I watched 47 movies in May. 38 of them were new to me. 20 of them were made before I was born. The theme for the month was Mysteries in May but I dropped that pretty quick.

Early in the month I went to make a post – I think a review of some mystery I’d just watched. It took me a long while to write it. The right words wouldn’t come. I came to it in fits and starts. I’d write a paragraph and then go do something else. Took me a couple of days to get it all down, and even then it wasn’t quite right. Then I lost it. I accidentally deleted the post, and it was gone.

That was disheartening. The post itself wasn’t that important. It wasn’t for Cinema Sentries or anything. Just a silly review on a silly site. But it was mine, and it was lost. I’m pretty perpetually on that edge, teetering between chucking this site into the sea or keeping it up because it’s fun, and that kind of threw me overboard for a bit.

Right around that time I saw the news that Google was completely changing how they do search by relying almost entirely on AI and no longer linking to sites like they’ve always done. That would kill what little search traffic I get.

I stopped writing for a bit and decided to watch whatever I wanted to watch without concern over this month’s theme. Obviously, I decided to keep writing.I’m not sure what I’d do with myself without this blog, but the theme never came back. I might be done with themes. At least until October rolls around again. I like the idea of themes, but they are difficult to keep up with.

Anyway, that’s why I didn’t watch a lot of mysteries.

In the most watched actors race, Spencer Tracy bumps up into second place with six films watched. Marcel Bozzufi, Robert Ryan, and Lino Ventura enter into the list, all tied for fourth place alongside Elisabeth Sladen, Mads Mikkelsen, and Lalla Ward. Lino and Marcel both come from my recent reviews of some French thrillers.  I hope to see Lino some more this year as he’s become one of my favorites.

In the most watched directors category, Raoul Walsh, John Sturges, and Jacques Tourneur all launched themselves into second place with three films each. Tourneur has three films on the Criterion Channel as part of their director’s series, and I jumped right into those.

Here’s the entire list. What did you watch last month?

Vertigo For A Killer (1970) ***1/2
I Love Boosters (2026) ****
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) ****
The Big Hit (1998) **
Cleopatra Jones (1973) ***1/2
McQ (1974) ***1/2
Berlin Express (1948) ***1/2
Whistle (2025) **1/2
Birds of Prey (1968) ****
Dark Shadows (1944) **1/2
Follow Me Quietly (1949) ***1/2
House of Strangers (1949) ***
The Blue Lamp (1950) ***1/2
When Worlds Collide (1951) ***1/2
Bad Boys (1995) ***
Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead (1983) ****
God’s Pocket (2014) ***
The Marseille Contract (1974) ***1/2
Bewitched (1981) **
Best Wishes to All (2023) ***
The Angry River (1971) ****
Kill Me Again (1989) ****
Desk Set (1957) ****
Spaceballs (1987) ***
The Sheep Detectives (2026) ***1/2
Civil War (2024) ****
Homicide (1991) ****
Doctor Who: Enlightenment (1983) ****
The Crazies (1973) ***1/2
They Will Kill You (2026) ****
The Punisher: One Last Kill (2026) ***
Rider on the Rain (1970) ****
Anaconda (1997) ***
Deep Blue Sea (1999) ***
Doctor Who: The Brain of Morbius (1976) ****
Bend of the River (1952) ****
Born to Kill (1947) ***
Twins of Evil (1971) ***1/2
Eye of the Devil (1966) ***
Freakscene: The Story of Dinosaur Jr. (2021) ***
Clerks (1994) **
Persuasion (1995) ****
Point Break (1991) ****
Against All Odds (1984) ***
Out of the Past (1947) ****1/2
Drop (2025) ***1/2
Down River (2025) **1/2

The Smashing Pumpkins were hugely important to me as I was coming of age. MTV put “Cherub Rock” the first single from their newest album at the time, Siamese Dream, on heavy rotation. That got me to buy the album, and soon after I purchased their debut album, Gish. I loved them both. They contained some of the first music that I took really seriously. I listened to them over and over. I studied the different parts of the songs. I can remember taking my two stereo speakers, placing them around my head, and then listening to the music while lying on my floor with the lights out – the music swirling around my ears.

When I learned the Pumpkins were coming to Tulsa, I was so excited. I’d never been to a rock concert before. It is possible my parents took me to something when I was younger. My mother went to a lot of concerts in the 1960s, including pop bands like Herman’s Hermits and even The Doors. She used to catch Neil Diamond every time he came to town, but adulthood, responsibilities, and three kids kept her away from music for the most part while I was growing up.  I don’t think my dad was ever much for live music.

I think the only concerts I’d really been to were gospel groups. I remember seeing a group called Acapella in the very venue I’d be seeing The Smashing Pumpkins. That was part of the Soul Winning Workshop the Churches of Christ put on every year. We didn’t believe in instrumental music with our worship songs, so a cappella music was where it was at.

Anyway, the Pumpkins were playing at the Expo Square in Tulsa, which is one of those pavilion-type arenas with a big open area in the middle and stands circling around it.  The type of place you could hold a soccer match or a hockey event, but being Oklahoma, I think it was often used for rodeos and cow competitions. For my concert, the stage was set up on one side with the rest of the floor open to the audience. We had tickets in the stands. Front row, not too terribly far from the stage.

I was with my friend Dustin and someone else. Probably his friend Kris. I was so excited. 

For some reason on the floor, up near the stage, they had set these big concrete barriers. The type of thing you see on the highway when they are doing construction. They were just randomly set out for the first fifteen feet or so beyond the state. At the time I figured they were there to keep people from stage diving or moshing (do people still do that at concerts?). That seemed terribly stupid, as people were still going to do that, and now they were likely going to hurt themselves bashing into concrete. 

Security seemed awfully tight as well. There were a lot of guards standing around. I remember several fans up in the stands periodically trying to jump down to the floor. They’d run toward the stage, inevitably being caught by security and sent back up.  I remember one kid kept jumping down near us, getting caught each time. At about his fourth attempt, he was escorted out of the venue. 

A band called Red Red Meat opened for them. I’d never heard of them. I remember liking them, which was probably more of a product of having never been to a rock concert before and being overwhelmed by the entire scene. Still, I do remember wishing they’d hurry up and let the Pumpkins play.

When they did finish their set, they played The Wizard of Oz without sound on a big screen behind the stage. I thought that was cool for some reason. I thought everything was cool. This was all so new to me. I was just terribly excited to be there.

The band finally came on, and they rocked. I don’t remember much about the actual music except that it was awesome, and I could feel D’Arcy’s bass thumping inside my chest.  I don’t remember what songs they played. It felt like they played every song I knew, which would have been every song off of Gish and Siamese Dream.

But it is all fuzzy except for how wonderful it all was. I remember Billy Corgan being in good spirits. And then came the encore. I knew about encores from movies and TV shows, but I really thought they were something special. I didn’t realize every band always comes back. So I stood there clapping and shouting, hoping with all of my heart they would come play another song.  

It took them a while, but they did come back. I remember Corgan apologizing that it took them so long but that there was some old episode of Star Trek playing on the TV in the dressing rooms, and they got caught up in it. They played another song or two and then were gone for good. I stood there for a little bit hoping they’d come back again, but the lights came up and the crowd dispersed. 

The show was over, but that feeling lasted forever.

This French thriller is part film noir, part Hitchcockian suspense. Neither part is as good as that sounds, but it’s not bad either. I’m a sucker for this type of thing, as you can read in my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

Beyond the Door (1974) was an Italian horror film that basically rips off The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby. The Italians were good at that. They’d take a popular American film and remake it without giving credit for the original story and make a few bucks. Rinse, repeat.

The Americans are good at it too. Beyond the Door was quite successful. So in 1977, when Mario Bava directed a supernatural film called Shock, when it came to American theaters, they renamed it Beyond the Door II. More than a decade later, the Italians made a completely unrelated (to either film) supernatural horror flick, and some crude individual dubbed it Beyond the Door III.

It is surprisingly good.

A group of American students travels to Yugoslavia to witness a sacred ritual that is only performed once every 100 years.  They are told it is a Passion Play, but also that it takes place from the time before Christ. Which should have probably been their first red flag.

They are met in Yugoslavia by Professor Andromolek (Bo Svenson), who seems very nice.  We quickly learn he is not so nice when he receives a telegram for Beverly Putnic (Mary Kohnert), one of the students (and our main protagonist), informing them that her mother has died in a tragic accident, and he rips it up without telling her.

He puts them on a boat, and they travel to the middle of nowhere, where they get off, walk through the woods, and come upon a small village full of strange people in Eastern European peasant garb who just stare at them menacingly.

Without further ado, they put the kids to bed. Everybody but Beverly is asked to sleep in a single cabin, but Beverly is taken on her own to a special place. They give her a white nightgown and probably drug her, for once she’s asleep an old hag checks to ensure she’s a virgin (gross!).

In the morning they set fire to the other student’s cabin.  All but one escape with their lives. Beverly awakens from her slumber, and they take off running. All but two of them jump on a train rolling down the tracks.  One girl misses it, and a chivalrous dude jumps off to be with her (hurting his leg in the process.)

The train is full of more strange-looking characters who are utterly unhelpful. And then things get really weird. There is a supernatural force that causes all sorts of blood-soaked harm. This is a film that isn’t afraid to let its freaky gore flag fly. It has some terrific kills with some gooey practical effects.

The train is apparently unstoppable. Sometimes the magic flips the rail switch, and it will just run straight into the ground and keep on going (making great use of some very cool miniatures.) Interspersed with these scenes are some cuts to some presumably Yugoslavian government workers who seem to be monitoring the train’s movements.  They presumably speak in Slavic, definitely not English, and AMC+ did not provide English subtitles. I assume they were just freaking out about the runaway train, but who knows?

The cinematography by Adolfo Bartoli is surprisingly great.  This film looks amazing. There are lots of scenes at night and in the dark, but it is so well lit you can see everything beautifully. This is especially true during the numerous scenes lit by fire. Seriously, this film has no reason to look this good.

It has no reason to be this good. I mean, the plot is rather silly, and the acting isn’t great. But for a little low-budget sort-of (but not really) final part of a horror trilogy, Beyond the Door III is well worth watching.

I find myself fascinated by Dick’s Picks and why he chose the shows he chose. I’m especially fascinated by This first one. It must have been both a wonderful opportunity and immensely stressful. You’ve got the keys to the vault; you can release any show you like. But which one do you choose? It must have felt important to him. Like that first pick would define who he was as a Deadhead. And if it failed, there wouldn’t be any more picks. He might lose his job. That’s a lot riding on one single show.

Dick was clearly a big fan of 1970s Dead. Almost all of his picks come from that decade. I wonder if he looked at the chronology of the releases that had come out by that point. There was Live/Dead from 1969 and Europe 72. Bear’s Choice came from 1970, and then you’ve got a release from 1974 (Steal Your Face) and another from 1975 (One From the Vault). Did he figure he needed to fill in that 1973 gap? Or did he think about something from the legendary May 1977 shows?

Who the heck knows? I tried to do a little research on this Pick, but the Internet sucks now, and I was unable to come up with much. 1973 is a colossal year for the Grateful Dead, so it certainly makes sense he’d choose a show from here.

The band members each had veto power over Dick’s choices. My understanding is Phil was especially difficult to please, so it’s possible Dick had several other shows in mind but, for one reason or another, was given a “no” for them. They also say that Phil demanded his solo be edited out of “The Other One” for some reason.

Unlike other Dick’s Picks, this is not the complete show, and the songs have been widely rearranged. Most of the first set is missing, and parts of the second set have been moved about onto the first disc. To a degree, I understand this and don’t really have a complaint about it. To have put the entire show out would have taken at least three CDs, probably four. That’s a lot of additional cost to produce. Narrowing it down to discs seems much more manageable. Especially at this point when they didn’t know how well these things would sell.

I’m old enough to remember the days of CD trading. Figuring out how to fit the music onto discs was always a challenge. First sets could usually easily fit on one desk, but second sets, with their massive jams, often ran over. But you didn’t want to cut up those massive jams either. Or all those songs that ran right into each other and got a “>” notation on the j-cards. Sometimes if there was extra room on the first disc, a song or two from the middle of the second set, or even the encore, might be thrown onto it. That beat having only one or two songs on a single disc or tape.

I’m less enthused about Phil’s bass solo getting cut out. That seems downright rude.

It is fascinating too seeing what did make the final cut. Why is “Big Railroad Blues” included and not “Dire Wolf”? Why did they keep “Around and Around” and lose “Jack Straw?” I certainly would have nixed the Chuck Berry cover.

But whatever, this shouldn’t be a what’s wrong with this release? post (I imagine Dick got more than a mouthful of that from Deadheads at the time). Let’s talk about what is here.

“Here Comes Sunshine” is actually the tenth song of the first set, but it starts our CD out here. It is a phenomenal version and makes it worth the price of admission alone. It is also a great example of what I love about the Grateful Dead.

I have to make an embarassing admission here. I don’t generally like it when the Dead jams a song deep into the cosmos. There is a point when their biggest jams leave all semblance of a song, and things get wonky. Those moments are often filled with dissonant notes, and extended noodles and I tend to start tuning it out or pressing the skip button.

I love the Dead’s improvisational jam style, but sometimes they go a little too far for my tastes. “Here Comes Sunshine” is the perfect blend. They start with the song, which is a good one. It has a wonderful, slightly odd rhythm to it, some great harmonies, and some classic opaque Robert Hunter lyrics. The song had just been released on their Wake of the Flood album in October of 1973, so it was relatively new, though they had been regularly playing it live since February of that year.

But after a couple of verses, they start to jam on it. At first the bones of the song are still there. Jerry is soloing all over the place, and Keith Godcheaux is getting down on the keyboards. But the rhythm section is still keeping the beat, but they are playing with it. They are adding in some extra notes. Slowly the song stretches and stretches until it no longer sounds like “Here Comes Sunshine.” I bet if you started playing it here and asked an average fan to name the song they wouldn’t be able to.

But it still sounds like what most people would consider to be music. It still sounds like a song. It has a nice beat, and my feet keep tapping, and I’m shaking my bones to it. I love these moments. I love feeling the band slip into something new and exciting, but not feeling like I need to plug my ears.

It is an all-time version of the song.

Now let’s move onto “Playing in the Band.” It officially closed the first set, and ended the first disc on this album. It is a song that often finished the first set, and it became a powerhouse jamming launchpad. Often the band will drive it headlong into the deepest, darkest parts of space. They don’t quite go that far in this version. I’d say they leave the stratosphere, but don’t venture much farther out. Not even to the moon.

Like “Here Comes Sunshine” they definitely break the confines of the song and stretch it into something else. They get close to completely breaking it, venturing into me pressing that skip button. But before my finger gets there, they bring it back down. There is plenty of good stuff here, but I’d argue it slips just slightly out of “great” territory for me.

The “Jam>The Other One>Jam” that sits right in the middle of the second disc does fall into that skip territory for me. It’s just a little too much for my tastes.

Weirdly, the band skips the “Across the Lazy River” section at the end of “Mississippi Half-Step” but it is otherwise a very good – if rather mellow and slinky – version. “Weather Report Suite” is also quite good with some excellent slide work from Mr. Garcia.

The rest ranges from quite good to fine. Nothing is bad. As I said, 1973 was a great year for the Dead, and they are firing on all cylinders. This does seem like a slightly mellow show. That’s actually borne out on the full tapes with all the songs. It is a very fine show, but probably not the one I would have picked if I were Dick. Not even if all I had was 1973 to choose from.

But it makes for a great start to this series, and obviously it did well enough to continue these releases, and for that we can all be happy.

Here’s the track list for Dicks Picks, Vol. 1

Disc one

Here Comes Sunshine
Big River
Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo
Weather Report Suite
Big Railroad Blues
Playing in the Band

Disc two

He’s Gone
Truckin’
Nobody’s Fault but Mine
Jam
The Other One
Jam
Stella Blue
Around and Around

And here’s the full setlist:

Set 1:
Promised Land
Sugaree
Mexicali Blues
Sugar Shack
Dire Wolf
Black Throated Wind
Candyman
Jack Straw
Big Railroad Blues
Big River
Here Comes Sunshine
El Paso
Ramble On Rose
Playin’ In The Band

Set 2:
Mississippi Half-Step
Me And Bobby McGee
WRS Prelude
WRS Part 1
Let It Grow
He’s Gone
Truckin’
Nobody’s Fault But Mine
The Other One
Stella Blue
Around And Around

Encore:
Casey Jones

Dick Latvala was the original Deadhead. He first heard them play at the Trips Festival in 1966 and remained a massive fan until his death in 1999. He was one of the earliest tapers and collectors and reportedly he amassed one of the biggest collections of Dead tapes in the world. In the early 1980s he started working for the Dead’s organization, just odd jobs mainly. It sounds like he basically just started hanging around, and eventually they put him to work.

The Dead had been recording their concerts from the earliest days, but they weren’t particularly organized with them. Dick changed that. He convinced the band that those recordings were a treasure trove and they needed to be organized and safely stored. This led to the creation of the infamous vault.

Dick’s management of the vault and his enthusiastic desire for more officially released live albums led to the Dick’s Picks series. The band was no stranger to live albums, having released Live/Dead in 1969 and a double album covering their legendary tour of Europe in 1972, plus several others. Those had been professional recordings on multitrack tapes. They were good and edited, mastered, and on at least one occasion, overdubbed.

The Dick’s Picks series would be pulled from two-track tapes, and took a warts and-all approach to the music. No edits, no overdubs, and if there was a flaw on the tape, that’s what you got. Most volumes included one entire show, though some contained complete second sets of two different shows, and others might just be highlight reels.

The band had the final say which caused some delays in the releases in the early days but eventually they seemed to just let Dick do what he wanted.

Between 1993 and 2006, they released 36 volumes in the Dick’s Picks series. Over half of them were released after Latvala’s death in 1993. After Dick’s death an actual archivist, David Lemiux, became keeper of the vault and he began a similar series, appropriately called Dave’s Picks, in 2012.

I thought it would be fun to listen to and then review each of the 36 Dick’s Picks. This will become the page I’ll link to all of those reviews. I hope you enjoy it.

PS that cover image is of the first Dicks Picks I ever bought. I remember it being a rip-roaring classic. I can’t wait to revisit it and talk about it.

Vol. 1 – Tampa, FL (12/19/73)

But I’m not going to complain. What I am going to do is talk more about music. There is a realization that I spent over a decade providing music on this site, and that is all. Then out of the blue, I switched things up and started talking about music. Then I killed the music completely.

I’m sure many of you were like, WTF? Who cares about movies? I want music! Now, I will still not be providing music downloads on this site in any public way. But I would like to talk about it. I figure I’ll write some reviews of officially released live albums. I’ve been thinking about doing a series on the Grateful Dead’s Dick’s Picks releases for a while now, so that seems like a good place to start. And maybe I’ll review some unofficially released music.  That sounds fun.

I do realize that I’ve gotten pretty good at reviewing movies, but I’ve not done a lot of music reviews. Certainly not in a long while. I haven’t worked that muscle in a long time. It has gotten flabby. Movies are easy. You can talk about story and plot. You can dive into a movie’s themes and talk about what the camera is doing. Or how scary, or funny it is. I know a little technical information about movies, and can impart that information. But I’m not a musician. I know nothing about the technical parts of a song.

There isn’t a plot to a song either. Not usually anyhow, and I’m not really a lyrics guy anyway. I dig on the melody and what the instruments are doing and pay little attention to the words. Music is about how it makes me feel, and that is hard to describe. It is very difficult to write down in something resembling a review.

This will be doubly hard when talking about live albums and bootlegs. Those songs won’t be new. They will have appeared on studio albums and played in concerts many times. So I’ll have to concentrate on the music.  That will be a challenge.

But a fun one, I think.  

Anyway, I hope you enjoy.

I love Charade. I mean, it has Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, which is enough on its own to make me love it. But then add in Walter Matthau, and I’m all in. It is the perfect movie to watch on a boring Sunday afternoon or to take to the in-laws and watch it over family gatherings. Criterion is putting it out on UHD and it has become my pick of the week. See me talk about it and other interesting things coming out this week by clicking here.

I love me a good zombie movie. We Bury the Dead is a very good, if not particularly original, zombie movie. Daisy Ridley stars as a woman who goes to Australia, where some kind of massive bioweapon was released, killing almost everyone but leaving a few in a zombie-like state. She’s there to help with the cleanup but also to find her husband, who she hopes is still alive (even if he is a zombie). It is a pretty slow-moving film, but I dug it. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

I feel like every time I talk about silent films, I note that I still struggle with watching them. I guess it is an evergreen statement because I keep watching them, and I keep having a difficult time with them. The Thief of Bagdad is a classic filled with stunning visuals and a spectacle-filled story. But I’d be lying if I didn’t have to keep focusing my attention on it because my mind kept wandering off. Still, it is a great movie, and you can read my review here.

I get pretty spoilery in this post so if you don’t like those stop reading.

ted me. It begins with a scene that takes place before the real movie sets in, designed to give you a little fright before it has to do the boring work of developing characters and building a plot. 

There is a high school basketball game. Our presumed heroes are down by a few points, and there are only a few seconds left. Our presumed main character takes the ball and makes a basket, narrowing the margin to one more point. Then he sees something in the stands. Smoke billows, and there is a strange figure standing there.  He shakes it off and gets the ball again. He runs. He shoots. He…the basketball does that thing it always does in basketball movies where it bounces back and forth around the rim in slow motion before it goes in. While it is doing that, a smoky, charcoal creature appears before the boy.

He runs to the locker room, takes out some kind of relic, and begs for his life. The creature appears again, and the boy smashes the relic. The creature disappears. Hurrah. The rest of the team comes in, and our boy takes a shower. Then he’s burnt to a crisp by the monster.

Flash forward three months. Nobody cares about that dead kid. He isn’t our hero. Neither are any of his friends or family. He exists so we can so the film can start with a bang.  Oh, and I guess so our actual main character can easily find the relic.

She’s Chrys Willet (Dafne Keen), and she’s new to the school. She gets the dead boy’s locker, and even though it has been three months since he died, and presumably that was a tragic event for the school, no one has bothered to clean out his locker. She grabs the relic and puts it in her bag.

She makes a few friends who seem to be the only people at this school. Seriously, she goes to her first class, and the only students are like the five people she just met in the hallway. They aren’t really her friends either. She just met them, and two of them were mean to her. One stared at her like she knew who Chrys was, but she doesn’t like her. The other is her cousin. They will become friends in the next scene because the film needs them to be. It needs some characters it can kill off to keep things exciting.

The relic does look cool. It’s kept inside this black crystal-like box, but the real thing has a groovy skull on one side and a little whistle thing on the other. When you blow it, death comes knocking.  You see, when you are born, your death is also born. Death spends its, um, life looking for you. When it finds you at the slated time, it kills you.  But the whistle summons your death early. Each person’s death looks like them at the slated time of their death, and if death comes early, you get killed in the manner you were always going to die.

This makes little sense but does create some fun kills. So, let’s say you are supposed to get run over by a bus in twenty years. You blow the whistle, and death comes calling sooner than expected. When it finds you, your body gets mutilated just like it would if you were hit by that bus.

I’m probably saying too much. I’ll have to add a spoiler tag at the front. But honestly, this film is dumb.  I can’t really recommend it anyway.

Our heroes (and us in the audience) learn this lore through the typical creepy old lady character we always find in this type of movie who collects ancient artifacts and knows all about spooky spells.

This movie reminded me of The Craft. Partially because it is about a weird new girl coming to a school, bonding with some newfound, and fighting supernatural powers. But also because it really isn’t that great, but I fully suspect there’s a group of teenagers who will become extremely nostalgic about it in twenty years. 

At least The Craft took some time developing its characters and developed its story. This film just throws everything together without bothering to make something cohesive.

Nick Frost is in it, and that’s always a good thing.  He plays the teacher who is the first adult to get a look at the relic and figure something out about it. But then he exits the film way too early. So much so I’m surprised someone of his status agreed to the role. Sophie Nélisse is one of the friends who becomes the love interest. That seems to be her thing now.  But I’m here for it.

Whistle is a dumb movie. It doesn’t take the time it needs to tell a good story. Instead it just jumps from scene to scene, advancing the plot in very familiar ways. But it never made me care about these people and their story.  It tries very hard to be cool. Chrys is a goth and a lesbian, and she listens to bands like The Cure and Iron Maiden on vinyl. At one point the film has her lying on her back, the camera shooting her from above, her super cool records neatly laid out around her head like a halo. Like I say, this is a film a certain type of teen will identify with, and I look forward to their essays on how misunderstood it was when I’m a much older man.

But the thing is, I kind of had a good time. The actors are decent. The directing does what it needs to do. The kills are pretty fun, even if they do use too much CGI. I won’t watch this again, and I certainly won’t feel nostalgia over it in a couple of decades, but I don’t hate myself for watching it.

Death Ship is one of those movies that kept showing up in my feeds. Every time I went looking for a horror movie to watch, there it was. It looked fun, but I kept putting it off. Then the Blu-ray landed in my lap, and here we are. It isn’t a particularly good movie, and for a movie about Nazi ghosts on a death ship, it is rather dull for its first half, but things do pick up, and it becomes pretty fun in its back half. And it has George Kennedy in it, and that’s never a bad thing. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

Kill Me Again is an overlooked neo-noir gem. Val Kilmer stars as a down-on-his-luck private eye (is there any other kind?) who is hired by a sexy femme fatale (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) to kill her.  Well, not really kill her, but make it look like somebody did and thus keep her abusive boyfriend from looking for her. 

Naturally, she is lying, and things get complicated in lots of interesting ways. It is by no means a perfect film, but it is a very good one, and it is nice to see it on Blu-ray. You can read my full review here.

I talk a lot about Shaw Brothers Studio in these pages, but there was another Hong Kong studio that was knocking out kung fu movies around the same time – Golden Harvest. I tend to think of them as second-rate to Shaw Brothers, and that isn’t really fair. They made some good movies, and Shaw Brothers made some atrocious ones.  I’ve just seen more Shaw Brothers films so I think that makes me lean more towards them.

The Angry River was Golden Harvest’ very first film, and it’s a good one. It is also the debut film of Angela Mao, who would become a big deal in Hong Kong cinema. 88 Films just released it on Blu-ray, and you can read my review at Cinema Sentries.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I got confused about which date I was supposed to write the Pick of the Week for Cinema Sentries and when I was supposed to do Five Cool Things. I wrote this 5CT last week, but it is just now getting posted. As you can see this time I’m talking about Sheep Detectives, some classic Doctor Who, a lovely Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn comedy, Civil War, and They Will Kill You. Click here to enjoy.

Over at Cinema Sentries, I alternate writing the Picks of the Week with another guy, Dave.  When I’m not writing that week’s Pick, I write my Five Cool Things articles. On several occasions I’ve gotten the weeks mixed up, and I’ll either write a Pick of the Week when it isn’t my turn to, or, like this week, I’ll write a Five Cool Things when I was supposed to write a Pick. 

The guy who runs Cinema Sentries texted me last night around eight about my error.  I promised to get a Pick of the Week written ASAP. In my mind I was going to dash something off quickly.  I’d write a couple of paragraphs about my pick, then maybe one single line for anything else that looked interesting.

But me being me, I wrote a whole freaking essay about turning 50 and how movies seem to change as you grow older.  Eventually I landed on the great movie Body Heat being released by Criterion as my pick.  You can read the whole thing here.

I love discovering new movies, new actors, and new directors. There is something wonderful about watching a film and finding a new artist to follow. Back in April I got a set of films from French director Yves Boisset. I’d never heard of him, but I dove into the films and really liked him. Now I’ll be seeking him out. That’s kind of awesome. You can read my review of the set at Cinema Sentries.

I’m fascinated with franchises that never really took off. Like a movie gets made, and the studio expects there will be sequels and spin-offs, but the first film bombs, and so nothing comes of it. Remo Williams is titled The Adventure Begins…but it also ended there because the film bombed and there wasn’t a sequel.

That’s too bad, too, because this film is a lot of fun. Fred Ward stars as Remo Williams, who actually isn’t Remo Williams but a NYC police officer who gets into a scrape and has his face and name changed to Remo Williams to help out a super secret government agency. He’s like James Bond but dumber and less cool.  Which pretty much sums up the film.  You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

I seem to have forgotten to post this Five Cool Things from April 15. 

It includes, well, it includes all the photos you see plus a Bill Frisell concert. You can read all about it over at Cinema Sentries.

Radiance Films continues to put out fantastic sets of really good, and rather obscure films from all over the universe. I seem to be watching a lot of their releases of 1970s-era Italian films, and I’m loving it.

Confessions of a Police Captain is a gritty tale of murder, corruption, and a man who wants to change things.  Martin Balsam is a corrupt cop who does something bad, and Franco Nero is the prosecutor trying to make things right. It is a great film and this is a great release from Radiance.  You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

This is a fun little sci-fi flick from director Gore Verbinski, who hadn’t made a film in nearly a decade. You can read my full review here.

And yes I’m not saying much about it here. I have a terrible sinus headache but I want to keep posting all the stuff I’ve written at Cinema Sentries on this pages.

They Will Kill You had the utter misfortune of being released at the same time as the Ready or Not sequel. The studio did it an even bigger disservice by creating a trailer that made this film look like a clone of the other one. But despite some similarities – a young woman being trapped in a large building and hunted by the rich – They Will Kill You has a lot of surprises up its sleeve.

Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz) gets a job as a maid in a swanky hotel run by the mysterious Lily Woodhouse (Patricia Arquette), but she soon discovers that everyone in the hotel is part of a cult that plans to make her the evening’s sacrifice. 

I’m afraid to say much more about the plot would spoil the fun. This is a film that gets a lot of mileage out of its many twists and turns. I especially appreciated how it did differentiate itself from Ready or Not, and those differences were worth being surprised about. 

I will say this is an incredibly enjoyable and thoroughly weird film. This is a film where everyone involved just decided to go for it, and it mostly works.

Sometimes it doesn’t. It brings up several threads and then never follows through with them. For instance, there is a moment where it is implied that each floor of the hotel corresponds with one level of Dante’s Inferno, but the only one we get a hint at is the “Fuck Floor.” A few times the film will hint at fun things it could have explored, and then it just doesn’t. 

The action is quite good, and the camera movements are very florid, but it does that thing where it often relies on computer effects instead of practical ones. This is true even in scenes where they could have just built a real set and made things look much more real. But modern movies tend to do that a lot.

But Zazie Beetz is a freaking star. She’s so much fun in this. Patricia Arquette is absolutely chewing the scenery, and the rest of the cast (including Tom Felton and Heather Graham) seem to be having a blast as well.

I had a ton of fun watching this, and I highly recommend it.

Exploitation films seem so strange through a modern lens. By design, those films are filled with excessive violence, sex, and nudity, things that are often frowned upon today. I loved those films as a younger person, mostly because of those excesses. I love them as a much older person, but I’m much more understanding of the arguments against such things.  Still, there is something wonderfully entertaining about films that take things to the extreme.

The title and cover art of So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious…make it sound like nothing but dumb exploitation cinema. In truth, it mostly is exactly that. This is a film loaded with gratuitous nudity, and yet it is surprisingly tender and interesting. I’m not necessarily even against films that are just exploitative and offer nothing else, but I find it fascinating when they do attempt something more.

This is by no means a great film, but it is an interesting one.  You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

Mads Mikkelsen has become one of my favorite actors in recent years. I think I first saw him in the wonderful TV series Hannibal, portraying the deliciously deplorable Hannibal Lecter. But he’s been in tons of stuff, from Rogue One to Quantum of Solace and Doctor Strange. He’s one of those guys that just seems to show up in stuff, and every time he does, he makes the picture better. So I was excited to see him in this new film, Dust Bunny.

Bryan Fuller has made some great TV, including Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me, and the aforementioned Hannibal. I had no idea he directed Dust Bunny until I saw the credits roll, at which point I was like, “Oh, that makes sense.”  

Put Mads and Fuller together and you’ve got a recipe for a fun film.  And it is. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

Lynne Ramsay’s latest stars Jennifer Lawrence as a mother who is, well, let’s just say she’s having a hard time of it. Her husband is gone a lot. She lives out in the woods with few neighbors. Her baby cries all the time. The dog her husband brought home does nothing but bark. It drives her a little mad. It is a bravura performance from Lawrence and a very good (if difficult to watch at times) film. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

I seem to have forgotten to post my Five Cool Things from a few weeks ago, so here it is. This one features the HBO series DTF St. Louis, a Spider-Man comic I’ve been trying to find for decades, a Batman comic, Stephen King’s The Running Man, Buckaroo Banzai, and the trailer for a fun looking film.

What a killer show opener.

Anthony Mann and James Stewart made a bunch of movies together. Many of them were westerns. Several are some of the best westerns made in the 1950s. Ben of the River is one of those. Stewart plays a man with a past who is trying to find redemption by leading a group of settlers to Oregon, where they will become farmers. He meets a lot of trouble on the way. Mann fills it with a lot of action and some beautiful scenery. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

Charles Bronson had such an interesting career. For a while, he was a terrific little character actor in films like The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven, and then he became a star and for a time he continued making interesting (if not great) films, and then he got stuck making dumb action films that wasted his talents as an actor.

Rider on the Rain is a very interesting film. It starts out like a rape revenge film, then turns into a thriller, but it turns into something far more interesting. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

Hello friends, I’m back with another Five Cool Things. This time I’m talking about the Gillian Welch and Wilco concerts I attended, plus Twins of Evil, Anaconda, and Mudtown (so mostly things I already talked about in these pages) plus the new trailer for the new Resident Evil movie. Click here to read all about it.

I suspect if you were to run some statistics on The Midnight Cafe, you’d find that I’ve reviewed more movies from Hammer Studios than any other one, and that Peter Cushing would be somewhere in the top in terms of actors I’ve written about. He is my seventh most watched actor, with some 37 of his films having been watched by me. I’ve written about eight of those films, most of which were Hammer Horror films. I’ve written about 24 different films from that studio.

That seems weird to me because Cushing isn’t one of my favorite actors. I mean, I do love him, but if I were to make a list of my favorites, he wouldn’t be on it. And I imagine if you took my ratings of all the Hammer films and averaged them out, the number you’d get wouldn’t be that high.

I don’t know what that means. I don’t know why I keep watching these films. That’s not true. I do love me some Hammer Horror even while I can admit they aren’t always the greatest of films. It is interesting to me that I keep turning to them and that it’s only been the last decade that I’ve become a fan.

Anyway, Twins of Evil is pretty great.

Cushing plays Gustav Weil, a stern Puritan who leads a gang of dudes who love burning pretty young women at the stake. I mean, sure, they declare them witches first, and there does seem to be quite a few folks getting horribly murdered, lending credibility to some kind of ungodly horror going on, but really it’s just fun to burn girls out in the forest.

Up on the hill in his castle overlooking the village, Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas) dabbles in Satanism (and I absolutely love that all the summaries of the film use that language, “dabbles in Satanism.”) While doing a bit of pretty young woman sacrificing of his own, he accidentally awakens Countess Mircalla Karnstein (Katya Wyeth) from her grave. She immediately turns him into a vampire.

Meanwhile, two twin sisters, Freida Gellhorn (Mary Collinson) and Maria (Mary Collinson), arrive in the village due to their parents dying. They take up residence with the good Gustav, their uncle. Now Maria is a good girl who wants to please her uncle, but Freida is a bad girl. She likes to sneak out at night and get into trouble. When she meets the Count, she’s all over that stuff.

Because this is a Hammer film and one made in 1971, both girls love to show off their cleavage and spend a great deal of the movie in their nightgowns with strategically placed camera angles.

The girls are a pain in their uncle’s neck. He believes them to be evil (one might even say Twins of Evil, actually Gustav says exactly that at one point.) Slowly everyone realizes the Count is a vampire, and Gustav will finally use God’s name in the service of fighting actual evil.

As per usual with Hammer, the production design is impeccable. The sets and costumes look great; the lighting is gorgeous. Cushing is wonderful. Unlike a lot of characters in films like this, he isn’t driven by an insane need for power, but rather he is a true believer. He truly thinks Satan is out there destroying the world. That warped faith drives him to do mad things. One could probably say something about how his Puritanical sense of sex drives him to burn beautiful young women at the stake, but I’ll leave that be. The Collinson sisters are a delight. Madeline especially has a lot of fun as the wild Freida.

Also, as per usual with Hammer films, the script isn’t great. It introduces the vampire aspect but doesn’t do a lot with it. The vamps do recoil from crosses, but don’t seem to mind daylight. But the look of the film and the performances make it well worth watching.

Sorry for the lack of posts this week. I’ve been working on some music projects. I’ve shared them with some of you, and I’ll share with more of you in time. I’m trying to work the kinks out and figure out how I want to do it, so be patient. 

Also, I just haven’t felt like writing or posting, and I’ve decided that there is no need to push myself.  I’ll write when I feel like it and won’t when I don’t. There are some things I’ll still try to do, like Picks of the Week and Friday Night Horror Movies, but otherwise I do what I want.

Anyway, this week’s pick is three films from Nicolas Winding Refn.  He’s the guy who made Drive. I loved that film. It is a loose trilogy about some criminals in Denmark. I’ve only seen the first two but quite liked them and am anxious to see the third.  You can read about this release and everything else that came out this week here.

I wrote this yesterday (Thursday) but then IMGBox, the site I use to host my images was down, so there was yet another delay in posting.

Wilco is one of my favorite bands. I’ve seen them more times in concert than any other artist by far. Not that this is a great accomplishment, I don’t actually go to that many concerts. But I catch Wilco every chance I can.

They seem to love playing at the Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa. We’ve seen them (or Jeff Tweedy solo) there half a dozen times. When they announced their most recent tour a few months back, they did not list Tulsa as a stop, but they were playing Bentonville, which is only about a two-hour drive from where I live. I immediately bought tickets.  Naturally, about two weeks later they announced they were playing Tulsa in July.

I looked at my wife and asked, “Are we going to see Wilco twice this summer?”  We bought tickets. My sister and her husband will be in town then, flying in from South Korea, and we bought them tickets too.

The Bentonville show was an outdoor gig and general admission. There was a time when I’d show up to a show well before the doors opened, hoping to score those great seats.  But I’m old now, and the idea of standing for two hours before a show and then another couple during the show is just too much for my back to take. 

We left about five for a show that started at eight. I figured that would be plenty of time to get there and even have a bit to eat on our way. We arrived about 7:30 and found a great long line. That was annoying because we had three lawn chairs, just as many blankets, plus a pillow, and some other stuff. Security was nice, but they made us open up our lawn chairs and open up my wife’s purse. 

Because everyone brought their own chairs, things were a little haphazard. Mostly people put them in straight lines, but there were large gaps and spaces everywhere. This meant we had to sit quite a ways into the back. We were maybe twenty yards behind the soundboard and off to the side.  Behind us was a small hill, which meant there was a walkway between it and us. The rest of the venue was pretty flat, which made it hard to see the stage.The sound back that far wasn’t great. It was really kind of distant, making the show sound like it was taking place someplace else.

I set all that up to say that the crowd was kind of obnoxious. I understand people are going to talk at a concert. I mean, I don’t get it, I don’t know why anyone pays a lot of money to see a band and then acts like they are just background music for their stupid conversation. But I understand that’s just the way it is. But this show was out of hand.  

There were two dudes behind us, sitting on that hill, that loudly talked through every song.  One lady came in late and sat beside my daughter. She literally turned her seat away from the band so she could chat with her friend.  A whole gang of folks gathered behind the soundboard, acting like they were at a bar, not a concert.

I do think the outdoor venue, the way we were all haphazardly positioned in our own chairs, and the poor sound quality at that contributed to all of this.

The music was good. The setlist was great. They opened with “Via Chicago” and then went into “Handshake Drugs.” The first set was a nice mix of newer songs and some old ones. Bassist John Stirratt even sang “It’s Just That Simple” off of their first album, AM. It ended with “California Stars”, one of my favorites.

I did my best to enjoy the music and not be annoyed by the talkers.  Sometimes I’d close my eyes and just try to listen.  It didn’t always work. I remember thinking this might be the worst concert I’ve ever been to.  Which sucked, because, like I said, the music was good.

At the set break, my daughter went to the bathroom, bought a drink, and then looked at the merch. On our way back to our seats, we noticed some open spaces much closer to the stage. We grabbed our chairs, explained everything to my wife, and, like the Jeffersons, “moved on up.”

What a difference that made.

The sound was so much better. The audience was much more into it. There were still a few talkers, but the sound drowned them out. The band was on fire. The setlist was off the charts good. They played songs from just about every album they’ve made and concentrated on the older ones. 

“Impossible Germany” was impossibly good. I’m a Nels Cline maniac. When we see them at Cain’s, I always stand on the Nels side of the stage. There is always a point where I turn to my wife and go, “Nels Fucking Cline!” On songs like “Impossible Germany” he tends to go crazy. He’ll launch into these frenzied solos where he just strums super fast and the band creates feedback behind him.  I love it.  But this time he played real solos. It reminded me a lot of the Jerry Garcia Band, where he was jamming, but it was still within the rhythm of the song. It was fantastic.

Jeff seemed in good spirits.  He chatted amiably and even had some short convos with the crowd.  The crowd was pretty laid-back. There wasn’t a lot of whooping and hollering.  During “Kingpin” there is a section where the crowd usually screams in response to Jeff singing “How Can I?” but here they were silent.  Jeff even joked with them about it, but it was a no go.

I suspect the cold had something to do with that.  It was quite chilly, and most of us were huddled under blankets. And the crowd seemed like they were maybe not huge fans.  The big songs off of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot got a lot of cheers, but the rest of the songs got claps, but nothing super enthusiastic.

