to die. He is three-dimensional in all the ways that matter.

Life-affirming in the most batshit way possible. I was cackling with my little brother the whole time. Need to see Neveldine/Taylor’s other stuff ASAP. 8/10.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula - dir. Francis Ford Coppola

Gothic Horror

The first Coppola movie I have actively disliked. Sumptuous production design is not enough for me in this instance, I found myself bored for much of the runtime. Maybe I’m not horny enough for this. Insomnia got me tweakin. I may revisit this when I’ve gotten some sleep. 4/10.

Dumplings - dir. Fruit Chan

Squeamish sound design, even the sex in this movie sounds abhorrent.

Overall I’m not as crazy about this as I hoped I would be. Thematically it’s a step-up from The Substance, but that’s not saying much. Fruit Chan combines feminist body horror with a critique of the one-child policy, so there’s more to chew on, at least. The problem with these kinds of movies for me is that they seem gimmicky, without much steam to propel them beyond their premises. It reminded me of Dead Sushi. Sure it’s a cool idea to have a horror movie about killer sushi but I need something more. 6/10.

Magic Mike - dir. Steven Soderbergh

What I figured out over the course of the film was that there isn’t a truly significant difference between male and female stripping. The female gaze may not be as leering as the male gaze, but Soderbergh detachedly observes the cold reality of the practice, which is fundamentally rooted around the commodification of the body. They are only worth the amount of money they can wrangle out of women’s pockets. The images of American myth are charged with sexual power, but the power only matters in its ability to turn a profit. Anything beyond that is hollow. 7/10.

Cold Fish - dir. Sion Sono

Incel cinema lmao. Not funny, not scary, not thrilling, not well-shot, not well-written… what is the point? Why?

I had really high hopes for this but I called it off with an hour left to go. Just nope. Not my thing at all. Very grating. 3/10.

Slam - dir. Mark Levin

Movies in the 90s were just different. The documentarian depictions of city life were at their zenith then, and I like a lot of how this film looks. The texture is there. The setpieces are poetry, and those are the scenes that you look forward to. The rest is sorta there. 6/10.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night - dir. Ana Lily Amirpour

A wildly unique panoply of genres. Reminded me of Tetro in its look and feel. Ana Lily Amirpour has my utmost interest, you have to be insanely talented to debut with a film like this.

Utilizing the horror genre to tell an earnest tale of young angst will never not be something I find relatable, see Body Snatchers.

Usually my critique of horror movies is that they’re not scary enough, but if they bother making me feel something other than fear then I’m willing to lean into it. So while I can’t recommend this to people who actually wanna get scared, I can recommend it to goth bisexuals. 7/10.

Uzumaki - dir. Akihiro Higuchi

There are some very creepy scenes, and this is all stylized and executed in classic J-Horror fashion, but I’d be lying if I said I was going to think about this at all ever again. 6/10.

The Wailing - dir. Na Hong-jin

Spinning wheels for the first half hour, what a ludicrous waste of time. You could straight up just skip to the part where the creepy lady talks to the main guy and you’d be fine, the rest of the movie is so tonally different that it’s kind of ridiculous.

After that there’s some good horror, a harrowing exorcism scene, some gross shit, but I felt that this was more or less nothing more than a decent film. If it were directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa it probably would’ve been a horror masterpiece. 6/10.

Deep Rising - dir. Stephen Sommers

I say this about a lot of horror movies but this really should’ve been directed by Stuart Gordon. 3/10.

The Man From Earth - dir. Richard Schenkman

Black Girl - dir. Ousmane Sembène

This is a righteously indignant, furious film that manages to squeeze a lot of genius into its short runtime, but nonetheless left me frustrated for a couple of reasons, mostly to do with the ending. It succeeds as an indictment of colonialism, but unfortunately Sembene shows how unequipped he is to tie in Diouana’s gender identity into the thematic framework. To me at least, the ending comes across exploitative rather than tragic. I am willing to hear arguments against this. I can already imagine a few in my head, but I write my reviews not from a point of logical exactitude but from my emotional internalization of the art itself, and I felt that the ending came from a desire to shock, especially with Diouana empowering herself mere moments before. A completely illogical chain of events that I can’t help but think only came into being as a result of poor characterization.