But I was loving it. This show went from one of my least favorite concerts ever in the first set to one of my absolute favorite gigs in the second.  

If you are a fan I highly recommend checking them out this tour.

Here’s the setlist:

Set 1:

Via Chicago
Handshake Drugs
If I Ever Was a Child
Cruel Country
Forget the Flowers
Evicted
Bird Without a Tail / Base of My Skull
I’m Always in Love
Everyone Hides
Hummingbird
It’s Just That Simple
You and I
War on War
Falling Apart (Right Now)
California Stars

Set 2:
Box Full of Letters
Annihilation
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
One Wing
Either Way
Love Is Everywhere (Beware)
Impossible Germany
Jesus, Etc.
The Universe
Hate It Here
Walken
Kingpin
Heavy Metal Drummer
I’m the Man Who Loves You

Encore:
The Late Greats
I Got You (At the End of the Century)
Outtasite (Outta Mind)

My wife and I watch a lot of British television. We’re huge fans of what they call panel shows, which are basically game shows with comedians. But we also love a good British mystery or crime drama. We subscribe to BritBox, a British streaming service that provides loads of stuff. Some of it is good, some of it is garbage. 

The difficulty is that I don’t see commercials for British television; I don’t know anyone or follow anyone on social media that regularly talks about British television. So I have no idea what’s good or what’s not.

Mudtown is pretty good.

Clare Lewis Jones (Erin Richards) is a volunteer magistrate in Newport, Wales.  I don’t even know what that means. I guess they hear low-level court cases and make decisions like a judge, but maybe not on major crimes. English law is weird.

Anyway, she’s good at her job. But she’s got a dark past. When she was young, she ran around with a guy now known as ‘Saint Pete’ Burton (Tom Cullen), who saved her neck back then. Now he runs drugs and is an up-and-comer in the criminal community. She’s got a husband and two kids. The oldest, Beca (Lauren Morais), has started dating Sonny Higgins (Lloyd Meredith), who is Saint Pete’s right-hand man. 

One night Beca is at a party with her high school chums at some old abandoned warehouse. Someone starts a fire that just so happens to burn up a bunch of Saint Pete’s money that he had stashed in the warehouse. Later, one of the kids finds himself shot.

Most of the show involves Saint Pete trying to find out who started the fire and Clare trying to keep Beca out of trouble. There is a lot of family drama (between Clare and her husband and daughter, and Saint Pete and his crew). 

The acting is good, the cinematography is great, and the story mostly worked for me. We recently watched a couple of shows where the characters made absolutely stupid decisions, and I was thrilled that for most of this one they actually seemed relatively intelligent.  It gets a little dumb by the final episode, but mostly this worked for me.

I especially appreciated how they played with the whole my kids in trouble trope. A lot of shows will put a kid into trouble, and they don’t actually care that much about the kid.  It is just a plot point to drive our heroes into action. But here Beca is a real character, and they do some interesting things with her.

I’m definitely hoping for a season two.

I watched 37 movies in April. 32 were new to me. Only eight of them were made before I was born. It was the Awesome 80s in April which explains why so many of them were not made before I was born. 18 of them were made in the 1980s.

It was a good month. I feel like I always say that. I guess there isn’t such a thing as a bad month watching movies. Unless you don’t get to watch any at all. But I did watch some good movies this month. There wasn’t anything particularly outstanding in the bunch, but there were a lot of very good ones.

The top actors list is fleshing out nicely. Tom Baker has taken the top spot with seven films. I continue to watch him in Doctor Who, and that’s why his companion in that show, Lalla Ward, is now in the top ten. I’ve actually taken to Letterboxd and started looking at big lists of classic Who stories and then trying to watch the ones I’ve never seen before. Or at least the ones I haven’t logged on Letterboxd before. 

The director’s list hasn’t changed all that much.  Spielberg has popped in, but nobody has challenged Yves Boisset with his four films, and most of the list is filled with just two film guys.  I need to kick up my directing game, I guess.

Here’s the full list.

Dust Bunny (2025) ****
Die My Love (2025) ****
Sleeping Dogs (2024) ***
Doctor Who: Revenge of the Cybermen (1975) ***
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009) ***
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) ****
Mrs. Pollifax — Spy (1971) **
Evil Dead Trap (1988) ***
Nightfall (1956) ****
Cherry 2000 (1987) **
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2025) ****
Doctor Who: Colony in Space (1971) ***1/2
So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious… (1975) ***
Doctor Who: The Horns of Nimon (1980) ***1/2
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice (2026) ***
Dead Bang (1989) ****
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) ****
Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) ***1/2
Confessions of a Police Captain (1971) ****
The Housemaid (2025) ***
To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) ****
Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Beginning of a New Era (2024) **
Poltergeist III (1988) ***
Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) **1/2
Poltergeist (1982) ****
TerrorVision (1986) ***
Out of Control (1985) **
The Thief of Bagdad (1924) ****
Spy, Stand Up (1982) ***1/2
La Femme flic (1980) ***1/2
Mad Enough to Kill (1975) ***1/2
Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985) ***1/2
The Lego Batman Movie (2017) ****
Invitation to Hell (1984) ***
Angel’s Leap (1971) ***1/2
Death Ship (1980) ***
We Bury the Dead (2024) ***1/2

Drop is the sort of those high-concept, utterly ridiculous thrillers they used to make a lot of in the 1990s. It is all kinds of dumb but still a lot of fun to watch.

Violet Gates (Meghann Fahy) is just beginning to get over the death of her abusive husband.  Oh, she’s not sad he’s dead, for he was an awful piece of…but she survived years of abuse and nearly let him kill her baby boy, and that’s hard to get over.  Even if you are a therapist.

She’s been talking to a handsome photographer named Henry (Brandon Sklenar) through one of those online dating apps, and tonight she’s finally agreed to meet him face-to-face for a dinner date at one of those fancy restaurants that sits atop a skyscraper, giving panoramic views of Chicago.

She leaves her sister June (Violett Beane) in charge of the boy (and her wardrobe) and nervously goes on the date. Before they can even order hors d’oeuvres, she starts receiving these strange airdropped digital messages. At first they are just sort of annoying, and the couple play a little game as to who it could be, but soon enough they become threatening. 

Look at the video footage from her at-home security cameras, it says. They show a masked man in her home.  Do what I say, or your family will be killed, it says. Tell no one what is happening. Do not call the cops.  Do not let your dinner date leave.

The tormentor seems to know everything she is doing.  He’s somehow got access to the restaurant’s internal camera system.  He’s also placed cameras inside the bathroom and next to her table. He’s cloned her phone.

I won’t spoil exactly what he asks her to do except that it has to do with destroying some evidence and causing harm to someone.  It makes very little sense as it is a dumb way to get what they want, but you just have to roll with it.

Director Christopher Landon keeps the tension high, and writers Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach find clever ways for Violet to solve her problem. Because those digital drops have to be sent from someone close they have a lot of fun hinting it might be this person or that one. I guessed correctly pretty quickly so it isn’t really that hard to figure out. It ends in a climactic battle that’s all sort of ridiculous, but I had a good time with it.

Landon directed both Happy Death Day films and Freaky, and I wish he’d leaned a little more heavily into the ridiculousness of this situation and made it a little funnier. But it’s still an entertaining little film. Like I said, they used to make this sort of film a lot in the 1990s, and I kind of miss them. Sometimes you want something ridiculous and not so serious.

Small housekeeping note.  We are in May, and that means we’re geared up for mysteries. Crime stories often blend mystery, thriller, and horror together, but it is always difficult to find one that leans that mix a little more toward horror for Friday nights.  I thought this one would do the trick, but it really is much more of a thriller than a horror film, but it is late and this is what you get.

Down River (2025)
Directed by Brian Barnard, Tommy Walton
Starring: Jody Thompson, Randy McDowell, and Ashley Sutton

Synopsis: A sheriff and deputy probe a crime at an abandoned farmhouse in West Virginia’s coal country. Their investigation uncovers dark secrets that endanger both the town and the sheriff’s grip on reality.

Rating: **1/2

There is something about this film that I really wanted to like. It starts off well. I’m a big fan of moody mysteries set in some mountainous backwater with a laconic sheriff who hunts a killer. Ronnie Long (Jodie Thompson, who also cowrote) fits that bill. He’s rugged and handsome. He’s got a past that haunts him.

Early on we’ll see him pull over his big old sheriff’s truck at that abandoned farmhouse. He finds a shovel that seems out of place and sneaks into the house. The tension builds. Something is about to happen. Then his partner and friend Shep Mills (Randy McDowell, who also cowrote) calls out. The tension drops, but now there is something strange happening. Ronnie shouldn’t be there. No crime seems to have been committed.

The above synopsis doesn’t really do the film justice. There isn’t much investigating in this movie. There is a twist about twenty minutes into it that I won’t spoil, and I really liked it, but it changes how we view everything that happened before. It changes the relationships the film was developing.

Sometime in the past, Ronnie suffered a tragedy that left him with a head wound. He’s turned to drinking. He started seeing things. Things that haven’t yet happened.

The film plays with time in strange ways. It is disjointed. It will flashback without warning or much in the way of indicating what it’s doing. There were several times I didn’t realize a scene was a flashback, and then I was confused about what was happening in the present. But then we’ll also see the things Ronnie is seeing in his visions. The way it jumps around between these things makes the plot difficult to get a handle on. Once the credits rolled and I had time to think about it, I was able to figure it all out, but it isn’t a good enough film to make me want to watch it again to see how the pieces fit together.

The cinematography is beautiful. The rolling hills and dense treelines are lovely to look at. I liked the story, but the jumbled way it was told was more confusing than interesting. Jodie Thompson is good when he’s being laconic, less so when he has to really emote. I didn’t particularly care for Randy McDowell’s performance at all. There is a side character, a jerk of a cop, that seemed out of place in this story, and they didn’t seem to know what to do with Ronnie’s mother. There is a scene with her late in the film that seems like it is leading to something, and then she just disappears.

Not a terrible film. Worth watching if you need a mystery fix. But not great either.

I got to see Gillian Welch and David Rawlings last night. It was wonderful. I’d seen them before several years ago in Memphis. It was one of my favorite concert experiences ever. It was in a small auditorium. The crowd was reverent. Not a soul spoke a word. The music was transcendent.

Last night was a free outdoor concert at the Guthrie Green. That’s a nice patch of grass in the middle of downtown Tulsa. My guess was the crowd would be more rowdy. Free would bring random folks interested in a fun night out. Outdoors, mean people would feel more free to talk and play. Plus there would be all sorts of downtown, city noises.

It turned out to be mostly reserved. It was a nice-sized crowd, but not overflowing. I guess a midweek show kept some people away. Those who were there all seemed to come to hear Gillian and Dave. Periodically I’d hear people talking, and every now and again someone would stand in front of me to get a picture. For the first set there was a food truck, or maybe one of the local bars, playing some kind of bass-thumping music at high volume nearby. That was obnoxious, especially during the quieter songs. But Dave’s big guitar playing usually drowned it out, and it seemed to stop by the second set.

We got a good seat just off to the side of the soundboard with a clear view. The sound was good. The performance was resplendent.

They started with a beautiful rendition of “Elvis Presley Blues”. That was the first Gillian Welch song I ever heard. I still remember when I heard it. I was driving down from Bloomington, IN, to where my wife’s folks lived, about an hour south. It came on the local independent radio station, and I was absolutely struck by it. My wife was riding down in her car because she was staying longer than I was. When we arrived, we both got out and asked each other if we’d heard that song.

The first set mostly stuck to the new songs (from the wonderful Woodland album) and a lot of Dave Rawlings songs that I wasn’t ultra-familiar with (but were still great.)

At some point they brought out the banjo, and David quipped that the show had started properly then. But it was out of tune, so Gillian talked while David tuned. I say she talked, but she admitted she didn’t really have anything to say. That she wasn’t good with banter. It was very awkward and cute.

They had a break and came back with a vengeance for the second set. As a couple, Gillian and Dave make the most wonderful harmonies. Their voices blend together in that magical way that only comes from spending years together with a fierce admiration for each other. David Rawlings is an underrated and absolutely brilliant guitarist. “Revelator” is another one of my favorite songs, and David’s guitar work just roared.

They talked a little about how they visited both the Bob Dylan Center and the Woody Guthrie one. Dave joked that he had a hard time deciding which artist’s song he should play to honor them. He landed on Bob Dylan’s “Song for Woody Guthrie” which was both appropriate and awesome.

For the encore, they covered Doc Watson’s “Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor” and then launched into a brilliant version of “Look at Miss Ohio” to which the entire audience sang along.

Then they played the Old Crow Medicine Show’s “I Hear Them All” which rolled into Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” Guthrie was from Oklahoma, and the Center is located not two blocks from our setting, and the crowd went nuts. They closed with a delightful sing-along of the old gospel tune “I’ll Fly Away.”

It was a beautiful (if a bit chilly) night with clear skies and a big full moon rising just above the stage. The setting was perfect and the music was divine.

My wonderful friend Cate has been sharing a lot of Jackson Browne shows with me. I was never a huge fan of his, but she’s turning me around. This is a terrific performance.

Mario Bava was a fascinating character. He’s best known today for his horror films and being the first guy to make a Giallo. But he made lots of other types of films, including science fiction stories, sword and sandal pictures, and even a comedy or two. 

Danger: Diabolik is his take on a James Bond-esque spy caper. It’s super stylish and so much fun. I like it better than probably half the real Bond films.  Eureka Entertainment presents the film with a new UHD transfer and loads of extras. 

Other films coming out this week that look interesting:

Highest 2 Lowest: Spike Lee’s take on Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low isn’t nearly as good as that film, but its still a good watch.

Dust Bunny:  A fun, quirky flick about a little girl and an assassin fighting bad guys and possibly a monster under her bed.  Mads Mikkelsen is the hitman, Bryan Fuller directed. I’ll have a full review up soon.

Innerspace: Fun little 1980s sci-fi flick about Dennis Quaid getting shrunk down to the size of a pea and getting injected into Martin Short’s body.  Arrow Video has this release, and I reviewed the film here.

John Singleton’s Hood Trilogy: Includes Boyz in the Hood, Poetic Justice, and Baby Boy. I’ve only seen Boyz but that film was important to my growth as a cinephile, so I should really check out the others.

The Living Dead Girl: Jean Rollin was the master of sexy vampire movies. This one’s about a dead girl revived by a toxic spill who has an insatiable thirst for blood. Eureka is giving it the upgrade with lots of extras.

Soldier: Arrow Video brings us this action flick starring Kurt Russell as a bio-engineered super soldier who is about to be replaced.

Boxcar Bertha: Martin Scorsese’s second feature length film was a for-hire gig. He was paid by Roger Corman to make it, but you can tell his heart wasn’t in it. Famously, John Cassavetes told him it was shit and that he should make something personal. Scorsese took him to heart and made Mean Streets and became the beloved director we know today. Boxcar Bertha isn’t actually that bad. It is well worth watching, and now it’s coming to UHD.

Grapes of Death: Another Jean Rollin vampire flick being put out by Eureka.

So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious: This Italian flick is mostly what you expect, with a beautiful young woman (Gloria Guida) getting naked every chance she can, but it is also surprisingly tender and modern. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries. 

Eclipse Series 48: Kinuyo Tanaka Directs: Six films from a Japanese director I’ve never heard of. I love these Eclipse Series from Criterion, as they give us a bundle of films at a cheap price. They come without their usual extras, but they are still cleaned up and look great.

I was too young to have seen Raiders of the Lost Ark in theaters when it came out in 1980, but I must have watched it a million times on television soon after.  I did see Temple of Doom in the theater. Probably three or four times. I would have been about 11 years old.  I loved it.

As a kid I especially loved all the stuff that made the moral majority people clutch their pearls which eventually led to the making of the PG-13 rating. My friends and I would constantly ask each other which thing we’d rather eat – snakes, bugs, or monkey brains. We would pretend to reach into each other’s chests and pull our hearts out. We dreamed of being on that awesome mine roller coaster.  

As an adult, I recognize the film’s many flaws. The least of which is not its cultural insensitivity, if not downright racism. Short Round is nothing but a Chinese stereotype, and there is a lot of stuff going on with the Indian characters and the “weird” stuff they eat. You could also certainly complain about the one female character and how she is nothing more than a “damsel in distress.” 

I do not think any of this was intentional by the filmmakers in the sense that they were not trying to be racist or sexist. I think a lot of that comes from how the Indiana Jones films are Spielberg and Lucas riffing on the old serial films they used to watch as kids. Old adventure films were rife with racist tropes and inherent sexism.

But I’m also going to table that discussion. I’ll let the experts dig into that stuff. I feel like when talking about this film, you need to mention those concerns and recognize their validity, but at the same time I don’t want to get bogged down in them.

Also this film rips.

It is generally considered the worst of the original trilogy. Spielberg has distanced himself, claiming it was made during a difficult time in his life (he was getting divorced) and it is too dark. I’ll stand by the opinion that it isn’t as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Last Crusade, but those are pretty high watermarks. There is still a ton of stuff to love in this film.

The opening scene in Shanghai, for starters. It begins with Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw, who later married Spielberg) singing “Anything Goes.” Spielberg shoots it like a classic musical. When the song ends, Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) enters. He’s made a deal with a Chinese gangster, trading the remains of some ancient emperor for a precious diamond.

Set in 1935, one year before the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark, making this film technically a prequel. They say Lucas and Spielberg didn’t want Indiana fighting Nazis again, so they set it a little earlier than the first film and moved the locations to Asia. It is interesting that in this film Indiana Jones is all about fortune and glory, and makes no mention of anything belonging in a museum.

With the help of Short Round (Ke Huy Quan), Indiana’s young sidekick, the three of them escape Shanghai but find themselves on a plane owned by the bad guy. The pilots dump the fuel and jump out of the plane, leaving it to crash into the Himalayas. Our heroes jump out of the plane using an inflatable raft as a sort of parachute and then sled that zooms down the snow covered mountain and over an impossibly high cliff and into some major rapids.

This scene is cartoonish in its impossibility. Most of the film will continue in this pattern. Raiders wasn’t exactly grounded in realism, but Temple of Doom pushes the bounds of possibility to an absurd degree. Not that it matters. It is still extraordinarily enjoyable.

They’ll be picked up by some villagers who explain that some thieves stole their sacred rock and their children, and ever since, everything has gone bad. Our heroes head to a palace where they are treated with kindness (and those crazy food choices.) There they will find a hidden passage that takes them to an underground temple and a group of cultists who practice child slavery and human sacrificing. 

It all culminates in a wild chase scene with our heroes riding a mine cart like a roller coaster through an impossibly long shaft and then battling it out on a ridiculously high rope bridge. 

I don’t know why I’m describing the plot; you’ve probably seen this film. It is crammed full with wonderfully crafted action sequences. Even when it slows down, it’s still entertaining. 

You do have to table some of that insensitive stuff, and I completely understand those who can’t do that, but if you can this is a heck of a ride.

I’m still playing around with these shows in history posts. I’m having a lot of fun uploading single songs to YouTube. Right now I’m just picking out a show from this day, finding a song I like and putting it up. If I get good at this I may do more, or have more to say about it.

Unless the powers that be start taking me down. But for now this is fun. I hope you enjoy.

Nightfall (1956)

Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Starring Aldo Ray, Anne Bancroft, Frank Albertson, and Frank Keith

Synopsis: An innocent man turns fugitive as he reconstructs events that implicate him for a murder and robbery he did not commit.

Rating: 8/10

I was looking for a horror movie to watch yesterday afternoon (because it was Friday), but then my wife sat down next to me, and she doesn’t like horror. So I went searching for something else.  The Criterion Channel is hosting three noirs from Tourneur, and I landed on this one mostly because it was short. And I’d seen it before and knew it was good. 

I love the way it begins. With Aldo Ray sitting by his lonesome in a bar. Ann Bancroft approaches him, says she’s lost her wallet, and can he loan her five bucks to pay for her drinks? He does, and they have a nice time. Even get a little dinner.  Then when they leave, two thugs come at them with guns and take him away. 

In flashbacks we’ll learn he was out in the mountains with his friend fishing and hunting. The two bad guys have a wreck near them. Our heroes try to help and find themselves face to face with guns. They’ve just robbed a bank, have a satchel full of cash, and need no witnesses.  Aldo Ray escapes. The bad guys accidentally mistake his bag for their money bag. By the time they realize their mistake, Aldo has split, hidden the money, and high-tailed it.

He wandered around the country doing odd jobs, biding his time until the coast was clear. He finds himself in Los Angeles when he meets Ann Bancroft.  Meanwhile insurance investigator James Gregory has been on Also’s tail since the beginning. But he’s not so sure if he had anything to do with the robbery.

Anyway, this is supposed to be a short review. There is a nice mix of dark city noir and scenes set in the wide open spaces of the mountains. Aldo Ray is a little flat, but everybody else is terrific and the story is great.

I’ve talked about the J-Horror craze of the 2000s in these pages a few times. Generally speaking, Japanese horror from this time period relied more on mood than gore. Their stories often involved elements of folklore, and the villains were often ghosts or other supernatural elements. 

But there is another side to the J-Horror phenomenon that is part of the larger Asian Extreme horror movement. Folks like Takashi Miike were making films filled with heavy violence and gruesome depravity.

Evil Dead Trap falls into the latter category. 

It is the kind of film I would have loved back in the late 2000s, when I was first discovering horror films outside the slashers I loved as a teenager and the classic Universal stories I loved in college. Back then I loved extreme horror. I thought it was cool to discover these weird little films that took gore to the max.

These days I prefer my horror a bit more gothic and subdued.

This film starts out promising. Nami Tsuchiya (Miyuki Ono) hosts a late-night TV show. It is the sort of thing that likes showing off the wild and the weird. She often asks folks to send her videotapes of their crazy stuff. One day she gets a tape showing a woman (that looks remarkably like her) having her eyeballs sliced open and her stomach stabbed. It looks real. She is intriged.  She takes her fellow showmakers to an abaonded military base where she thinks the film was shot.

Naturally, things go bad.  A killer starts picking them off in some pretty gruesome ways. It feels a lot more like those slashers from the 1980s than a typical Japanese horror movie.  This is especially true in the buildup. Our heroes consist of five girls and one guy. Of course they split into groups to explore the grounds.  Nami goes at it alone. The guy and the girls have sex. Then he hides and jumps out to scare everyone.

Nami runs into a creepy guy, Daisuke Muraki (Yuji Honma) who says he’s there looking for his brother. He warns Nami to stay away from the place, then goes off on his own. There is a touch of Saw in one scene with a complicated trap set, forcing one of the girls to kill the other.  The score is reminiscent of something Goblin would do for Dario Argento, with a main theme repeating every time the killer comes near.

It is unnerving, and it pushes hard into the extreme horror ideas with lots of gore and a pretty horrific rape scene.  The last act gets really goofy, weird, and gross. 

It really is the kind of film I would have loved twenty years ago. It is one of those things I’d love to ask other people if they’d seen it, feeling cool because they hadn’t.  And then going into some of the wilder details.

These days I can admire what it’s doing and appreciate the weirdness, but I can’t say I really liked it.

I love the idea of regularly doing a shows in history post. It seems super fun to listen to a show that happened on this day sometime in the past. I do have to train myself to remember to actually listen to a show from this day in history.

Also, the last couple of times I did this, I got a lot of questions concerning where you could download the show.  I need to make sure everyone knows I am no longer uploading shows. If I do a show in history, it is just for fun. It is just to talk about the show, but I won’t be putting download links on this site.

I have been having fun uploading one song from a show to YouTube. I’m still learning how to do it properly, but it seems like a fun way to share a snippet of the shows I’m talking about.

In this case I haven’t had time to actually listen to any show from today. I did listen to a bit of this show from Bob Dylan in Montreal, 1980. The audience recording isn’t great. And to be honest, I wasn’t really in the mood for Christian Bob, but this version of “Slow Train Coming” is a good one and I thought you all might enjoy.

I’ll try to do some more actual Shows in History posts soon.

I’ve been a fan of David Tennant since I watched him in Doctor Who. I try to watch him in just about everything he does (but he does a lot of things, so I’m always way behind.) I caught him in the first season of Broadchurch right as it was airing.  I think that was the first time I ever saw Olivia Colman in anything, but I immediately became a fan.

That first season was excellent. It was one of those murders in a small, picturesque British village type things that they’ve done a million times, but the writing was good and the acting was excellent. 

I was worried that season two would do what a lot of these types of stories do when they get a second season and add yet another murder to solve in this same sleepy little village, but it circumvents that problem in interesting ways. 

I never did get around to watching Season Three, but reading this old review makes me want to go through the entire thing again.  You can read my review of Season Two here.

I’ve been a comics reader for about fifteen years now. I’m not hardcore about it. I’m not one of those people who reads single issues as they come out each month. I read the stories packaged into graphic novels or omnibuses. I’m fairly random at that too, just picking up one book here and there without paying much attention to where it falls within the greater continuity of the character.

My favorites are Batman and X-Men (although I also really love Saga, Chew, and Sandman, among others.) Those two favorites have been around for decades. They have a long list of writers. They have all sorts of spin-off characters (X-Factor, New Mutants, Nightwing, Catwoman, etc.) that get their own runs. And then there are all kinds of one-off stories and side stories, and to be honest, I don’t really understand it. I get lost in all the titles.

Shadows of the Bat ran from 1992-2000 and its focus was on side characters. Or at least that’s what the Wikis say. But while the cover of this graphic novel has “Shadows of the Bat” on it, the single issues were apparently released as part of the Batman Detective Comics line.  Like I said, I don’t understand all this stuff.

House of Gotham focuses on a boy whose family was killed by the Joker.  Batman tries to help him by putting him in a Wayne-funded orphanage and various other things, but he’s an awfully busy superhero, so the kid winds up slipping through the cracks.

He finds help in the strangest of places – some of Gotham’s most notorious villains take the boy under their wing. Clayface befriends him inside Arkham Asylum. Penguin gives him a job. It is true that these villains help the boy with ulterior motives, but at least they are truly present. Unlike Batman.

The story takes place over the course of about a decade. Some of Batman’s most notorious cases – Knightfall, where Bane breaks his back, and No Man’s Land, where an earthquake seals off Gotham from the world – serve as a backdrop to this story. We understand why Batman is so busy he can’t pay much attention to the boy, but also that this is still a failure of our hero.

The art by Fernando Blanco (Artist), Jordie Bellaire (Colorist) is excellent, and the writing by Matthew Rosenberg is good.  I love these kinds of stories where we get to know more about characters who would normally be in the background, who might normally get just a page or two, or a few lines to move the larger plot along.  I’m also a huge fan of stories that allow the more famous stories to be seen just in passing. 

I’ve been trying to read every Batman story ever written (a monumental task, I know).  I bought this one randomly because it was on sale for cheap. I’m glad I did because I really liked it.

I used to write a lot more TV reviews. For a while, back when this blog was still young, I’d actually do what they now call recaps of different shows (running down the plots of single episodes and discussing their good and bad points.) Sometimes I wish I’d stuck with that, as it later became something you could actually make a living at. But it was a lot of work, and I stopped.  But even after that, I did a lot of seasonal reviews when the DVDs came out.

I don’t do that anymore, but I keep thinking about it. In my continuing effort to write about all the arts I consume (and I really hate that word – consume – but it is hard to find a better one that fits all the arts), I may try and do more TV talking.

I hate to sound like a broken record as I’m posting all these old reviews, but I don’t remember this show at all. It sounds like it had a lot of potential but wound up being just another dumb cop show.  You can read my review of it here.

For a time in the late 1970s and 1980s, Stephen King published several books under the pen name Richard Bachman. His publishers didn’t think it was a good idea for King to release more than one book a year, and he is a prolific writer, so he came up with Bachman as a way to release more books.

The Bachman books tend to be grittier, more intense, and grim. Such is the case with The Running Man.  Set in the near future (2025!) America’s economy is in shambles and has become a totalitarian hellscape (!).  The gulf between the rich and the poor has never been wider (!!). To keep the poor from rioting, the government has created a Games Network that features a variety of violent game shows in which people can win loads of cash (if they don’t die in the process, which they usually do.)

The biggest game and the one you can win the biggest loot from is The Running Man, where a few folks are set loose into the world, given a small head start, and then hunted like animals. The longer they survive, the more money their surviving family will receive. 

Ben Richards is poor; his wife has turned to prostitution to make ends meet, and his young daughter is very sick. He becomes a Running Man. He learns he will do anything to survive – lie, cheat and even kill.  He also learns there is a whole underground movement trying to get the people to rise up against the government.

This is King at his most cynical and his grimiest. He breaks his story into tiny chapters (each one with a heading counting down to presumably Richard’s end). There is none of that usual King excess. As such, we barely get to know Richards or this world he’s living in. Still, it is a cool concept, and King is always good at keeping me turning the page.

It is nothing like the Arnold Schwarzenegger film from the 1980s. The more recent adaptation is much more faithful, but it loses a lot of the stories bleakness.

Cherry 2000 (1987)

Directed by Steve De Jarnatt

Starring Melanie Griffith, David Andrews, Pamela Gidley, Ben Johnson, Marshall Bell, and Harry Carey, Jr.

Synopsis: When successful businessman Sam Treadwell finds that his android wife, Cherry model 2000, has blown a fuse, he hires sexy renegade tracker E. Johnson to find her exact duplicate. But as their journey to replace his perfect mate leads them into the treacherous and lawless region of ‘The Zone,’ Treadwell learns the hard way that the perfect woman is made not of computer chips and diodes.

Rating: 3/10

The other day a friend of mine posted on Facebook saying that he had created a Substack, and he linked to his first post.  It was a bunch of nothing. Just a list of some recent movies he’d watched and a couple of words (not even full sentences) on what he thought. That was it.

I was shocked. I’m shy about promoting my official reviews or well-thought-out essays on social media, and here he was proudly posting this nonsense.  I was kind of jealous, actually. 

I have always had this idea that I should post about everything I’m reading, watching, and listening to. I like the idea that this blog could be just a collection of little things, mad thoughts, pictures of my cats, etc. But I’m bad at it. I’m bad at social media. I just don’t have the personality to post regularly everyday.

This is especially true with thoughts about films and the like. I always feel like I should write full reviews. But I just don’t have the time or mental energy for that. This is also complicated by the fact that I do write full reviews for Cinema Sentries and this little blog. When I hope to write full reviews, then I don’t write little bitty ones. But then sometimes I don’t write full reviews. 

Even for things I know I’m not going to write full reviews on, I sometimes write things for Five Cool Things. It seems silly to write some little something here and then have to repeat myself for those articles.

And yet.  And yet, here I am. I’m gonna try and do better. I’m gonna try and write at least a tiny thought on the various things I’m enjoying (or not enjoying, as the case may be.) If I then write full reviews, or include it in Five Cool Things, then that’s just the way it is.

Or, knowing me, I’ll write this one post and then never do this again.

And here are a couple of thoughts about Cherry 2000.  For a movie about a dude hiring a sexy bounty hunter to find his sexbot in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, this movie is really rather dull. 

There is a version of this film that is wild, sexy, and fun. One that leans into the ridiculous nature of that story. But this movie just limps along. Melanie Griffith is dressed with absolute drab, and her performance isn’t much better.

Sometimes when I’m reading these old reviews, I wonder what I was thinking. In this review of Rio Bravo that I wrote in 2015, I compare it to High Noon (famously, Howard Hawks made Rio Bravo because he thought High Noon was stupid). I note that both movies are great, but I’d give High Noon the higher rating. I can’t believe I wrote that.  I still think both films are great, but in terms of sheer entertainment, Rio Bravo is one of the greatest movies ever made. 

I think about it often. I pull it out to watch pretty regularly. I rarely think about High Noon.  But whatever, you can still read my review even if I don’t even agree with it myself.

Every now and again my connections to Cinema Sentries will give me access to something fun beyond just getting Blu-rays to review. I’ll get tickets to a con or to some special event. Just before Inside Out was released, I got to go to an event with my family where they gave you a commemorative poster (I still have it; it hangs on my wall right behind me), and there was some fun behind the scenes stuff on the screen. We had a lot of fun, and the movie was great. You can read all about it here.

There is just too much TV to watch these days. I can’t keep up. I can’t even remember what I’m keeping up with. Ripper Street periodically pops up as a recommendation to me in my streaming feeds. Sometimes I think I ought to watch it. Apparently, I already have. At least the third season. Reading my review, I have the vaguest recollection of watching it. At least some of those plot points sound familiar. I don’t know if that means I should go back and watch the entire thing, or if I should just give up on it entirely. but I did like that third season, so that’s something.

I have this memory from my teenage years of walking through Mega Movies – the former Burger King turned massive video store rental place – looking for something to watch. We went there at least once a week (and in the summer multiple times a week). Going so often, I’d reach the point where I’d seen all the new releases and regularly dug into the regular shelves. But it was a big enough place I’d still stumble upon something that looked interesting.

I remember seeing an adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. The cover had a girl in a bikini or some scantily clad outfit, and she was standing by a great big hook of some kind. That cover and the fact that the title had “screw” in it made me think this was something titillating, not an adaptation of one of the great literary works of the last century.

I want to say I rented it and was greatly disappointed by it, but I really can’t remember.  But the idea they were trying to reach dumb, horny teens like me with a scintillating cover for a Henry James adaptation makes me smile. I just tried to figure out which adaptation it was, but I had no luck. 

This is not that movie, but a rather dull BBC adaptation starring Michelle Dockery and Dan Stevens. You can read my review at Cinema Sentries.

Originally posted on Cinema Sentries in 2015.

Akira Kurosawa is one of my favorite film directors.  Shinobu Hashimoto is one of the great Japanese screenwriters.  The two collaborated on some of the greatest films ever made, including The Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and Throne of Blood. This book, written by Hashimoto, details that collaboration, but dives into how he became a screenwriter and gives tips on how to write a script.  It’s pretty darn cool.  You can read all about it over at Cinema Sentries.

I’m once again going back through my old Cinema Sentry reviews and posting them here.  I wrote this review back in April of 2016, so almost exactly 11 years ago. I haven’t seen the film since. Reading my review, I seem to have liked it so I may have to remedy that soon.

The Immigrant stars Marion Cotillard as an immigrant to the United States. Jeremy Renner and Joaquin Phoenix are two guys that make her life miserable.  Yet it is a story of hope and grace. You can read my full review here.

My daughter is celebrating her birthday this weekend. We spent a large chunk of last night putting up decorations, cleaning the house, and otherwise preparing for her party. By the time we were done, I was whooped. I managed to watch this movie, but I was way too tired to write about it. So once again you get a Friday Night Horror Movie on Saturday morning.

When I think of movies from the 1980s, I naturally think of movies I loved as a kid. Movies I actually watched during the ’80s. Then there were also movies that I did not watch. Movies I knew about, but that wasn’t for me. Weren’t for kids. Movies for adults I had no interest in. There were other movies that I’d see in the video rental store but didn’t rent for one reason or another.  And finally, there are movies like Q: The Winged Serpent. Movies I’d never heard of until much later.  Way after the 1980s.  I mean, I don’t think I saw this film in a video store; surely I would have remembered that crazy cover of a dragon-looking monster on top of the Chrysler Building.

But as an adult, this film kept popping up in my feeds. Someone would talk about it on social media, or it would come up in some list. It definitely kept rearing its head when I went searching for movies to watch from the 1980s.

I put off watching it for a long time because I kept getting it confused with another 1980s horror movie. One whose name I can’t remember now, but that apparently has some pretty nasty rape scenes, and I’m never in the mood for that.

Gillian and Dave are curretnly doing a small tour where they are playing Grateful Dead and Dead adjacent tunes. None of the shows were anywhere near me (though they are playing a free gig in Tulsa later this month, but it isn’t listed as part of this tour, and presumably will play their own songs). Man I wish I’d spent the money and caught one of these shows. This snippet is amazing.

The first sequel to Poltergeist did quite well, easily enough for the powers that be to want to make another film, but most of the cast had had enough. But when did a little thing like 80 percent of the cast refusing to return stop a studio from trying to cash in yet again on a successful franchise?  They talked 12-year-old Heather O’Rourke into coming back as Carol Ann and sent her character off to live with some relatives in New York City. Naturally, the ghosts follow her.  It’s actually not half bad, all things considered.

Carol Ann was sent to New York to attend a special school for kids who are both gifted and have emotional problems.  She lives with her Aunt Patricia (Nancy Allen), her Uncle Bruce (Tom Skerritt), and their daughter Donna (Laura Flynn Boyle).  Bruce is in charge of a fancy, new, very modern skyscraper, which they all live in.

Carol Ann is having a pretty rough time at it. Patricia is annoyed at her existence, and didn’t really want to take her in. Bruce is more sympathetic, but he’s very busy running the place and doesn’t have nice things to say about the rest of her family (he thinks they dumped her on them because of some bad real estate deals Carol Ann’s daddy got into, and doesn’t believe any of the haunting nonsense). Donna is very nice, but she’s also a teenager more interested in partying with her friends and dreaming about boys than dealing with a young girl’s problems.  The dude that runs the school is a jerk, thinks Carol Ann made up all the paranormal stuff from her life, and is faking her newfound psychic abilities. 

So yeah, her time in New York has been tough, and now the ghosts are coming back, especially the specter of Kane, who now is fully a ghost and can’t take on a physical form like he could in the last movie. He’s after Carol Ann because she can lead him to the next life or something.

Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein) comes back too, mostly to explain to the family that the ghosts are real and Carol Ann’s powers are true.  Most of the story is utter nonsense, but the skyrise is a nice setting for this sort of thing. Most of it seems to be made of mirrors, and the ghosts now live inside mirrors, so there is a lot of fun with reflections and the like. I’m honestly not sure how the special effects team pulled some of the visuals off. 

It isn’t a very good movie by any means, but I liked it more then the second one. The mirror work really is quite fun, and they also do some cool stuff with puddles of water. 

In elementary school I can remember bragging about how many times I’d seen the original Star Wars. I’d even brag that my brother had seen it more than me, something like 27 different times. My mother says it played constantly on HBO, and we’d watch it every time it was on.

But then I also remember when I was a young teenager renting the original trilogy, and it felt like new. I knew I had seen the films before, but I only had vague memories of them. And I can remember excitedly talking to my friends about it like it was a new discovery. 

Yet I also remember watching Return of the Jedi in the theater. I would have been seven years old.  

I don’t know what to make of all that except that memory is a weird thing.

I don’t remember ever seeing Poltergeist II: The Other Side before. I’d never logged it on Letterboxd or IMDB. For the first two thirds of the film, nothing was familiar. And then the family ran into the garage to flee the ghosts. Suddenly I remembered that they were about to get attacked by power tools. Suddenly I remembered talking about that scene with my friends right after we watched the movie. We felt it was the best scene in the entire film.  Clearly I had seen the film before; I just couldn’t remember it.  

Like I say, memory is a weird thing.

Truth be told, other than that garage scene, most of the movie is rather forgettable.

Poltergeist was so popular a sequel was inevitable. The trouble was how do you make a sequel to a haunted house movie when the haunted house was completely destroyed at the end of the movie?

The reasoning for the haunting in Poltergeist was that they built the house on top of an old cemetery and only bothered to  move the headstones and not the actual corpses.

For the sequel, they retcon some business about how underneath the Freelings house not only was there part of a cemetery but also a big cave where an insane preacher incarcerated his flock because he felt the end of the world was nigh.  They all died there, and the preacher has now turned into a spectral beast that’s now hunting poor Carole Anne (Heather O’Rourke) because of her time spent in the netherworld, and maybe she can help get him out.

Or something. It is all a lot of silly hogwash.

The preacher (Julian Beck) can manifest into a physical form and looks a bit like a reject from Children of the Corn. He’s actually quite creepy and makes for the second-best part of the entire film.

The Freeling family has moved in with Diane’s (JoBeth Williams) mother. They are trying their best to forget about the past and move on with their lives. But Carole Ann keeps having psychic visions, and that darn preacher keeps showing up. Then the old psychic from the first movie, Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), shows up declaring all sorts of terrible things to come.

The thing I loved about the first film is that it slowly revealed what was happening. It allowed us to get to know the Freelings, and the scares were doled out a little at a time. That built the tension over the course of the movie.

It isn’t that things come too fast in this movie, for it too takes its time before the real scares come, but the buildup just isn’t interesting. Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg made those early scenes fun to watch. Here it’s just a lot of myth building that the first film didn’t need.

There are some good scares. The preacher is creepy, and that garage scene is great. There is another moment where Steve Freeling (Craig T. Nelson) eats the worm in a bottle of tequila, and things get really nasty. 

But mostly this feels like a sequel that was rushed into production without much thought being given to why it should exist at all.

My church youth minister turned me on to Monty Python when I was in high school. He showed us Holy Grail first, and when we loved that, he showed us Life of Brian. By us I mean me and a few of my friends – older kids in the youth group who he thought could both enjoy the material and wouldn’t make a fuss (or, more likely, whose parents wouldn’t make a fuss if they found out.)

In typical youth minister fashion, he tried to tell us that Life of Brian was actually an incisive critique of certain sects of Judaism and could be applied to Christianity if you looked at it right.  Or some such thing. 

I also remember him standing in front of the television set during a brief nude scene. 

I loved both films and later watched The Meaning of Life and lots of the TV series. I watched them a lot in college, and then they kind of vanished from my life. It wasn’t so much that I stopped liking them but that I’d had enough of them and moved on. Then I kind of forgot about them.

My wife randomly turned on Holy Grail the other day, and my goodness, that movie is funny. It was wild how much I could still quote even though I haven’t seen it in decades.

I still haven’t watched Life of Brian again, but I know it is still funny, and now that Criterion is giving it the UHD treatment, I’m totally on board for it being my pick of the week.

Also coming out this week that looks interesting:

The Phantom: The 1990s were a weird time for superhero movies. Tim Burton’s Batman made a splash in 1989, but the sequels were less than great. There were some good ones like The Crow and Blade, but there were a lot of films that just didn’t seem to know what they were doing. 

The Phantom stars Billy Zane as a hero from Bengalla who must travel to New York to protect some magic skulls and fight bad guys. It bombed upon release, but like so many things from the 1990s, it has been reappreciated and is now getting a UHD release from Kino Lorber.

Trouble in Paradise: Ernst Lubitsch is one of those guys who many of my film loving friends absolutely adore. I’ve only seen a couple of his films, and while I’ve enjoyed them, I didn’t fall head over heels for them or him as a director. But I need to watch more. This one is about a love triangle between two jewel thieves and their intended victim.  Criterion has the UHD release.

Becoming Led Zeppelin: Documentary about the band.

Remo Williams: Fred Ward stars in this silly attempt at creating a new action hero from some old stories. You can read my full review here.

Death Ship: Goofy horror film about a Nazi torture ship cruising the ocean looking for new victims.  You can read my full review here.

Hearts of Darkness: The Making of The Final Friday: Documentary about the making of one of the more interesting Friday the 13th movies.

Growing up, I was a big fan of late-night talk shows. As a kid I watched Johnny Carson whenever I was allowed to stay up that late. I didn’t always get the jokes in the monologue, but sometimes I did. I loved the silly skits, especially Carnac the Magnificent. And I usually enjoyed the various celebrity guests. 

But while Carson had been cool, he was also old when I started watching, and for a young teenager, old meant decidedly not cool.  At some point Carson was old enough he couldn’t do it every night, and Jay Leno became the permanent guest host, taking the reins on Monday nights. I loved Leno. I made sure I always watched when he was hosting. 

In eighth grade I took a drama class at school, and one of our assignments was to read up on the celebrity of our choice and then pretend to do an interview with them. I chose Jay Leno to interview. I thought that would make me cool.

It amuses me to no end to think that back then I thought Jay Leno – who I would now consider to be the blandest and most vanilla celebrities – was the coolest guy around.

At some point I discovered David Letterman. I don’t think I ever thought he was cool – he was more nerdy and weird, like me. He was hilarious. With his Stupid Pet Tricks and doing things like wearing a Velcro suit and jumping onto a wall, he was like nobody I’d ever seen before.  I learned a lot about my own sense of humor from David Letterman.

And then there was Arsenio Hall.  Now he was cool. His guests were cool, his musical acts were cool. His audience was cool doing the whole “whoof whoof” thing instead of clapping and The Dogpound.

He wasn’t just cool; he was hip. He was tuned into a part of the culture that guys like Carson or Leno and even Letterman just didn’t understand.  I loved it.

One night, during his monologue, Arsenio started chanting, “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire,” the crowd ecstatically joined in. He continued, “We don’t need no water no…” and as the crowd started to say the next line, Arsenio smiled, waved his hands back and forth emphatically, and told them to stop. He couldn’t sing the next line, or he’d get in trouble. The audience went crazy.

I think he did the same thing the next night and maybe a few times more over the next couple of weeks. I was intrigued. I had no idea what song they were singing. But I liked it. I was especially curious about what that next line was. What could be so bad that they couldn’t say it on Arsenio?

Sometime later I discovered it was “…let the motherfucker burn.”

I don’t remember ever listening to the song. It certainly didn’t become a staple. It is possible my brother simply told me what the line was, and I never actually heard it.  But that moment on Arsenio stuck in my mind. I loved the way the audience shouted it with glee.

To this day I’ll periodically say, “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire” just to see if anyone responds.  I did that the other day while I was on a walk with my family. They had no idea what I was talking about.  This made me want to listen to the song.

Pulling it up on Spotify made me realize how little of the song I actually know. The famous part doesn’t come in until the very end, and everything before that is rather repetitive and annoying. 

I get why it became a hit and why Arsenio was singing it that day. It would be a fun song to have playing in a club or at a party, or indeed singing on late night TV. It has a good beat, and it has these sing-along lyrics where it asks the audience to repeat back and forth, and then there is the roof. That’s a crazy fun thing to shout. That’s cool on a dance floor but rather tedious listening in your car. I swear I almost turned it off before it even got to the part about the roof and it being on fire.

Still, those memories are good ones, and you can bet I’ll still be repeating those lines even as an old man.

I was too young to have seen Poltergeist in the theater, but I discovered it not long after on home video and cable television. It became one of the defining movies of the 1980s for me. But unlike films like The Goonies or Harry and the Hendersons, Poltergeist still holds up remarkably well all these years later, even watching it as an adult (and I say that as someone who still enjoys The Goonies but recognizes its many flaws).

It certainly helps that it had Steven Spielberg as a cowriter and a very hands-on producer. This is Spielberg in the 1980s, the absolute peak of his powers. There is actually a bit of controversy over how much work he did on this film. Tobe Hooper is the credited director, but it has long been rumored that Spielberg did most of the helming. He was in the middle of making E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial at the time, and his contract on that film said he couldn’t direct anything else while making that film.

As far as I can tell, Hooper did direct it, but Spielberg was on set most days, was very enthusiastic about the picture, and likely persuaded Hooper to his way of directing in numerous moments.

Whoever directed what, this is still a great movie. I made my daughter watch it with me last night, and she loved it. I still do, too.

Something I noticed this time around was that the Freeling family are good people. They all clearly love each other, and there aren’t any real problems going on between them. Spielberg’s parents divorced when he was 19 years old, and it had a clear impact on him and his art. Many of his films deal with broken homes, so it is interesting to see how solid the marriage is in this film.

I love how deliberate the film is with its storytelling and the manner in which it doles out the horror. It begins with Carole Ann (Heather O’Rourke) putting her hands on the TV playing static just after the patriotic sign-off (and I had to explain to my daughter that TV used to shut down for the night) and talking to it. The next night she’ll do it again and utter her famous “they’re here.”

Before that, the boy Robbie (Oliver Robbins) will get frightened by a storm, the creepy tree just outside his window, and a clown doll (that freaking clown!), both of which will come back later in terrifying ways. But then we’ll see the dad, Steve (Craig T. Nelson), come in to comfort him. He explains how you can tell a storm is moving away by counting the time between the lightning flash and the thunder (something I did for years after watching this.). When the storm moves closer, the two youngest will wind up sleeping with Steve and their mother, Diane (Jobeth Williams,) but not before Steve tells his oldest daughter, Dana (Dominique Dunne), to get off the phone and go to bed.

All of this allows us to see that this is a real, loving family. We’ll later see Diane fixing the kids breakfast and Steve trying to sell a house to a nice couple. These are nice, normal people.

The frights are slowly dropped into these domestic scenes. The dining room chairs stack themselves onto the table. It gives Diane a fright, but then she’s curious about it. She experiments with them. By the time Steve gets home, she’s figured out if you place a chair in one spot, it will slide to another. She’s even marked the starting spot with a circle on the floor and drawn arrows down to indicate its path. She’s more fascinated by this than scared. She’ll even allow Carol Anne (with a football helmet on) to slide across the floor.

This is the most Spielbergian moment in the film to me. There is a sense of wonder about what’s going on here. It reminds me of that scene in Close Encounter of the Third Kind where the little boy stands in front of a doorway with this immense bright light shining down on him. His early films always had this sense of marvel and delight at the unexplained and unknown.

Then, of course, all hell breaks loose. The ghosts come, Carol Ann disappears, that freaking clown attacks. The horror amplifies. As an audience member, I am thrilled. They bring in parapsychologists to study the phenomenon. A powerful medium, Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), comes to try and contact Carol Ann. She gets a great entrance, marching into the house as everybody moves out of her path until she comes into the living room, her hair pulled back, her big glasses shining, her small stature feeling so big.

All of this allows the film to pull back a little from the horror. So many horror films lean into the monsters; they push them into our faces so we’ll be scared. This film studies the phenomenon, allowing the audience to feel slightly safer. That sense of wonder remains. But then again the scares come, and we are unsettled. It is a brilliant balancing act, pushing and pulling us between that sense of wonder and being scared out of our wits.

I forgot how much I loved this film, but watching it again with my daughter made me relish just how brilliantly it is made and how fantastic it still remains.

I love 1980s movies. In particular, I love 1980s horror movies. Sandwiched between the gritty, no-holds-barred horror of the 1970s and the more self aware horror of the 1990s, the 1980s was like the Wild West for horror. Literally anything goes.

The ratings system allowed 1970s horror to be more gruesome than ever before, and the 1980s horror films picked that up and ran with it. The home video market allowed for even more flexibility in terms of violence and sexuality. But it also allowed independent studios to make low-budget films and find an audience like never before.

And while certainly there are all sorts of no-budget, terrible-looking films from the 1980s, the decade also saw a lot of fascinating horror films made on a shoestring by craftspeople who cared about what they were doing and had the artistry to create something fun.

TerrorVision is not a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but it is lovingly made and well crafted. It is a mix of goopy horror and goofy comedy.

On an alien planet, a worker bee periodically converts a monstrous mutant into energy beams and launches it into deepest space. One day he accidentally sends the beams down to Earth, where they are picked up by the Putterman family’s new DIY satellite dish.

Mom and Dad Putterman are pretty careless parents and big-time swingers. Their house is full of sexed-up pop art, she wears tight leather skirts, and he’s all unbuttoned shirts with bit gold necklaces. The grandfather is a conspiracy theorist gun nut who sleeps in a bomb shelter. The daughter is a punk rocker who’s dating a metalhead named OD, and the son is learning to follow in Grandpa’s footsteps.

The alien who accidentally sent the monster to Earth keeps showing up on their TV screens begging them to destroy the satellite dish and turn off the TV. But everybody just thinks its some dumb sci-fi flick being shown by an Elvira-esque TV hots who mostly exists to show off her cleavage.

It is basically one of those alien-invasion sci-fi 1950s movies with a totally ’80s bent. The alien comes in through the TV and starts eating everyone. The effects are wild. It in no way looks real, but it is imaginative and well-made.

Maybe it is my age, but I much prefer practical effects over CGI. The monster here looks fake. Obviously it isn’t a real alien monster, and you can tell it was made with rubber, wire, and latex. But it feels tangible in a way that CGI never does. With these types of effects, someone had to sit down, come up with the concept, and then try and figure out how to make it with real stuff. That gives it a real quality that some kid sitting down at a computer can never duplicate.

Anyway, there are lots of dumb gags, a whole lot of silliness, and plenty of goopy monster violence. Like I say, it isn’t a great movie, but I appreciate its existence anyway.

I watched 45 movies in March. 29 of them were new to me. 14 of them were made before I was born. It was Westerns in March, and I watched seven of those. That’s a piddling number. As I’ve mentioned a couple of times now, I’ve been trying to up my game in terms of writing for Cinema Sentries. The more “official” reviews I do, the less time I have for watching what I want. You would think I’d want to watch whatever theme I’m doing in a given month, but that winds up feeling like work again, and so I just watch other stuff. I may be winding the whole monthly theme thing down. Or, more likely, I’ll just plan on writing about one theme movie a week or something like that.

It was a good month. It felt like a weird month, and looking back on everything I watched, I was a bit all over the place. I caught two movies in the theater (The Bride! and Project Hail Mary), which is rare for me. Favorite new-to-me watches included Project Hail Mary, Hamnet, Bleeder, and Hidden in the Fog.

The actors list changed quite a bit. I watched three films from director Nicolas Winding Refn, which tied him for second place, but those three films had actor Zlatko Burić in them, and apparently he is also in The Bride! and Wolfs, which put him in the top spot, even though I’d never heard of him before. We’ve been watching some Tom Baker era Doctor Who, and he’s tied for number one with five films. I’m glad to see Lino Ventura in the list as well. He’s one of my favorite French actors.

I got a boxed set of Yves Boisset films the other day.  Technically I watched them this month, but since Letterboxd doesn’t break them down like that, he gets counted in this journal.  I’ll have a review of that boxed set soon.

It is nice to see the director’s list getting filled out even if I haven’t seen a lot of movies from any one person.

Anyway, here’s the full list.

Bullet in the Head (1990) ****
Project Hail Mary (2026) ****
The Deadly Companions (1961) ***1/2
Doctor Who: Attack of the Cybermen (1985) ***1/2
A Perfect Murder (1998) ***
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) ***
Pusher II (2004) ***1/2
Dial M for Murder (1954) ****
From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) ****
Tea and Sympathy (1956) ****
Bye Bye Morons (2020) ***1/2
Once a Thief (1991) ****
A Bridge Too Far (1977) ***1/2
It All Came True (1940) ****
The Dancing Hawk (1978) **1/2
The Funhouse (1981) ***
Maigret Sees Red (1963) ***1/2
Hidden in the Fog (1953)
Hamnet (2025)
Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942)
Doctor Who: Warriors’ Gate (1981) ****
The Bride! (2026) ****
Big City Blues (1932) ***
Decision at Sundown (1957) ****
Doctor Who: State of Decay (1980) ****
The Marvels (2023) ***1/2
Jason X (2001) **
Ganja & Hess (1973) ***
Re-Wind (1988) ***
The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) ****
Dead for a Dollar (2022) ***1/2
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) ****
Doctor Who: Full Circle (1980) ****
Pusher (1996) ***1/2
Dead Again (1991) ***1/2
Bleeder (1999) ****
Valdez Is Coming (1971) ***1/2
Suspicion (1941) ***1/2
Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004) ***
Excalibur (1981) ****
The Quick and the Dead (1987) *1/2
Hour of the Gun (1967) ***

I love writing these posts. I love discovering cool looking sets for films I’ve never heard of. In this case my pick is a double-pack of films starring the great Japanese actress Meiko Kaji.

Other films out this week include Gilda, Carlito’s Way, The Thief of Bagdad and more. Click here to read all about it.

It is April 7, and I’m just now doing an Awesome 80s in April. That’s not entirely true; my last Friday Night Horror Movie was from the 1980s, and I’ve watched a couple of other movies from that decade. I’ll have those reviews up sometime  soon. But this is my first real mention of the theme, and we are a week into it. As I mentioned last week, I’ve been trying to write more official reviews for Cinema Sentries, which means my time to work on my themes is lessened.  But I’ll try to do a few more before the month is out (speaking of which, I realize I still haven’t written my movie journal for March… I’m so behind.

Anyway, I had a little free time this afternoon after watching and reviewing half a dozen movies for CS over the weekend, and I was happy to sit down with something I didn’t have to watch. The question then becomes, what do I want to watch?

I was tired and not in the mood to spend a lot of time deciding, and I definitely didn’t want to watch anything complicated that would make me think too hard.  I found this film on a streaming service; read the blurb:

“Wild teens (Martin Hewitt, Betsy Russell, Sherilyn Fenn) crash-land on an island of drug smugglers.”

And figured, why not? A big, dumb, wild teenagers movie should hit the spot. And it stars Sherilyn Fenn, who I loved in Twin Peaks, so that was a bonus.

I definitely got the dumb part right. This movie is utterly stupid.

It begins with basically a music video. A song called “Out of Control” plays while a bunch of teenagers (or probably twentysomethings made up to look like teenagers) smile at the camera, dance, and shake their heads. The entire song plays, and we realize this is a music video created by one of the teens being played at the prom. Weirdly, the video quality of that video is better than the actual film we are about to watch. Weirder still is that after several minutes of watching a video where teens dance to music, we get more music and more teens dancing at the prom.

Eventually several of the teens slip away, jump on a small boat, which takes them to  a small plane that is flying them to a small island for the weekend.  The plane crashes, and the kids swim to a deserted island. 

They freak out for a bit, and then one of them finds a hidden stash of booze and SPAM. So they settle down to a night of drinking, which leads to a game of Spin the Bottle, which leads to a game of Strip Spin the Bottle. Contrary to what my church leaders taught me, this does not lead to a lot of sexing. Almost everybody just passes out. One couple almost goes all the way, and the cool kid called Cowboy tries to get his girl down, but she says she wants her first time to be special.

This whole scene takes an incredibly long time. Music plays, and we see them spin the bottle and kiss, spin the bottle and kiss. Many times over, it’s spin the bottle and kiss.  Then dance. Then someone recommends stripping, so it’s spin the bottle and take off some clothes. Over and over again.

Clearly this movie had no budget, so they had to pad out their run time with dancing and half nakeness.

I paused the movie at some point, which moved it into my queue of “Now Watching” on our streaming stick.  My wife saw it, read that blurb, and asked me with a smile, “Are you enjoying your movie?  It sounds like its just an excuse to have a bunch of teenagers run around in their bikinis.”

I corrected her that it was really just an excuse for a bunch of teenagers to run around in their underwear. She gave me that knowing smile (knowing that I’m a complete dumb-dumb) and I finished the flick.

Eventually, something more happens. The drug smugglers show up. The kids think they are there to rescue them and climb aboard their boat. Then things get nasty.  The bad guys pull out guns, slap some of them around and attempt to rape one of the girls.  Luckily that cowboy kid didn’t get on the boat, and he comes to the rescue. The boat burns, then explodes, and the kids are stuck on the island again.

No kidding, the girl who was nearly raped was the girl who told the cowboy she was waiting for something special before she had sex. Naturally, after that horrifying experience, she has sex with the cowboy.

I threw my remote at the TV.

Some more bad guys show up, and there is a little gunplay. This actually isn’t half bad.  It isn’t good by any means, but it is better than dancing, kissing, or talking about kissing.  Blah, blah, blah, our heroes win, and they take this plane to safety.

I probably just spoiled the entire movie for you, but really and truly there is no reason to watch this. The few moments that are interesting aren’t worth all the really boring bits.

Wes Craven’s debut film, The Last House on the Left (1972), was quite successful financially, but its brutal violence led it to be censored and banned, and didn’t exactly make it easy for him to get financing for another film. He actually returned to his porno roots, making the hardcore incest film The Fireworks Woman, before he was able to get financing for another horror film, The Hills Have Eyes (1977). It was also a big hit, and from there he started to get really noticed.  He moved to Los Angeles and made several modest hits before directing A Nightmare on Elm Street, which made him a horror icon. 

Just before that film came out, he made this one for ABC TV. It is unbelievable that he made those two movies back to back. One is a horror masterpiece; the other is this film.

Invitation to Hell is like a mix of The Stepford Wives and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Matt Winslow (Robert Urich), is a brilliant computer scientist who prefers to work alone. But there isn’t a lot of money in that, so he eventually agrees to work for some big tech firm with his fraternity brother Tom Peterson (Joe Regalbuto). This involves a lot more money than he’s ever made before and a big office. This allows him, his wife Pat (Joanna Cassidy), and two children, Chrissy (Soleil Moon Frye) and Robert (Barrett Oliver), to move into a big, fancy house in the suburbs. 

He loves his job. The company is building a fancy spacesuit for NASA, and Matt is in charge of fitting it with lots of computer stuff so the astronauts will be able to do things like tell the surface temperature and determine if the living creature in front of them is human or alien.  The suit is also fireproof and shoots lasers.

Everyone at the office keeps pressuring him to join the Steaming Spring Country Club run by the beautiful Jessica Jones (Susan Lucci). But Matt isn’t a joiner, and something seems fishy at the club, so he keeps declining. But the wife and kids like the place, so they keep going to it, and eventually join.

All of this is reasonable well done. If you recognize it is a made-for-TV movie from the early 1980s and keep your expectations real low, then you might find you can enjoy yourself. The final 15 minutes are pretty great. Sort-of spoilers ahead for (again) a movie called Invitation to Hell – Matt finds a portal to Hell at the club, dons his fancy space suit, and goes in to save his family. Hell looks amazing. Craven saved all his budget for this scene. There are some great matte paintings and killer set designs. The climactic battle with Jessica (who wears an amazing dress) is, well, not all that climactic, but it doesn’t matter because the sets are so darn cool.

It is time for another round of Five Cool Things. This week we are talking about Project Hail Mary, Ghosts UK, Last One Laughing UK, From Dusk Till Dawn, Dial M For Murder, and a fun new trailer. Click here to check it out.

It is a fine time to be a John Woo fan. A great many of his films have recently received the UHD treatment. Bullet in the Head is just the latest, and the second one I’ve reviewed.

This is John Woo at his most epic and most personal. It features a trio of friends who constantly get into trouble and find themselves in the middle of the Vietnam War.  You can read my full review here.

I managed to listen to this show this afternoon and then got busy and forgot to write anything about it.  And now it is late, and I have some other things to do, so this will be short.

Get this show. It is excellent. There are at least two versions of it over at Expecting Rain, and I can’t recommend it enough.

Bob is in excellent form, and the band is on fire.  And if that wasn’t enough, you get Elvis Costello (guitar & shared vocals), Chrissie Hynde, and Carole King on a couple of songs.

Here’s the setlist:

Brixton Academy 
London, England 
31 March 1995 

01 – Crash On The Levee (Down In The Flood)
02 – SeÒor (Tales Of Yankee Power)
03 – All Along The Watchtower
04 – I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
05 – Tombstone Blues
06 – Shelter From The Storm
07 – Mr. Tambourine Man
08 – The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll
09 – It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
10 – Highway 61 Revisited
11 – In The Garden
12 – Joey (Bob Dylan-Jacques Levy/Bob Dylan)

  (encore)

13 – Like A Rolling Stone
14 – My Back Pages
15 – I Shall Be Released
16 – Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35

I uploaded “Shelter From the Storm” for your listening pleasure.

Other shows that were played on this date in history.

Miles Davis – Los Angeles, CA (03/31/46)

1984 (Featuring Brian May) – Teddington, England (03/31/67)

Queen – Tokyo, Japan (03/31/76)

I’m going to try this again. I do like this idea. I like looking at what shows were played on any particular day. There is a part of me that loves stats. I love seeing if there are particular days that have a lot of shows or others that have very few shows. When I am good at this sort of thing, you can follow a tour and see how often the setlists change, etc.

But really, right now, I like listening to shows that happen today. I have a lot of shows, and it is always difficult to know what to listen to. Finding a show that was performed on this day sometime in history is easy. And fun.  And here we go.

As much as I love Van Morrison, I’m not well versed in his different eras. I know about Them and the Caledonia Soul Orchestra, his time with Pee Wee Ellis, his brief stint with Linda Gail Lewis, etc. But I unlike with the Grateful Dead or Bob Dylan, I couldn’t tell you my favorite year for Van Morrison performances or anything really about a specific time period.  For me with Van I’m usually just picking out something at random and giving it a listen. I should work on that. 

I mention this to say I don’t really know what was going on with Van in 1991. I know he released Hymns to the Silence this year, and that’s a good album. But I don’t know if this is considered a good year for Van or not.

Listening to this show, I suspect it is a good year. The liner notes indicate the bootleg Pagan Streams was recorded around this time, and that one’s a killer.  This is a long show with something like 29 songs being played and running just over three hours in length.

Most of the first disc isn’t really my thing. I don’t tend to like his bluesy numbers. Songs like “Stormy Monday” and “Baby, Please Don’t Go” are fine, not bad, but they don’t really do it for me. 

Things pick up toward the end of Disc 1 with “And the Healing Has Begun” and the rest of the disc finishes out strongly. Disc 2 begins with “Help Me” which is another song I tend to not gravitate toward, though I’ve heard some good versions. This one is certainly energetic.

But then we get to “Orangefield” and I’m in heaven. The rest of the set is wonderful straight through. “Summertime in England” lasts a full twenty two minutes, which I think is the longest one he ever played. Certainly the longest version I’ve ever heard. 

Van is in good spirits throughout. He talks a lot, and the conversations are interesting.  

The sound quality is mostly good. The liner notes talk about how there was a low quality AUD that circulated for a long time, but then they found a new source of a much better quality. Unfortunately, that source doesn’t have all the songs, so they are spliced in, which can be a little jarring. Especially in the middle of “Summertime in England” which I guess got cut off in the best-sounding tape. 

If you don’t already have this, email me, and I’ll point you in the right direction.

Just for kicks I played around with it today and managed to upload “Whenever God Shines His Light” to YouTube. I really just wanted to see if I could do that.

Here are the full show notes.

Van Morrison
March 30, 1991
De Doelen – Rotterdam, Netherlands

Source: Daud clone, except for the three Georgie Fame selections, the conclusion to Summertime in England starting at approximately 17:00, and Caravan through end of show , which are from unknown generation cassettes > CD

The Complete Show

CD 1
1) You’re The One
2) Out of Sight
3) Ain’t That Loving You Baby
4) Stormy Monday,
5) Baby Please Don’t Go
6) We’re Gonna Groove > Who Do You Love (Van with Howlin’ Wilf and the Vee Jays (James Hunter)

7) Parchman Farm
8) Yeh Yeh
9) Green Onions (Georgie Fame and band)

10) And The Healing Has Begun
11) See Me Through
12) Moondance
13) Youth of 1000 Summers
14) Whenever God Shines His Light

CD 2:

1) Help Me
2) Carrying a Torch
3) Orangefield
4) It’s All In The Game > Make It Real One More Time
5) Northern Muse(Solid Ground) > When Heart Is Open
6) I’ll Go Crazy
7) Enlightenment
8) Summertime In England

CD 3:
1) In The Garden
2) Vanlose Stairway > Trans-Euro Train
3) Caravan
4) Send In The Clowns
5) I Can’t Stop Loving You
6) Why Must I Always Explain
7) Gloria (Cuts. Tape apparently gave out at 3-hour mark)

Band: Haji Ahkba, trumpet; Richie Buckley sax; Dave Early, drums; Georgie Fame, organ; Howard Francis, piano; Steve Gregory, sax; Ronnie Johnson, guitar; Nicky Scott, bass.

Notes:
Many years ago I received two Maxell analog cassette tapes containing this show.
The sound on the tapes was very muffled and sounded like the show was duplicated on a boom box with dirty heads.
Oh, those were the days.
Despite the sound quality caveats, Van and the band’s performance was a treasure that I cherished and studied because of its depth and length. I believe the Summertime in England is the longest ever performed by Van. It runs almost 22 minutes. Morrison talks about Christianity, psychiatry, and cults, among other things.
I searched and searched for a good quality recording of this gig for years, and finally one surfaced, but it ended 17 minutes into Summertime, then cut abruptly. The entire rest of the show involving an additional 7 songs was missing.
Recently, in a true labor of love, a friend and Van archivist and my brother helped prepare this complete version of the show, which contains the original nearly two hours of good quality recording, plus the rest of the show from a higher quality analog cassette tape.
I remember that on my original cassettes of the gig, the final song, Gloria, cut, as it does here. It appears that the taper just “ran out of road” as the show went just over the 3-hour mark!
The show has never been uploaded in as complete a condition as this project. This upload runs just a few seconds shy of 3 hours, and contains the opening set of Van with Howlin’ Wilf and the Vee Jays. Georgie Fame then performs for three songs before Van takes the stage again.
Rotterdam was the first show of a legendary 3-gig run that also included The Hague and then Utrecht, made famous as Pagan Streams.

Here are some other shows that were performed today in history.

Eric Clapton & Friends – Malibu, CA (03/30/76)

10,000 Maniacs – Our Time In Eden Tour Rehearsals (03/30/92)

Pink Floyd – Miami, FL (03/30/94)

Bruce Hornsby – Williamsburg, VA (03/30/99)

The Dead – New York, NY (03/30/09)

Adele – Milan, Italy (03/30/11)

In my last post I talked about how I got my first CD player from my brother and how excited I was that it was a five disc changer. The idea of owning five whole CDs that would fill that changer was so exciting to me. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I bought a sixth CD, and I’d have to make a decision as to which disc to hold out.

I can’t remember now if Queensrÿche’s Empire was my second or third CD. I know I also bought U2’s Achtung Baby around that same time. Whatever number it was, I absolutely loved it.

I’m sure I bought it because of the hit single “Silent Lucidity.” That’s a great song, and it is part of a long tradition of power ballads where hard rockers show off their sensitive side with acoustic guitars and introspective lyrics. As a teenager, I was a sucker for that sort of thing. 

I have a great memory of watching them play that song at the MTV Video Awards with a full orchestra. I thought that was the coolest thing.

The rest of the album rocked. As a teenager, all of 14-15 years old, I thought the social and political lyrics were amazing. They spoke about real things. Important things. They spoke directly to me. 

The opening track “Best That I Can” told the story of a man in a wheelchair who dreamed of being a writer, of doing big things despite his disability. “Della Brown” talks about a woman living on the street. “Empire” was its magnum opus, a big, loud song that talked about gun violence, the illicit drug trade, and the lack of federal support for law enforcement. That was big stuff for little old me.

I took a drama class in eighth or ninth grade. For extra credit, you could lip synch any song you liked. You needed to get the synch just right, but you were also supposed to dress up like the character in the song or bring in props.

I was way too shy to actually do any of that, but I used to sit in my bedroom, listening to this album, thinking of all the ways I could perform these songs. I created all these little dances to go with them, gyrating in tune and doing my best to create a story. I thought it would blow their mind to hear “Empire.”

Like so many of these early albums, I haven’t listened to this in a very long time. Listening now, I still mostly like it. The hit songs are still great.  I still love “Silent Lucidity” and “Jet City Woman” is a banger. I like “Another Rainy Night (Without You),” and “Best That I Can” has a nice beat. I like the progressive rock angles of many of the songs.

The lyrics seem a little pompous and simplistic to me now. “Empire” has a spoken word bit about how little the federal government spends on law enforcement, which seems absolutely wild now when you realize how much we spend these days and how little it has worked.  

I added a few of those songs to my regular playlist, but most of them I’ll leave off and probably never listen to again. I can’t see myself listening to the album again any time soon.

This is by far the best album out of the three I’ve thus far talked about in this series, so that’s something.

The Hollywood Production Code did not allow for homosexuality to exist in their movies. Gay people were not acceptable. That doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. Clever filmmakers often included gay characters in their films. They just couldn’t come out right, and state it. But if you look closely, you’ll find all sorts of gay-coded characters hiding in plain sight.

Tea and Sympathy is a great example of this. Based on a play in which the main character is explicitly gay, the film was never allowed to call Tom (John Kerr) a homosexual, and he never shows any interest in men.  Instead, he’s just not “manly” like the other boys at his school. He likes poetry and art and listening to classical music by himself. When he’s caught sewing a button on a shirt while hanging out with a bunch of teachers’s wives instead of horsing around with the boys, things come to a boil.  

His only refuge is the housemaster’s wife (a wonderful Deborah Kerr), who seems to understand who he is, and who attempts to help. This is still a 1950s movie, and it is still entangled in that production code, but it is a surprisingly sympathetic and heartfelt little drama.  You can read my full review here.

Humphrey Bogart is my favorite actor. He made some of my favorite movies – The Big Sleep, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Casablanca, and so many more. But the thing I always have to remember is that he spent more than a decade as a second-tier star. He played gangsters and heavies for a long time. He was often the third or fourth actor billed on a poster or in the credits before he became the star that we know and love.

He is exactly that in It All Came True. Originally he was third billed. He plays a gangster causing trouble for top-billed Ann Sheridan. But not long after this movie came out, Bogart did become a big star. In subsequent rereleases, suddenly Bogart was top billed. They even changed the opening credits for him.

Which is kind of dumb because this is Ann Sheridan’s movie through and through. It is an odd movie.  Part of it is a fairly serious drama, but then they keep injecting magic tricks, show tunes, and vaudeville acts.  That makes it less than a great movie, but it sure is fun. You can read my full review here.

Last year a bare-bones DVD release of Tobe Hooper’s terrific TV movie adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot hit the streets (I reviewed it here.) It was an odd release, as we live in the time of 4K UHD, so it’s confusing as to who would want a DVD with absolutely no extras. Especially since there was already a nice Blu-ray release of the film with plenty of extras selling cheaply on Amazon. But I guess there are still folk who just have DVD players and aren’t looking for extras. 

At any rate, Arrow Video is now releasing the film in UHD with loads of extras. I’ve got a soft spot for the film (I also reviewed it just for my blog, which you can read here). Despite its being made-for-TV in the 1970s, it is surprisingly effective and genuinely creepy. Now I’m glad I didn’t buy that Blu-ray because this is a much better upgrade.

Also coming out this week that looks interesting:

Marty Supreme: I have to admit I’ve never seen a film by either of the Safdie Brothers. They are directors I keep hearing good things about, and there is no reason for me not to see their films; I just haven’t.  This one stars Timothy Chamelet as a guy who dreams of being a ping pong star and will stop at nothing to achieve that goal.

The Blade: Criterion presents this Japanese film about a blade manufacturer who quits his job and looks for revenge.

Eiichi Kudo’s Samurai Revolution Trilogy: Modern takes on the samurai film that push back the classic noble samurai idea and show how corrupt the systems really were. 

Lupin the 3rd: Specials Collection 1: Lupin III is a Japanese character who is supposed to be the grandson of the great fictional thief Arsene Lupin. There have been lots of movies, shows, comics, etc. based on the character. This package delivers five TV movies inducing: Bye Bye Lady Liberty, The Hemingway Papers, Napoleon’s Dictionary, From Siberia with Love, and Voyage to Danger

As I’m about to start writing this week’s Five Cool Things, I once again remember I forgot to post the last one. It featured an excellent Japanese manga about killer spirals, The Bride!, a wonderful crime drama from Denmark called Bleeder, Hamnet, my new Arrow UHD of Excalibur, and the new trailer for Dune: Part Three. You can read all about it here.

In 1974 Shaw Brothers Studio teamed up with Hammer Films to produce The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. On paper that sounds like a dream come true. Both studios are known for making terrific genre films with high production values on low budgets. Hammer was the king of remaking classic monster movies with gothic style and extra violence and sex appeal. Shaw Brothers mastered the art of kung fu style. Mixing them should have created an incredible film full of beautifully drawn castles whereupon kung fu masters battled vampires, werewolves, and other assorted demons.

Sadly, the actual film is rather dull and poorly produced.

The plot is a simple thing. Kah (Chan Shen), a Daoist monk, travels to Dracula’s castle in hopes that he can restore the glory of the 7 Golden Vampires who have ruled a small Chinese village for centuries, but when a poor villager killed one of them, their power was drained.

At first Dracula (sadly not Christopher Lee, but here played by John Forbes-Robertson) is like, “Nah, I’m good,” and “I don’t take orders from people like you; I make them my slaves.” But then he realizes he’s been stuck inside his castle for some reason, and the only way to get out is to take control of Kah’s body. Once that happens, he figures he might as well see what the whole Golden Vampire thing is about. Then he disappears for almost the entire film, only showing back up at the very end.

Professor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing, yea!) is lecturing at a Chinese university about vampires but gets the shrug-off by most of the intellectual community there. Only one kid believes him. Hsi Ching (David Chiang) is from the village of the Golden Vampires, and it was his grandfather that killed one of them.

He convinces Van Helsing, along with his son Leyland (Robin Stewart) and a rich blonde woman, Vanessa Buren (Julie Ege), who is financing the entire thing, to follow him and his martial expert six siblings to travel to the village and kill the Golden Vampires.

The journey is long and difficult and filled with many battles. Eventually they get to the village, fight the Golden Vampire, and then Dracula comes out to fight Van Helsing one on one.

So what went wrong? It was a troubled shoot from the beginning. They shot at Shaw Studios in Hong Kong with a British director (Roy Ward Baker), a mostly English cast (at least for the speaking roles), and a Chinese crew. Communication was difficult as most of the Chinese didn’t speak English and vice versa.

Baker had made some decent films for Hammer, but he doesn’t seem to know what to do with the kung fu aspects of the film. Eventually the Shaw Brothers people hired Chang Cheh to handle the action sequences because Baker was out of his depth with them.

Trouble is they shot most of the film outdoors on the rather barren, scrabble mountains near Hong Kong. Hammer Films is known for its great use of gothic castles, intricate sets, and bold color designs. You get very little of that by shooting outdoors in the sunshine. There are a few scenes indoors, and Baker really shines there, but there are far too few of them to make things interesting.

The kung fu scenes are mostly unremarkable as well. There is none of that jaw-dropping stunt work that made the Shaw Brothers famous. The story is mostly dull. Even Peter Cushing seems to be phoning it in.

Truth is Hammer Studios was running out of steam. Their glory days were behind them. Shaw Brothers would keep making numerous films well into the 1980s, but even though this was shot on their home turf, they seem to have been relegated to the second string.

In the end, this is a curiosity piece. If you are a fan of both studios, it is worth watching, but you’ll probably end up much like I did, wondering what could have been.

I first watched From Dusk till Dawn in the theater when it came out. I liked the first half a lot more than the second. It felt more like a Quentin Tarantino film with its interesting dialogue and stylistic flourishes. The back half was too goopy and gore-filled for my tastes at that moment. It had some fun dialogue, and I certainly wasn’t going to complain about that Salma Hayek dance number, but it seemed like a completely different film than the first half, and I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much.

I do remember immediately after watching it having long conversations with my buddies about the film. We loved that opening scene and those little stylistic flourishes, like how Richie Gecko (Tarantino) imagines Kate (Juliette Lewis) saying something crude to him, or how they do a little X-ray vision of the trunk of the car showing the kidnap victim inside. We all agreed that once the vampires show up, the film takes a dip.

I can’t remember if I watched it anymore during my college years, probably so, but then I took a very long break from it. I watched it again maybe ten years ago, and I didn’t like it at all. I felt the first half felt more like someone trying to write like Tarantino instead of an actual script written by him. It no longer thrilled. And the back half was even worse, just puerile horror that was more interested in goopy explosions than telling a story.

But Ryan Coogler was clearly influenced by this film, and I keep seeing people on the worst social media site basically saying that Sinners was a poor imitation of From Dusk till Dawn, so I wanted to give it another chance.

I think I liked it this go-around more than all the previous viewings. The first half does feel like Tarantino-lite. This was early in his career. He was paid to write this film in 1992 on commission. They say Tarantino took the best parts of this script and put them into Pulp Fiction. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but this is definitely not his best work.

The Gecko Brothers, Richie and Seth (George Clooney) are on the run after a daring escape from the courthouse where Seth was in custody. They’ve killed several people, including two cops, and have a hostage in the trunk of their car.

They stop at a hotel in El Paso, to plot how they are going to cross the (heavily guarded) border and into Mexico, where someone Seth knows will hide them until things cool down.

When Seth steps out to get a better view of what they are up against, Richie rapes and murders the hostage. Seth is a criminal who will not hesitate to kill someone when he deems it necessary, but Richie is a psychopath.

Salvation (or damnation, as we’ll soon find out) comes in the form of a loving family and an RV. Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel) is a former Baptist minister who lost his faith when his wife died in a car accident. He’s taking his two kids, Kate and Scott (Ernest Liu) to Mexico as a getaway from their grief.

There are some nicely tense scenes with the Gecko brothers forcing the Fuller family to drive them across the border and not get caught. Then they head to a skeevy biker/trucker bar called the Titty Twister. It is open from Dusk to Dawn and is the seemingly perfect place for them to hide out until the man can come and give the brothers safe passage.

After some minor confrontations and a pretty darn sexy dance, the vampires come. Things get wild and blood-soaked from there. Tom Savini plays a biker named Sex Machine. It doesn’t seem that he did any of the special effects/makeup work, but this is the type of thing he became famous for doing. There are lots of great practical effects. The vampires have grotesque faces, and they turn to slop when staked and sometimes explode.

It can be a bit much.

When this came out, I thought Quentin Tarantino was the bee’s knees. I saw Pulp Fiction in the theater and thought it was amazing. We watched Reservoir Dogs in the dorm room and went nuts. I also very much liked Robert Rodriguez (who directs this film; Tarantino just wrote it.) I thought Desperado was a lot of fun, and El Mariachi was brilliant for a no-budget film from a first-time director.

But I’ve since very much cooled on Tarantino. I think he is a very talented director but kind of an obnoxious human. I always watch his films and often enjoy them, but the days of them being an event for me are over. The days of me having to see them in the theater are long gone. I now think Rodriguez is a hack.

This feels like the best and worst of what a collaboration between Rodriguez and Tarantino could be. There is some clever writing from Tarantino (and I find it hilarious that he wrote his character as a foot-loving, psychopathic pervert), but it’s also sloppy and disjointed. Rodriguez is at his best when he’s able to let go and just have fun with all the vampire carnage. He doesn’t do nearly as well when he’s dealing with Tarantino’s more dialogue-heavy front end. The two are very good friends, and they seem to let each other indulge in some of their worst instincts. For example, Rodriguez once again uses a crotch gun, and Tarantino gets a scene where he literally sucks beer off of Salma Hayek’s toes.

This definitely falls into the category of movie where you just have to let go and enjoy the ride. I definitely did this time around.

I know this barely qualifies as a western. It takes place in modern times and no one wears a cowboy hat or rides a horse. But it is set in the barren landscapes of Texas and Mexico and its characters would certainly fit into the lawless wild west. So I’m counting it.

Every time Westerns in March rolls around, I find myself drawn to one of the Ranown Westerns (seven films director Budd Boetticher made with Randolph Scott). In a few years I’ll have them all reviewed, and then I don’t know what I’ll do.

Decision at Sundown is the third film together and sits somewhere in the middle in terms of my love for it.

Bart Allison (Scott) rides into the town of Sundown with his pal Sam (Noah Beery, Jr.) Sam had been scouting the place out as Bart has been scouring the Earth looking for a man he thinks was responsible for his wife’s suicide.

That man is Tate Kimbrough (John Carroll.) He came to Sundown some time before and has essentially taken the town over. On the day Bart arrives, Tate is set to marry Lucy Summerton (Karen Steele).