Another reason I feel this film fails its central character as a woman is in how it portrays the French husband. The wife is portrayed as the greater evil in the dynamic, while the husband is shown as a reasonable party, often taking the side of Diouana herself. Again, I can already argue with myself on this front too. Perhaps the film is commentating on patriarchy pitting women against each other. Perhaps Sembene is trying to show a bit of sexual jealousy on the part of the white woman. Perhaps, even, the white woman feels alienated from her role as a mother, and so she takes her rage out on the only person less powerful than herself, the Black woman. I may have just talked myself into conceding my initial point lmao.

Despite my critiques, which I only harped upon because I wanted to share something about the film that hopefully hadn’t been discussed to death, I did like this very much, and I’m looking forward to checking out some of Sembene’s other work. I was not being facetious when I called this film genius, in spite of its flaws. 7/10.

Peeping Tom - dir. Michael Powell

Beautiful colors, Alfred Hitchcock-ahh plot. 4/10.

Little Murders - dir. Alan Arkin

Saddest realization of my life: Not every New Hollywood movie is a 10/10 instant classic.

I gotta smoke whatever the people who think this is funny are smoking. Maybe it’s a generational thing. Maybe not, because there are 70’s movies I find hilarious, like Harold and Maude.

This really did nothing for me. 3/10.

Halloween - dir. John Carpenter

If this is the best the slasher genre has to offer then it might just be cooked.

There are some interesting ideas but I really, REALLY struggled to click with this.

I’ve just seen way better takes on the theme of suburban rot. Michael Myers is kinda scary but there was never a single moment in this entire film where I felt worried for the main characters. This is the same issue I encountered in The Thing, except that movie at least had a way more foreboding vibe to lean on and absolutely insane creature FX. Also aliens are more interesting than serial killers. 5/10.

Hour of the Wolf - dir. Ingmar Bergman

Possibly the most chilling premise to any horror movie ever: Imagine you were Ingmar Bergman’s wife.

Shuddering just thinking about it.

Bergman explores hidden desires and horror at the edges of the subconscious. It’s my first time experiencing his work, and some of it works for me, some of it leaves me cold. One of my favorite reviewers on this site, @KaoriKap (who everybody should be following imo) negatively reviewed Autumn Sonata for its treatment of women. I am simplifying her review for the sake of brevity, but I say this to establish that I was primed to see the misogyny in Bergman’s work from the jump. That’s nobody’s fault but my own, though I can’t say the claim is unfounded.

I choose to view this as abstract and not literal, because if it is literal then it’s a little bit silly to me, I dunno… The best scene is the one with the kid, obviously, because that’s the only time Bergman actually recalls that this is, in fact, supposed to be a horror film, in theory. The imagery is gorgeous but I didn’t feel a sense of dread permeating through it like Bergman likely intended.

All my critiques are ultimately just rationalizations, though. At the end of the day this didn’t click. 6/10.

Wendigo - dir. Larry Fessenden

Earnestly captures the feeling of being a kid coming to terms with your own consciousness. Of course, this is just an estimation, since most of us can’t remember what that felt like… but I’m sure it felt something like this. Uncomfortable, abjuring the tenuous imagination for reality, picayune and yet vast. 6/10.

StageFright - dir. Michele Soavi

See: my thoughts on slashers. 4/10.

Jaws - dir. Steven Spielberg

I have no idea what I was cooking when I tried watching this years ago, this movie is actually pretty good, one of Spielberg’s best. I think more than anything I’m impressed by the commitment to horror from a director who is usually responsible for movies you watch with your parents. Like this is basically a slasher/creature feature with some extra doohickeys.