At first Bart takes his time scoping the situation out, but he makes it clear to anyone near him that he has no love for Kinbrough. He gets a shave and tells the barber he’s no friend of the man. He gets a drink at the bar, and even though all drinks are being paid for by Kimbrough, he makes a show of giving the bar keep a coin.

Eventually, he’s had enough, and he bursts into the wedding ceremony and announces that before the day is over, he will kill Kimbrough dead.

The townsfolk chase Bart and Sam out, and they take refuge in a livery stable. From there the film becomes a base-under-siege story. But something is happening in the town. The people don’t seem all that interested in capturing our heroes. Oh sure, Kimbrough’s got some hired guns who keep shooting at the stable, and the sheriff (Andrew Duggan) is Kimbrough’s man, though even he seems reluctant to put his life on the line for Kimbrough.

Plus there is that thing that Bart said at the wedding. Did Kimbrough really seduce Bart’s wife, leading to her suicide? Certainly Lucy wants answers to that question.

All of this loosens Kimbrough’s grip on the town. Dr. John Storrow (John Archer) has never liked Kimbrough or his influence on the town. Bart has given him the courage to stand up. Others begin to wonder why they’ve been letting Kimbrough run roughshod over them for so long.

At the same time, Bart learns more information about his wife. Maybe she wasn’t the chaste, loving wife he thought she was. What does that do to his need for revenge?

It all wraps up fairly neatly, though not as happily as you might expect. That’s the thing about these Ranown films: they aren’t afraid to give you a thoughtful, even downtrodden ending. Scott is his usual taciturn self, and Boetticher’s direction is as solid as ever. This isn’t a film that’s going to get counted as the genre’s best ever, but it is sturdy and so well made that it is still worth watching. And then a few years later, watching again. I keep it in regular rotation with all the other Ranown Westerns.

Today is my 50th birthday. I can’t believe I’m typing those words. I cannot believe I am that old. I gotta admit it is hitting me pretty hard. 

What am I even doing with my life? 

I am definitely not where I thought I would be at this stage in my existence. I am not the man I imagined I’d become.

Have I lived my best life?

It hasn’t been a bad life. I’ve done a fair bit of traveling, seen a few amazing things, made some great friends, and created a loving family. I own a house and have filled it with the things I love. I’ve never been hungry, etc. 

There are things I’ve failed at and mistakes I’ve made that find me in the dark hours of the evening and make me shiver. This last decade has been difficult. Covid, work stresses, loss of church, declining health, and I don’t really have any real-life friends. But I have a great wife and an insanely amazing daughter, a job, and plenty of real-life comforts.  I can’t complain. Not really.

Then there is this blog. I’ve been writing it for 22 years. That’s nearly half my life. That’s unbelievable. Like me, it has gone through many changes. It has had its ups and downs. But it has been one of the few stable things for most of my adult life. That’s amazing.

My readers were very generous to me when I was sharing music.  I appreciate that very much. I know writing about movies and pop culture isn’t the same. I know most of the folks who enjoyed my music sharing are less interested in what I’m doing now.

Still, this isn’t nothing, and I hope it is maybe worth something to some of you. So I’m going to put up a little PayPal link. If you enjoy my writing and think it is worth some monetary value, I’d appreciate anything you can give.  I don’t expect much; I’ll probably get nothing.  I’ll eventually put a link in the sidebar and let it just sit. But for now it is going at the very bottom of this page.  

Whether you give or not, I appreciate anyone who comes by, likes, and comments.  Here’s to another 50 years of life and many more years of this blog.

If you want to give please click here.

And for those interested, the picture if all the gifts my wife gave me. I’ve been on a comic book kick lately so I got lots of those, plus a couple of silly movies.

Criterion is having a 50% off flash sale as I write this. I had some discounts for their site due to me being a member of the Criterion Channel.  I just picked up a 4K UHD copy of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon for $5.

That’s not the reason it is this week’s pick, but it’s still pretty cool. You can read all about why I picked it and what else is coming out today over at Cinema Sentries. You can read my review of the film right here.

On the old music site, I used to periodically do a Shows in History post where I’d link to all the shows that had taken place on today’s date throughout history. It was a fun way to highlight a bunch of different shows, and I always enjoyed seeing the wide variety of acts one could potentially have caught on a particular day.

Though I no longer post download links to shows, I still think that idea is a fun one.

I am going to try and actually listen to one of the shows that was performed on today’s date (whatever date that is) and maybe give a short review of it or some random thoughts. I know that won’t happen every day, as some days are weird, and busy, and I won’t have time to sit and listen to a full show. 

Knowing me, this will be the only time I do this at all. 

Today’s show is from the Grateful Dead back in 1986. That’s no one’s favorite year for the Dead. It is the infamous year that Garcia’s addictions/poor health put him in a diabetic coma in July.

But while this is certainly not Peak Grateful Dead nor the best that Jerry ever did, this is a pretty darn good show. The big news here is they played “Box of Rain” something they hadn’t regularly done in over a decade and a half. They’d played it a few nights before in Hampton, which was the first time they’d busted it out in some seventeen years. So it wasn’t a complete surprise when Phil started singing it this night, but you can hear the crowd roar in exultant joy.

The first set is well played but not spectacular. The second set features a very nice “Lost Sailor>Saint of Circumstance” with Bob doing a weird little rap in the transition about freedom.  Weirdly, the set ends with just one song being played after the “Drums/Space” combo, but it’s a very nice version of “Morning Dew.” It all ends with a quick little “In the Midnight Hour” for the encore.

So yeah, not the greatest of shows, but still a very good one.  If you’ve written off 1986 entirely, I’d give this one a go (and you can do just that over at the Archive)

Here’s the full setlist:

Grateful Dead
3/24/86
The Spectrum
Philadelphia, PA

–Set 1–
Alabama Getaway ->
Greatest Story Ever Told
Dire Wolf
Little Red Rooster
Brown Eyed Women
My Brother Esau
Ramble on Rose
El Paso
Box of Rain

–Set 2–
Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo ->
Man Smart (Women Are Smarter)
High Time
Lost Sailor ->
Saint of Circumstance ->
Drums ->
Space ->
Morning Dew

–Encore–
In the Midnight Hour

Other shows that took place on this day:

Jackson Browne – Osaka, Japan (03/24/77)
Led Zeppelin – Los Angeles, CA (03/24/75)
Bruce Hornsby – Daytona Beach, FL (03/24/87)
Bela Fleck – Dublin, Ireland (02/03/24)
Queen – Himeji, Japan (03/24/76)
Eric Clapton – Charlotte, NC (03/24/78)
Steve Earle – Dallas, TX (03/24/89)

Those links just go to show information; there is nothing to download. I feel a little guilty that I spent some fifteen years providing you all with thousands of shows to download and then just one day stopped and transitioned to talking about movies. 

Maybe someday I’ll go back to sharing shows, but that won’t ever be on this site. But I still want to talk about music more. That seems only fair. One idea I have is to do regular show reviews.  And maybe provide lots of information about the different shows – setlists, artwork, various reviews, etc. That’s a lot of work, and I get so involved with my movie stuff that I forget to do that sort of thing. So this is like a step in that direction. I hope you like it.  If you do, please leave me a comment.

Jean Gabin played Maigret, the great Parisian detective from Belgian writer Georges Simenon, three times. This was his final attempt. It is the worst film of the three, but it’s still pretty good if you like Gabin or detective stories. You can read my full review here.

I find that while I absolutely love the way John Woo shoots action scenes, I tend to find his drama and especially his comedy a bit too goofy for my tastes. Once a Thief leans heavily into the comedy, and I was mostly bored. But there are a few good action scenes, and the finale is absolutely brilliant. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

A Bridge Too Far is an epic, star-studded war movie about the failed Operation Market Garden, where the Allies tried to secure a single road and several bridges across the Netherlands right to the German border.  It is pretty good, but also a bit too long and somewhat confusing. 

Kino Lorber just released a 4K UHD disc, and I’ve got your review.

In a scene that is clearly aping the opening moments of Halloween (1978), our movie begins with a point-of-view shot of someone walking ominously through a house. There are horror posters hanging on the room and a torture chamber’s worth of weapons and devices hanging on the wall. A hand reaches out and grabs a knife. A teenaged girl takes off her robe and steps into the shower. 

From Halloween, our movie switches to Psycho with the camera inside the shower and a knife-wielding maniac seen in shadows through the steam. The curtain opens. The blade stabs. The girl screams.

Our killer is the girls’ young brother. The knife is rubber. The scene turns from horror to goof.

With the runaway success of Friday the 13th (1980), Universal Studios was looking to get into the teenage horror game. They hired Tobe Hooper, still riding high off the triumphs of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Salem’s Lot (1979). It would be his first film for a major studio.

That girl in the shower is Amy (Elizabeth Berridge), and she’s got a hot date. Her father warns her not to go to the carnival, for two kids were killed at one not that far away a few weeks ago. She promises she won’t, but her date Buzz (Cooper Huckabee) insists, and besides, they already told their two friends Liz (Largo Woodruff) and Richie (Miles Chapin) that’s what they were going to do.

It’s a pretty cheap and sleazy carnival with deformed animals and half-naked ladies on display. Our heroes have a good time, and Amy begins to fall for Buzz. They visit a psychic (Sylvia Miles, having a blast) but get kicked out of her tent for giggling too much. Meanwhile, Amy’s little brother sneaks out of the house and visits the carnival. 

Our heroes decide it would be fun to stay the night at the funhouse, so before everything shuts down, they find a place to hide. And have some sexy fun times. But before things get too heated, they hear something. Someone has come into the room below. It is the psychic and a large man wearing a Frankenstein mask. He’s nonverbal. She tells him if he wants it, he has to pay. He finds some cash, and she strips down. But our boy’s a little too excited, and he finishes before even getting his pants off. When she says there are no refunds, he kills her.

Yikes! Zoinks! Our heroes find that they are trapped inside this funhouse with no way to escape. Frankenstein’s (Wayne Doba) daddy, the Carnival Barker (Kevin Conway), scolds him, then beats him, knocking the mask off his deformed, monstrous face.

One of the kids drops a lighter, alerting our villains, and the rest of the movie has them chasing our heroes around the funhouse. 

Periodically we’ll find the little brother wandering around the carnival, oblivious to everything. The film hints that he’s going to be killed, even having him caught by some creepy-looking dude. But he turns out nice and calls the boy’s parents, and the boy is never seen again.  It is a nice little fake-out. The film does that a few times when the story will lean one way and then go another. 

It is a film best left with your brain checked out.  Otherwise you’ll find yourself wondering why a roaming carnival has a funhouse with multiple stories, a long hallway with a giant ventilation system, and a room full of killer gears and rotating hooks.  Seriously, that temporary funhouse is enormous.

But if you can push such analytical thoughts aside, you might find there is a lot of fun to be had in this film. Hooper dives into the goofiness of the carnival aspects. It comes across like a mix between classic 1980s slasher films with something even more classic from Universal with a dash of Freaks thrown in for good measure. Not a great movie by any stretch, but an interesting one.

We’re big fans of cozy British mysteries in my house. We watched a couple of episodes of the first season of Shakespeare and Hathaway a while back. It was charming, but we got distracted and didn’t return to it. 

There was a bit of a thing that happened over at Cinema Sentries, and the person who was supposed to watch this DVD set of Season Five was unable to, so I decided I’d pitch in and help out. 

There was no need to prep myself on all the episodes I missed; this isn’t that kind of series. It is about a couple of detectives who like to dress up and solve murders. It is very light and very silly and you can read my full review here.

Whenever I write these posts, I tend to think about my pick in two ways.  First, if I had unlimited funds, which new release would I buy? And second, which film am I really interested in watching, that I haven’t seen? Normally, that first part trumps everything. This is a series about physical releases after all, so my pick should be about which physical release looks the coolest.

But sometimes there isn’t anything coming out that looks all that interesting in terms of its packaging or extras, and I move to that second tier. If I can’t pick something that thrills me with its packaging, then I can at least pick something I really want to see. 

Once in a blue moon I have to go to a third tier. When there aren’t any special releases and none of the movies are calling out to me as something I have to watch, I just kind of pick something and hope for the best. 

It is in these moments I tend to think about what might bring the most readership.  What is the most popular thing coming out that might get folks to read my thoughts?  

Which brings us to this week’s pick.

The Housemaid is a film that keeps showing up in my feeds. It stars Sydney Sweeney, who I’ve quite liked as an actress in the few films I’ve seen her in, but who has become rather controversial of late, and Amanda Seyfried, who was beloved for many years until her personal life imploded. She’s made a bit of a comeback of late. 

Anyway, Sweeney plays a woman down on her luck who gets a gig as a housemaid for Amanda Seyfried’s character. But as these things turn out, Seyfried and her husband have a past, and things get dark and scary and other stuff. It was directed by Paul Feig, so I’m guessing things don’t get that dark. I’ve heard mostly good things about it, especially Seyfried’s performance, and this week that is enough to make it my pick.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

The Big Risk: Criterion brings us this French thriller. It stars the always great Lino Ventura as a man who’s been hiding out in Milan for the better part of a decade, but decides to bring his family back to Paris despite the fact that he has a death sentence hanging over him. He is accompanied by his appointed guardian (the always great Jean Paul Belmondo.) I’d never heard of this film before, but that sounds great.

Mimic: Kino Lorber is bringing this rather silly, bug-infested horror movie from Guillermo Del Toro (you can read my review of the film here.)

Anaconda: Sometimes Hollywood’s obsession with remakes and the like gets really silly. Anaconda (1997) was an unintentionally hilarious action/horror film starring Ice Cube and a giant, CGI snake. It was the kind of film people loved to hate on. Or that the MST3K guys could have a ball with. They remade it last year with Jack Black and Paul Rudd, but this time they are in on the joke. Hilarity is supposed to ensue, but the reviews have been bad.

Zodiac Killer Project: Charlie Shackleton was trying to make a documentary on the infamous Zodiac Killer, but the project fell through way before it was completed. But being a big fan of true crime shows, he decided to point his camera inward and make a film about true crime and how that genre bends our perception and why we are all obsessed with serial killers.

Is This Thing On:  Bradley Cooper directs Will Arnett as a stand-up comic having to come to terms with how his life is falling apart.

Dead Again: Kenneth Branagh directed this film and stars as a private detective who meets an amnesiac woman (Emma Thompson) whose life intersected with his in a previous incarnation.  You can read my review here.

We Bury the Dead: Daisy Ridley stars in this drama about a woman looking for her husband after a terrible military incident, but as she looks for his body amongst many other thousands, she finds that some of them seem to be coming back to life.

Good Boy: This horror film takes the dog’s point of view as his master is overcome by supernatural forces. You can read my review here.

The Boy and the Beast: Japanese animated film about a boy who enters a world of strange beasts.

Testament: Criterion presents this drama about the life of a family after a nuclear attack.

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! is a big, bold movie that takes a lot of big swings. It didn’t always work for me, and it is a lot, I mean a lot, to take in, but what did work was amazing, and I’m so glad films like this still exist. 

In the original novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus the creature longs for a mate, a companion, someone he can spend time with and who will not be repulsed by him. Victor Frnkenstein begins creating a female creature but destroys it before he brings her life.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935), James Whale’s sequel to his classic adaptation of the story, ponders what would happen if his monster did get a companion. It doesn’t end well. The bride only shows up at the end of the film, and her screen time (played to perfection by Elsa Lanchester) is only a few minutes.

The Bride! lets her live and gives her a modernity not found in any adaptation of the story that I’ve seen. It begins with the book’s author herself, Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley), dead and stuck in some sort of purgatory. She decries that she had more of the Frankenstein story to tell, but death robbed her of it. So she does what dead authors often do: she possesses the body of a 1920s gangster moll, Ida (also played by Jessie Buckley). 

Buckley’s performance here (and everywhere) is magnificent. As Shelley possesses her, she swings from Ida – brashy with plenty of New York accent and attitude—to Shelly – reserved British accoutrements, but full of anger and resentment. At first she struggles with keeping her thoughts and voice under control. She repeats words and phrases and winds up spilling the beans on the mob boss.  This last bit gets her thrown down a flight of stairs to her death.

Enter Frankenstein (Christian Bale). Yes, technically he’s Frankenstein’s monster, as Frankenstein was the mad scientist. The film acknowledges this but still allows the monster to call himself Frank anyway.  He finds Dr. Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Benning), who has been working on the reanimating of dead flesh. He tells her he wants a companion. They dig up Ida and reanimate her.

The process leave her with blood stains across her face and her hair strays straight up in a way that makes her look vaguely like the Bride in James Whale’s film.

Frank is obsessed with an actor (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), and he takes Ida to see all his movies. After watching one of them, they go to a vaguely queer underground party that feels like it belongs in the 1970s or ’80s, something from Studio 54 perhaps, not 1920s New York City.  Or perhaps not. What do I know about underground parties in the 1920s? I know very little about regular parties of today. I’m such a homebody.

They dance wildly, and it is in these moments that I enjoyed it most. The early parts of the film have this wonderful energy about them. They feel joyous and electric. Later the film will get bogged down in its plot and its deeper meaning, and I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much. 

After the dance, Ida is assaulted by some dudes. Frank intervenes, brutally killing them. This brings police detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) onto the case, and with him, his assistant Myrna Malloy (Penelope Cruz). She’s really the brains of the outfit (and yes, her name is awfully close to Myrna Loy, the classic film actress, and that surely isn’t a coincidence. This film is stuffed to the gills with those kinds of things.)

Myrna is the real brains of the operation, but she can’t be a detective because she’s a lady. The film will use this to make several nods to sexism and the like, which mostly didn’t work for me. I’m pro-feminism and equal rights, but the film doesn’t really dig deeply into that angle. Instead it just sort of nods to it, and expects us to cheer when she does make detective, gets sneered at by a bunch of redneck cops, and still saves the day.  It is one of many thematic strands that don’t get much attention. The film is trying to do so much, and it just doesn’t have the time to give some of them the time they need.

Frank and Ida are now on the lam, crisscrossing the country, going wherever one of those movies is playing. When watching one of those films, Frank often imagines himself and Ida on the screen doing those dances, singing those songs.  

Bonnie and Clyde is the clear influence on this film, but it also references things as diverse as Wild at Heart, classic song and dance movies like Top Hat, the films of Ingmar Bergman, Thelma and Louise, Metropolis, and so much more. Gyllenhaal clearly has a lot on her mind, and she’s trying to do it all in this film. Amazingly, most of it works. And even when it doesn’t, I admire the ambition.

It does start to run out of steam toward the end. I had a lot more fun watching these two run around the country getting into trouble while pursued by the cops than I did watching them try and figure out who they are and what it means to be alive. 

I suspect this will be a film that will grow on me in time. Further viewings will allow me to take more of it in and enjoy it.  But until then I can say I loved how big it swung and how hard it tried.

120 Minutes first aired on MTV on March 10, 1986. My social media feed was full of remembrances on this 40th anniversary, and I meant to say something myself. Then I got distracted and forgot. But those thoughts are still in my head, so I thought I’d get them out anyway.

I was born in the late 1970s, was raised in the 1980s, and came of age in the early 1990s. I grew up listening to hair metal bands like Mötley Crüe, Poison, and Bon Jovi, but I also dug pop stars like Tiffany, Madonna, and Michael Jackson. 

I was a shy, nerdy kid from rural Oklahoma; I didn’t have access to truly alternative bands. My brother was a lot cooler than me, and he turned me on to bands like R.E.M. and The Cure, but even then it was just their bigger songs.

Then Nirvana broke. That changed everything. Suddenly alternative was popular. I can’t remember now if I had watched 120 Minutes before “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was released or after. I probably knew about it before then because I was an MTV junkie, but I don’t think I tuned in every week.

But at some point it became a fixture in my life. Again, I was a shy, nerdy kid from rural Oklahoma. I had very few outlets for discovering alternative music. The local radio stations certainly didn’t play anything but popular music. 

I subscribed to Spin magazine and Alternative Press, and they were great at tuning me into new music, but that was only print; they didn’t give me any ways to actually listen. Sometimes I’d go to a Tulsa record shop and buy one of the records those magazines raved about, but I wasn’t rich, and that was taking an awful chance. There is nothing worse than spending your hard-earned money on a record and finding you don’t like it.

Discovering 120 Minutes was like discovering the Holy Grail. Suddenly, every week amazing alternative music was being beamed into my living room. I could now listen to (and watch the cool videos) music I previously would have never been able to hear. It was amazing. 

Alternative music became more and more popular. One of the Tulsa radio stations became “The Edge” and played alternative tunes. MTV created a nightly show called Alternative Nation. Record  shops in the malls even had an alternative section right next to rock and roll and heavy metal.

But nothing ever beat 120 Minutes for me. It felt more real than all that other stuff. The Edge, Alternative Nation, and everything felt like they were hitching themselves to a bandwagon. 120 Minutes was there before alternative became cool.  You could tell the VJs really got the music and loved it.  I loved it too.

Based upon a book by Elmore Leonard, Valdez Is Coming stars Burt Lancaster as Bob Valdez, a Mexican constable who is tricked into killing an African American by a rich rancher named Frank Tanner (Jon Cypher) and then takes his revenge. 

Tanner accuses the man of murder, and his hired gun, R.L. Davis (Richard Jordan) has been shooting his hovel up for quite a while before Valdez shows up. There is a great moment when the accused man’s Native American wife walks out of the hovel and over to a creek to fetch some water. Davis keeps shooting at her (intentionally missing; he just wants to watch her squeal), but she fetches the water with absolute calm.

Valdez figures he might be able to talk the man out instead of killing him. And he’s just about able to. He explains the man will have a better chance if he tells his side of the story instead of shooting it out with those men. As the man begins to agree, he leaves the door open, and Davis shoots at him. The man (and I’m sorry, I don’t think the film actually gives him a name, and I can’t figure out who played him) thinks it’s a setup and starts shooting at Valdez, who then shoots back, killing the man.

Once Tanner takes a look at the dead man, he realizes he wasn’t the murderer but shrugs it off as if it were no big deal.  Valdez figures they owe the man’s woman an apology and perhaps a little money for the mistake.  When he asks Tanner for $100, he’s laughed at and shooed away. When Valdez insists Tanner get his men to tie Valdez to a wooden cross and drive him into the desert.

He eventually gets himself free and finds his way home. Then he loads up with ammo and finds one of Tanner’s men and tells him to issue the titular warning:

“Valdez is Coming.”

And come he does. He sneaks into Tanner’s complex, kills some of his men, and then kidnaps Tanner’s woman, Gay Erin (Susan Clark.) The kidnapping is sort of accidental. It wasn’t part of the plan, but when Valdez gets into a bit of a jam, he grabs Gay Erin and runs.

I think this is supposed to show that Valdez isn’t the type of guy who usually kidnaps women, but that in these particular circumstances he had no choice. It helps that Gay Erin doesn’t actually like Tanner all that much. A sort of romance eventually develops between Valdez and Gay Erin, though the film is smart enough to not let it fully develop.

All of this is the type of thing we’ve seen before. There are plenty of films where a seemingly unsubstantial man gets pushed too far, and it turns out he’s an old badass after all. Valdez Is Coming doesn’t do anything particularly new with this, but it does what it does fairly well. If you can forgive Lancaster for playing a Mexican, his performance is actually quite moving.

I’m a big fan of Elmore Leonard’s crime novels, though I’ve never read any of his westerns. I have a copy of this one and have read the first few pages a couple of times, but it has never grabbed me, and I get distracted. The film has definitely made me want to go back to it. They say the film changes quite a bit and that the book is better (isn’t it always?)

The film is pretty good, so maybe that means the book is great.  Time will tell.

There comes a time when a horror fan has to admit that the Friday the 13th films aren’t very good. I grew up in the 1980s, otherwise known as ground zero for slasher films. I loved the Friday the 13th films. Jason Voorhees is one of the greatest, most iconic villains of horror.

The reality is I never watched the full, uncut versions. I always watched them on the USA Network and TBS, or some other basic cable network where they were edited for television. Basic cable was different back then; they had to cut out the harder swear words, the nudity, and the more blood-soaked violence. I think I liked those films in part because my pubescent brain filled in those edited parts. I imagined what happened when the screen cut to something different.

I didn’t watch the uncut versions until I was in college. I gotta admit I was a little disappointed by them. What I had imagined was so much more gnarly and titillating than what was actually shown.

But also by that point I was fully into my film snob cinephilia. I was discovering the films of Martin Scorsese and Alfred Hitchcock. I had realized that films could be more than entertainment. That horror could be more than just fun kills and naked flesh. I was starting to turn my nose up at films like the Friday the 13th franchise.

I went to see Jason X in the cinema when it came out in 2001. I was a full-on film snob by then, but I was also feeling some nostalgia for the films of my youth. I was hoping for some dumb fun, and maybe a little self aware humor like the Scream film (the third of which had come out the year before.) What I got was dumb, but it sure wasn’t fun, and while there were some jokes, they weren’t the self-referential kind. 

I have not watched this film since that first viewing. But I own it on DVD. I’m still a horror nerd after all, and I own the first 8 films via a nice boxed set (which I reviewed, and you can read about at Cinema Sentries), so I just had to own the remaining films in some way.

And now, since it is Friday the 13th, I figured I’d give it a watch.

It begins in the Crystal Lake Research Facility, something that never existed in the other films. It seems to be designed solely to hold Jason and nothing else.  At least judging by how empty the rest of the facility is. Even though this film acknowledges that Jason is an unstoppable killing machine, they’ve left him in an unguarded, very large room. He is chained up and hanging from the ceiling, but why he wouldn’t be locked in a cell is unexplained.  Why there aren’t numerous guards all around him is also unexplained. There is one kid, and he does at least have a gun, but that’s it.  

The kid places a blanket over Jason’s head (the better for us and incoming soldiers to not be able to see who exactly is under the blanket in the coming moments). Rowan LaFontaine (Lexa Doig), the head of the research facility, has plans to cryogenically freeze Jason so that some future generation can deal with him. But before that happens, some dumb soldiers enter the room and demand his release. They are led by Dr. Aloysius Wimmer (David Cronenberg, who was apparently excited to be in a Friday the 13th film and rewrote all of his dialogue), who hopes to figure out how Jason is unable to die. 

Jason, of course, has already killed that boy from (and placed him in the chains and under the blanket) and wreaks havoc on the soldiers. He chases Rowan in the room with the freezing chamber, and she manages to shoot and push him into it. But just as he’s freezing, he pushes his machete (yes, for some reason these people kept his machete within grabbing distance of the supervillain) through the chamber door, stabbing Rowan and filling the room with freezing fog.

Despite all this carnage inside what one assumes is a famous and very expensive science facility, apparently no one bothered to come in and clean up. Or do anything at all.  For the film, flash forwards to the year 2455, and both Jason and Rowan are exactly where they fell, still frozen. 

A group of randy scientists and jokey soldiers find them and take them to their ship.  The Earth has long been abandoned due to massive pollution, but these guys like to visit once in a while and salvage what they can for resale.

They use their special futuristic microrobots to fix and heal Rowan, but figure Jason is too far gone to be saved.  Naturally, he comes back to life once he thaws out.  Lots of killing ensues. 

Some of it is pretty cool; a lot of it is pretty bad.

While some of the scientists are studying Jason, and letting Rowan know she’s now in the future. Others go off to have sex. Because this is a Friday the 13th movie, and you can’t have one of those without sexy teens doing what sexy teens do.

The leader of the ship is a greedy professor who hopes to sell Jason to the highest bidder (he’s still pretty well known in the future, and rich weirdos would like to have his corpse.). And if that doesn’t clue us in to how skeevy he is, there is another scene where he talks one of his students into having (kinky) sex with him – he dresses up in women’s lingerie, she twists his nipple (which by 2001 standars is extra wild!) in order for her to get a good grade.

There is also an android named KM-14 (Lisa Ryder). And if all of this is starting to sound like an Aliens riff to you, you are not alone.  This film was conceived because the Freddy vs. Jason film was locked in development hell over rights issues, and they wanted to have some Jason film out to keep fans interest up. They hired Todd Farmer to write the film, despite him having zero credits to his name. After some thought, he figured the only thing they could do to the character was send him into space and riff on the Alien films. 

But back to the kills. Most of them are fairly standard stuff – Jason hacking folks to pieces with his machete. (Poorly rendered) CGI allowed for them to do things like hack heads and arms off without too much blood and guts, or cut a guy basically in half. One lady has her head stuck in a bowl of liquid nitrogen, and then Jason cracks it like glass. One guy gets tossed onto a massive mining drill, and we watch him slowly slide around and round to the bottom (causing another character to say, when asked how the guy was doing, “He’s screwed”)

Yeah, there are a lot of jokes like that. One-liners coming after someone gets killed. They are more like the kind of thing you get in action movies from the 1980s than ironic in-jokes from a post-Scream world. At one point, to distract Jason, they use a holographic simulator to project a version of Camp Crystal Lake to him. Out come a couple of scantily clad girls who look him in the eye and say something like, “We love having casual sex.”

Jason eventually gets destroyed, but those fancy nanobots have a mind of their own, and they put him back together, but this time they add a bunch of Terminator-esque robot parts and create an Uber Jason.

This is a bad movie.  Probably the worst in the franchise. But you know what? I’m not mad I watched it. All the Jason movies are bad, but there is a certain level of fun in them. If you can turn your brain off before it begins and revert to some dumb teenaged version of yourself, you might find yourself entertained.

Once again I am late to posting this. It actually isn’t that great of a week, with only a few items that I found interesting. But my Pick is pretty cool with a collection of early Peter Sellers films. You can read all about it here.

I’ve always been a fan of exploitation films. As a young teen, I loved the babes, the sex, the violence, the gore, and the exploitativeness of it all. I still love that stuff now, I guess, but I really love the unabashedness of those films now. Exploitation films are exactly what they say they are going to be. They don’t try to wrap that stuff up in artistic pretensions like so many other films do. 

Sometimes they are actually good movies too, as is the case with at least two of the Female Prisoner Scorpion flicks.  I reviewed the Arrow Video box set of all four films back in 2016 and now you can read them.

The Night Manager is a rather slow but still thrilling spy series starring Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, and Olivia Colman. It also introduced me to the wonderful Elizabeth Debicki. Weirdly, some ten years after the first season, a second one has dropped. I haven’t seen it but I quite liked the first one. I’m thinking I need to rewatch it before diving into the second one. You can read my review of Season One over at Cinema Sentries.

Not to be confused with the Sam Raimi film of the same name, this The Quick and the Dead stars Sam Elliott, Kate Capshaw, and Tom Conti and was based on a book by Louis Lamour. I haven’t seen the Raimi film, but I’d bet my ten-gallon hat it is a lot better than this nonsense.

In the Wild West, Duncan McKaskel (Tom Conti), his wife Susanna (Kate Capshaw), and their 12-year-old son Tom (Kenny Morrison) are traveling to Bighorn, Montana, where Susanna’s brother is camped with Custard. The rest of the wagon train were stricken with consumption.

They come across an old, worn-down town and ask a man named Doc Shabbitt (Matt Clark) for help. He says they can stay in an abandoned house for the night, but Duncan decides Shabbitt’s gang looks a little too shabby, and they decide to move along.

That night Shabbitt’s men steal two horses from our heroes.  And then comes Con Vallian (Sam Shepherd). He’s half Native American and a full-blooded badass.  He’s also the kind of guy who likes looking at Susanna and saying things like “Your wife sure is a handsome woman.”  And then says it again. And again. Seriously, half his dialogue is saying inappropriate things to her. It is all kinds of creepy, and he’s the hero of this film.

Anyway, Vallian tells Duncan about the stolen horses and how Shabbit took them. He also says if he doesn’t do something about it, then Shabbitt’s men will think them weak and will keep coming back for more stuff and his woman. Vallian says he’ll take care of it, but Duncan says, “No” it is his battle to fight. Vallian says “ok” and you get the feeling he wouldn’t mind if Duncan got killed so he could have some good times with that “handsome woman.”

Duncan goes to the men and demands his horses back and nearly gets killed for it. Luckily, Vallian came in behind him and saves the day. When they return to camp, the boy hails Vallian as a hero and she starts looking at Vallian like maybe he’s a handsome man.

The rest of the film is like this. Shabbitt or his men will attack, and Vallian will defeat them. Tom wishes his dad was more like Vallian, and Susanna finds herself taking waterfall showers within Vallian’s view. 

What pissed me off about all of this is that Duncan is a good man. He’s smart and fair, and he doesn’t lack for courage. He goes after Shabbitt just as much as Vallian, and he’s not afraid to look Vallian in the face and tell him to stop saying such things about his wife. He isn’t as tough or masculine as Vallian or as good with a gun.  But he still deserves respect.  And he isn’t getting it from his wife, his son, or even the film.

Now I will say that Tom does sometimes say to Vallian that his dad is tough. That he fought bravely in the war. And other than one good kiss, Susanna doesn’t give in to her temptation. But it is still a weird and rather lousy way the film frames Vallian as a hero. This is a TV movie so thing do work out in the end, and if they hadn’t I would have thrown my boots at the TV.

The action is rather dull. Shabbit and his men aren’t particularly interesting or threatening, and the rest of the film never really goes anywhere. There is a romanticism to the Old West that I suspect comes from Louis Lamour’s book, but I sure hope he treats his characters better. 

Now you’ll have to excuse me, I’m going to go watch the Sam Raimi film in hopes it will help me forget this mess.

Once again we’ve run into a film that I had forgotten I watched. I pretty much request to review anything that is offered from the Criterion Collection because they are always good, or if not good, at least interesting. Seeing this title, I instantly remembered I had seen it, but I couldn’t tell you anything about it. Reading my review makes me want to watch it again.  

The story is about a Japanese kid who wants to be an actor but isn’t very good at it.  He has to make many a sacrifice to hone his craft, as does his lover. The film dives into what it takes to make great art and if the sacrifice is worth it. You can read all my thoughts here.

Edward Snowden was a former NSA contractor who leaked thousands of documents proving the USA government was spying on its citizens. He was a complicated dude and not completely aboveboard, as one can assume since he’s become a Russian citizen, but also a hero for leaking those documents and letting us know what our government has been up to. This was all back in 2013, and considering everything else that has happened in this country since then, it all seems a little like “nothing much” which is a crazy thought in and of itself.

But I don’t  like to talk about politics in these pages, and I’ll leave it at that.  Of course Oliver Stone made a movie about Snowden, and I got to see it on the big screen back then. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

There have been a million adaptations of Agatha Christie stories. This French television did something original with it. They essentially removed Christie’s detectives (Poirot, Miss Marple, etc.) and inserted two original characters while keeping the plots. 

I reviewed this back in 2016 and haven’t watched it since, but I’m thinking it is time for a rewatch.  You can read my full review here.

The thing about watching a lot of movies is that I can’t always remember all the details of every film.  Or any of the details.  Or whether I’ve even seen the film. The thing about writing lots of movie reviews is that when I forget about a movie, I can go back and read my reviews to jog my memory.

So it was with DeadEnd Drive-In. I probably would have recalled seeing this if you had asked me about it, but I wouldn’t have any idea what it was about.  But reading this old review makes me want to watch it again.

You can read it over at Cinema Sentries.  And yes, this is me once again going through these old reviews and posting them here.

Somewhere in Time is a film I’ve always felt like people loved. I thought it was a revered minor classic. I watched it many years ago and was a little disappointed in it, but when I got the opportunity to review this new UHD release from Kino Lorber, I figured it was time to give it another try.

Furthermore, I was still disappointed in it. Apprently, I was wrong thinking everybody else loved it because all my Letterboxd followers feel the same as me and all the reviews I’ve read find it to be mostly average.

Christopher Reeve becomes obsessed with an old painting of Jane Seymour and finds a way to travel back in time to meet her. 

Reeve and Seymour look beautiful, and the idea of the story is interesting, but I never really bought into the romance.  And the film didn’t seem all that interested in the time travel aspects. 

You can read all of my thoughts over at Cinema Sentries.

For the third (and final) film in the Ginger Snaps series, they went back to the beginning. Or rather the beginning of the beginning. Or something. What I’m saying is they made a prequel. 

Set in 1815, this film follows two sisters, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabel), as they battle werewolves and try to keep Ginger from turning into one after she’s been bitten. 

If you’ll remember, that is exactly the plot of the original film, even down to the same actresses playing characters with the same names and (more or less) the same personalities.

Instead of being two modern girls living through the hell of high school and being obsessed with death, these sisters have survived a terrible accident that killed their parents and everyone else in their party while exploring the great wilderness.  

They come upon a nearly abandoned fort filled with suspicious characters. The people inside have been waiting for a party to return with food and supplies, but they are two months late.  Wolf-like creatures have been attacking the fort regularly.

One night Ginger discovers a strange, deformed boy hidden in a room. The boy bites her. It will come as no surprise to learn the boy was bitten by a werewolf and is starting to turn. Soon enough Ginger will start to turn as well.

To keep that from happening, she needs to kill the boy. But her father is none too keen on that happening, and killing a child proves a bit difficult for her as well.

The original Ginger Snaps was a terrific little horror film that blended the smart high school satire of Heathers with a good dash of bloody horror. This third entry feels like they just took the same concept and threw it into a different time period. The sisters act just like they do in the original film, down to the way they talk (which is rather off-putting since it takes place in the 1800s). There also isn’t much satire to it.  It really doesn’t feel like they took the time to think through the earlier time period but needed it to be a sequel since (spoilers for the previous films) Ginger is dead and Brigitte is a full-fledged werewolf. 

The end result isn’t terrible. It is a perfectly serviceable horror film. It just pales in comparison with the first one.

Hello, and welcome to another addition of Five Cool Things. I did good this time as I’m posting this just one day after it hit Cinema Sentires. This time I’m talking about Kagemusha, Port of Shadows, Five Star Final, Face/Off and a new movie trailer. Come on over to Cinema Sentries to read all about it.

In my first post of this series, I talked about the very first cassette tape I owned. This time I’m going to talk about the very first CD I bought. 

The truth is I don’t really remember any other cassette tapes that I owned before I got a CD player. I’m sure there were some. I remember owning some kind of compilation album that had lots of 1950s-era hits on it – artists like Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Haley, and Little Richard. I think I had the Stand By Me soundtrack and maybe cassette singles from Tiffany and Debbie Gibson. 

Things get muddled a bit because even after I owned a CD player for my home stereo, I still had a cassette player in my car. Sometimes I’d record my CDs to cassette for listening in the car, and I often bought used cassettes at the local head shop. My memory of which tapes I bought before I owned a CD player and which tapes I bought just for the car gets muddled.

I just looked it up, and there were only five years between when Europe’s Final Countdown (my first cassette tape) came out and Van Halen released For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (my first CD). That’s not a huge period of time for me to have built up a big cassette collection, especially since I was fairly young during that time period.

Not that any of that matters; it’s just the way my brain works. I had intended for this series to be more or less chronological, and the fact that I can’t think of another cassette tape I bought before CDs came along bugs me. 

I have a very specific memory of being in a Wal-Mart with my mother and my older brother Neal. He was trying to convince Mom that he needed a CD player. These were fairly new at the time, and he was excitedly extolling the virtues of this new technology. About how the sound quality was so much better, about how they lasted longer, and most importantly, you didn’t have to fast forward and rewind a CD, you could just press skip.  

Mom wasn’t having it. She’d been through vinyl albums, 8-tracks, and cassette tapes.  She didn’t want to have to buy all her old albums on yet another format. She argued that in a few years some new technology would come along and he’d have to buy everything once again.  Cassette tapes were good enough.

My brother saved up and bought himself a five-disc CD changer.  Some time after that, he joined the Navy and moved away, leaving his CD changer behind. I can’t remember if he actually gave it to me, or if I just started using it after he left. But I was so excited by it.

Truth be told, I can’t remember if For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge was the first CD I bought. It might have been U2’s Achtung Baby or Queensrÿche’s Empire. But whatever, the Van Halen disc was an early purchase. I thought the 5-Disc changer was awesome. I remember putting the first couple of CDs in it and wondering what I’d do when I got a sixth one. Then I’d have to decide which discs stayed in and which one had to wait.  This was a big deal to me at the time. 

Honestly, I was never a huge Van Halen fan. I absolutely loved “Jump” and enjoyed songs like “Hot For Teacher” and “Runnin’ With the Devil” but I’d never bought one of their albums and didn’t follow them in any way.

I bought the album primarily because I loved the song “Right Now” and I loved that song primarily because of the video. It is weird to think about how much time I spent watching MTV back then.

The video channel is gone now, but it was a long running joke to say that you remembered when Music Television actually played music. Like so many channels, they drifted in later years to mostly airing reality TV.

But the truth is, they played non-music-related stuff relatively early in their history. I remember a comedy show with Julie Brown, the game show Remote Control, and of course The Real World, which essentially launched the reality boom we are still living in today.

But they did play a lot of music videos, and I watched those all the time. Every day I watched their Top 10 countdown, but I’d also sit and just watch random videos whenever there was nothing else on to watch. Music videos were awesome. Not only did you get the great music, but they often did interesting visuals to match. I know people like Taylor Swift are still doing interesting videos for YouTube or whatever, but the late 1980s/early 1990s feel like the heyday of great music videos.  Or maybe that’s just when I watched them.

Anyway, “Right Now” had a great video. They used big block letters running across the screen to discuss various social and political issues from the time. They’d say things  like “Right Now No One Is Safe From Loneliness” and “Right Now Our Government Is Doing Things We Think Only Other Countries Do.” Behind the words were visuals that brought home those messages.

Watching it now, I find most of the messaging fairly simplistic, but at the time I thought it was amazing. I was 14 or 15 when I first saw it, so political messaging in a music video felt revolutionary. It touched on things I was thinking about. It. made me feel like Van Halen really understood me.

I don’t remember much of the rest of the album. I think I liked it, but didn’t love it. I certainly didn’t listen to it like I listened to Achtung Baby or Empire. At a guess, I’d say it was the first album that got taken out of the disc changer when I bought my sixth CD. Though I’d certainly pop it back in every now and again.

It is an album I haven’t listened to in a very long time. Listening to it now, I find it to be just okay. I still love “Right Now.”  “Poundcake” is pretty good, and I like “Runaround” quite a bit. The rest of it is fine, I guess, but not really my thing.

Eddie Van Halen was a brilliant technical guitar player, but I’ve never really connected to him. I don’t want to say he lacked soul, but I don’t tend to connect to music that relies on technical prowess without having something deeper and more meaningful inside. It doesn’t help that a lot of Van Halen’s music focuses on frat boy antics and base sexuality.  

But I don’t want to argue about that. I’m not a musician. I don’t understand all the technical stuff. I just like what I like.  I connect to what moves me, and I don’t know how to explain it. But I also have no problem with those who connect to things I don’t like.

In the end, this is not an album I’ll probably ever listen to again. I didn’t add any of those songs to my playlists.  Except for “Right Now” that song still rocks.

Welcome back to Westerns in March. This is my fourth year doing this theme, and I’ve come to really enjoy it. There is something wonderful about this genre with its wide-open spaces, its barroom brawls, and its shootouts. So let’s get started.

Director John Sturges made Gunfight at the OK Corral in 1957 with Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday. It is a darn good film. It ends with the titular gunfight.

Ten years later Sturges revisited the story with this film, a sort of sequel with James Garner in the Earp role and Jason Robards as Holiday. It begins with the gunfight at the OK Corral and then deals with its aftermath.

An opening title notes that “This picture is based on Fact. This is the way it happened” and Sturges did strive for more historical accuracy than is usually told with these stories, though, of course, he still changed quite a bit to suit his needs.

Ike Clanton (Robert Ryan) survived the gunfight (something he did in real life but did not in the previous film) and is now taking our heroes to court. He claims his men were unarmed and had raised their hands in the air when Earp and his men shot them dead.

Clanton loses the court case but sets up his own personal war with Earp, his brothers, and Holiday. Some of them get shot, some of them get killed. Wyatt is determined to stop them, but his moral code demands he do it legally. But his stubbornness makes him bend the law to suit his needs.

Robards is terrific as Doc Holiday. This is a very different performance from Val Kilmer’s portrayal in Tombstone, but it’s still real good. I never really buy James Garner as Wyatt Earp. I’m so used to him playing rascally wiseacres that it is difficult to buy him as the deadly serious man he’s playing here.

Robert Ryan barely has any screen time, and when he does, he isn’t nearly menacing enough. He’s the main villain, and he’s far too tame to be threatening. Which is a weird thing to say about Robert Ryan, who is usually so good at playing scary dudes.

Sturges’s direction is steady but not memorable. Ultimately, the film is worth watching for Robards’s performance and if you are interested in what happened after the famous gunfight.

I watched 35 movies in February. 23 of them were new to me. 22 of them were made before I was born. It was Foreign Film February, and I watched 9 films that were not in English.

It was a good month. I’ve been trying to do more official reviews for Cinema Sentries. I mean, I always do quite a bit, but I’m trying to step up my game. I like writing whatever random reviews I do just for this site, but I get distracted, so I figure making requests where I have to review will get me even more in the habit, and maybe that will lead somewhere.

But that does mean I won’t have as much time for watching whatever I want. This has always been the struggle for me. I’ll get a bunch of official reviews, and they stack up on my desk. I have to watch and review them all, which means I can’t watch whatever else I want. I get tired of that and stop making requests, then I really wish I was getting the cool stuff in the mail. Back and forth. Back and forth. So I’m trying to lean into the real reviews, and we’ll see how it goes.

Which means there is less time for Foreign Film February and whatever. But still I did pretty good, nine films for the monthly theme isn’t bad.

My most watched actors list got shaken up a little. James Stewart got bumped by Spencer Tracy. I had another one of those boxes that put Tracy up front with 5 films. Walter Brennan is tied in second place with four films, and Robert Ryan jumps into things with three films watched.

My director’s list finally has a couple of names on it. As this is Westerns in March month, I suspect we’ll see John Ford take a few leaps forward, but who else will join him?

That’s it. Here’s the full list:

Crime 101 (2026) **1/2
Port of Shadows (1938) ****1/2
Five Star Final (1931) ****
The Astronaut (2025) ***
Bad Moon (1996) *
Somewhere in Time (1980) ***
Scream 7 (2026) **
Wolfs (2024) ***1/2
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939) ***1/2
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) ****
Doctor Who: The Hand of Fear (1976) ****
Kagemusha (1980) ****
The Pyx (1973) ***1/2
Face/Off (1997) ****
The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971) ****
Mogambo (1953) ***1/2
Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) ***
Iphigenia (1977) ****1/2
Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) ****1/2
Doctor Who: The Masque of Mandragora (1976) ***1/2
Northwest Passage (1940) **
Libeled Lady (1936) ****
Fury (1936) ****
All That We Destroy (2019) **
Dillinger (1973) ***1/2
2 Minutes Late (1952) ****
The Naked Jungle (1954) ***
Borderline (2025) **1/2
Pierrot le Fou (1965) ****
Elevator to the Gallows (1958) ****1/2
Vengeance of the Zombies (1973) ***
The Five Venoms (1978) ***
Wild People (1932) **
Red Dust (1932) ****
The Sin of Nora Moran (1933) ***1/2

I watched The Rider at the Circle Cinema in Tulsa. That’s our cool little arthouse theater. They show all kinds of films – new independent films, silent films, classic noirs, and midnight movies. I love the place. I caught The Rider because my family was out of town and I wanted something to do. I don’t think I knew much about it at the time but was knocked out by it.

It was directed by Chloe Zhao, and she immediately became someone to watch. Her next film was Nomadland, and it is really great as well. Then she made The Eternals, a Marvel movie that is hated by just about everyone. One assumes she did it because she got paid well and that money will help finance future films, but who knows? I didn’t see it.

Her latest film is Hamnet, a film about William Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, as they deal with the loss of their young son, whose name is the movie’s title. That grief is generally said to have motivated Shakespeare to write Hamlet, perhaps his greatest play. 

The reviews for the film have been very good and it is up for an Oscar next week.  I missed it in the theater but I’m excited to watch it now and happy to make it my pick.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

Piranha: Joe Dante directed this low budget thriller about some government-modified piranhas that accidentally escape and attack a summer camp. It is a film that used to air on cable TV back in my day, and I’m sure I watched at least parts of it multiple times, though I’d be hard pressed to tell you anything about it. Shout Factory is giving it the Steelbook anniversary treatment.

Cobra Kai: The Complete Series: I’ve not watched any of this series that brings back many of the characters from the Karate Kid films, but I know a lot of folks that love it.

The Swordsman Trilogy: Trio of wuxia films is getting a boxed set from Shout Factory.

Chainsaw Man: My daughter has been getting into manga over the last few years. One day I saw this book in the store and jokingly recommended it to her. Because what could be cooler than a dude with chainsaw hands? She didn’t want the book but has since seen some of the series. Now there is a film. It is about a kid who makes a deal with a demon and gets those crazy hands.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Season 3: My wife and I started season one of this series, but have yet to finish it. I like it, but we got distracted. It follows Captain Pike, who helmed the Enterprise before Kirk took over.

The Running Man: Oh, I wanted this to be really good. Edgar Wright directing a Stephen King book should have been awesome.  Instead it was just okay.  Glen Powell stars as a man who signs up for a game show in a terrible future where he has to survive for several days without being caught. If he’s caught, he’ll be killed. If he survives, his family will get some much-needed money.

Zootopia 2: The first film was a fun little romp about talking animals trying to solve a crime. This time around more animals will try to solve a different case.

I’ve written about Scream (1996) several times before. I grew up watching slashers in the late 1980s, and Scream did this amazing job of both satirizing the genre conventions and actually being one of the best films in the genre. The characters are all self-aware. They seem to know they are living inside a horror movie. Well, not that exactly; they are real characters, but they all know the horror conventions. They constantly talk about horror movies, and at one point one of the characters breaks down the “rules.”

I loved that. I’d never seen a movie where characters talked about pop culture in the same way I did. I’d often thought about the rules of horror, even if I’d never exactly put it that way. To see characters on the screen that were like me was revolutionary.

There were two immediate sequels, followed by what are now four legacy sequels that started  just over a decade after the third one ended. They have mostly been a series of diminishing returns. This latest one is the worst in the franchise.

Scream satirized the entire horror genre, specifically slasher films. Scream 2 turned its eyes on sequels, and Scream 3 attempted to go after trilogies. Then there were shots at remakes, YouTube Videos, and Legacy Sequels. Scream 7 seems to just be satirizing itself, as if there are not other aspects of the genre it can poke fun at.

The legacy films in this series have been a mixed bag. Sometimes they’ve felt like they are trying to set up a new group of characters to carry the torch, and yet they can never seem to let go of the old familiar faces. I’ve seen them all, but I would be hard-pressed to tell you anything about the last three films. 

Due to a salary dispute, Neve Campbell did not appear in Scream 6, but she is back front and center for this one. As is Courteney Cox.  Melissa Barrera, who was set up as the main lead in Scream 5 and Scream 6, was not asked to be back for this film due to some social media-related kerfuffle. Jenna Oretega then decided not to return.

I’ve said an awful lot here without actually talking about the film at hand. There just isn’t that much to talk about.

The cold open features a couple of Stab fans (Stab being the in-movie films that basically fictionalize the events of the Scream films, if that makes sense). They come to the house that most of the characters died in the original Scream,as a sort of dark tourism satire and promptly get killed.

Sidney (Campbell) has now moved to a rural town, gotten married to a cop (Joel McHale), and has a kid who she named Tatum (Isabel May) (the name of one of her friends in the first film who was horribly killed – which is kind of weird when you think about it – and the characters in this film do think about it).

Ghostface Killer finds them and starts murdering people in very gore-filled but not so imaginative ways. He video calls Sidney and has the voice and face of the original killer in Scream. But it can’t be him because he was killed in that first film.  Or can it? By this point in the franchise, anything can happen (but mostly doesn’t).

There are a lot of secondary characters who are also suspects. There is the weird kid obsessed with Sidney and her (many) run-ins with killers. There’s the boyfriend and movie nerd girl. Plus a couple of kids from the last film.  There is some decent meta-humor where characters literally call these people by the names I’m using (weird kid, boyfriend, etc.). 

They have the now perfunctory meta-discussion on who the killer could be, but they put no real effort into it.  Gayle (Cox) eventually shows up. Her entrance is pretty good, but then they don’t seem to know what to do with her.

Scream is one of my all-time favorite horror films. I’ve enjoyed many of the sequels even while recognizing they are never as good as the original. But this one just doesn’t seem to have a reason to exist. Yet, I’m not mad I watched it. I even spent good money on it to see it in the theater (something I haven’t done since Scream 3). 

But if they make another one, I hope they get rid of the entire original cast and find a way to make it feel original again. At this point this series is starting to feel like the films the original was so good at making fun of.

I’m a big fan of Radiance Films. They put out really cool releases of relatively obscure films. My understanding is that one of the guys who used to run Arrow Video now runs Radiance, and that checks out. Arrow made a name for themselves by doing some very nice restorations of low-budget cult films and giving them loads of cool extras. Radiance is doing the same but with obscure arthouse European films. 

I try to get as many of them as I can, and I’m never disappointed.

Iphigenia is based on a Greek legend about Agamemnon having to sacrifice his firstborn child in order to win the war with Troy. It is a really beautiful, wonderfully made film, and I’m so glad I watched it.  You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

The 1970s were a difficult decade for Akira Kurosawa. In the late 1960s, he spent years working on two projects that never came to fruition – Runaway Train was cancelled after months of prep work, and he was fired from Tora! Tora! Tora! after three weeks of shooting.

He struggled to gain financing for another picture, but with the help of some friends, he made his first color film, Dodes’ka-den, in 1970. It was a commercial failure.

He attempted suicide in 1971.

He only made one other film in the 1970s, Dersu Uzala, and that had to be made in Russia with Russian financing. It did relatively well both critically and commercially, but he would not make another film this decade.

With the help of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, he was able to make Kagemusha in 1980. In some ways it feels like a warm-up for the director’s next film (and his last truly great movie), Ran.  Both films are set in the Sengoku period of Japan’s history and feature epic battles, political cunning, and samurai. 

Ran tends to get all the glory, but don’t sleep on Kagemusha.

A petty thief (Tatsuya Nakadai) is set to be executed by crucifixion, but when Takeda Nobukado (Tsutomu Yamazaki), the brother of Takeda Shingen (Tatsuya Nakadai), the daimyo (or warlord) of the powerful Takeda Clan, realizes that the thief looks a lot like Takeda, he stays his execution and uses him as a double, or political decoy: a kagemusha – or shadow warrior.

While laying siege to a castle, Takeda is mortally injured. Before he dies, he tells his generals to keep his death a secret for three years. Much of the film is spent with the generals trying to fool everyone –  Takeda’s grandson, his mistresses, his enemies, and even his horse – that the thief (who is never given a name, so we’ll call him Takeda from now on) is the daimyo.

This proves surprisingly easy, and the double is quite good at impersonating the real Takeda. At first the grandson recognizes he is not the real Takeda, but the double is so much kinder and more playful than his real grandfather that the boy quickly takes to him and soon doesn’t care if he is real or not.

The mistresses either don’t notice the differences or are smart enough to realize that if they make a fuss, they will likely lose their jobs or their lives. In a meeting the double proves himself sly, besting the son in words when he balks at the whole scenario.

Most of the clan and their enemies have never seen their leader up close, and since he is careful to wear the full daimyo armor in public and is only seen at a distance by most, nobody seems to realize they are being duped. 

Over time, Takeda begins to think he is the real deal. He starts to give orders as if he is truly boss, much to the chagrin of the generals. As part of the real Takeda’s orders, the clan was supposed to suspend all fighting and keep to themselves for a time.  But the double starts pushing toward war. The film ends on a poignant and utterly devastating note.

At 180 minutes, the film runs long. I found myself struggling to keep up somewhere in the middle. The story is a bit difficult to follow. Many of the characters are based on real people, and I have no doubt that many of the historical and cultural nuances went straight over my head.

Where the film excels is in its visual storytelling. There is a great scene where the rifleman who shot the real Takeda demonstrates how he was able to do it, shooting with a rudimentary gun at a great distance in the dark. It is Kurosawa storytelling at its best.

The film used hundreds, even thousands, of extras for the battle scenes. Kurosawa was a master at staging, and he does so brilliantly here. Sometimes there will be long lines of horses that march across the back of the screen, then the middle, and the foreground. Between them are foot soldiers marching in opposite directions. It must have been quite a feat getting them all to move in the way that looks visually interesting.

His use of color is astounding. There is one scene where all of these soldiers are marching. The sun is setting behind them, and it is so stunningly beautiful I almost cried.

Famously, there is a dream sequence where the fake Takeda faces the real one. Because it is a dream, Kurosawa paints it with vivid colors. The background is a psychedelic landscape of primaries, the ground is the stuff of fantasy, and it ends with Takeda staring at himself in a mirror like pool of water. 

Every moment of this film is beautiful to look at.

I just wish the story held my attention more. In the end, this isn’t top-tier Kurosawa, but there is so much beauty to be found I must highly recommend it.

Pretty much whenever I watch a movie, I internally review it. More often than not, once the movie is over, I’ll spend some time mentally writing a review. Sometimes that makes it onto the page, and I post it here or elsewhere. Sometimes I get distracted, and it never goes anywhere.

Every once in a while I’ll mentally write a review and think that I have actually posted it only to discover, later, that I never did write it out. This is one such occasion. I sure thought I had written a review for this film, but alas, I have not.

The trouble is I watched this a couple of weeks ago, and the plotting details are already foggy. And because this is a fairly obscure Norwegian film from 1952, there aren’t a lot of details of the film online. 

But it is still Foreign Film February, and I wanted to write something about it, so here goes. 

The Criterion Channel is running a little collection of Nordic Noir, and I’ve been enjoying it. The first two films I watched weren’t all that noirish, to be honest. There were hints of noir in there, but you have to stretch the definition a little bit to categorize them as such. But 2 Minutes Late is straight-up noir, and I loved it.

Max Paduan (Poul Reichhardt) is married to the nervous, clingy, and extraordinarily jealous Grete (Grethe Thordahl). She’s even jealous of her sister Beth (Astrid Villaume), thinking her friendship with her husband might be something more. 

One day Grete goes to an old bookstore to find something to read while she’s getting her hair done. She accidentally leaves her purse behind. When she returns, she finds the owner has left for lunch, but a little push on the door and it opens. She smells something strange in the store but shrugs it off, grabs her purse, and leaves. 

Later she’ll learn someone was murdered in that store right around the time she was in it. Suspicions fall on Max, and it is Beth who does some investigating to find out who really did it. The plot gets all sorts of twisty, and it’s filled with lots of interesting little details. This is where my memory gets fuzzy. I don’t remember exactly where it all goes, but I do remember I quite liked it.

If you like film noir and have the Criterion Channel I highly recommend it.

I freaking love me some Peter Lorre. I am a huge film noir fan. Stranger on the Third Floor stars Peter Lorre and is often cited as the very first noir. Several times now I’ve gotten all sorts of excited thinking about that and put this movie on only to be disappointed by it. 

It isn’t a terrible film, but it is definitely a B-movie that never expected to be talked about some seventy years after it first appeared on screens. And Peter Lorre is in it for less than ten minutes.  He’s great, and there is a pretty cool dream sequence in the middle, but other than that it is kind of dull.  Anyway, you can read my full review here.

My wife and I were latecomers to Twin Peaks. I never watched it when it first ran. We picked it up sometime just after we first married, but we didn’t finish even the first season. But just about a year ago we watched it from beginning to end (you can read more about my thoughts here).

Most of the series revolves around the murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) and the authorities attempt to catch her killer. The pilot episode begins on February 24. We know this because Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) rolls into town and announces the date into a small recording device.  This has become something of a meme for fans (as you can see in the image above), and so today has become Twin Peaks Day.

We decided to start a rewatch today. Watching that pilot episode now, which pretty much introduces us to all the various characters that fill Twin Peaks, knowing what is to come. Knowing who the murderer is. Knowing the absolute horror Laura Palmer will be subjected to really makes the pilot hit so much harder.

It is a great introduction to this series. It is  funny and weird, heartbreaking and thrilling in equal measure.  I can’t wait to catch all the details I missed the first time around.

Some two decades after Clark Gable starred in Red Dust, he starred in a remake with Grace Kelly and Ava Gardner. It isn’t nearly as good as the original, but it has its charms. You can read my full review here.

I write a pick of the week almost every week. Beyond the actual pick I talk about at least two or three other interesting releases, often talking about many more.  It is actually quite rare for me to buy any of the things I talk about. I just don’t have the money. 

While writing this week’s pick, I actually talked myself into purchasing it. I don’t even like Excalibur all that much. But it is stunningly beautiful, and weird, and I dig that. And this set of it by Arrow is pretty awesome.  You can read all about it and more over at Cinema Sentries.

This was one of the first Dario Argento films I ever watched. I had definitely watched The Bird With the Crystal Plumage before, and probably Suspiria, but I was not well versed in Argento or Giallo at that point.  I watched it on an old DVD that I bought on the cheap. It was one of those packs of multiple films all put onto a couple of discs where the quality is god-awful. This was a pack of like ten slasher films on two discs.

I didn’t know anything about the film; I’m not even sure I knew it was an Argento, but it sounded interesting, and I gave it a go. I mostly liked it, but I didn’t love it. 

I’ve seen it a couple of times since and have come to enjoy it more. Having now seen almost all of Argento’s filmography and a whole lot of Giallo, I can better see how it fits inside those things and appreciate it more.  It still isn’t anywhere close to my favorite, but it’s a long way from the worst.   I do find it interesting that I watched it so early.

The Cat O’ Nine Tails was the second film Argento ever directed and is the middle part of what has become known as his “Animal Trilogy” (the first is Bird With the Crystal Plumage, the last is Four Flies on Gray Velvet.)

This film suffers from it leaning more towards the murder mystery aspects of the Giallo and away from the more lurid and stylistic parts of the genre. 

Someone breaks into the Terzi Medical Institute but steals nothing. The institute studies genetics and has just made a breakthrough. It seems that individuals with an extra Y chromosome—making it XYY – have a much greater tendency toward violence. That extra chromosome is quite rare, but a study inside a prison found that those convicted of violent crimes had it at a much higher rate.

Since nothing was stolen, the police basically shrug. But a newspaper man named Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus) takes an interest in the story, as does Franco “Cookie” Arno (Karl Malden), a blind man who loves working puzzles. 

Before they can figure it out, the bodies start piling up. Someone is strangling people that at first seem random, but they ultimately are found to have some connection to the institute. 

There are lots of groovy scenes featured from the killer’s point of view, usually as he’s killing someone. In the midst of this, Argento often gives us extreme close-ups on the killer’s eyes, but until the end we do not see who the killer is. With that and Cookie being blind, Argento’s themes about what we see and what we don’t are none too subtle. But still effective. 

The editing is rather fascinating. Between scenes, the film will often give us flashes of what is to come. As one scene is ending, we’ll see the beginning of the next scene  flash cut into the previous scene for a few seconds.  There are a few nicely staged scenes and some typical Dario style, but mostly he plays it straight. Which is too bad because the actual story doesn’t quite have enough in it to keep me completely interested.

It is well worth seeing if you are a fan of Argento or Giallo. It isn’t the first film I’d turn to if you are interested, but it is definitely a nice way of seeing how things developed.

As an aside note I’m counting this as part of Foreign Film February even though the copy I watched was an English dub. Like a lot of Italian films from this time I believe Cat O’ Nine Tails was filmed with everyone speaking in their native tongue and then in post production it was dubbed into English and Italian (with the main actors using their own voice when possible – so Karl Malden speaks in English, and was presumably dubbed by an Italian for that version.) So this was a foreign made film directed by an Italian so I’m counting it.

Spencer Tracy is one of those actors whom I like in just about everything but that I’ve never really gravitated towards. I have no idea why. I got this four-film set the other day and quite enjoyed it (well, three of the films, anyways).

You can read my review of the entire set here.

I used to write a series entitled “Random Shuffle.” This is where I’d literally put my entire music collection (all ripped to iTunes), put it on shuffle mode, and then talk about whatever songs came up. Sometimes I’d talk about the music, but mostly I talked about the memories the music brought to mind. It became kind of an emotional journal, a history of my life in music.

I love the way music does that. How a certain song can take you back to a specific moment in your life. It is transportive. I love that sometimes it isn’t a specific memory but a feeling. There are songs that remind me of being sixteen and driving around in my beat-up Plymouth with the windows rolled down and not a care in the world.

I loved writing those posts. I think it’s still some of the best writing I ever did. I often think about starting it again. But the thing is I just don’t listen to music like I once did. I no longer buy an album and listen to it over and over and over again. Those long nights where I’d lie on the floor with my headphones on, letting the music take me far away, never happen anymore.

These days I generally listen to music in my car as I’m riding around for work or at home while I’m cooking dinner. Or in my office while doing some work or playing a game. I hate to say it, but more often than not I’m letting Spotify or Amazon Music, or some other streaming service, pipe in a playlist curated for me off of songs I’ve told it I liked. These things usually aren’t that inventive and rarely play me new music that interests me. And I admit when they do play something I don’t already know, I often skip it.

So now when I put my music on shuffle, it doesn’t bring up any new memories. I haven’t connected to music in the way that I used to. I don’t mean I never listen to anything new or that I haven’t found music I loved recently. But I don’t connect to them in the same way.

Maybe I’m just not having the adventures I used to. Maybe my life is too boring to bring in new memories. It doesn’t help that I now own hundreds of albums that I’ve barely listened to or that my music player is filled up with thousands of live concerts. Shuffle looks a lot different now than it did back then.

But I want to write about music in a meaningful way again. My idea is to do something similar to Random Shuffle but more long-form. With Random Shuffle I usually talked about 4-5 songs; now I want to hit on just one album or one song.

This will still be autobiographical. I’ll still be talking about how the music connected to me on a personal and emotional level. I actually hit on this idea because a friend of mine is doing a list of the best 1,000 albums ever, but in a very personal way. He’s not trying to be objective about it (as if that even exists) but making it very subjective. They are his favorite albums.

I like that. I won’t necessarily only be talking about albums. Sometimes I’ll just talk about one song. And I won’t be counting anything down. They won’t necessarily even be songs/albums that I love. Just ones that I’ve connected to at some point in my life. I suspect they’ll start out more or less chronological, but then we’ll just see where it goes.

The third album by Swedish rock band Europe, The Final Countdown, was the first album I ever owned. I got it on cassette tape. I can’t remember now if I bought it with my own money or I got it for a Christmas or birthday present. I can’t remember much about the album now. I remember I liked it. I know I loved the single “The Final Countdown.” 

I had probably owned some cassette singles before owning this album. I’m quite sure I had some blank tapes that I recorded songs from the radio onto. to tell the truth, I really don’t remember if this was the first album I ever owned. It is the first album I remember owning, so we’ll leave it at that. 

What I do remember is losing it. I took it with me to church one day. This would have been either Sunday night worship or Wednesday night Bible Study. It definitely wasn’t for Sunday morning worship; that would have been uncivilized.  I would have been about ten years old.

I vaguely remember taking the tape out of the case. We probably played it on the way to church, but I would have taken it out before going into the building. I probably did not properly put it back into its case. I liked looking at the liner notes and staring at the pictures.

 When we got home that night, I realized I did not have the tape. I had the cover, but not the tape. I looked everywhere for it. I tore that car apart.  Our best guess at the time was that I had probably laid it on the exterior of the car somewhere. Maybe I put it on the trunk or the hood when I and the boys played around after services. I had a vague notion I may have laid it on the bumper absentmindedly.

I can’t remember now if my parents drove me back to church that night or if they said it was too late and we went the next day. I do remember for weeks after every time we drove to church I’d look out my window hoping I’d see it lying on the side of the road somewhere.

We never did find it.

I was heartbroken.

Years later I remember finding a copy of that album. I think a friend had it or something. I definitely didn’t ever buy it again. This was a CD, and I nostalgically pressed “play” only to discover I didn’t recognize any of the songs. In that memory I loved the entire album, but none of the snippets I played (and I only played snippets; I didn’t have time to play the entire album in that moment) were familiar to me.

It wasn’t until the TV series Arrested Development made “The Final Countdown” popular again that I remembered that song. For me now, that song is a cheesy bit of nostalgia. Something that makes me smile and raise my fists when I hear it, but only if I hear it every once in a while. I had it on one of my Spotify playlists for a while, but that made me hear it too often, and that’s definitely a song you do not need to hear too often.

So this is the type of thing I’ll be doing now. Songs and albums that mean something to me. That provokes memories.  I’d like to say this will become a weekly article. I’d like to say that, but I won’t.  I’ll likely forget to write it fairly regularly, but hopefully it will at least pop up once a month or so.

Encouraging comments will help me keep it up.

It is kind of amazing to me that the Predator franchise is still a thing. Not only that, but the last couple of films have been some of the best in the entire series. Predator: Badlands might just be my very favorite of all of them. It was definitely one of my favorite films of last year, and you can read all about that here.

It is getting a variety of releases in different formats and covers (plus it is now streaming on Hulu, but I guess I shouldn’t talk about that in a post covering physical releases).  And now it is my pick of the week.

Here’s what else is coming out this week that struck my fancy:

Ben-Hur: William Wyler’s biblical epic took home a whopping 11 Oscars in 1959, and now it is getting the UHD treatment. It has been a long time since I watched this, but now I’m itching to see it again in HD glory.

Song Sung Blue: Loosely based on a true story, this film follows a married couple who form a Neil Diamond cover act and see both success and failures along the way.

Rental Family: Brendan Fraser stars in this drama about an American living in Japan who is hired as a token American for a rental-family company.

All the President’s Men: Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman star as the real-life Woodward and Bernstein, the reporters who helped uncover the Watergate Scandal and bring the Nixon presidency down. A great film in every way, and this UHD upgrade is getting good reviews.

Dexter: Resurrection: The Complete First Season: I think I watched the first season of the original Dexter, and I’ve not really paid it much attention after that. But I know it has fans.

Cloud: Kiyoshi Kurosawa is one of my favorite modern Japanese directors. His latest features a guy who gets into the resale business, but his carelessness puts him in harm’s way. That’s a terrible description, but the film is great.

The Visitor: This absolutely insane film is about an intergalactic warrior who joins a Christ-like figure to battle a demonic eight-year-old.  Arrow has the release.

Eclipse Series 8: Lubitsch Musicals: I’ve only seen a couple of Ernst Lubitsch movies, and none of them have been musicals, but all of them have been enjoyable.  He’s one of those directors who is beloved by a lot of people I like, but I’ve never truly dug into him.  Maybe now is the time to start.  The films include The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, The Smiling Lieutenant, One Hour With You.

Spencer Tracy 4-Film Collection: I’ll have a review of this up soon. The films include Bad Day at Black Rock, Fury, Northwest Passage, and Libeled Lady.

Last night the family and I went to see the King Cabbage Brass Band in concert. I’ll probably have more to say about that later, but for now I’ll say we had a blast. It was a great show.  To get there we had to leave about 6:30, and we didn’t get home until almost midnight, at which point I was utterly exhausted, and was not capable of sitting down to watch a horror movie.

I had actually planned for this and watched a movie earlier in the afternoon.  I got about half of this post written before it was time to go. So, I’m finishing it now, and we’re calling it the Saturday Morning Horror Movie. I guess I could call it the Friday Afternoon Horror Movie since that’s when I watched it, but let’s not make things complicated.

—

There is just too darn much stuff to watch. My daughter wanted to watch Hamilton a couple of weeks ago, and the only way to stream it is to get Disney+. Apparently, the only way to get Disney+ is to bundle it with Hulu. Being the good father that I am, I ordered both, and we all enjoyed Hamilton.

Then I started to enjoy Hulu. They’ve got some good movies, and some great shows, and I decided to keep it for another month. Tonight I figured I’d see how their horror selection was and came across this film. The trailer looked intriguing, and I gave it a go.

Turns out it is part of a horror anthology series from horror stalwarts Blumhouse Pictures. Into the Dark, as the series was called, ran for two seasons with roughly one movie coming out per month. Each movie was holiday themed, grabbing whatever big holiday happened during the month it aired.

Somehow, I’d never heard of this.  Like at all.  Which is weird because this sort of thing is right up my alley. Like I say, there is just too darn much stuff to watch.

But now that I’ve watched this, I’m kind of glad I’d not heard of it before. There are some intriguing ideas in All That We Destroy, but none of them are explored with any real gusto.

Dr. Harris (Samantha Mathis) is a geneticist who has found a way to make perfect human clones. In her house. It is perfect timing because, as it turns out, her son Spencer (Israel Broussard) is probably a serial killer. He’d shown all sorts of signs of that growing up, but when he actually kills a human – a drifter named Ashley (Aurora Perrineu)—she’s sure of it. Instead of turning him in or getting him some kind of therapy, she clones Ashley and lets him keep killing her. 

The idea is that if she observes his killings, then maybe she can figure out what makes him tick and change him. Or at the very least, killing a clone will get those instincts out of his system (for a time), enabling him to live a normal life. And whenever those instincts pop back up, he can come home and kill another clone. 

That’s an interesting idea, but again the film doesn’t do much with it. It doesn’t really explore what makes him tick. The mom could turn into a great villain. It makes a certain sense that any mom would protect their son, but she just keeps churning out clones for him to kill. Even when the clones start to have memories of themselves and increasingly seem human, she just keeps making them.

The trouble is Spencer knows he’s killing a clone. That makes her not human, and he can tell the difference. It just isn’t the same killing a clone.  Enter Marissa (Dora Madison), the cute, effervescent neighbor who takes a liking to Spencer even though he speaks in monotone and acts very strangely. She becomes the love interest but also a real human he might have to kill.

Spencer’s Dad (Frank Whaley) shows up at some point, but only through these very strange virtual reality phone calls with his mom. When he calls, the mom picks up these little dots she attaches to her head and gets transported to a virtual world where they both walk and talk together. There are some other odd technological moments in this film that seem to exist to show that we are living in the near future or something. 

The script does nobody any favors. Madison and Perrineau give it their best, and both are quite good with what they’re given. There really is something to this story, but it’s like the filmmakers didn’t quite believe in it enough and wound up falling back on some stupid tropes.

For one reason or another I can’t figure out how to import them to this blog, so I’m going to have to manually copy/past them here. I am able to set the date of the posts to match the dates of when I originally posted them. WordPress will accept that so they will exist in the correct timeline. But if you subscribe to my emails you will still get a new one.

I just posted one as a trial and it seems to have worked. But I then realized if you are getting my emails then you may be really confused. So we are not going to China again, but you are going to get a bunch of emails about those adventures many years ago.

I always seem to forget to post these things shortly after they go up at Cinema Sentries. I don’t know why other than that they don’t go up the moment I send them to that site. They go past an editor and then they decide when they want to actually publish it. By the time that happens I think I just forget all about it.

But here we are, a week after it did get published. This week I’m talking about Bob Weir, the excellent Australian series The Newsreader, the final season of Stranger Things, The Vast of the Night, Send Help, and the trailer for a new TV series based on Jo Nesbos’ popular crime novels. You can read all about it here.

I love it when my movie theme of the month lines up perfectly with my other writings. In this case my Pick of the Week is a classic French film which fits right in with Foreign Film February. Read all about it and everything else coming out this week right here.

Warner Archive and Kino Lorber both put out a lot of what you might call second-tier classic films. These are movies with big-name stars or directors that, for one reason or another, are not all that well known all these decades later. 

I quite enjoy watching and reviewing them because you never know what you are going to get. Sure, most of them are not the greatest films, but usually they aren’t bad, and once in a while you find a real gem.

Red Dust is a very enjoyable little film. It stars Clark Gable as a rubber plantation owner in Asia and Jean Harlow as the no-nonsense sex worker he falls in love with. Mary Astor also appears as the prim and proper lady Gable’s character initially falls for.  Anyways, I quite enjoyed it, and you can read my review here.

I am an emotional cinephile, not an intellectual one.  What I mean by that is that when I watch a film, I respond to it with my gut, with my heart, not my mind. My favorite films are ones that move me in some way. As is probably painfully obvious from my reviews, I don’t spend a lot of time analyzing a film for its deeper meanings or its themes. I don’t necessarily spend hours digging into the filmmaker’s personal beliefs, what they’ve said in interviews, or the political climate the film was made in.

Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t use my intellect when watching a film. I am often stimulated by the filmmaking techniques, the director’s sense of style, and how they tell their story. I love reading intellectual critiques of films; I’m just not all that capable of writing one.  I’ll let you decide if that is a good or a bad thing.

What this means is that sometimes I come across a film and have no idea how to talk about it.  Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou  is a meta-movie, a crime thriller, a relationship drama, and so much more. 

The plot is fairly simple. Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is sick of his average, boring life. His wife drags him to a party where the men talk like commercials selling cars and the women sound like an ad for skin cream. He leaves early and discovers the babysitter, Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), sound asleep. He agrees to take her home, and they reminisce about how they used to be lovers. 

Those reminisces turn into something more, and they run away, turn to crime, and have a bit of a Bonnie and Clyde situation. It turns out she’s got a history; her brother has been a criminal for quite some time, and…well, now that I think about it, that simple plot gets a little complicated.

The thing is, Godard is taking a fairly standard crime plot, and he’s having all kinds of fun with it. The  title of the film literally translates to “Pierrot, the Fool.”  Marianne constantly calls Ferdinand “Pierrot,” to which he always replies, “My name is Ferdinand.”  The name Pierrot refers to the sad clown of Commedia dell’arte. 

The film makes various references to French literature (most of which went over my head, but my wife filled me in), and movies. At that party early in the film, the great American director Samuel Fuller shows up and discusses film by saying “Film is like a battleground. There’s love, hate, action, violence, death… in one word: emotion.”  Well known French actor Jean-Pierre Leaud shows up as an extra at one point. You can barely see him at the bottom of the frame while our heroes are at a movie.

The score often cuts out for a second only to come back as if Godard is trying to remind us we are watching a film and that real life doesn’t come with a soundtrack. At least a couple of times, characters look straight at the camera and speak to the audience.  Marianne catches Ferdinand doing it and asks, “Who are you talking to?” To which he replies, “The audience.”

This is where I come back to the part where I’m not intellectual enough to talk about this film. There is so much going on in every second of this film that I’ve barely covered it. I can’t cover it, because I know I missed most of it.  I’m just not qualified to give this a true review.

That isn’t to say I didn’t like the film. On the contrary, I loved it. I’ve seen enough films to understand that Godard is being playful, that he’s calling attention to the fact he’s making a film while also making a thoroughly enjoyable story.  

I don’t think you have to be a total film nerd or an intellectual to enjoy this film. I think it can be enjoyed at face value while providing many layers for smart people to sift through.  Highly recommended.

A woman whispers “I love you, I love you” over and over on the phone.

In an office, a businessman, Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), talks mindlessly to a telephone operator. They talk about the long upcoming weekend. Then he goes into his office and closes the door. In a desk drawer he takes out a grappling hook, a pair of gloves, and a gun. He puts on the gloves and takes the rest with him.

He climbs out a window onto a long balcony. He uses the grappling hook to climb up to the floor above. He enters through a window and then walks to his boss’s office. They discuss an upcoming deal, and then Julien shoots his boss in the head. 

The boss was a war profiteer, and Julien is an ex soldier so it is possible that that the killing is political. Later we’ll learn that the voice on the telephone belonged to Florence (Jeanne Moreau), the boss’ wife and Julien’s lover. So, probably they cooked up a scheme to kill him and run away together.

He puts the gun into the boss’s hand, making it look like a suicide. Then he locks the doors, cleverly using a knife to block the lock until he closes the door from the outside, making it appear it was locked from the inside.

As he is climbing back down to his floor, his office phone rings. The operator is with the security guard, who is ready for them to leave so he can lock up. In a rush to answer, Julien forgets about the grappling hook. He tells them he’ll be ready in a minute, then walks out with them.

He walks across the street and starts his car only to look up and see the rope flapping in the wind.  He rushes back to the building and takes the elevator up. Before he can get there, the security guard turns off all the power, trapping Julian inside the elevator.

Outside, a young flower girl, Veronique (Yori Bertin) and her boyfriend, Louis (Georges Poujouly), stare at Julien’s car. It is fancy and fast and too much for Louis to resist. He jumps in and starts to drive away. Veronique protests, saying that Julien will kill him for the deed, as his body is full of medals and scars. 

They’ll spend the evening driving aimlessly around Paris. Eventually they will cross paths with an older German couple in a sports car. They’ll race each other and then find themselves at a motel. Veronique is excited to register as man and wife, but afraid to use their real names. So she chooses Mr. and Mrs. Julien Tavernier. The two couples will drink and tell stories. Louis pretends to have lived Julien’s life. But the old man calls him out.

An act of violence will send Veronique and Louis on the run.

Meanwhile, Florence will wander the streets of Paris looking for Julien, while Miles Davis plays on the soundtrack.

Julien tears the elevator apart trying to find a way to escape. He manages to open the door, but it is between floors, and there isn’t enough room to escape. 

These three stories will come together in wonderful ways.

Elevator to the Gallows was the first film directed by Louis Malle. It is a fascinating take on the film noir.  Most noirs would begin much earlier in the story. We’d see Julian and Florence first meet – perhaps at a party or while she was visiting her husband at the office. They’d have a torrid affair and fall in love. She’d talk about how horrible her husband was, how he made money from those terrible wars. And they’d hatch a plan to kill him. The murder would come much later in the movie.

But here it is at the beginning. We see none of the love love or lust these two have for each other. Other than that telephone call at the very beginning, they do not talk to each other on screen, and they spend the entire film apart. 

As it is Foreign Film February, I wanted to do a non-English language film for my Friday Night Horror flick. It has also been a long day, so I grabbed the thing closest to me, which was my Paul Naschy boxed set. There are five films in that set, and I hope to watch and review them all over the next couple of months. I love the idea of reviewing all the DVDs I own, but that is a monumental task.

Vengeance of the Zombies is an absolutely bonkers film. In the booklet that came with this set, Naschy (who wrote the film) is quoted as having probably been on hashish when he sat down at his typewriter. That definitely checks out.

It also checks out that this was a chepie exploitation flick. Technically there is a plot, but it is so haphazardly put together it is impossible to make sense of.  

Someone is killing a bunch of women in London. Then someone else, a voodoo priest named Kantanka (Paul Naschy), is bringing them back to life as part of his zombie horde.  Naschy also plays Krisna an East Indian mystic.

Elvire Irving (Romy) thinks Krisna is one cool cat and follows him to his big mansion out in the country. The big mansion was once the home of an evil family who were eventually murdered and hung upon the trees in the yard.

There are a lot of dream sequences where Kantanka and some other foul faced fiends attack Elvire. In one particularly groovy dream sequence, Paul Naschy plays Satan, to whom various others make sacrifices.  Another sequence (which may or may not be a dream; it is difficult to tell), a lady wearing a big box painted like a man’s face dances around while Kantanka pours blood onto corpses to turn them alive.  Or something.

Scotland Yard gets involved but is mostly useless. 