I kinda wish the shark was as big in the movie as it is on the poster. 7/10.

The Fog - dir. John Carpenter

Too boring couldn’t finish 3/10

Liverleaf - dir. Eisuke Naito

Basic, flat coverage shots and unyielding misery porn. If you love Dhar Mann but wish he directed horror films in Japan, I couldn’t recommend this enough. 2/10.

Claudine - dir. John Berry

Back in the 70’s movies poured their fucking hearts out, man. This reminded me of a Hal Ashby flick; the layered, nuanced depiction of people going through tribulations of class. Every single actor here is on their A-game, and I was at their mercy.

The 70’s were an interrogation of the cultural apparatus, the stymied nature of America’s social development, and ultimately the ways in which institutional violence hurt the individual, from all walks of life. And Claudine is yet another film in this tradition. It’s full of these tiny details that enrich the setting, the characters, the vibes, the exact kind of thing I love in social realist stories. Above all, it never forgets the inherent humor of life, which so many social realist films seem to neglect. 7/10.

Kuroneko - dir. Kaneto Shindō

I really am not sure what’s happening. This movie bored me to tears. It was a genuine struggle to see it through to the end and despite its beauty I cannot in any fairness pretend I liked it.

I blame my recent insomnia. I feel like that has to be it. I can’t be this much of a moron. Adding this to the list of movies I need to give a second chance to in the future. 4/10.

The Visitor - dir. Giulio Paradisi

I’m actually so mad lmao. This is like the cinematic equivalent of clickbait. It teases you with cool imagery but plays out more like Disney giallo. I would watch a whole movie with the visuals of the first 2 minutes, too bad the rest of this is unforgivably lame in comparison. 2 stars for 2 unparalleled moments of cinematic splendor. 4/19.

In the Name of the Father - dir. Jim Sheridan

I like when movies are well-shot and have cinematography and look good and have visual aesthetic and feature a degree of auteurist craftsmanship. 3/10.

American Gangster - dir. Ridley Scott

Lost in the great circling of the drain, the American Gangster–always more of a concept than a figment of material reality–was doomed to civility from the get-go. Each disadvantaged American took their turn at it; the Italians, the Irish, the Jews… and then finally a Black man took the reins of power, and he got all the cops arrested for crimes worse than anything he’d done. All the gangster ever represented was the capitalist not in tandem with the laws of the state, a capitalist unruled by government, the ideal libertarian in control of a dynasty, the urban dominion beyond the reach of the sheriffs. What the fuck is the rule of law, anyway? Does it have anything to do with what’s right and what’s wrong? That’s the question Richie doesn’t seem to have an answer to.

How utterly fascinating it is to me that Richie’s Jewishness is so pronounced, so much so that he gets called the most obscure slur on the planet to emphasize it. He’s not just a goody two-shoes cop, he’s a kike on top of that. He wears the Star of David. I’m sure he recites passages from the Tanakh while he fucks shiksahs like no tomorrow too. It should strike you as absurd that he is singled out for his Jewishness in the instance of the slur, because it is absurd that somebody played by Russell fucking Crowe would have their Jewry indicated, and it is absurd that capitalism constructs all these delineations of ethnic identity. American Gangster draws us back to the original thesis that’s existed from the inception of the crime genre, that the criminal and the cop are one and the same. Frank Lucas and Richie Roberts are men wandering a world built on lies and corruption and constructing moral codes to survive.

What Ridley Scott does here is something I appreciate in many of my favorite films: he creates a world that feels alive and far vaster than any of its central characters. Their only function is to give us windows into the world, and even then their perspective is limited.

Above all else, I’m just a sucker for the film grain. And Denzel Washington. 8/10.