Seriously, I just watched this film, and I’m having a hard time remembering anything about the actual plot.

There is lots of murdering. Plenty of ladies wearing sheer nightgowns. And loads of gratuitous sex.

I do love the sex scenes in these types of films. During one scene, the housekeeper is upset over something. Krisna tells her everything is going to be ok. Then he looks at her, the music starts up, and he then pulls down the covers, pulls down her top, and gropes her breasts three times. She then sits up and passionately kisses him.

In another scene, Elvire goes into a barn only to find a woman with her head nearly chopped off. Then she is attacked by a dude with a scythe. Krisna jumps in and saves the day. They then go to the house, where she tells him that he should call the cops. He brusquely says “no” to which she responds by making out with him.

I’ve been doing my seduction techniques all wrong, I guess.

The music is a wild mix of popular rock and funk. It is so crazily inappropriate for most of what’s happening on screen.

This is a ridiculously bad film in every imaginable way. But it’s also a lot of fun to watch. It is the kind of film you want to watch late at night with a group of friends while getting loaded. Check your brain at the door and get ready for ridiculousness.

Welcome back to Foreign Film February. This is one of my longest-running movie themes. I think it is second only to 31 Days of Horror,in terms of longevity. I’ve been doing it since February 2022.

It is the 6th of February, and this is my first post to Foreign Film February, which feels a little late, but also reminds me of how much I’ve been stepping back from my movie themes.  My original theme month was 31 Days of Horror, and I initially tried to write about one movie per day. But that is difficult, and all my other themes quickly became less than that. 

Still, I always tried to write as many posts as I could with each theme.  Some did better than others. But now I write a Friday Night Horror column, and a Pick of the Week, plus I do Five Cool Things every other week, and I’ve been writing a lot of reviews for Cinema Sentries. None of that is going to stop, and so there is a realization that I won’t be writing as many posts about each month’s theme. I’ll still try to do a theme each month; just don’t expect so many posts.

I thought I’d start this month’s FFF with something fun. I’ve written about the Shaw Brothers films numerous times, and I am a big fan of the studio’s kung fu output. This film comes from Arrow Video’s first big boxed set of Shaw Brothers films and is one of their most popular films.

Five Deadly Venoms is a clear favorite of Quentin Tarantino’s. It likely influenced the fictional TV show that Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction starred in, The Deadly Viper Squad, and certainly influenced the Kill Bill films (there is a fan theory that the events of Kill Bill are actually part of that series, which makes it all a fictional TV series within the real Pulp Fiction universe, but I digress.)

It is a strange film within the Shaw Brothers filmography, as it relies more on story than most, with the action sequences taking a bit of a back seat. At the heart of the film is a mystery, or rather multiple mysteries, as we’ll see.

It begins with the dying master of the Five Deadly Vipers clan sending his last pupil, Yang Tieh (Chiang Sheng), on a mission to stop the other clan members dead in their tracks. The Vipers, it seems, have been up to no good; they have become an evil clan. It is unclear whether the master set them up this way (probably) and now that he’s dying he wants to set things right, or if they went wrong somewhere along the way.

Either way, Yang Tieg is now charged with finding them and stopping them from getting some mysterious treasure. Finding that treasure and giving it to charity will put karma on his side.

The trouble is each of the five clan members (and the dude who has the treasure) is a mystery. When they left the master’s teachings, they took on new identities. 

They are all likely in one village where the treasure should also be. When Yang Tieg arrives in that village, he finds a family has been brutally murdered. The treasure may have been stolen from them.

So, Yang Tieg must find the treasure and figure out who each of the five clan members are. The five clan members are all trying to find the treasure. And now the police have a murder to solve. 

I’m not against convoluted mysteries, but this one stays confusing and not all that interesting. The script never leans into one of them. Instead we wander from one clan member to the next, and then hang out with the governor and the police trying to solve the murder.

What is cool about this movie is those five clan members – the Five Deadly Venoms—follow a specific style of fighting:  Centipede, Snake, Scorpion, Lizard, and Toad. The clan master introduces them early in the film.  Each of them wears totally rad masks and demonstrates their fighting style (Centipede is so fast with his arms it looks like 1,000 punches come at you at once – Snake crawls on the ground, etc.). Each fighter fights like his namesake. 

That stuff is so much fun. Unfortunately, because each clan member is hiding from the other, they hardly wear their masks, and they rarely use their special techniques. This film would be 1,000 times cooler if it was just Yang Tieh discovering each of the Vipers one by one and fighting them in their full regalia.

There are moments of interest throughout. At one point the evil governor puts one of the Vipers into an Iron Maiden like device with a thousand nails that is suppossed to find his one weak spot. Another guy gets a thin knife stuck into his brain through his nose.

But mostly we get a convoluted mystery. The finale does give us some cool fighting, and that is worth the price of admission. But it sure is a slog getting there.

I love it when a low-budget film that should have been forgotten about weeks after its release and completely forgotten by time manages to do something completely different and become a classic. Remembered nearly one hundred years after it was released.

The Sin of Nora Moran was a poverty row drama whose story was a dime-a-dozen, but they did something in the editing room that made it interesting and different, and here we are with a new Blu-ray release of it in 2026. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

James Stewart is one of my favorite classic actors. He made a ton of great movies and is always good in them. I recently reviewed a boxed set of four of his films – The Naked Spur, The Shop Around the Corner, How the West Was Won, and The Mortal Storm – for Cinema Sentries. It is a great set and I mostly loved the movie. You can read the full review here.

Don’t tell anyone, but sometimes I request review copies just for my wife. I’m on record as stating I’m weird about comedies. I don’t like movies or shows that are just joke factories. I want a story and characters first and then jokes.

But she’s a fan of silliness, and she had mentioned wanting to see this film, so when I got offered a Blu-ray, I took it. 

It took me a little while to warm up to Fackham Hall, but once I got into its groove, I found it to be very funny. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

I watched 41 movies in January. 34 of them were new to me. 18 of them were made before I was born. I completely failed at my new theme – New Year, New You. I watched a few films that could be categorized as that, but I only wrote about three of them. I really am going to have to just stick to genres or decades for my themes.

It is always exciting to me to come into a new year with my movie journals. Every January I reset everything. I start fresh with my most-watched actor and director lists. It feels like I can just watch whatever I want.

I always enjoy watching those lists slowly solidify as the months roll on.

For my most-watched actors category, James Stewart has taken the lead. I got a four-film boxed set of his films to review this past month, putting him in first place. Paul Walter Hauser is a guy I’d never heard of until a few months ago when I watched him in a TV series called Blackbird. Now I keep finding him in all sorts of things.

I’ve apparently not watched any director for more than a single film, so that list doesn’t even exist yet.

Favorite new to me films I watched in January include Send Help, The Shop Around the Corner, The Vast of Night, Sleeping Car to Trieste, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, and Barry Lyndon.

Here’s the ful list.

The Naked Spur (1953) ****1/2
Fackham Hall (2025) ****
Send Help (2026) ****
How the West Was Won (1962) ***1/2
The Mortal Storm (1940) ****
The Shop Around the Corner (1940) ****
Black Phone 2 (2025) ***
Manpower (1941) ***
The Verdict (1946) ***1/2
Relay (2024) ***1/2
The Fantastic 4: First Steps (2025) ***
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) ****1/2 Catherine Called Birdy (2022) ***1/2
The Vast of Night (2019) ****
Operation Amsterdam (1959) ***
Death Is a Caress (1949) ***
Sleeping Car to Trieste (1948) ****
The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949) ****
Wrong Turn (2003) *
Good Boy (2025) ***
Death on the Nile (1978) ****
Americana (2023) ***
Doctor Who: The Power of the Daleks (1966) ***1/2
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026) ****
Deadline at Dawn (1946) ***
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) ****
The Sign of Four (1983) ***
Horror Rises from the Tomb (1973) ***1/2
Blood for Dust (2023) ***1/2
Murder on the Blackpool Express (2017) **1/2
Barry Lyndon (1975) ****1/2
Illustrious Corpses (1976) ****
Evil Under the Sun (1982) ****
What’s Up, Doc? (1972) ****
Cronos (1992) ****
Girl with Hyacinths (1950) ****1/2
The Naked Gun (2025) ***1/2
Boogie Nights (1997) ****
Lost in America (1985) ****
Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1971) ***1/2
Catch Me If You Can (2002) ****

During Franco’s reign of Spain from 1939 to 1975, the government controlled all forms of artistic expression. After his death, movies once again began to express themselves as their creators desired. Artistic expression was political freedom. These films, which were suddenly able to explore sexuality, violence, and horror in ways that had been censored for decades, became a kind of cultural exorcism.

Severin Films is now releasing 19 of those films in a boxed set they are calling Exorcismo: Defying a Dictator & Raising Hell in Post-Franco Spain. I’ve not heard of any of these films, and my film knowledge is severely lacking in all Spanish cinema, but this sounds like a marvelous place to start. I’m happy to make this set my pick of the week.

Also out that looks interesting:

Keeper: Osgood Perkins’ latest has gotten very mixed reviews, but I always find his films at least interesting. Tatiana Maslany stars as a woman left alone in an isolated cabin only to discover an unspeakable evil.

3:10 to Yuma: Criterion is giving this classic western starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin about a mild-mannered rancher who is tasked with shepherding an outlaw back to prison the UHD treatment.

Friday the 13th (2009): Arrow Video is giving this terrible remake their special treatment.

Peter Greenstreet and Peter Lorre starred in nine films together including two absolute bangers – The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. The Verdict was their final collaboration, and sadly it isn’t great. But it isn’t terrible and it was the first film ever directed by Don Siegel so it has that going for it. You can read my full review here.

When I first began writing these Friday Night Horror columns, back in 2022, I didn’t really write full reviews of the films. They really were Friday night movies. After supper, me and the family would go upstairs to my bedroom and watch a Doctor Who episode, and then I’d write my Five Cool Things column (which was published on Fridays back then), and then I’d start watching a horror movie. But by then it was usually pretty late. Many times I’d actually fall asleep on the couch before I’d finished the movie. Even if I did make it to the end, it would be way too late for me to be able to write a full review.  So usually, somewhere in the middle of the film, I’d dash off my column with promises to write my full thoughts the next morning (usually this didn’t happen.)

At some point my daughter got older and started having friends over on Friday nights (or she’d go to their house), and the Doctor Who watching kind of stopped. Then I stopped writing Five Cool Things on Fridays, and suddenly I had a lot more free time to start my weekend. Truth be told, I often watch my horror movies on Friday afternoons. 

Short thoughts on movies I hadn’t even finished became full-on reviews, and here we are. I say all this to admit one thing: I can barely remember watching Black Phone (2021). When trailers started dropping for Black Phone 2, I remembered I had seen the first one, but I couldn’t remember anything about it. I was pretty sure I had written about it, so I searched my site hoping to find a review to refresh my memory. I found my Friday Night Horror column on it, but then had to face the fact that it was written at that time when I wasn’t writing full reviews. And in the case of this movie, I was so spoiler-avoidant I hardly said anything about the plot.

I started to watch it again because I wasn’t interested in the sequel, but I’ve got a stack of Blu-rays on my desk that need watching (and reviewing), so I didn’t feel like I had time.  So I watched a couple of trailers and refreshed myself with the basic premise of the films and sat down with the sequel. 

Black Phone 2 takes place four years after the original film. The hero of that film, Finney Black (Mason Thames), the only survivor of the Grabber’s (Ethan Hawke) reign as a serial killer, is haunted by his experience.  His sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), who helped find Finn when he was trapped in the Grabber’s basement, is now haunted by  nightmares featuring young boys being murdered at the Alpine Lake Christian Camp. When she receives a phone call from her dead mother and discovers that she once worked at Alpine Lake, she convinces Finn and her friend Ernesto (Miguel Mora) – whose brother was killed by the Grabber – to visit Alpine Lake and investigate.

They tell the camp they are interested in becoming counselors in training. The camp agrees, but by the time they arrive, a great blizzard has rolled in. Most of the staff went home to stay out of the storm, and none of the other counselors (or campers) have arrived.  This leaves our heroes alone with Armondo (Demián Bichir) the camp supervisor; Mustang (Arianna Rivas), Armondo’s niece and assistant; and Barbara (Maev Beaty) and Kenneth (Graham Abbey) two employees of the camp and staunch Christians. 

As someone who grew up in a conservative Christian environment and who attended a Christian summer camp for several years, I have a little complaint to make. Our heroes – two boys and a girl – arrive at this camp in the midst of a terrible storm in the middle of the night. They are greeted rather coldly and then immediately separated – boys in one cabin, Gwen in another. When Gwen asks about this arrangement, not wanting to be left alone in this strange place in the middle of a storm, she’s told by Mustang that there is a law against underage boys and girls sleeping in the same cabin. Furthermore, while Mustang would like to stay with Gwen, she also is not allowed by law because she is not a licensed counselor. 

What the what? I’ve been to numerous Christian camps and retreats, and while it is true they don’t allow boys and girls to bunk in the same house as each other, it isn’t because of some law but rather because they fear the sexy. Boys and girls can’t be trusted with their lust and therefore must be separated. Even if it is in the middle of the night, in a strange place, and there is a scary snowstorm.  Even if one of the boys is the girl’s brother. And almost every adult I’ve ever known in this situation would absolutely let Gwen either stay with her brother or with them. No way are they making her sleep by herself.

But I digress.

Gwen continues to have dreams. A payphone (for some reason located outside by itself, very near a frozen lake) starts ringing even though it is disconnected. Finn answers it and discovers the Grabber isn’t dead, and he’s ready for his revenge.

Armondo is suspicious these kids aren’t really the Christian camp counselor type (Gwen’s hilariously foul mouth tips him off), and soon enough they confess to him why they are really there. He remembers the mother and agrees to help.

Gwen’s nightmares were shot using Super 8 and Super 16 cameras, which give it a wonderfully gritty and old look. Unfortunately, they are mostly gore-filled jump scares that didn’t do anything for me. The rest of the film didn’t fare much better.

My (admittedly vague) memory of the first film is that it was very tense and thrilling. The sequel has none of that. They don’t attempt to add anything to the lore. They don’t try and explain how the Grabber is still alive. He’s come from hell, I guess. They do some variations on his creepy mask, which is kind of cool, but he isn’t terrifying here. 

I didn’t hate the film. There are moments that are interesting. I do appreciate that they tried to go in a different direction instead of imitating the original, but they missed the goal line.

I feel like I grouse a little too much about not having much of a readership. In truth, it isn’t that big of a deal. Sure, I wish more people read my stuff, but I’m not actually trying all that hard to gain a readership. I write because I like to write.

But I also realize that I tend to write about relatively obscure stuff. I don’t go to the movies every week and catch the hot movies. I don’t even tend to watch them at home and write about them. I watch stuff like this – an obscure Italian murder mystery that wasn’t likely known in the US when it came out, much less 50 years later.

Sometimes I tell myself to write about new things, or at least popular ones, but I can’t help myself. I watch what I like, and I write about that.

Oh well. This film may be obscure, it is certainly strange, but it was also pretty good. You can read my full review here.

I very intentionally stay away from writing about politics in these pages. Partially because I don’t think I would sway anyone one way or another, but also because I just don’t have the energy to argue anymore.

But what ICE is doing all over our country, and especially in Minneapolis, is unconscionable. It is wrong. There has to be a better way.

Bruce Springsteen just dropped a song about it, and it is angry and powerful. He does not hold back. Neither should you. Neither should I. 

When I was thinking of what theme I should do for January, my wife was the first to come up with the New Year concept. Originally she suggested road trip movies. New Year means trying to make changes in your life, and sometimes that means leaving the place you’ve been stuck in. I liked that idea but wasn’t sure I could do enough road trip movies to make it through the month. 

But I do think you can encompass travel into my larger theme of New Year, New You. Now, we are going to stretch it a little further and suggest any movie where the people are traveling somewhere even if they don’t experience much growth along the way.

I love road trip movies. I love movies set on trains even more. I love train travel in general. I have ridden a lot of trains all over Europe and Asia; it is a wonderful way to travel. As much as I love to drive, it is very nice to ride the rails and not have to worry about anything. Trains are so much more enjoyable than planes. You have more legroom. You can get up and walk about. And the scenery is often much more beautiful. 

There are lots of different types of movies set on and around trains. I love a good mystery or thriller set aboard a train.  Trains are enclosed spaces, so the killer (or thief, or whatever) only has so many places to hide. But there are usually many cars so that you aren’t just stuck in one room. And the train is traveling, which allows for different scenery and different passengers to come and go, and the ever present possibility that someone could jump.

An important diary is stolen from the Paris Embassy by Zurta (Albert Lieven) and Valya (Jean Kent). They hand it to a man called Poole (Alan Wheatley) who is supposed to usher it to a designated rendezvous point. Instead, he runs to the Orient Express with intentions to sell it to the highest bidder. The diary is said to contain information that in the wrong hands would lead to yet another world war.

Zurta and Valya learn of Poole’s deception and board the train. It departs for Trieste. To complicate matters, Zurta is wanted by the authorities in Trieste and must depart before they arrive there.

They don’t exactly know where Poole is on the train; he’s doing a good job of staying low, and they can’t make a show of looking for him because they had every intention of using the diary themselves. 

Mixed in with all of this espionage is a big bag of characters having their own side stories. Usually this kind of film has lots of these types of characters, but their screen time is minimized. They exist to give the film color, to give the setting some realism. But here they are given ample opportunity to be on screen. Numerous, what would normally be side characters, are given time to have fully drawn stories. Our leads often feel like supporting parts. 

There is a young GI looking for some birds to chat up and winds up in a car with a British ornithologist. A boorish Brit spends all his time with the train’s renowned chef trying to teach him how to cook dull dishes. A businessman takes a woman with him who is decidedly not his wife in hopes of an affair, but fate keeps intervening and keeping them apart. Etc. and so forth. 

Poole bribes a porter to get a private room where he hides the diary. But then he’s kicked out because that room was reserved by a very prominent and rich writer. He’s then sat with a French detective, Inspector Jolif (Paul Dupuis). Eventually, the diary will be found, and someone (or someones) will find themselves dead. It is Inspector Jolif who will have to put everything together. But even then the film doesn’t bother itself too much with that angle.

I sound like I’m complaining, but I’m absolutely not. I enjoyed this crazy cast of characters and each of their stories. I would have enjoyed it more if they’d spent just a little more time on the thriller aspects, but mostly this film is a lot of fun.

Once again a John Woo flick is getting the 4K UHD treatment and once again I’m making it my Pick of the Week. I’ve never seen Once a Thief, never even heard of it if I’m being honest, but it sounds interesting to me. Read all about it and everything else that’s coming out over at Cinema Sentries.

I love, love, loved Dinosaur Jr. when I was a teenager. A bad breakup with a girl in college kept me away from them for a long time, but I’ve since come back to enjoy their brand of music.

Wilco is one of my very favorite bands. Wilco invited Dinosaur Jr to play on their Sky Blue Sky festival in Mexico this week. During Wilco’s set J joined them for a fiery version of Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer.”

Three lead guitar players is always a challenge but I love the way they pulled it off here. Jeff, J, and Nels all get a chance to solo, but when they aren’t doing that they still add plenty of texture. I love how Jeff seems to almost forget about the final verse and just kind of throw it out there at the end.

Well, once again I seem to have completely biffed on a monthly movie theme. I really should only choose genres and time periods. Everything else seems to be too much work. I can easily choose movies from a genre on any streaming service or my own collection. Ditto for movies by decade. But when I choose something like this – movies that feature characters in transition or moving in some manner – then I have to do a little research, and then I have to figure out how to watch those films. Most days I’m too tired to do even that little bit of effort.

So here we are on January 24, and I’m talking about my second film from this month’s theme.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore was Martin Scorsese’s fourth feature-length film. He was still trying to find his footing as a director. His first film, Who’s That Knocking On My Door, is actually quite interesting and dives right into many of the themes Scorsese would continue to tackle for the rest of his career, but it was really just one step above a student film. 

After that he moved to Hollywood, and Roger Corman gave him the money (with stipulations) to make Boxcar Bertha. It isn’t a bad film, but it was definitely a director-for-hire kind of gig. Scorsese’s friends, especially John Cassavetes, hated it and were afraid Scorsese was selling out.

He then made Mean Streets, a semi-autobiographical film about street hoods in New York City. It did quite well both commercially and critically and hailed Scorsese as a director one should keep their eye on.

The question then was, what would he do next?  The answer came from Ellen Burstyn. She was looking to make what they used to call a “Woman’s Picture” but with more modern sensibilities. Her friend Francis Ford Coppola told her to watch Mean Streets, and she immediately thought Scorsese was the man to make her film.

The movie immediately announces she was right. The opening credits roll over soft satin; an old romantic song croons on the soundtrack. Then we open on a farm straight out of The Wizard of Oz. Scorsese drenches it in bright reds as if the sun is setting. It looks very much like an old film from the classic days of Hollywood. Everything is beautiful, but artificial.

A young girl, Alice (Mia Bendixsen), sings the song we just heard over the credits. She says something about how she’ll grow up to be a singer, and then something like, “I hope to Christ I will.”  It is that “Christ” that catches your attention. Little girls in old movies don’t blaspheme. A moment later she’ll curse again. Then she’ll be called into her house for supper. The film moves in on her through the window.

Then crash cut. “All the Way From Memphis” by Mott the Hoople blasts on the radio. The color returns to normal. We see Ellen, now an adult (and played by Ellen Burstyn), in the kitchen of her new home.  Her preteen son Tommy (Alfred Lutter) lies on the floor listening to that song loudly, the speakers set inches away from his ears.  Ellen is enjoying it. She sways to the music, but her husband, Billy (Donald Hyatt) isn’t so chill. He shouts at Tommy to turn that racket down. 

This is Scorsese announcing that this isn’t your mothers type of movie.

I’d seen this film once before many years ago. In my memory, Billy was a horrible husband, mean and abusive. Alice sets out on her adventure by leaving him. I was pretty sure she left her son with him.  

In reality, the husband isn’t so bad. He’s not particularly attentive, but other than some yelling, he isn’t abusive. He seems like a man who has become tired of his life – of his low paying job, of his son, who is rather high-strung and is always making noise, and of his wife, who isn’t quite as exciting as she once was.  There is an early scene where he lies on the bed watching TV. Alice comes in and asks what he’s watching and what it’s about. He mostly grunts, giving her half answers. He’s not really paying attention to the show, but wants to be left alone.  She begins to quietly sob.  But he notices her, sees her pain, and comforts her. There is love in that relationship.

Then he dies. A terrible car accident changes Alice’s and Tommy’s lives forever. Alice moved to New Mexico when they got married, but now she’s thinking of that old farm in Monterey, California. She was happy there. She thinks she could be happy there again.

She sells all her stuff and takes to the road. But there isn’t enough money to get them to Monterey. They stop in Phoenix. She gets a job as a lounge singer. She meets a guy (Harvey Keitel). At first she pushes him away, but she’s lonesome, and she lets him have her. He seems nice, and she thinks about staying. Then his wife shows up, and he loses his temper, and they hit the road once again.

They make it to Tucson, and she’s forced to take a job as a waitress at a crummy diner. She befriends Flo (Diane Ladd), a fiery waitress with a way with words (and yes, this part of the movie is the basis for the long-running television series, Alice). She meets another man, David (Kris Kristofferson), and once again her plans for Monterey get sidetracked. 

It does feel like a film that was taking something old and outdated and giving it a modern spin. Alice wasn’t exactly unhappy in her life as a homemaker, but she wasn’t thriving either. Her husband’s death forces her to make changes, but this isn’t a film where everything comes up roses. She struggles. She gets sidetracked. 

Tommy is a good kid, but he’s loud, obnoxious, and he talks back constantly. Alice mostly lets him get away with it. She gives him sass right back. Sometimes she yells at him, but she’s also very protective of him.  This gets her into trouble with her men. David tells her she spoils the kid, that what he needs is a good swift kick in the rear. But she won’t have any of that. It is a very real picture of single-motherhood with all its struggles. Alice isn’t perfect, but she’s trying.

Other than that opening scene, Scorsese refrains from making it too flashy. He lets the story (and Burstyn’s performance, for which she won an Oscar) take the lead. It isn’t my favorite Scorsese picture by a long shot, and it feels very much apart from pretty much every other film he’s directed, but it is still quite good and I recommend it.

The idea of a horror movie told from the perspective of a dog is a good one.  It’s a great one, actually. It seems so simple you wonder why it hasn’t ever been done before. The execution of Good Boy is mostly good too. Except for a few shots, it isn’t from the dog’s POV or anything, but the camera is often set down low, from the height a dog would normally see. The dog’s owner, Todd (Shane Jensen), barely has his face on screen. If you’ve ever had a dog suddenly look out a window into darkness or bark at a door when no one was outside, then you know the feeling this movie gives you.

There isn’t a whole lot of plot to describe. Todd has some kind of disease. The kind that makes him cough up blood regularly. The film opens on him unconscious, lying on his couch with the dog Indy (a very good dog, indeed) sitting by his feet. Todd’s sister Vera (Arielle Friedman) discovers him there and calls for an ambulance. 

Upon release, he moves to his dead grandfather’s old home in the woods. Vera constantly calls Todd with concerns over his health, to his increased annoyance. The house is old and creepy and possibly haunted. Indy regularly feels a dark presence there. Sometimes he sees something lurking in the shadows. Sometimes it does more than lurk. This is the type of film that will linger in a wide shot inside the house. After a long beat, something will move, or a shadow will become a creature. I found myself always looking in the backgrounds to find some new horror.

It is a mood film with jump scares.

I dug all of that. But the script has problems. Nothing is very well defined. My expectations were that Todd would be attacked in some way by the monster and Indy would triumphantly save him. I would have even accepted Todd dying early in the film and the rest of it being Indy trying to survive the monster like a Final Girl.

But Todd hardly even notices the evil presence. It might be attacking him. It might be making him sicker.  Or it might be possessing him somehow. But none of that is clear. At one point I thought the monster might just be a metaphor for his illness.

Indy is more of a passive observer than a hero. It would have been incredibly obnoxious to have him barking at everything the entire movie, but he just sits there watching weird shadows appear and nightmare monsters attack without hardly even growling. 

All of this makes the film fairly inert. There isn’t much forward motion to it. The plot never seems to go anywhere, but the themes—what the film is trying to say—are more muddled than clear.

I’m glad I watched it. I really do think the concept is a good one, and the execution is well done. I just wish there was more to it.

We are about to get hit by a massive snowstorm and ridiculous cold (for Oklahoma, which means about 10 inches of snow and temperatures around -5). Or so they say. I don’t really trust weather predictions around here. We could just as likely have record-breaking heat. It looks like large swaths of the USA are going to get hit, so if you are in its range, stay safe.

While you are staying inside and keeping warm, I’ve got a few cool things you can check out, including an intense HBO series, a zombie sequel, a new release of an old book, an old remake of an even older comedy, a couple of Agatha Christie adaptations, and the first look at a retelling of the Frankenstein story. Click here to find out more.

Between 1934 and 1943, James M. Cain wrote The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, and Double Indemnity, three stone-cold classics.  These made him one of the godfathers of the hard-boiled detective stories. They made three great movies off of those novels, which also makes him the godfather of film noir.  

He wrote several other books during this time. I’ve only read one of them, Serenade, and didn’t particularly care for it, but those big three are amazing. He wrote many more books after this period, too, and I only just realized he kept writing up until his death in 1977. In fact, he was writing The Cocktail Waitress when he died. 

I say writing it, but in fact he had mostly finished it. Or rather, he had finished it a few different times. Originally written in the third person, Cain became unsatisfied with this and rewrote it in the first person, changing the vernacular to fit his protagonist’s voice. He then sent a draft to his publisher, who demanded he change the ending. A final draft was never sent, and so the novel was shelved after Cain died. 

Many years later, the good people at Hard Case Crime publishing went digging for it and found several different drafts. They had to make some decisions on which parts of which drafts to use, but ultimately published what they consider the final book in 2012. But this isn’t a case where they hired some new writer  to complete an unfinished novel; they simply had to decide which parts of various finished drafts to edit into what we now have on our shelves.

The end result is pretty good. Like I said, I haven’t read any of the books Cain wrote after Double Indemnity in 1943, but my understanding is that his later books tackled other interests besides crime. The Cocktail Waitress was then an attempt to return to form, perhaps to stir up commercial interest that had waned.

Our narrator is Joan Medford, and her story begins with her husband’s end. He was a deadbeat and a drunk who used to beat her. He died in an automobile accident, leaving her with a young son, a house, and a pile of unpaid bills.  The accident was a little suspicious, but the cops couldn’t find enough evidence to book her for it, so they let her be.

Because she’s telling her story (into a tape recorder to get her side of every crime – there will be several – onto an official record), we’re never quite sure if what she’s telling is the truth. She is absolutely an unreliable narrator.

Because of the unpaid bills, she takes a job as a cocktail waitress. It’s one of those joints where she has to wear a skimpy outfit and accept the fact that her customers are going to hit on her, pinch her posterior, and sometimes ask for more.

She’ll meet two men at this job that will change her life. The first is Earl White, an elderly, very wealthy gentleman with a heart condition that makes it impossible for him to have sex with Joan or anyone else. This doesn’t keep him from making passes at her, but he tips extremely well, so she encourages him. So much that he eventually asks her to marry him. He promises he’ll behave, and anyway, if he doesn’t, he’ll literally die from trying, so what has she got to lose? 

That would certainly get her out of all her financial troubles, set her up for life, and allow her son to live a good life. Currently the boy is living with his dead husband’s sister, a woman Joan hates.  She suspects the woman wants to keep her boy permanently, but she knows she’s got to get something more financially permanent in her life in order to take him back, and Earl would be just the thing. 

The other man is Tom. He’s young, fiery, and handsome. Also broke. Also a bit of pig. The first time he meets him, he’s drunk as hell, and he slides his hands right up her skimpy waitress outfit and into places no man should go without asking first. She gives him her what-for for doing that, but it kind of turned her on. Or something. She’ll eventually let him take her out. For her trouble, he takes her to a place with curtains around the booths so that couples can do things people really shouldn’t do on a table where others might want to eat. She kind of likes it this time, but then remembers her deal with Earl and splits before things get too heavy.

And that’s the crux of the story. Earl will give her all the stability she craves, but she’s not attracted to him. Also, he just can’t help himself. Whether it will kill him or not, he’d really like to get it on with Joan.  Then there is Tom, who cannot help her financial situation out, and he’s kind of lecherous, but damn it if he doesn’t turn her on.

If you know anything about James M. Cain, you’ll know this story will have some deadly twists. I won’t spoil them, but let’s just say the law gets back on her trail, and it will be difficult for her to get out of it this time.

Cain’s stories were always a little bit sleazy. He liked writing about characters on the rough side of the tracks and never strayed away from sex in his stories. Lust is all over The Postman Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. He goes pretty hard in that direction in this story. I know it was written in the 1970s when those boundaries had been pushed farther by others at this point, but it did feel wild to read him going as far as he does in this story.

It also feels like an older man trying to keep up. Or a once great writer trying to relive his glory days.  And you can definitely feel some of the editing going on. I don’t ‘know that I could point you to a specific page where you can tell that the editor used an older draft or whatever, but overall it did feel a little disjointed.  But also, I rather enjoyed reading it.

I remember reading Mildred Pierce for the first time and stopping after several pages, my heart racing and a smile on my face.  I immediately told my wife she had to read it. I wanted to shout it to everyone that this was an amazing book. It was just that good. I did not have a moment like that while reading The Cocktail Waitress. But that doesn’t mean I’m unhappy I read the book either. I’m glad I did. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in Cain’s novels. I’m so glad they were able to put it together and give it to the world.

One Battle After Another was one of my favorite movies of 2025. I saw it in the theater, I watched it streaming at home, and now I’m going to own it on 4K UHD. It is a great movie. You can read my thoughts on it in my post about my favorite films of 2025 here.

Unfortunately, this disc comes with no extras. Apparently there is a Steelbook coming out in March that has some extras, but as far as I can tell, it has already sold out.  Maybe Criterion will hook us up sometime in the future.  Until then, this looks like it. I’m still making it my pick of the week because I love the movie, and I’m excited to own it on home video.

Also out this week that looks interesting:  

Wicked: For Good: A movie based on a musical that was based on a book that was made into a movie that was adapted from a book. Or something. Wicked was a smash hit on Broadway. It was based on a book that adapted the beloved Wizard of Oz novel by Frank L. Baum (which of course became a beloved movie.) They stretched the musical into two movies, and this is the second one.

Roofman: Based on a true story, this drama/comedy stars Channing Tatum as a man who robbed a bunch of fast food joints by cutting through their ceilings. He got caught, went to prison, broke out of prison, and wound up living inside a Toys R Us. The trailers make it look like a silly, fun movie, but there is quite a bit of downer drama mixed in.

Doctor Who: Tom Baker Complete Season Two:  If you like classic Doctor Who these Blu-ray sets of complete seasons are amazing.  This one includes the following stories: Terror of the Zygons, Planet of Evil, Pyramids of Mars, The Android Invasion, The Brain of Morbius, and The Seeds of Doom.

Springsteen: Delivery Me From Nowhere: I still haven’t seen that Bob Dylan biopic, so don’t ask me about this one.

Snakes on a Plane 4K UHD: It seems so strange today to think about the build-up to this movie. People were so excited about it. Mainly because that clip of Samuel L. Jackson saying a very funny thing was everywhere. But then the movie came out, and it was kind of a dud, (or so I’ve been told – I still haven’t seen it), and we all moved on. But if you are a fan, then Arrow Video is giving it the UHD treatment.

Fackham Hall: This very silly comedy, which is basically a Downton Abbey spoof, was cowritten by Jimmy Carr, a British comedian who hosts about half the panel shows airing in England right now. 

Captain Blood 4K UHD: Criterion is releasing this Errol Flynn swashbuckler about a physician who becomes a pirate after being unjustly imprisoned.

The Dead 4K UHD: John Huston’s adaptation of the James Joyce short story of the same name gets the Criterion treatment.

Death on the Nile 4K UHD: After the success of the Sidney Lumet-directed Murder on the Orient Express, EMI Films wanted to adapt another popular Agatha Christie story. This was the natural selection. Albert Finney bowed out of playing Hercule Poirot again, so Peter Ustinov jumped in his shoes. This star studded mystery has some lovely on-location shooting in Egypt. You can read my review here.

Evil Under the Sun 4K UHD: Death on the Nile was successful enough that they adapted yet another Agatha Christie. You can read my review here.

The Mirror Crack’d 4K UHD: Yet another Agatha Christie adaptation. This one doesn’t feature Poirot. Instead, Angela Lansbury is playing Christie’s other famed detective, Miss Marple. I watched this one several years ago and found it rather dull, which is why I do not have a review for you.

Lucifer: The Complete Series: Based on a DC Comics series, this show follows Lucifer Morningstar, aka Satan, as he abdicates his throne as ruler of Hell and moves to Los Angeles to run a nightclub.

Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, No. 5: The famed director (my favorite) has been working with the Criterion Collection, creating these boxed sets of lesser known films from around the world. This set features Chronicle of the Years of Fire, Yam Daabo, Kummatty, and The Fall of Otrar.

Torso: A pretty sleazy Giallo finds beautiful women hiding out from a serial killer inside an isolated country villa. Naturally, the killer finds them there, and they have nowhere to run. I reviewed the movie (not this release) here.

Deadline at Dawn (1946)
Directed by Harold Clurman
Starring Susan Hayward, Paul Lukas, and Bill Williams

After a woman he meets is murdered, a soon-to-ship-out sailor has until dawn to find the killer, aided by a weary dance hall girl.

Rating: 7/10

The first act of this story is quite good. A drunk sailor wakes up to find he has no memory of the last hour of his life and a wad of bills in his pocket. He has a hazy memory of the money belonging to a girl he got drunk with the night before, but when he goes to return it, he finds her dead. He enlists a dance hall girl to help him figure out what happened. He has to be on a bus to report for duty at six in the morning.

All of that stuff is enjoyable, but then they get a cab driver entangled in the mystery, and the quality dips. The character of the cab driver is actually interesting, and the performance from Paul Lukas is good, but he winds up feeling like a third wheel. He takes away from the chemistry the two leads have and muddles it all up.

I hated the conclusion. Thinking about it now, it sort of makes sense, but in the moment it felt absolutely wrong. But the filmmaking is good, and the acting is good, so it is well worth watching.

Paul Naschy was a Spanish writer/actor/director who is most known for a series of horror films he made where he starred as a werewolf named Count Waldemar Daninsky. The films are mostly unconnected to one another except that he plays a werewolf with the same name, but there is no continuity to be found within them. I’ve seen a couple of them and quite enjoyed the watch. So much so that I found a collection of Naschy films boxed up in a Blu-ray set and put them on my wishlist for Christmas.  My lovely wife bought them for me, and I opened them up tonight to start watching.

What I failed to recognize when I put this set on my wish list was that these films are just random Paul Naschy films, not a collection of his werewolf movies. Still, in for a penny, in for a pound, so I put on the first one and hoped for the best. 

According to the liner notes (and Wikipedia), Naschy was told by the producers they wanted to make a film with him, but in order to do so, they needed a script ASAP. So he popped some pills and sat down to write, pounding out the script to Horror Rises from the Grave in 36 hours.

It definitely feels like a movie whose script was written in 36 hours. There is very little story to it, and it plays like Naschy just took every horror movie he loved and blended them together. Then added copious amounts of gore effects and enough naked breasts to make Cinemax on a Saturday night blush.

Still, it is pretty fun to watch.

It begins in medieval times, where a warlock called Alaric de Marnac (Paul Naschy) and his witch companion Mabille de Lancre (Helga Line) are executed (he has his head chopped off, she is burned alive) for Satanism.

Flash forward to the present, and a group of young people, including Hugo de Marnac (also Paul Naschy) head out to Hugo’s ancestral grounds, where a psychic medium told them the bones of Alaric de Marnac are buried. They figure it will be fun to dig up an old warlock (also there might be treasure).

Naturally, they find the bones. Naturally, when they do, all hell breaks loose. But it is a strange sort of hell. This is where the rushed script becomes apparent. Eventually old Alaric de Marnac will rise from the grave, but first his severed head seems to mesmerize some local townsfolk, and then some of Hugo’s friends, where they go about killing everyone in sight. Later, some of those dead folks will rise, zombie-like, and wreak havoc. Alaric de Marnac takes a couple of our heroes as slaves, and one pretty (and scantily clothed) lady has her blood drained onto the bones of Mabille de Lancre, which brings her back to life.

The movie pretty much exists so that our villains can kill our heroes with full gruesomeness and pretty ladies can run around in sheer nightgowns taking their tops off (with echoes of the vampire films of Jean Rollin).  It does do both of those things very well, so who am I to complain? There are some interesting transitions, and the gore effects are good. It is goofy and dumb, but if you like that sort of thing, this film is pretty fun.

One of the bonus features on my Blu-ray is a selection of alternate “clothed” scenes. Some theaters in Spain at the time didn’t allow nudity, so they shot those scenes twice, once without clothes once with them on.  I thought that was pretty funny.

Though I haven’t seen them in many, many years, I have a great fondness for the Pink Panther movies. Kino Lorber is releasing all five of the original films (but not that dreadful remake with Steve Martin) in UHD. Sadly, there is no boxed set, but I grouped them together anyway for my pick of the week.

There are a few other interesting things coming out this week as you can see in my post over at Cinema Sentries.

I’ve written over 1,300 articles for Cinema Sentries. I don’t know what the breakdown is between reviews and other things like Picks of the Week and Five Cool Things. I regularly try and do a post on this site with a link to my Cinema Sentries articles, but I’ve still got a ways to go.

I try to keep up with my new writings, but sometimes I get distracted. And when I have caught up, I try to dig into much older posts. I know none of this matters to anyone, but I’m kind of astounded I’ve written that many articles for Cinema Sentries. I really ought to branch out and write for some other publications.

Anyway, I forgot to post this review when I wrote it in August. Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror isn’t a Frankenstein movie at all, but rather it is Paul Naschy’s first werewolf film. He directed and starred in a whole bunch of werewolf films back in the day. I actually got a collection of them for Christmas. They are a lot of fun, as you can read in my review.

I love Stanley Kubrick’s films. I think he was a genius. I’ve now seen all of his films (save for two short films he made very early in his career). For reasons I get into in my review I only just this weekend watched Barry Lyndon. I don’t know why I waited to long, its brilliant.

Earlier this afternoon I was watching a movie. When it was over, I looked at my phone. There were messages from friends from all over the country. They were all saying something like, “I hate to be the one to tell you, but Bob Weir has passed.”

I didn’t know what to say. Now I don’t know what to write. I’m still processing the news. 

I first listened to the Grateful Dead in high school. I bought Skeletons From the Closet – a collection of their “greatest hits” from one of those Columbia House deals where you got 12 CDs for a penny or some such thing. I liked quite a lot of it, but found some of it to be a bit weird (strangely, I absolutely loved “Rosemary” one of the most un-Dead like things they ever recorded.)

But I didn’t venture any farther than that until college. I had a buddy who had a handful of shows he’d recorded off a guy he knew in high school whose brother was a collector (the kid would allow him to tape one show every time my friend would take him to McDonald’s for lunch.) He’d play those tapes loud while we were driving around Montgomery, Alabama, and I totally dug it (I also thought the idea of these unofficially released tapes was just the coolest.)

From there I bought American Beauty, and I’ve been on the bus ever since.

In 1994 the Dead came to Birmingham, and my friend asked me if I wanted to go with him. The tickets were like $30 (!), which I thought was way too expensive for my budget, so I figured I’d catch them the next time they came around. Obviously, they never did come around again for the next year Jerry was dead.