Glorious - dir. Rebekah McKendry

I won’t lie, I really enjoyed this. I just can’t fully love it because of the way some of the dialogue is written (it’s got that indie snark that so many developing screenwriters think sounds slick) and because the shot compositions are mostly terrible outside of the bisexual lighting bits. Conceptually, though, this movie is fucking awesome, and I want to see more horror films like it. It feels like something off of creepypasta, r/nosleep, or the SCP Archives, and taking a gander at Rebekah McKendry’s other films it seems she likes that kind of stuff generally, which I love to see. If she adapts more horror in that lane, I’ll be first in line to see it. 6/10.

Battle Royale - dir. Kinji Fukasaku

Fascistic fantasy; all the young people are caricatured morons and the only way their irrational hatred of TRADITION can be quashed is by throwing them in a murder dungeon for society’s entertainment. Also, the teacher who got wronged gets to be in charge of the military and personally torture the kids who wronged him.

This is only part of the story, though, because the whole movie doesn’t actually play out like fascistic fantasy. Small details like each kid’s individual reaction to the bag claiming scene (when they first get dropped into Hell) bely a humanity that I find oddly exultant. Like sure the fascists get what they want, but fascism is weak at its center like a tootsie pop–it’s no match for the indomitable human spirit.

What Battle Royale gets about fascism is that it’s not even that fun for the fascists. You can’t be a happy, fulfilled father and also throw your daughter into a murder parade to teach her a lesson. Conservative parents scratch their heads wondering why their kids don’t call them, and the short answer is why the fuck would anyone want to be around that? Bad vibes. Fascism is simply bad vibes. That’s really what sets them apart from the “authoritarian woke left.” While there may be some in the leftist camp with truly rancid personalities, nobody becomes or identifies as a leftist for the purpose of causing other people pain. Fascism, on the other hand, is all about the desire to dominate or to be dominated. These people are the ultimate losers, they think that the answer to their problems is to torture the weak but most of them don’t even want to do it themselves, they need a strong figurehead to push the motions forward for them. They need a big daddy dictator to enact their sicko fantasies on their behalf, and in the end the fascists live miserable pathetic lives because the ideology is anti-human and thus untenable.

Okay, back to this movie… I thought it was pretty solid, pretty schlocky entertainment. Where it loses me is in the flashbacks, especially Mitsuko’s. I could’ve gone the entire movie not knowing the psychoanalytical origins of her murderous sociopathy. That whole flashback scene is just so silly to me. Lost did it better, but I’m getting increasingly annoyed with the therapization of art. Let the murderer remain ambiguous, don’t make their bloodthirsty survival instinct a product of a near-diddle in childhood. I also thought introducing the transfer students was an unnecessary muddling of the core premise. Seeing classmates grapple with the BR program was already morbidly fascinating enough, do we really need to introduce two overpowered strangers? All that does is eliminate the potential for decision making amongst the core class. Instead of one classmate using the opportunity to torment the rest we have some random schmuck with no connection to anybody doing it instead. BORING! 6/10.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - dir. Robert Wiene

The score got SO annoying but I don’t feel right giving this a rating because I knew like 10 mins in this was not a movie for me at all.

House of the 1000 Corpses - dir. Rob Zombie

Hell is the backroads of middle America and the invented folklore that spring up in the cultural vacuum, the hicks that pick you up and drop you off at your destination, the submerged lair of Satan as he experiments on the facsimile of the facsimile of the final girl, brutish mutants swinging axes with runny yolk-like pus dripping out of their puckered up mouths. Rob Zombie accomplishes many things here, but chief of them is making me do a double take on Tobe Hooper: Have I been too harsh? I think I finally get it. I was looking at his take on horror too literally, close-mindedly, even. I’m man enough to admit that.

The Hooper slasher is really no different from Zombie’s affectionate homage in that Hooper is less interested in padding out a plot and more interested in the conceptual underpinnings of the genre itself, the ideas that spring up in your head when you see the intuitively vile shit he puts up on screen. He takes ordinary ideas of American people (sometimes non-American, in the case of Djinn) and he places them against the ideas we have of monsters. In many cases, this was the wild hick, the mutant, the crocodiles in the swamps, the lurking demons in the walls of the apartment. Hooper, fundamentally, wanted to explore the edges of cultural consciousness, and I would argue that this is what makes horror horror, what draws artists to the genre in the first place. And I’m honestly kicking myself for taking his movies so literally. It feels silly now to be like “Hooper is ableist for making mentally disabled people the villains of all his movies”. It’s just not the right way to look at these kinds of movies, at least in the case of Zombie or Hooper, where the point is less literal and more evocative. 7/10.

You Won’t Be Alone - dir. Goran Stolevski

Killing as delicate as lovemaking, the human experience fragmented and prismatic, all the parts of the whole in simplicity and earthy village life, with all its dimensions and all its parts, incomplete without each contribution. Escaping the body you were deigned to walk in, but facing up to the reality that no matter who you inhabit your soul still belongs to you and all of the limitations that come with that. The dog, the woman, the man, the child, transforming into them grants you new physical experiences but the internal being is the same.

Oh yeah, this is also one of the most breathtakingly shot films of the 2020’s. Don’t miss out on it. Especially if you like Malick, as many have pointed out. The influences are obvious, but never overbearing. Then again, I’m biased because he’s my favorite filmmaker ever and I’ve been looking for more films to soothe me in the same way that his do. Not many exist so I’m grateful when I find one. Stolevski is a talent to watch, I think he can only go up from here. 7/10.

Angel - dir. Robert Vincent O’Neil

Really boring. 3/10.

The Brood - dir. David Cronenberg

Maybe I’ll give this another chance in the future, I was pretty mentally checked out and I found it tedious to watch. No real visual flair imo. 4/10.

Hellraiser - dir. Clive Barker

Clive Barker’s cuckolding fetish once again takes us deep into the intersections of sex and horror, a woman’s desire manifesting itself as untold sadomasochistic pleasure. The similarities to Candyman are there, though in practice these are very different films. I just find Barker’s mythicism fascinating, the way he creates horror realms out of subconscious ideas.

Hellraiser is just fucking terrific in a way that relieves me… I was beginning to think I didn’t like horror, but when it’s executed the right way, when it really does chill me or have a visceral effect on me, there’s no competition, no parallel. I like when concepts are made literal in rich sci-fi acuity, stuff at the edges of reality, extremity pushed upon the senses. Sci-fi and horror are not so different, and so when their similarities are embraced I get my favorite genre films of all time. 8/10.

Magic Mike XXL - dir. Gregory Jacobs

Without the craft, is it even possible to retain definition? The commitment to the game precipitates certain outcomes, outcomes that your young self may be prepared for, but not your older self. As Tarzan puts it, “that ship has sailed.” You can only be young and make a living off of your body for so long, and the lifestyle prohibits any kind of long-term attachments. The only bonds these guys have are to each other, the brotherhood of male entertainers. It’s wholesome but Soderbergh’s camera can’t hide the pathos, this trip is their last time together, in theory, and all of their relationships to women are marred by professionalism, the transactional relationship they find themselves in. Women throw money at you for your moves long enough, you start to disassociate the customer from the person.

Don’t get me wrong, these guys are good guys, I’m not trying to say that there’s a moral reckoning to be had for the strippers, I’m just saying that at the end of the day, there’s a reason none of them are married. And it’s not their fault, either, the transaction goes both ways–you throw money at a man long enough and they become a sex object. A plaything is only as good as the next sexual release it can provide.

So many times in this movie, characters discuss their business plans, their hustles, what they came here to do vs what they ended up doing, and I have a hard time not seeing the ideological continuation from the first film, this holistic slice of America, an America that creates products out of people, and forces them into economic competition for survival and for identity. We are ALMOST nothing without the commercial value we provide. Almost, because we still have our brotherhood, and the commitment that binds us.

Wicked City - dir. Yoshiaki Kawajiri

Pretty boring but I’ll give it some benefit of the doubt because I watched the dub. 4/10.