I did get to see Bob Weir in various bands over the years and always loved the shows. The last time I got to see him was on the Americanarama tour in Nashville. That was the time Bob Dylan toured around with bands like Wilco and My Morning Jacket. Weir did just a few gigs with them as a solo artist. Before that show, we were all standing around outside the gate, waiting for them to open it. It was an outdoor venue, and the fence keeping us out wasn’t very high.

Suddenly I hear a familiar sound. I’d know Bob Weir’s guitar sound anywhere. Sure enough, I peek over the fence, and there he is, standing all by his lonesome on stage with his guitar. It was a soundcheck, and I could hear him clear as day. He ran through several songs, including a great version of Dylan’s “Most of the Time.”  

People all around me were chatting and paying no attention. I kept giving them glares and quietly telling them all to shut up. Didn’t they know one of the greats was on stage giving us a little private concert?

I was enthralled. And Bob wasn’t just going through the motions; he was really playing and singing those songs. He was always the consummate musician. Later that night he joined Wilco for a rousing version of “Bird Song” and an incredible cover of The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

I had tickets to see him with Dead & Co. in Texas for their “final tour” but I got sick and couldn’t go.

I’m rambling now. Like I said, I’m still processing this loss. I’ve loved The Grateful Dead and Bob Weir for longer than I’ve lost just about anything else. If there is any comfort in this, it is that his music will live on without him. Those songs are timeless. And the fact that so many of his shows were recorded means we can still be listening to them for decades to come.

I’m not good at knowing what my favorite performances of anything are. So I don’t have a list of Bob Weir’s greatest moments.  But someone mentioned this performance of “Greatest Story Ever Told” and by god it is a good one.

I find I have mixed feelings about Guillermo del Toro. He’s clearly a great visual stylist, and his apparent love of cinema imbues all of his films with a certain reverent love, but I find his stories to be hit or miss.  Because of that, I’ve been putting off watching his first film, Cronos, afraid that I’d be disappointed.

I was not.

With caveats.

Cronos is basically a vampire story, though one that is different from any vampire story I’ve ever seen. It begins with a prologue where we’re informed that in the 1500s some alchemist invented a scarab-looking device that will prolong one’s life forever. 

Flash to the present, and Jesús Gri (Federico Luppi) finds the scarab hidden in the bottom of a statue a strange man left in his shop. He fiddles with it, and it opens; the scarab’s legs extend, grabbing his arm, while a stinger pricks his skin. Inside the scarab, we see a living creature sucking the blood.

The next morning, Jesús feels good.  And he looks younger. Also, he’s got a hankering for some blood. At a party a man has a nosebleed, and Jesús laps it up like a dog.  Then he’s bumped on the head and killed. Or not killed, as he can no longer die.

The killer is Angel de la Guardia (a young Ron Pearlman). He’s the son of Dieter de la Guardia (Claudio Brook), a rich, dying man who’s been trying to find the scarab for many years. He’s got a book that tells you how to use the scarab. He wants to make a deal with Jesús so they can both live together.  Or he’ll just kill Jesús and take the scarab. Either way is fine.

There is also a little girl named Aurora (Tamara Shanath) who is Jesús’ granddaughter, and Mercedes (Margarita Isabel), his wife. Del Toro tries to do a lot with them emotionally, but they feel underwritten. Especially Mercedes. 

There are some of the tropes of vampire movies – Jesús feels pain at sunlight, Aurora builds him a coffin to sleep in. And some utterly wild additions – Jesús’ skin peels off revealing a blindingly white skin underneath.

It definitely feels like a first movie, but the practical effects are mostly terrific. Del Toro has always been a master of those. It is a lot of fun watching Perlman at this stage of his career, acting a bit more goofy than menacing. The whole thing is well worth your time.

Albert Brooks is one of those guys whom I naturally like, but I don’t actually know all that well. I’ve seen him in films like Taxi Driver and Out of Sight, where he played memorable side characters. I loved him in Finding Nemo and Drive. He was amazing as Homer’s James Bondian boss on The Simpsons. Etc. But he’s been in a million other things, he’s made comedy albums, and most importantly (for this post anyway) he’s written and directed several underseen but beloved movies.

I would often hear film nerds talk about the films he made as a director and think to myself that I ought to watch them, but I never seemed to get around to it.  But then when I saw Lost In America show up on the Criterion Channel (as part of their Fresh Starts collection – a theme that fits in perfectly with mine), I decided to give it a go.  I’m glad I did because it is delightful. 

Brooks stars as David Howard, who has a successful job at an ad agency. His wife, Linda (Julie Hagerty) works in HR at a department store. They make good money, drive nice cars, and live in a nice house. They are successful but unsatisfied. David is up for a promotion at his job, and he’s quite sure he’ll get it. He’ll be an executive with a much larger salary. He’s so sure he’ll get it he’s already put a large down payment on a much bigger house, and he’s regularly talking to a guy about buying an expensive car. This, he thinks, will surely make him happy.

Or will it? Brooks gives David that nervous persona many of his characters have. He’s nerdy and nebbish and constantly worries. 

Of course he doesn’t get the promotion. Instead, he’s asked to move from LA to New York, where he’ll run the newly acquired Ford campaign. His boss thinks he’ll be happy with the move. He’s staying in the creative field, where he strives instead of being bored in the executive branch. But David is furious. He wanted that promotion. He deserved that promotion. That promotion would have made him fulfilled. He absolutely loses it, and his boss fires him.

But then, he has an epiphany. Maybe losing his job was the best thing for him. Maybe he was living in a rut and didn’t know it. The rat race is no place for a man like him. He talks his wife into quitting her job. They sell the house; they sell everything. They buy a big RV and make big plans to drop out of life like in Easy Rider. They’ll get back to nature. They will travel the country completely free.

The genius of this film (which was cowritten by Brooks and Monica Johnson) is that they never get anywhere. Their first destination is Las Vegas, and they spend that first night not in their RV but in a chintzy hotel where the beds are shaped like hearts (but aren’t big enough for the two of them to sleep together.)  By the morning, disaster has struck, and they have to drastically change their plans. 

There is one scene late in the film where David is looking for a job in a small town in Arizona. He goes to an employment agency and tells the man about his previous job, where he made $100,000 a year. When he explains that he’s quit his job so he could change his life, the counselor replies, “You couldn’t change your life on a hundred thousand a year?”

That’s a perfect encapsulation of the movie. These two yuppies have everything and aren’t happy. Someone with much less cannot even begin to fathom what they could be unhappy about or why they find themselves broken down in the middle of nowhere. The line delivery is also absolutely hysterical.

It was about that point in the film that I started to worry it was going to screw up the landing. There was a way they could have ended it that would have felt wrong. I don’t want to spoil how they got there or how it ends, but they did not go in that direction and it ends perfectly.

It is a film that I found more enjoyable than hilarious. I laughed at a few scenes, but mostly I just smiled with amusement. Brooks pitches the film with an ironic smile, and he’s perfectly cast against Julie Hagerty. Most of the film is just them talking, and arguing, and they are perfect together.

I’m very much looking forward to his other directorial efforts.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to think of a new theme for January. A couple of years ago I did a theme called “Frozen in January” which was all about watching movies that took place in some frosty climate, but that proved difficult. I couldn’t find that many movies set in cold places.

I’m a big fan of alliteration, and you can see that with Awesome ’80s in April, Mysteries in May, Animation in August, and Sci-Fi in July (ok, technically that last one isn’t alliteration, but it is a good rhyme.) But I couldn’t figure anything out that worked with January.

My wife suggested something to do with the new year, and that felt right. A good movie theme needs to be able to encompass a lot of movies. I should be able to find lots of movies within that theme, and there should also be a little wiggle room. I’ll get bored if I’m watching basically the same movie over and over again.

New Year, New You could mean a lot of things. A lot of us make resolutions for the new year; we try to make meaningful changes in our lives. We aren’t always successful, but a new year brings with it hope. Maybe this year we will lose that weight, or write that book, or do whatever thing we really wish we could do to improve ourselves.

There are lots of interesting films where a character sets out to improve themselves.  Or often they don’t set out to do anything, but they find themselves on a quest, and that changes them.  Or if not a quest, they get involved in something that changes them before the credits roll. There are hero’s journeys and character arcs. I can work with a theme like that.

Journeys can also mean travel. I might write about movies in which the characters take a long trip to somewhere. I actually thought about doing an entire theme on road trip movies, but that seemed a little more limiting than I wanted it to be.

I never know how these themes are going to go when I start them. Sometimes I write about a lot of movies and have a lot of fun. Sometimes I struggle to find anything to watch. Sometimes they keep going year after year, and other times I never return to it.

I hope this one lasts.  It sounds fun to me.  I hope it sounds fun to you.

I’m back from the holidays, refreshed and ready to talk about more cool things. This week I’m talking about Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Girl With Hyacinths, The Naked Gun, Over the Garden Wall and The Princess Bride. Click here to learn more.

Like most people my age I first came to Alec Guinness through Star Wars and his memorable role as the old Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi. Later, I loved him in The Bridge on the River Kwai and Oliver Twist. For years and years I thought of him solely as a dramatic actor. It was quite surprising, then to discover him as a delightful comedic actor.

I was quite thrilled to obtain this four movie set of some of his best comedies (Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit, and The Ladykillers.) You can read my full review here.

The Naked Gun (2025)
Directed by Akiva Shaffer
Starring Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Danny Huston, CCH Pounder

Only one man has the particular set of skills… to lead Police Squad and save the world: Lt. Frank Drebin Jr. Following in his father’s footsteps, he must solve a murder case to prevent Police Squad from closure.

Rating: 7/10

I was twelve when the original The Naked Gun came out. I can’t remember if I watched it in the theaters, but I watched it many times on home video and loved it. It was one of those movies that seemed to be always playing on cable TV. Or my friends and family members would rent it regularly. I remember seeing it often. I remember it would come on, and me and whoever was with me would sit and watch it.

It was a film that everyone seemed to love. Me, my friends, my parents, sibling, and other relatives. It felt like the funniest movie ever. I watched both sequels in the theater. I remember liking the second one quite a bit but finding the third to be rather terrible. I think most people did, as the franchise kind of died afterward.

And then we all collectively forgot about the films. I hadn’t thought about them in years. I think last year, or maybe the year before, I caught the first one on some streaming service. It was funny, but not hilarious. My sense of humor has changed since I was twelve, and I don’t tend to like movies that are just one joke after the other without much story.

Which brings me to this new one. When it came out, a lot of the critics I follow were excited about it. Some were declaring it the future of cinema. I guess a lot of straight-up comedies don’t make it to the cinemas much anymore, so the fact that this one had big stars and got a real theatrical release got them excited.

I skipped it in the theater because, again, my comedy instincts are weird, and this looked like non-stop gags. But I finally caught up with it this weekend, and guess what? It’s funny.

Liam Neeson is terrific in this. He’s basically sending the type of character he’s played in a thousand movies. He plays it completely straight, which makes all the insanity going on around him that much funnier.

As I figured, there are a lot of gags. I won’t say too many of them because that is how this type of comedy works, but it was a lot. Quite a lot of them worked for me. Not all of them, probably not even half of them, but that’s the thing with throwing tons of jokes at the audince – if only a small percentage of them work, we are still laughing quite a lot.

I don’t know why John Woo films suddenly keep getting the 4K UHD treatment with loads of special features added to boot, but I am here for it. I’ve not actually seen Bullet in the Head, but it stars Tony Leung and is about three male friends who grow up in the slums of Hong Kong and attempt to escape from the oppressive poverty only to increase their troubles, and that is enough for me.

This is a Shout Factory release. It comes with a 4K UHD disc, a Blu-ray, and a third disc full of extras. Those include new audio commentaries, alternate cuts, deleted scenes, and more.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

Falling Skies: The Complete Series: One imagines this is coming out because its star, Noah Wylie, has been getting critical acclaim for his starring role in The Pitt, the second season of which comes out later this week. This series is about an alien invasion and how humans try to get their planet back.

Shameless: The Complete Series: I only saw a few episodes of this American remake of a British show about a family of misfits (led by the always great William H. Macy). I liked it okay, but not enough to keep me coming back.

Dead Man 4K UHD: Criterion has updated their release of this Jim Jarmusch film to UHD. Johnny Depp stars as a wanderer who finds himself wanted for double murder. In his flight he comes across a man who helps him reinvent himself.  I haven’t seen this in many years. I didn’t like it that much back then, but I’ve come to love Jarmusch, so this deserves a revisit.

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley: Documentary about the late, great singer.

Under Siege: Arrow Video presents this “Die Hard on a Ship” action flick starring Steven Seagal. A bare-bones release of this film came out a few months ago (I reviewed it here), but Arrow is packing it with their usual flair. 

Tron: Ares: I remember watching the original Tron back in the 1980s.  I liked it, and I really liked the video game, but it wasn’t something that I truly loved. So I never bothered with the last sequel, and I have little interest in this one.

I watched 25 films in December. 18 of them were new to me. 8 of them were made before I was born. There wasn’t so much a theme this month as I tried to watch some movies from 2025 in order to make a best-of list. I watched 8 films from that year, though three of them I had previously seen before. Due to the holidays, it was a bit of a slow month for me. We were gone for several days visiting my wife’s family, and then my sister came to town from South Korea, so I didn’t have as much time to sit around watching movies.

Since 2025 is now over, I can do a full year-end review. I watched 461 movies this year. That’s down a bit from 2024, when I watched 471 movies. It calculates out to 38.4 movies per month, or 8.8 per week. 326 of the films I watched this year were new to me, and 135 were rewatches which puts my percentage of new films watched compared to rewatches at 70.7%, which is a bit under my goal of 75%. I mostly blame that on the fact that a lot of the review material I got this year was films I’d previously seen.

The most watched actors category stays pretty much the same as last month. I think Josh Brolin jumped into a tie for third place with six films watched (I watched three films with him in it in December). It is fun to look at this list and realize why some of these actors are in my top watched. There is Colin Baker, who starred as Doctor Who, and I watched a bunch of those. Robert Englund is there because I watched and reviewed all the Nightmare on Elm Street films. And then Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing exist because I love Hammer Horror films.

It is also fun to look at previous year-end lists and see similar names. There always seems to be a Doctor Who star and Hammer Horror folks. Humphrey Bogart has been a staple since I’ve been doing this list.

My most watched directors also remain mostly the same from last month. Renny Harlin is new, and I’ll be honest, I had to look him up. Unlike the actors list, my most watched directors tend to change from year to year. For the last few years I’ve not spent a lot of time watching certain directors. I used to do that a lot, but now I seem to dig into lots of different films from lots of different directors. I don’t know why.

So yea, it was a good year all around. I suspect my trend of watching less film will continue into 2026. I’ve got some ideas on what I want to do with this blog which will involve more writing and less watching. I’ll have more on that later. But who knows what will actually happen?

Letterboxd, has a fun little year end wrap up for me.

And finally, here’s the list of films I watched in December.

Twentieth Century (1934) ***1/2
The Princess Bride (1987) *****
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) ***1/2
One Battle After Another (2025) ****1/2
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) ****
The Running Man (2025) ****
Young, Violent, Dangerous (1976) ***1/2
Inside Out 2 (2024) ****
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) ***1/2
Blood Rites: Inside Scars of Dracula (2019) ***1/2
Scars of Dracula (1970) ***1/2
Doctor Who: The War Machines (1966) ***
Weapons (2025) ****
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025) ***1/2
Roofman (2025) ***1/2
Wake Up Dead Man (2025) ****
The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024) *1/2
I Know Where I’m Going! (1945) ****
Ninja III: The Domination (1984) ***1/2
Doctor Who: The Gunfighters (1966) ***
Sinners (2025) ****1/2
Revenge of the Ninja (1983) ***1/2
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 (2025) **
Enter the Ninja (1981) **
Train Dreams (2025) ****1/2

I’ve probably said this before, but one of the many things I love about the state of home video these days is that there are so many boutique labels putting out so many wonderful, obscure movies. Movies I’d never even know existed if it weren’t for these releases. There are entire genres I wouldn’t even know about if it weren’t for boutique labels.  Poliziotteschi, for one. 

That Italian crime subgenre  was completely unknown to me until I started reviewing some of those films, and now it is one of my favorite genres (as you can see from my reviews). Young, Violent, Dangerous is kind of a subgenre of Poliziotteschi, which, like the title implies, involves young men who have come to a life of crime more or less out of boredom. 

It isn’t a great film, but I love that we not only have access to this type of film but we can own it in restored HD.  I call that a win-win.  You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

I watched Catch Me If You Can when it first came out in theaters. I immediately loved it. Tom Hanks was at the height of his power, Steven Spielberg was consistently still making great movies, and Leonardo DiCaprio was in his post-Titanic heartthrob period. Everybody was firing on all cylinders including John Williams who wrote an incredible score.

I hadn’t seen the film in many years when I received this new 4K UHD copy so I was real curious how well it would hold up. I’m here to say it is even better than I remembered. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

With all the holiday happenings I forgot to post this when I wrote it. I’ll actually have a new Five Cool Things here in a couple of days. I hope everyone had a good holiday and that we are all refreshed and ready to conquer a new year.

For this post I’m talking about the new Knives Out movie, the new Running Man movie, a new to me song from a band I’ve never heard of before, a newish song from Hayes Carll and a Christmas song from The Pogues. You can read all about it over at Cinema Sentries.

As I put on this film, my wife asked me if I would watch as many Hammer Horror films if she wasn’t around. She doesn’t like horror films, you see; she can’t stand the violence, the gore, and the scares. But she enjoys the Hammer films, as they are a little bit cheesy but well produced and not all that scary. I answered in the negative, as I probably would not watch as many films from the famed studio without her. Oh, I’d still watch their films, but I do have a habit of putting them on when I want to watch a horror film with her. It is either Hammer or Universal, and I’ve seen all the Universal films.

As you have probably surmised, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde is based on the novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. This was the third time Hammer Studios had adapted that novella. The previous two were The Ugly Duckling (1959) and The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960). 

As the change of title suggests, this film takes quite a few liberties with the text and throws in some strong references to Jack the Ripper and Burke & Hare (the historical grave robbers/murderers). 

Dr. Henry Jekyll (Ralph Bates) has dedicated his life to creating an elixir that will cure all known illnesses. But when his friend and libertine Professor Robertson (Gerald Sim) points out that it will take him more years than he has left to create such an elixir, Jekyll becomes obsessed with finding a life-extending potion.  He believes that since women live longer than men on average, the solution to his problem lies in female hormones.

He at first enlists Burke and Hare to provide him with fresh corpses from which to extract those hormones, but soon enough he’ll turn to murdering sex workers. His elixir transforms him into a woman whom he pretends is his sister named Mrs. Hyde (Martine Beswick). While Jekyll is a bit reserved, and shy (especially around women, specifically his upstairs neighbor Susan (Susan Broderick)), and dedicated to his work, Hyde is wild, sexy, passionate, and a bit mad.

There is no actual indication the elixir will prolong life, but Jekyll is obsessed with it anyway. The more hormones he extracts, the more often he changes into Hyde. The more often he changes into Hyde, the more she wants to be the dominant person. Eventually, she’ll stop needing the hormones and be able to change him at will. This then becomes a battle of wills, with each personality fighting for dominance.

There are some fascinating queer/trans readings of the films that I don’t feel qualified to comment on, but they are out there if you look for them. I’m not sure the film is all that interested in diving into gender and sexual politics, but it is quite fascinating to ponder them nonetheless. There is a rather funny scene when Jekyll first transforms into Hyde where she fondles her naked breasts with curiosity. I found the gender twist to be a fascinating change to the usual Jekyll/Hyde story.  Martine Beswick is quite good as Hyde, giving the character a heightened sexuality and freedom. She’s not evil exactly (well, I mean she does quite a bit of murdering), but rather she longs to be freed from the body of Jekyll and his rather oppressed nature. 

Production-wise, the film enjoys Hammer’s usual excellent set designs and costumes. Director Roy Ward Baker and cinematographer Norman Warwick make great use of fog machines, making the nighttime London streets look quite eerie and beautiful. There are some wonderful transition scenes as well, making Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde quite believable. 

The romantic scenes between Jekyll and Susan feel a bit superfluous and dull (Hyde’s seduction of Susan’s brother is much more fun to watch), and its attempts to either turn Jekyll into Jack the Ripper or at least make him some sort of copycat feel a bit tacked on, but mostly I quite enjoyed this film.  If you are a fan of Hammer’s Horror output or Dr. Jekyll adaptations, I highly recommend it.

Happy Holidays, everybody. I hope yours is spent with those you love and that they bring you joy.

We’ve had a good Christmastime thus far. Last night we got together with our larger family.  My mother grew up in this area, and all of her siblings (and their children and grandchildren) still live here. We always gather with them for Christmas Eve and share food and fellowship with one another and then do a little Dirty Santa.  It is strange how they keep changing. One of my cousins has completely blacklisted the entire family for some reason, so she no longer shows up to that shindig. Sometimes her children drop by, but they didn’t this year.  One of my other cousins now does stuff with his new wife’s family, so he was absent, as was yet another cousin for reasons that weren’t disclosed to me. It feels so weird to not have such a full house, but I get it; things change. Many’s  the time when we’ve not gone to that particular party because we’ve been elsewhere. But I enjoyed the time we had with those who were there.

This morning we had brunch with my parents, my brother, and his wife.  That was a new tradition, but a good one. Later this week we’ll be visiting my wife’s family in Kentucky. When we get back, my sister will be in from her life in South Korea. Like I say, things change, but it is still good.

The important part of Christmas is family and love, and I’m so happy to have those things.  But I have to admit I really like Christmas presents. I love opening things and receiving gifts.  I guess it just brings out the kid in me.

And with that, I get to share my Christmas haul with you all.

For years and years I always asked everybody to get me fun socks. I was tired of wearing boring white and black socks. I wanted my feet to have some fun. But for the longest time no one seemed to understand that.  At best I’d get a couple of pairs of argyle socks, and that was it. Then several years ago my wife found some good stripy ones and a few others with fun designs. I made sure that I praised them to high heavens to everyone, and now I have a lovely collection of fun socks. This year my wife got me these most excellent Jaws socks, and I just love them. She also got me some Scrabble socks for some reason. That’s a game I haven’t played in years, but I sure will wear the socks with joy anyway.

Most years my wife and I buy each other some fun “nerd” shirts. This year she got me this excellent one of Peter Cushing holding up a cross to keep the vampires away. I cut them off in this photo, but she also got me a couple of collectible dolls – one Frankenstein, one from The Fog. I used to hate collectible toys, but now I love them.

Then there is an X-Men comic, a collection of Paul Naschy films (who made a bunch of silly werewolf films), the three Doctor Who specials with David Tennant’s brief comeback, and Thrillers From the Vault, which features some great-looking B-grade horror movies with guys like Boris Karloff, a collection of Psycho films, and a UHD version of the classic anime Akira. Good stuff, one and all. Color me thankful.

I feel like I’ve been saying this for the last several years, but thanks for hanging in there with me. The blog yet again went through several changes.  The biggest, of course, was that I gave up the music. I can’t say that I regret doing that, as I do think it was time, but I do miss it. I keep thinking about returning to it in some new way (some way that won’t have my real name associated with the files), but that’s just a flighty dream at the moment. 

I appreciate all those who have stayed with me through this transition into just talking about movies and things. I know most of you don’t care, that most of you just wish I’d share some more music.  I’m very thankful for those of you who do care and who comment and chat about cinema with me.  But I’m also thankful for those of you who are still signed up for the emails even though you probably ignore them or have shifted them to spam. It is nice to pretend that the nearly 1,000 of you that are subscribed actually enjoy my writing.  And that’s  sincere, not me being snarky. I do realize that many of you aren’t interested in movies, but it makes me happy that you haven’t unsubscribed yet.

Anyway, I just want to say thank you.  This blog still means a lot to me.  And I truly do hope your lives are full of good cheer and joy this time of year.

With that being said, I did make an effort to watch more new movies this year. I actually made it to the theater on seven different occasions and watched a total of 42 movies made in 2025. For context, I’ve still only watched 34 movies from 2024, and I’ve had an extra year to see them.

That’s not a bad number, but considering there were hundreds of movies that came out this year, it is but a small drop in a very large bucket. So, I can’t really say these are the best movies of 2025, but they are my favorites of the ones I’ve seen.

5. Caught Stealing

This crime thriller from Darren Aronofsky seems to have completely flown under everyone’s radar. That’s too bad because it is a terrific little flick with an incredible cast and some wonderful direction. Austin Butler stars as Hank Thompson, an alcoholic bartender who could have been a contender, but his once promising baseball career ended after a terrible drunk driving accident left him wounded.

When his neighbor (a mohawk-wearing, thickly accented Matt Smith) leaves town and leaves Hank with his cat to take care of, all hell breaks loose. Before the week is up, he’ll be tortured by Russians, threatened by cops, and nearly killed by some Hasidic gangsters. Caught Stealing is light on its feet and gnarly fun.

4. Predator: Badlands

Who would have thought that in the year of our Lord 2025 we’d get yet another Predator movie and that it would be one of the best of the year? Director Dan Trachtenberg, who also helmed the excellent Prey and the pretty good Predator: Killer of Killers knows how to take what was a silly 1980s action flick and turn it into something meaty and good.

All of the other Predator films have basically been Predator vs. human stories. This one turns the Predator into our hero and sets it on the deadliest planet in the universe, where even the plants want to kill you. He’s teamed with Thia (Elle Fanning), a half-broken cyborg created by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation (which is from the Alien franchise, which means we might finally get a good crossover film at some point). They will attempt to not only survive but also kill the universe’s most fearsome creatures.

The world building is terrific, the action is incredible, and Elle Fanning is a blast to watch.

3. Train Dreams

If I were doing a longer list and adding in lots of special categories, I’d call Train Dreams my surprise favorite. I had never heard of the film before I watched it. I hadn’t seen a trailer or a poster, even. Nobody in my social media circles was talking about it. But one day I was looking through a list of movies that came out in 2025, hoping to find something interesting that hadn’t been hyped to death, and I landed on this. I’m so glad I did.

Train Dreams stars Joel Edgerton as a logger living in the early part of the twentieth century. He is a quiet, simple man who faces love and loss while the years roll by and the country around him changes all around him. It is a slow film, never flashy or exciting in an action-packed sort of way, but it is beautiful and profound. Filmed in the Pacific Northwest, the camera lingers on the nature all around him. He’ll meet various characters and find friendship and love, and feel great guilt over the violence he observes. Edgerton has never been better. He says so much with so little dialogue.

This is a tone poem, filled with beauty and wonder, sadness and awe.

2. One Battle After Another

This Paul Thomas Anderson epic is his most political film and his most personal. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Bob, a former revolutionary who settled down once his girlfriend split, leaving him to raise his daughter. Sixteen years pass, and he’s become something of a drug-addled, alcoholic burnout. But when a former nemesis reappears and comes after his daughter, he rejoins the movement and bands together to save her.

There are some current political themes in the films, as migrants are seen being held prisoner inside fenced-in cages, and the villains are racist white nationalists, but mostly it is about this dad trying to connect with his teenaged daughter and keep her safe.

It has a grand scale and a large cast; it is epic, yet personal, tense, and often hilarious. DiCaprio has never been better, Sean Penn is terrific as the hard-nosed military goon going after the girl, but it is Benicio Del Toro that steals the show. He’s a levelheaded sensai who keeps Bob (and the film) grounded. He is the calm in the midst of an insane, chaotic storm.

I watched this one again just a few days ago, and it was even better the second time.

1. Sinners

I watched this one again last week, and it is still mind-blowingly good. Ryan Coogler has managed to make a vampire movie where the vampires are the least interesting thing about it. Michael B. Jordan stars as twin brothers Smoke and Stack, who grew up in the deep south, fought in World War I, then moved to Chicago, where they worked for Al Capone, and now they’ve come back to their hometown to open up a juke joint.

The film takes its time getting to its horror elements. It follows the brothers as they recruit various people into helping them. They talk a Chinese grocer into supplying the food, a fieldworker into being the bouncer, and an old bluesman into making the music. Smoke’s wife will cook, and their nephew will play guitar. These scenes are given time to naturally develop, and they are a joy to watch. Coogler is giving us a tour of the Deep South from an African American perspective. We are ensconced in this culture.

The film could almost be categorized as a musical, as characters routinely play songs and music is a huge part of what this film is. There is one scene in the middle where the cousin plays a song, and it bends time and space. It is one of the greatest all-time scenes ever put to celluloid.

I could live in this world for a long time. It is almost a shame the vampires show up. It isn’t that the horror elements are bad, but I so thoroughly enjoyed watching the brothers build this community that I hate to leave that aspect to bring in the vampires. He does do some interesting things thematically with the vampires. The main ones are Irish, and there is a long history in the United States of prejudice against the Irish. Part of their welcoming call for our heroes to become vampires is that there is no more racism, for vampires aren’t prejudiced.

The battle with the vampires is appropriately thrilling and bloody, and in any other movie I’d be praising that half of the film. But man, that first half is so good I wind up feeling slightly disappointed when the vamps show up. But nevertheless, Sinners is a fantastic film, the rare film that is both thematically rich and thoroughly entertaining.

And that’s it. I won’t say these are the best movies of the year, but they are my favorite films from 2025 that I watched. What were your favorites?

This year I actually made an effort to keep up with new TV and to watch more of it. So, I thought it would be fun to make a Top Five list of my favorites. Four of them are new series that debuted in 2025, and one of them is a little bit older, but it did run a new season this year. That was my one rule – the season that I’m talking about how to have run this year. Technically, show #4 originally aired in 2024, but that was in England; it didn’t air in the US until 2025, so I’m counting it. And here we go.

5. Slow Horses: Season 5

Slow Horses is about an inept group of MI5 agents who have severely screwed up in one way or another (but not badly enough to actually get fired), and are now relegated to Slough House – a sort of detention center for screwups. It is run by Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), an unkempt, heavy-drinking, chain-smoking elder statesman who was once a great agent but is now sick of it all.

Each season naturally finds this team of goofballs solving a real, major case, almost by accident. Season Five finds them embroiled in a terrorist plot, an assassination attempt, and a group of incels. It is a tad overstuffed, and the characters are starting to drift from their designated personalities, but it more than makes up for those flaws with added comedy. Gary Oldman is a treasure, but the rest of the cast is wonderfully fun as well.

4. Ludwig

David Mitchell’s comic persona is that of a well-educated, middle-class, slightly stuffy bloke who’d mostly like to be left alone. Ludwig was custom-made for that persona. He plays John Taylor, a reclusive puzzle maker whose twin brother is an Oxford police detective. When that brother disappears, his wife (Anna Maxwell Martin) calls upon John to help her find out what happened. Being identical twins, John pretends to be his brother initially to grab some notebooks from his desk at police headquarters. But quickly he’s swept up into a murder mystery. And because murder mysteries are like puzzles, he quickly solves it.

Each week brings a new murder, or puzzle, and John is able to solve it. Mitchell is an absolute delight, and the puzzles are great fun. I liked this season so much I almost immediately watched it again.

3. Task

I’m a huge fan of crime dramas. I’m obviously not the only one, as there are approximately eight kajillion of them out there. And that’s the thing; the popularity of the genre means there is a blueprint for it. At their most basic, crime dramas involve someone committing a crime and someone else trying to catch them. There are all sorts of variations on that basic outline. And that’s the other thing; because there is a blueprint and because there are so many of them, crime dramas can feel like a comfortable pair of socks. You put them on, and as long as they keep your feet warm, you don’t really think about them again. You only notice them when they’ve got a hole in them or they are exceptionally warm and soft.

To wear out that metaphor, crime dramas are something you can throw on, enjoy, and never think about again. They are only memorable when they are exceptionally bad, or really good. The Task is excellent. Mark Ruffalo stars as Tom Brandis, an FBI agent who has been having a tough time of it lately. His family life is in chaos, and he’s suffered a recent personal tragedy. As such, we find him, at the start of the show, taking kind of a break. He’s off active duty and spends his work hours at job fairs recruiting for the FBI.

But then his boss calls to say she needs him to head up a task force to catch someone who’s been robbing drug houses run by a local biker gang. The show follows Brandis and his task force (made up of state, county, and local police) and the thief (an incredible Tom Pelphrey.) Task doesn’t do anything new with the genre, but everything is working at such a high level I have no complaints.

2. The Pitt

It is impossible to talk about The Pitt without comparing it to ER. Both shows are set in emergency rooms and follow the absolute insanity that takes place there. Both are set inside teaching hospitals, so you get a mix of attending physicians, residents, beginners, and students. They were both produced by John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill, and they both star Noah Wylie. Each series also balances big, complicated cases with smaller, simpler ones, as well as their big emotional beats with more light-hearted ones.

The biggest difference between the two is that ER aired on NBC and The Pitt is an HBO show, which allows The Pitt to be more graphic (in its language, its gore, and its explicitness – at one point we get a close-up view of a doctor trying to pull a baby out of its mother’s vagina.) It is also set during one twelve-hour shift, with each episode lasting just under sixty minutes in length.

Much like Task, this show doesn’t necessarily do anything new with its genre, but it is so incredibly well produced, well made, and acted that after one season I’m just about ready to call it the best medical drama TV has ever produced. Even better, they’ve already shot the second season, and it airs early next year.

1. Pluribus

Up until just today I was all set to make The Pitt my number one show of 2025. It is so good I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I watched it this past spring. I immediately loved Pluribus when it started airing last month, but I wasn’t ready to have it knock The Pitt off its (presumed) top spot. Then its season finale dropped this morning, and Holy Moly was I blown away.

This is a show that’s actually best watched if you know nothing about it. So I won’t talk about its plot so that you can come to it completely fresh. I will say it was created by Vince Gilligan (who also created Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul), and it stars Rhea Seehorn (who also starred in Better Call Saul). It is nothing like those two shows other than the production values are incredibly high and it never does what you expect it to do.

Every episode is surprising. I had absolutely no idea what it was going to do next, and yet I happily followed along. It is utterly original, unique, and brilliant. Seehorn is magnificent, and I love that her character feels completely real. She’s a hero, but utterly human, good but also selfish and flawed. I cannot wait for the next season to come out.

And that’s it. I won’t say these were the absolute best TV series that aired this past year. I didn’t watch every series that aired in 2025. Not even close. But these are five series I utterly enjoyed. What shows did you enjoy?

Hammer Studios made nine Dracula films. I’ve seen all but one of them (Dracula A.D. 1972), but I’ve watched them all randomly and out of order. Which makes me get the timelines all screwed up in my head. I thought this one was the third in the series, but it is actually the fourth.

One year after the previous film (Dracula: Prince of Darkness), the village that Dracula terrorized still lives in fear. A visiting Monsignor, Ernst Mueller (Rupert Davies) berates the local priest (Ewan Hooper) for not holding mass. The priest, who has lost his faith and is found sitting drunk in a tavern, informs the Monsignor that his flock will no longer enter the church for the shadow of Castle Dracula still falls upon it.

The Monsignor grabs a giant cross, takes hold of the priest, and climbs the mountain toward the castle. The priest stops short of the castle while the Monsignor gives it a good exorcism and plants the cross at the front door.  The poor, dumb priest stumbles, cuts his head, and falls onto the frozen creek where Dracula (Christopher Lee) died in the last film. The ice cracks, the priest’s blood pours into Dracula’s mouth, and we get our title for this film.

The priest becomes Dracula’s slave, and Monsignor goes home. Dracula, unable to enter his castle, vows his revenge on the Monsignor and goes after his niece Maria (Veronica Carlson). She’s very much in love with our dopey hero, Paul (Barry Andrews). He’s an atheist, which very much annoys the Monsignor.

There are a lot of boring bits in the middle of this film. That beginning is pretty great, and the finale is excellent, but between the two are lots of filler. Paul works at a bakery/inn, but he studies at night to become a doctor or something. There are scenes of him working and talking to the flirty waitress (Barbara Ewing). He visits the Monsignor and Maria’s aunt. He gets drunk, and he kisses Maria. Etc. It all seems to exist to stretch the budget and the runtime to the appropriate amount. Dracula eventually shows up, sucks the neck of the waitress, and seduces Maria. It will be up to the Monsignor and Paul to save the day. The final battle is a good one, but lord, does it take its time getting there.

It does look amazing. Hammer was always good at making wonderful sets that look completely lived in and painting spectacular backdrops, and they certainly did that here. Maria often sneaks out of her home and walks across balconies and rooftops to visit Paul, and this gives some wonderful views of the town below from above. I believe it was all set work, and it looks great.

All in all, it is another fine addition to the Hammer Horror annals. It could have been a real classic if they’d spent a little more time developing the middle section, but the beginning and ending is well worth the watching.

Humphrey Bogart is my favorite actor. He made some incredible films in his storied career (including my all-time favorite, Casablanca), and more than a few of them were film noirs. More than just about any actor of the classic period, his name is (arguably) the one most associated with noir. So I thought it would be fun to do a Top Five favorite noirs starring Bogart.

5.  High Sierra (1941)

Bogart wasn’t always the big star we know him as today. He spent the better part of a decade as a supporting player, often billed as a gangster or heavy. High Sierra changed that. He was lucky to get that role, as both Paul Muni and George Raft had been offered it first, and director Raoul Walsh didn’t think he was leading man material.  But writer John Huston thought Bogart was perfect for the role, and eventually Walsh relented. Huston would, that very same year, cast Bogart in his film The Maltese Falcon (more on that in a minute).

With this film he hasn’t quite left the gangster mold; he plays Roy Earle, a guy who’s just gotten out of prison and is already set for his next score. He’s holed up in a cabin in the mountains with three other guys and a girl, just waiting for the right time to rob a ritzy hotel. The girl (played by the always great Ida Lupino) will lead to trouble. Bogart is still perfecting his world-weary, cynical, but ultimately sentimental character, but he’s still terrific as Earle.  Lupino is great too, and Walsh’s direction is quite wonderful. 

4. The Maltese Falcon (1941)

If High Sierra made Bogart a star, then The Maltese Falcon solidified it. Based on the novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett, this film is often considered the first truly great film noir. Bogart plays Sam Spade, a tough, cynical private eye who is hired by a woman (Mary Astor) who may not be who she claims to be and may not actually want what she claims to want. 

What she really wants is the titular object, which is a mythical, jewel-crusted statue of a bird that was supposedly gifted to the Holy Roman Emperor hundreds of years ago but has been lost to time. While trying to find the bird, Spade will run across a number of eclectic and strange people, including ones played by Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. 

The plot is complicated, the cast is perfect, and John Huston’s direction (it was his directorial debut) is fantastic.

3. In a Lonely Place (1950)

This is probably the least noirish film on the list and quite possibly Bogart’s best performance. Based on the excellent novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, Bogart plays a troubled screenwriter with a penchant for violence who hasn’t written a hit movie in years. One night he takes a girl home with him, then changes his mind and kicks her out.  The next morning she finds herself dead, and he finds himself a suspect. Through this he’ll meet his neighbor Laura (a magnificent Gloria Grahame), and they’ll fall in love, but she’ll never quite be sure he didn’t kill that girl.

Bogart’s performance is heartbreaking. The script is full of great lines like, “I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, and I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” Just a magnificent movie.

02. Key Largo (1948)

Bogart and Lauren Bacall met on the set of To Have and Have Not (1944) and fell in love and stayed together until he died in 1957. They made four films together (three of them are absolute bangers, and the fourth one isn’t bad – one of the others almost made it to this list, and the other is #1).

Directed by John Huston (his second film on this list), Key Largo includes an incredible cast (including Thomas Gomez, Lionel Barrymore, and Edward G. Robinson).  Bogart plays Frank McCloud, a former soldier who stops by Key Largo to visit with his dead comrade’s father (Barrymore) and widow (Bacall) but gets stuck when a hurricane rolls in. Also stuck with them are a few gangsters awaiting a car full of cash that they’ll trade for counterfeit bills.  

The hurricane and the gangsters make for a pot of dangerous soup that’s ready to boil. This boasts a classic Bogart performance. He’s smart and tough, witty and sensitive. He and Bacall work magic together, and Barrymore is great as the father who doesn’t take any crap. But it is Robinson who steals the show. He gets one of the all-time great introductory scenes and remains awesome throughout.

01. The Big Sleep (1946)

I think this was the first film noir I ever watched. Based on the fantastic book by Raymond Chandler, Bogart plays Phillip Marlowe, a private eye hired by an old man over some blackmail scheme involving his youngest daughter (Martha Vickers in a small but oh-so-memorable role). Quickly things turn complicated, convoluted, and murderous (director Howard Hawks famously phoned Raymond Chandler over who killed a certain chauffeur, and Chandler didn’t actually know the answer). But the plot isn’t really the point. 

The Big Sleep is all about its mood, its characters, and the way it makes you feel. Bacall is the older daughter and potential love interest. It is a blast watching her flirt with Bogart and become the femme fatale. Everyone flirts with Bogart in this movie. The two sisters, the cab driver, the bookstore clerk—hell, I’d flirt with him if I were in this movie. It is the perfect noir and an absolute blast to watch.

Well, there you have it, my favorite Humphrey Bogart film noirs. Do you have a favorite? Do you disagree with my picks? Honestly, if I wrote this tomorrow I’d probably have different picks. But this was fun.  I’ll try to do more of these when I can.

The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” is one of my favorite songs. It is the perfect Christmas song. I love that it is slightly irreverent, and funny. And sad. It makes me cry every time I listen to it (and I listen to it a lot this time of year.) I love that it is a song for everyone, not just the churchgoing folk. I love its structure and its lyrics. Like I said, it is one of my favorite Christmas songs.

I just discovered this a cappella version of it from an Irish group called The Ramparts. It is quite lovely, and now I’m sharing it with you.

Regular readers will know I’m a big fan of Hammer Studios horror films. The truth is I don’t necessarily think all their films are all that good, but there is something about them that I love anyway. They are like Classic Doctor Who in that manner.

Scars of Dracula isn’t a great film by any real measurement, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself with it anyway. I truly can’t get enough of Christophe Lee enjoying himself as Dracula.

You can read my review of this film in all of its 4K UHD glory right here.

Pee-wee is in the Criterion Collection! I love Pee-Wee Herman and his Big Adventure is one of my favorite things. I love that it is getting the royal treatment in UHD.

It is a good week for other releases including something from David Byrne, Hammer Horror, PT Anderson, Hong Kong cinema and more. You can read all about it here.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)
Directed by Rian Johnson
Starring: Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Jeremy Renner, Mila Kunis, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, Thomas Haden Church, and Jeffrey Wright

Synopsis: A young priest is sent to help a charismatic older priest in a small church. A seemingly impossible murder brings in Detective Benoit Blanc to solve the case. Every parishioner is a suspect.

Rating: 8/10

Released on Thanksgiving in 2019, Knives Out felt like a breath of fresh air. This was just before Covid kept us all home and right in the middle of Trump’s first term in office. It was a cozy little blanket that kept us warm from all the trouble brewing in the air. It was a lovely little Agatha Christie-esque mystery with an incredible cast and a terrifically twisty plot. I loved it.  I still love it, as I watched it last week and found it to be just as delightful as ever.

Its sequel, Glass Onion, wasn’t quite as good. It felt a little too modern and a little less cozy, but it featured another great cast, and Daniel Craig had slipped perfectly back into his brilliant detective’s slippers.

I’ve been excitedly waiting for the third film ever since. Sadly, because Wake Up Dead Man is a Netflix film, it only got a limited theatrical release. The only theater anywhere near me that was showing it was an old, broken-down theater half an hour away. I really wanted to see this on a great big screen with an audience, but that didn’t happen.

Still, it was worth the wait. We get another great cast and a mostly great, twisty mystery. Josh O’Connor is terrific as a young priest with a dark past but a passion for compassion who comes up against a firebrand more interested in calling out the sinners than loving his flock. There are some interesting reflections on faith and the importance of finding your own calling.

At 142 minutes, it runs a little long, and not everything worked for me. The original is still my favorite, but I hope they keep making these movies for years and years to come.

This film has been popping up in my feeds and the like for a while now. A brief preview of some of my friends’ Letterboxd reviews noted it to be pretty dumb but enjoyable; also, there is a sequel in theaters now, and I’m trying to watch as many movies from 2025 as i can this month, so I pressed “play.” 

I should have taken a nap.  Or rewatched one of the Halloween movies for the umpteenth time. Or smashed my thumb with a hammer.  Any of those would have been more enjoyable than this movie.

Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and her boyfriend Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) are in the midst of a cross-country drive that will end in Portland, where Maya has a job interview. Because nothing makes you more refreshed and ready for an all-important interview like being stuck in a car for days on end.

Ryan says he’s hungry, and Maya looks at the map on her phone, spies a little diner, and tells him to exit now. I submit it is possible that there are people in this world who, while in the midst of a multi-day drive across the country, simply whip out their phones when they are hungry and choose the very first restaurant they see without looking at a menu or reading reviews on Yelp, but that was my first red flag that this movie was playing it fast and loose with plot details.

The cafe is in a tiny little town in Oregon. It is far enough off the highway that they lose their cell phone signal, but big enough, apparently, to have a good signal inside of town. Except, they actually note how big the town is, and it only has, like, 350 people. Like an old-fashioned movie, everybody in the surprisingly full cafe stops what they are doing and stares at the newcomers. 

They are all shocked – shocked I tell you – that she wants a vegetarian plate. They are even more shocked when they realize our heroes are celebrating their five year anniversary – but not of marriage, just dating. Apparently the citizens of this small town are very conservative. Not that any of this seems to matter to the actual plot, it’s just a chance for the film to add a little atmosphere.

Lunch over, they head to their car and find that it doesn’t start. A creepy mechanic appears out of nowhere (the film will do this a lot – hide somebody skulking around from the audience’s point of view and pretend  the characters somehow wouldn’t notice a person walking right up to them and staring.) He says they’ll have to order some parts, and our heroes will have to spend the night. Luckily, there is a really nice cabin in the woods that gets “rented on the internet.”

At the cabin they sit outide and they enjoy the quiet of the woods. Then they start a little sexy time. Ryan lifts her up and takes her to…not the bedroom, but the kitchen. Because where else do you go for a little sexy time in a stranger’s house but their kitchen counters?

The doorbell interrupts their fun, and some creepy girl stands outside awkwardly. Everyone stares at each other for some ridiculously long beats, and then she asks if someone or the other is home. Ryan gives her a harsh “no” while Maya indicates she must have the wrong house. Then they stare at each other in silence for a while. It s so awkward and weird this scene. Any normal person would assume that maybe the guy who owns the place has a daughter who plays with this young girl.  Any normal person would explain that they are renting the place for the night. 

Girl leaves, and our heroes get their sexy time (on the couch, not the bed, because there will be a “spooky” reveal in the bedroom later). And then, oops, our heroes realize they accidentally left his asthma inhaler in the car. Because what normal people would definitely do when they are leaving their car for the night in an old auto shop miles away from where they will be spending the night with no modes of transportation is not make sure they have a life saving medical device. And it wasn’t knocked under the seat. It was sitting right there in the console.

So Ryan gets on a motorcycle that is for some reason left on the property with the keys and rides back to town. He gets the inhaler and then some food (ordering her a cheeseburger without the met – so just bread and cheese, I guess).  While he’s gone, she drinks three small bottles of hard liquor and a bottle of beer. 

She also calls the owner of the place because the refrigerator is out and essentially demands that he send someone that night to fix it. Despite the fact that the only thing they have to keep cool is a six pack of beer, they will be leaving in the morning. The fridge will not come into play for the rest of the movie.  Not even when the evildoers start showing up and knocking on the door. It would have been an easy jump scare for our heroes to think the person at the door was a refrigerator repairman only to find out it was someone with nefarious intent. But whatever.

The creepy girl knocks on the door again while Ryan is out. Maya doesn’t open the door but is pretty freaked out by it. So what does she do in this frightened state inside a strange cabin in the woods while her boyfriend is away? She smokes a blunt, then takes a shower. That’s what everybody would do, right?

The thing is, while Maya has been alone in the cabin, we have seen the creeps staring at her from inside and outside the house. Maya plays some music on a piano, and one of them sits on a chair behind her. When she takes a shower, someone comes inside the bathroom and watches. They would surely make some noise moving around like that.  Unless she’s completely oblivious, she would surely see them.

Whatever, horror movie tropes and all that. Eventually, Ryan comes home, and the creeps attack for good. More stupid decisions are made, including never calling the cops and not just high-tailing it out of there. At one point Ryan has a shotgun and the killers only have blades, but he still tells Maya to go run through the woods while he stays there. And doesn’t shoot them.

I’ve rattled on for too long. I just couldn’t believe how dumb this film was.  I expect characters to make stupid decisions in horror films because otherwise the film would be over in ten minutes, but the characters in this film never make even one sensible decision.

It ends with a “To Be Continued” and while I hated this film, I kind of want to see the sequel (there will be a third one, too). Also, apparently, this is an attempt to reboot a Strangers franchise. The original The Strangers was made in 2005 and a sequel came out in 2018. I might have to watch them all as punishment for my sins.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are known for their large scale, brilliantly shot in technicolor productions such as The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, but they also made much smaller production such as this film. I’d honestly never heard of it until I got a copy of it on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection, but I found it to be just lovely.

It is about a woman who goes to a small village in Scotland to meet her fiancee and get married but instead she falls in love with the local villagers and meets another man. That’s sound like every other romantic comedy out there, but in the hands of masters like Powell and Presssburger it is wonderful. You can read my full review here.

While I did forget to write a Pick of the Week this week I absolutely remembered to write my Five Cool Things. This week the focus was on some movies that came out in 2025 including Train Dreams, A House of Dynamite, She Rides Shotgun, and The Man in My Basement, plus a David Byrne concert and a trailer for an upcoming horror movie.

You can read all about it over at Cinema Sentries.

I totally forgot to write a Pick of the Week this week, and now it seems foolish to write about things that already came out. But I still want to let you all know what came out that I find interesting, so you get images instead of my endless prattle.

Steam had a big Black Friday sale, and I bought her a couple of games. But since I bought them through the website that she plays her games on, she automatically knew I had purchased them. Christmas came early for her, or so we thought.

Her little laptop wasn’t able to handle them at all. They wouldn’t play in the least little bit.

That really sucked, as while the games were on sale, they weren’t cheap. They were going to be her big ticket Christmas items. She’ll get a few other small things, but that’s it.  And now she can’t even play them.

I promised her we’d look into buying her a desktop that could handle these games, but not now. Maybe for her birthday or something (if her grandparents chipped in.) The thing is, I’m a Mac guy. I’ve been using Apple products for a good 15 years now. Macs are great for many things, but games aren’t one of them. Macs also don’t like you to tinker with them. They are designed to plug in and just work.  I’m perfectly happy with that. While I used to be someone who knew a little something about computers, I am no longer that guy.  I have no idea what the latest processors are, how much RAM you need, etc.

That made looking online to determine what kind of a computer she needed extremely difficult. Luckily my brother’s boy is a hardcore gamer, and I figured he could help me with the specs. At first he sent me a bunch of information that went over my head. Then he sent me some links to computers he thought were reasonably priced.  His version of reasonable and my version are very different things. I was not prepared to spend $1,000 so my daughter could play some video games. I told him that we needed to go a little cheaper, and he said he’d look into it.

I mentioned all this to my brother, just in casual conversation; I wasn’t expecting him to do anything about it. But then he mentioned that his son had given him a very nice computer a couple of years ago. My brother used to be really into World of Warcraft, but he hasn’t played in a long while and doesn’t plan to return to it, so, he said, she could have that one. He needed to run that by his son as it was a gift, but he didn’t think that would be a problem.

It wasn’t, and yesterday he delivered us a nice computer. Then the bomb dropped.  It didn’t have Wi-Fi. My brother always connected via an Ethernet cord and didn’t need Wi-Fi.  Our router is downstairs in my wife’s sewing room. Daughter wanted to use her computer upstairs. That would mean dragging over 100 feet of Ethernet cable across the house, up the stairs, and then back across the house. That just wasn’t going to work. 

I chatted with my nephew’s girlfriend, who is a bit of a computer nerd. She knew there were little devices you could buy and plug in to give it Wi-Fi, but she’d not had good luck with them. She suggested I just upgrade the motherboard and get one with Wi-Fi capabilities.  Then she said she was thinking of upgrading her motherboard, and she could give us her old one.

That was a little over my head, but she seemed to think it would work.  Then she called back a little later.  She’d decided she was going to buy her boyfriend a brand-new computer, and we could have his old one.  It had Wi-Fi, and it was better than my brother’s old one.

She brought it over tonight.  I had to move some desks around and spend way too much time trying to get it all set up, but it plays her games beautifully.  She’s one happy camper. 

And so am I.

Batman is probably my favorite comic book character (I go back and forth between him and the X-Men – which I know is a group of characters, but you’ll just have to deal with that.) I love that he doesn’t have any true superpowers, I love that he’s often more detective than superhero, and he has a great Rogue’s Gallery of villains.

I realize I don’t talk about comics all that much in these pages, but I like the idea of writing more small reviews and telling personal stories. I want to make this old blog more of a blog.  Maybe. Tomorrow I’ll probably change my mind, but for now I’m talking about Batman.

Batman: Killing Time is a limited series written by Tom King and illustrated by David Marquez. It begins with three villains – The Penguin, The Riddler, and Catwoman, who pull off the heist of the century. But then they immediately begin double crossing one another. It is up to Batman to put the clues together and pick up the pieces.

King tells the story with an off-kilter timeline. He does this thing where he’ll start a page with the date and a specific time, and then on the next page he’ll tell us it is exactly 1 hour and fifteen minutes later or whatever. Back and forth, back and forth, each pages, sometimes multiple times a page the time changes.  Sometimes he’ll go back hundreds, thousands of years to tell us a little mythology. This mostly ties together in an interesting way by the conclusion, but it is also a little confusing. 

At some point a new villain, The Help, is introduced. He’s kind of like Alfred from the Pennyworth TV series (which I quite liked and recommend) in that he’s got an English butler vibe but with loads of combat training).  He’s an interesting character, but then he just kind of disappears.  That’s about the time a foul mouthed US agent shows up who’s ready to wipe everybody out if the secret, possibly magical MacGuffin gets into the wrong hands.  

The story is fine. It isn’t anything special, but it worked well enough for me. The mastermind of the whole thing is apparently some obscure villain that hasn’t been seen in the comics for a long time. I didn’t know him, but the character makes sense within the context of the story and I liked him. But I’d be hard pressed to give you the details of what happened now that I’ve finished it.

The artwork is excellent. One of the things I love about Batman comics is that the artwork often has a noir feel to it and that’s implemented here to great effect. 

Overall, a quite good comic. Not Batman’s best, but well worth the read.

Ever since my wife and I got married, some twenty odd years ago, we’ve bought a real tree for Christmas. There is just something special about a real tree that beats a fake one every time. To me, real trees look better, they smell better, and I even like the way the pine needles fall onto the floor.

There is a tree farm about twenty miles west of our little town, and we go there every year. It is one of those places that has multiple plots of land. Each year they allow tree hunters to go into one section, choose their tree, and cut it down. Then when the season is done, they plant new trees in that section and allow them to grow for a couple of seasons. Then the next season the next section is cut down, and so forth.

Once you choose your tree, they give you a little tag, and you can go shop for ornaments or whatever while the workers cut the tree, put it into a little shaking machine to free any loose needles; then they shoot it through a netting machine and place it in the line for you to pick up.  We then take our tag, pull the car around, and they tie it to the roof.

The way they are supposed to tie it is they open our doors, run the twine through the car’s interior, then over the tree, and tie it all down. The guy must have been distracted when he tied ours.  I stopped off at a QuickTrip to get a drink and a snack and quickly realized I was trapped inside the car. The guy had looped the string through my window instead of opening the door, and thus the string had essentially locked me in!

The wife got my drink, and then when we got home, she cut me loose.

When I was a kid, my father owned a copy of the John Denver and the Muppets album A Christmas Together. We would play it over and over again around the Christmas holidays. It features fun versions of Christmas classics like “Little Saint Nick” and the “12 Days of Christmas” (with Miss Piggy adding a zealous “ba-dum, bum, bum” to her Five Gold Rings segment). Plus an assortment of Denver-led ballads. His version of “Silent Night” where he sings it in the original German and explains the origins of the song, tears me up every time.

Anyway, I now own that album on CD, and it is always the album we play while we’re putting up our Christmas tree. We don’t have a lot of traditions in our family, but that is one of my favorites. Stringing lights up and putting ornaments on the tree while The Muppets sing silly songs and John Denver makes me cry always brings in the spirit of the season for me.

Some days I truly miss the old video stores. There was something special about walking through the aisles looking at the same VHS covers you’d seen a thousand times, hoping to stumble across something special. In those days before IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, I often had no idea what a movie was like other than that cover and a description written on the back. Some of those covers made the movies seem utterly amazing. Some of them are still etched into my brain (like the cover for April Fool’s Day where a woman’s hair is braided to look like a hangman’s noose).

I don’t think I ever managed to see any of the Ninja Trilogy when I was a kid, though I do remember looking at those VHS tapes and wishing I could rent them, but I sure was thrilled when I learned they were getting the UHD treatment.  Now I’ve not only seen them, but I own them, and I’ve reviewed them (something you can read right here at Cinema Sentries.)

My daughter is a big fan of the Five Nights at Freddy’s video games, and all their supplemental material, including the movies. Her mother took her and some friends to see the first movie on opening night in the theater. She loved it, and when it came to streaming, she made me watch it with her. I remember absolutely nothing about the movie. I gave it three stars on Letterboxd but I suspect at least half a star was due to her excitement over watching it again. Exuberance is catching.

She has been super excited over the sequel for weeks now, and she talked me into buying her and three friends tickets to it for opening night tonight. They are old enough to go to the theater alone now, so the wife and I were looking forward to a quiet night at home.

Unfortunately, one of the friends got sick, and not being ones to let good money go to waste, the wife and I drew straws to see who would take the now empty seat. I drew the short straw. You would think that if my daughter’s excitement encouraged me to enjoy the last movie while watching it by ourselves at home, then a packed theater full of excited fans would make this viewing even more enjoyable. You would be wrong. The reasons for this are twofold: 

1. It has been a long week, and I was tired. I was in no mood to go to the theater and watch a movie I wasn’t really interested in.
2. Those excited fans were all teenagers.

The two boys sitting next to me (I’d put their age at 15) talked through the entire movie. I hate when people talk during movies.But then I realized my daughter’s friends were also talking through parts of the film and excitedly pointing at the screen when someone happened that they recognized from the games. I listened to the boys talk, and they two were just excited to be there, and were having a good time, So why shouldn’t I enjoy myself?

The movie isn’t good. I’ve never played the game, but I can see the appeal of wandering around an old, dark, abandoned amusement palace where animatronic robots jump out and try to kill you. But that doesn’t translate very well to the movies. Especially when the movie attempts to build things like character and story into the murdering robot movie.

Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) seems to have recovered from the events of the first movie (which happened a year ago) and more or less has his stuff together. His daughter Abby (Piper Rubio) misses the friends she made back then (and remember, her friends were actually the ghosts of five murdered children inhabiting those animatronic robots). Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) also returns from the first movie, but she’s still haunted by the past. 

The story of what happened on those five nights one year ago has become something of a legend in town. People love the stories and, in fact, are planning an anniversary party of sorts where they will all dress up as the robots and have a carnival.

There is also a science fair about to happen, and Abby is working on a robot submission (when that fails, guess what robot will come to her aid?). Apparently the school of this small town is cool enough to have an entire robotics department. It is led by a vicious and mean teacher (played to perfection by Wayne Knight) who will surely get his comeuppance.

Matthew Lillard returns in flashbacks and Skeet Ulrich shows up at one point making it a mini-Scream reunion.

Yada, yada, yada, there is some lore building (and no doubt plenty of references to the games I haven’t played). Abby is getting a spirit called from some other dead girl who needs her to come to the original Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza to help the animatronic robots flee the restaurant and wreak havoc on the town.

There are a few decent jump scares, and the scenes in the pizzeria have a certain eeriness to them, but mostly the film is just dumb. I suspect a lot of that is the translation from game to screen. Things that work well when you are playing a game are pretty idiotic when watching it happen in a movie.

For example, the original Freddy’s has some kind of fake river flowing through it. It is maybe three  feet deep, and the walls surrounding it go up another foot or two. It would not be a difficult thing to climb out of. Twice characters fall into it and can’t get out of it. Another time a character has to log into a computer and try and shut down the Wi-Fi signal (which is what controls the robots). We see a lot of screenshots with him clicking through boxes. Both of these things seem very much like something you’d deal with effectively in a game, but on screen…boring.

But the girls had fun, and sometimes that’s all that matters.

I watched 51 movies in November. That’s a lot of movies, even for me. It wasn’t really intentional. I’m still on a slow movie-watching kick so I can watch more TV kick, but I had a lot of reviews to do, including an Alec Guinness boxed set. Normally I watch movies on the weekend and watch TV through the week, but with reviews I have due dates, so I wound up watching a lot of those through the week while still maintaining my weekend movie schedule. 20 of the movies I watched were new to me. 29 of them were made before I was born.

It was Noirvember (which partially explains the numerous old movies; also see those reviews), and I watched 17 of those. I’ve decided that for December I’m going to try and watch a lot of movies that came out in 2025 and hopefully do a whole list of my favorites from this year. By the end of November, I got a little tired of noirs and started watching some new movies.

For my most watched actors category, Willem Dafoe jumped way up into #1 with 8 films watched. I’ve always found him to be an incredibly interesting actor, and I admire that he’s made a career out of choosing all sorts of roles, never pigeonholing himself into one type of thing. I didn’t intentionally try to watch a bunch of his films this year; it just sort of happened. I think I watched a couple early in the year, and had that kind of lightbulb go off in my head about how much I like him, and then whenever I’d see him show up in something, I’d automatically give it a shot. The rest of the actor’s field looks pretty much the same.

The most watched director’s list saw some small changes. Wes Anderson and Terence Fisher broke out of their six-way tie and moved into first with five films each.

Overall it was a very good month with some of my favorite new films being A House of Dynamite, The Man in my Basement, Caught Stealing, Predator: Badlands, Hell Drivers,and Cairo Station.

A House of Dynamite (2025) ****
Key Largo (1948) *****
Superman (2025) ***1/2
She Rides Shotgun (2025) ***1/2
The Man in My Basement (2025) ****
Knives Out (2019) ****1/2
Heart Eyes (2025) ***1/2
After the Hunt (2025) *
Muppet Treasure Island (1996) ***
Doctor Who: Horror of Fang Rock (1977) ****
The Long Walk (2025) ***
Moonrise Kingdom (2012) ***1/2
The Man in the White Suit (1951) ****
Ladykillers (1955) ****
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) ***1/2
The Mad Miss Manton (1938) ****
The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) ****
Kansas City Confidential (1952) ****
Out of the Fog (1941) ****
Roast-Beef and Movies (1934) **
Manhattan Melodrama (1934) ***
Caught Stealing (2025) ****
Frankenstein (2025) ***1/2
Stakeout (1958) ***1/2
The Woman in Question (1950) ****
Burden of Dreams (1982) ****
Thunderbolts* (2025) ***1/2
The Ogre of Athens (1956) ***/1/2
Impact (1949) ***
To Have and Have Not (1944) ****1/2
Framed (1947) ***1/2
Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995) ***1/2
The Mothman Prophecies (2002) **
Predator: Badlands (2025) ****
The Social Network (2010) ****1/2
Dream Lover (1994) **
War-Gods of the Deep (1965) ***1/2
The Gun Runners (1958) ***1/2
Blowing Wild (1953) **1/2
Black River (1957) ***1/2
The Roundup (2022) ****
Guilty Bystander (1950) ***1/2
Memoir of a Murderer (2017) ***1/2
Blackout (1954) ***/12
Dead End (1937) ****
The Maltese Falcon (1941) ****1/2
Black Angel (1946) ***1/2
Hell Drivers (1957) ****
Cairo Station (1958) ****
Midnight (1934) *
The Blue Gardenia (1953) ***1/2

Apologies for the delay in posting this, and for the complete lack of posts this week. I got some kind of nasty stomach bug on Monday and was completely down and out. I’m feeling much better now, but that totally threw my week off.

I’ve also had some kind of pretty intense pain in my hip area for the last several weeks. I finally went to the doctor last week and now I’m in physical therapy and that stuff is no joke. I’m about as sore as a loser right now.

Anyway, John Woo films have been getting some pretty awesome home video treatment this year and his excellent film The Killer is this week’s pick.

I was about halfway through Heart Eyes before I realized that it was directed by the same guy who made Werewolves Within (2021), Josh Ruben. I quite liked that movie. It was smart and funny and clever about the way it played with its genre.  Heart Eyes isn’t nearly as clever, and it winks a little too hard at the audience, like it is constantly letting the audience know that it  knows it’s just a movie. 

The genre it’s playing with is the slasher genre, and that’s a genre that’s had more than its fair share of meta commentary. The Scream films have pretty well bled that well dry. I’m being a little too harsh; there are parts of Heart Eyes that I really enjoyed, and the parts I didn’t like as much were still well made and entertaining.

A serial killer has been terrorizing lovers across the United States every Valentine’s Day for the last several years. This year he’s moved to Seattle, where we find our heroes Ally McCabe (Olivia Holt) and Jay Simmons (Mason Gooding.) She works in advertising and has just completed a campaign for a jewelry company where she spoofs the lives and bloody deaths of various doomed couples like Bonnie and Clyde. The boss lady previously approved it but now hates it because she feels it is in bad taste considering the Heart Eyes Killer has come to their town.  She hires Jay to come in and fix things.

They go to dinner to talk about the new campaign. Things don’t go well, he leaves, and she chases him down to apologize. Outside she sees her ex-boyfriend with a new girl. In an attempt to make him jealous, Ally gives Jay a big kiss on the lips. The Heart Eyes Killer sees this, thinks they are true lovers, and spends the rest of the movie trying to kill them.

There are some very funny moments when the two of them try to convince the killer that they aren’t in love and that he should go kill someone else. Eventually Jordana Brewster shows up as a detective trying to solve the murders. When a ring shows up at one of the crime scenes with the initials JS on it, she starts to think Jay Simmons just might be her man.

I won’t spoil it, but fairly early on it is easy to figure out who really might be involved.

One of the difficulties of a film like this for me is that the slasher genre has been done to death. There aren’t really any more clever ways to kill a person. Heart Eyes tries, even in its own knowing way, but never does anything all that clever or interesting. There is a nice set piece set inside a drive-in theater that is both funny and exciting. 

The film also has that super slick look that so many modern horror films have. Cameras have become so cheap and so good at their jobs that you don’t necessarily need the tech and the lighting you once needed. That’s not a bad thing, but sometimes modern horror films wind up a little too glossy for my tastes.

But overall this is a perfectly enjoyable film, and I’m very much looking forward to watching what Josh Ruben makes next.

I’ve been a little remiss with my Noirvember postings, but I’m making up for it with this week’s Five Cool Things. I decided to write about nothing but film noir in this week’s edition. Films include To Have and Have Not, Cairo Station, Out of the Fog, Hell Drivers, Kansas City Confidential and The Maltese Falcon. You can read all about it here.

Doctor Who
The Horror of Fang Rock
Season 15, Story 92

The Doctor (Tom Baker) and Leela (Louise Jameson) accidentally land the TARDIS on Fang Rock, a small island off the southern coast of England. When The Doctor notices that the lighthouse is without a light, they go and investigate. Inside the lighthouse they discover a dead guy and two still living lighthouse keepers – Reuben (Colin Douglas) and Vince (John Abbott). They explain that just before The Doctor arrived, they saw a strange light crash into the sea, and ever since the power has been fluctuating as the temperature keeps dropping.

While The Doctor and Leela are investigating the rest of the lighthouse, someone or something moves the corpse. Then, because the lighthouse light keeps going out, a pleasure boat crashes into the rocks. It is owned by a snooty lord, and with him are a lady and two other men.

Legend has it many years ago a monster came to Fang Rock and killed two of the keepers and drove one mad. Now a new creature has arrived, but this time it is from outer space. It is known as a Ruton, and it thinks Earth might be a good strategic place to fight the Sontarans.

The Ruton is a round, blobby thing that looks a bit like an egg yolk with some streamers hanging off of it. Tis not the greatest of Classic Who monsters, I tell you that. The production team made the smart decision to keep it off-screen for the most part, and they made it a shape-shifter so sometimes it appears as the dead keeper.

I am a big fan of base-under-siege stories, and the lighthouse makes for a great setting. The Ruton is not a great villain, but for most of this series four parts, it is off base trying to get in. The addition of the rich, snobby people adds a nice touch of fear and hysteria to the proceedings, while the lighthouse keepers mostly keep it together.

It is a pretty dark story, and Tom Baker eases into that side of the character, showing very little concern for the other characters who keep getting themselves killed. It has been a while since I’ve seen any of the other Leela stories, but she does seem to be transitioning nicely from the “noble savage” she was when she first joined the Doctor to someone who relies a little more on her intelligence than her strength (though she still throws a knife nicely and wields an axe at one point during this story.)

I’ve seen this one many times. It has become one of my go-to Classic Doctor Who stories as it moves at a brisk pace, has a terrific little story, and finds Tom Baker in fine form.

I feel like I haven’t had much to say around these parts lately, but that’s mostly been due to the fact that I’ve been writing my head off for Cinema Sentries. I’ll try to post those things on this site soon, but until then I once again wish you a very Happy Thanksgiving.

After my disastrous semester attempting to get a master’s degree, I got a really great job working on an EPA-funded project in northeastern Oklahoma. Being young and single, I moved myself to Joplin, Missouri, which was the nearest place approximating a city, and thus had things for a young, single man to do after work.

I went to the movies nearly every weekend and often invited my various coworkers. I have very specific memories of inviting a friend to see Eyes Wide Shut and both of us walking out with that look in our eyes. Neither of us had any idea what to make of the film, but we were sure we’d seen something special.

I’ve only come to appreciate it more as the years have gone by. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman have hardly been better, and watching Cruise wander through an increasingly paranoid labyrinth of sexual obsession is a deep and enjoyable ride.

The Criterion Collection is releasing it in 4K UHD and I’m happy to make it this week’s pick.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

The Long Walk: Based on a Stephen King book (who was using the nom de plume Richard Bachman), this dystopian film pits a group of young men in a contest to the death, that will be televised. A game show offers a major prize to the man who can continue walking at a steady pace the longest. If anyone slows down, they are shot (by a gruff military man played by Mark Hamill). I’ve heard good things.

The Conjuring 4: Last Rites 4K UHD: I love The Conjuring. I think it is one of the best horror films of the last fifteen years. I love the story, I love the filmmaking, and it has ample amounts of jump scares and an unsettling atmosphere. The sequels have been a series of diminishing returns. I hear this fourth and probably last film (at least the last Conjuring film; I suspect the various spin-offs will continue churning out films for some time to come) is pretty lousy. Still, I love finishing a series so I’ll no doubt get to this soon.

Pride and Prejudice (2005) 20th Anniversary Edition 4K UHD: I’ve never been able to get into Jane Austen. I’ve tried to read several of her books several times and never managed more than a few chapters. I don’t know why, exactly. My wife absolutely adores her. For a long time I hated the cinematic adaptations of her stories.  But one day I got offered to review the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. That is my wife’s very favorite thing, so I thought it would be a wonderful present for her. But as it was a review item, I had to watch it.  So I did, and then I reviewed it. Turns out I rather loved it. I’ve since come around to several other Austen adaptations (but I still haven’t managed to read anything by her.)

This adaptation of Pride and Prejudice doesn’t get quite the love the BBC miniseries does, but my wife says it is still quite lovely. It stars Keira Knightley as Elizabeth and Matthew Macfayden as Mr. Darcy. It has a new UHD print and lots of extras.

The Agatha Christie Collection 4K UHD: We are big fans of Christie in our house, and especially of the various cinematic adaptations that have been made of her work over the years. There is something so cozy about watching a murder mystery be solved amongst the beautiful English countryside.  This set includes four films (Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Death on the Nile (1978), The Mirror Crack’d (1982), and Evil Under the Sun (1982) all of which I might argue are the definitive versions of each story.

Anemone 4K UHD: Daniel Day-Lewis stars in this drama directed by his son Ronan Day-Lewis about a hermit living in the woods who is contacted by his estranged brother (played by Sean Bean) in an attempt to put their lives back together after a tragedy.

The Death Wish Collection: The original Death Wish stars Charles Bronson as a man who starts out as a pacifist, but once his daughter is sexually assaulted all bets are off. The first one attempts to have something to say beyond just Charles Bronson blowing people away, but it isn’t very good at it. The sequels get increasingly silly (but strangely better once they drop all pretense of depth).  Kino Lorber has packaged them all up in a nice looking little set.

French Film Noir Collection Vol. II: When I first learned about film noir, I thought it was a very small genre. In my mind I thought it was relegated to classics like The Third Man, and The Big Sleep. That was a silly thought, and I don’t know how it got into my head, but it wasn’t until years later that I realized how big the genre really is. The thing is, of course, that film noir is a very malleable genre without any hard rules as to what it really is. And it wasn’t just relegated to the United States; you can find noirs in just about every country that makes film. I’ve not actually heard of these four films, but I love a good film noir and I’m excited to see what the French have done with it. This set includes the following films: Rhine Virgin / The Beast is Loose / Trapped by Fear / The Passion of Slow Fire.

Alec Guinness Masterpiece Collection 4K UHD: My generation knows Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi from the Star Wars films, but the actor had a very long career making all sorts of films.  This set collects four films (Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit, and The Ladykillers) from his early years making comedies for Ealing Studios. I’ll have a full review up soon.

Sleepless 4K UHD: Dario Argento’s giallo-esque thriller from 2001 is far from his best work, but it isn’t bad either. It feels a bit like a great artist reimagining his hits rather than a brand new work by a master firing on all cylinders.  You can read my Friday Night Horror review of the film here. Vinegar Syndrome has this release.

Considering the talent – Clark Gable, William Powell, Myrna Loy, and WS Van Dyke (who directed most of The Thin Man movies) this film was entirely disappointing. Melodrama is right. This thing lacks all the wit and cleverness one would expect in a film with that cast.

You can read my full review here.

I don’t believe I’ve ever read Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, but I have seen several different cinematic adaptations of it. I’ve seen the 1931 film with Boris Karloff, of course, and all the sequels from Universal. I’ve seen several of the Hammer Studio versions and that one from the 1990s with Robert DeNiro. I guess it is safe to say I like the story, or perhaps I just like the monster.

Guillermo del Toro is a director whom I like but don’t really love. He’s an incredibly creative creator, and his films have an amazing visual style, but his stories rarely do it for me.

I don’t know why I tell you these things except that I guess when a beloved director takes on a beloved story, it feels like I should begin by expressing my feelings toward both things before I tackle how I feel about their collaboration.

For del Toro’s part, he’s apparently loved the story for decades and dreamed of making his own adaptation of it. I am reminded of Martin Scorsese’s The Gangs of New York, which was likewise a film the director had wanted to make for decades, yet when he finally got to do it, the film was compromised and became far less than his greatest film and presumably fell far from his aspirations.  I don’t know if del Toro’s film was compromised by Netflix or anyone else, but the end result is overlong and overstuffed, and if it were to be given a subtitle like the novel, it might go something like this: Frankenstein; or, Be Careful What You Wish For.

The good news is the film looks absolutely amazing, even via streaming. Del Toro’s visual sensibilities have never been stronger. Frankenstein’s castle is a maze of gothic sensibilities and steampunk technology. The exteriors exist with beautiful mountain-strewn landscapes that made me want to grab my passport and head for the mountains of Eastern Europe. The acting is good across the board, especially Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the monster. And I always love to see Mia Goth in anything.

The problem, then, lies in the story. As I mentioned, I have not read the book, so I have no idea if this version is more faithful than the films I’ve seen, or less. It begins with a prelude. On an ice strewn sea somewhere,  a ship full of Russian sailors is desperately trying to break through the ice and make it to the North Pole.  They hear a noise and see flames rise somewhere toward the horizon. They run in that direction and find Victor Frankenstein badly wounded, near death.

Then the monster comes.  It is fierce and dangerous and apparently impervious to bullets. It kills many men and screams Victor’s name. The sailors manage to get Victor aboard the ship and blow up the ice around the monster, sinking him into the frozen abyss. 

Victor then tells the captain his tale, which makes up Part 1 of the film. It is more or less the story we all know. We do get a little more backstory on Victor. We see him as a child being taught by a demanding father (a wonderful Charles Dance) and being doted on by his mother.  Then one by one her parents die, and he becomes estranged from his brother. 

He becomes a doctor with wild ideas about life and death and is shunned by the community. He meets Henrich Harlande (Christoph Waltz), who is intrigued by his ideas. He gives him all the funding and supplies he needs and sets him up in an isolated castle. 

He makes the monster but is disappointed when he doesn’t seem intelligent. The estranged brother comes back, and with him his fiancée, Lady Elizabeth Harlander (Mia Goth,) whom Victor falls in love with. It is Elizabeth that sparks the humanity inside the monster. Still, Victor tries to destroy him.

Part II picks up from there and tells the monster’s side of the story. He survives Victor’s murder attempt and flees to the forest. There he is taken in by a kindly, blind, old man (David Bradley) and learns to read and about friendship. Eventually he must leave, for he knows he cannot die, and he desires a companion. A companion only Victor Frankenstein can create. Slowly we’ll be brought back around to the prelude, and finally the film’s end.

It isn’t that the story is bad, but perhaps that it has been told too many times before, so it can no longer be made interesting. Del Tor does try. He keeps some things familiar but adds many other things, and even the familiar ones he plays with. But at 2 and a half hours, it is far too long and has far too many parts that just drag. 

One wonders if del Toro is too big of a name now that no one was willing to tell him “no.” With pet projects like this, sometimes that’s exactly what you need.  It is well worth watching for the acting and the stunning visuals. I just wish the story they are telling was more worthy of the artistry behind it.

It was a great show, even if I didn’t know all the songs (he played most of his new album and a few songs from previous solo albums, but nothing from Wilco).

On this tour for the encore he’s been playing one or two cover songs from artists who came to fame somewhere near the town he’s playing at. For the Tulsa show he covered “Wish I Had Not Said That” by JJ Cale and then (of course) “Do Re Mi” by Woody Guthrie. Both versions were excellent.

My ambition often far exceeds my abilities. Inevitably, whenever Noirvember rolls around, I get excited and watch numerous noirs in the first week or so of the month. I’ll happily write a few reviews, but then life gets in the way. I have other official things to write, or I get stressed out over some work thing, or I’m just tired. I’m tired all the time these days. The days roll by, and I put off writing more noir reviews, and after a while I need something non-noir to watch. Then all of a sudden the month is over, and I’ve not written or watched nearly as many noirs as I wanted.

This month I thought it would be fun to write a whole series of reviews covering the Criterion Channel’s collection of Blackout Noirs. I got really excited about that and watched several of them. I wrote some of the reviews, and then that fatigue kicked in and I got distracted, and here I am trying to write something about Guilty Bystander, a movie I watched a week and a half ago. 

So, you’ll have to forgive me if this review is a little light on the details.  My memory has faded on some of the specifics of this particular film.

I can say that Guilty Bystander was made in 1950 and was directed by Joseph Lerner. It was made on a shoestring budget. According to noir aficionado Eddie Mueller, the filmmakers couldn’t afford to purchase the requisite filming permit to shoot in New York, so they often shot incognito or bribed police officers to look the other way.

This imbues the film with a real on-the-streets quality. And if you want to know what the seedier sides of New York City looked like in 1950, this film is for you.

Zachary Scott stars as Max Thursday, an alcoholic ex-cop who is living in a flophouse, working as the house detective. One night his ex-wife Georgia (Faye Emerson) comes to him in a panic. Their son Jeff and her brother Fred have gone missing. Georgia’s friend Dr. Elder (Jed Prouty) has advised her not to talk to the police just in case this is a case of kidnapping. 

A drunk Max visits Dr. Elder and gets into a fight with him. The good doctor knocks him unconscious, and Max awakes to find himself in police custody because Elder has found himself dead and Max now finds himself suspect #1.

Georgia gives him an alibi, and Max is on the hunt. The plot is standard noir stuff, and the film mostly plods along. I’ve liked Zachary Scott in the films I’ve seen him in, and he’s pretty good here. The script doesn’t do him any favors, but Joseph Lerner’s direction is on point, and the on location stuff is good. There is a scene in a subway tunnel that’s thrilling (and makes one wonder if they actually got permission to shoot down there).  

It is a film worth seeing if you are a noir fan, all others should not apply.

It is time again for me to talk about all the cool new Blu-ray/UHD releases coming out this week. This week’s pick is a trilogy of films that essentially launched John Woo’s career and created en entire new genre (gun fu). There are lots of other things coming out this week including Howard’s End, a new Ken Burns documentary, a couple of Criterion releases and more.

You can read all about it over at Cinema Sentries.

When I was 13 or 14, maybe, my mother took me and my sister to Orlando, Florida. My brother was graduating from Naval bootcamp, and we decided to make a vacation of it. We visited SeaWorld and Universal Studios and a few other touristy places (though oddly enough we did not go to Disney World). It was the first time I’d ever taken a vacation like that. It was amazing. 

The thing about amusement parks is that you wind up waiting in line for most of your time there. I know Disney and probably the other parks have ways around the long lines now, but back then you just waited.  The lines wrapped back and forth around each other, so you wound up zigzagging between different groups of people. As the lines took over an hour to get you to your destination, you could get to where you felt you knew the people you kept crossing around.

You’d cross paths with the same people over and over again. You’d smile at them and make small talk. You’d complain about the long line. Sometimes you’d run into those same people at other rides. It was the first time in my life that I’d realized the world was filled with so many people. People with their own lives. Their own hopes and dreams. These were people I’d never see again in my life, but their lives would continue.  It was a strange enlightenment.

Indiscretion of an American Wife is a bit like that. Or that’s what it was originally meant to be. Director Vittorio De Sica imagined a movie about the various lives that briefly crossed paths at a train station. American producers mucked that concept up a great deal, instead making it concentrate on one love story, but you can find bits of the original concept in there if you look. 

Anyway, that’s a long introduction to my review of the Blu-ray of that film. You can read even more thoughts over at Cinema Sentries.

A broke and down American, Casey Morrow (Dane Clark), is quietly getting drunk by himself. He’s approached by a beautiful heiress named Phyllis Brunner (Belinda Lee). She says she’ll pay him $500 to marry her. A smart man would immediately think something is fishy, but film noirs aren’t filled with smart men. He accepts, and she plies him with more drinks. He awakes the next morning in a strange apartment owned by Maggie Doone (Eleanor Summerfield). She says she found him last night stumbling about, dead drunk, so she took him in and let him crash. She’s an artist and has a painting of Phyllis on an easel.

They are alerted by the newspapers that Phyllis’ father was brutally murdered last night with a fireplace poker. Casey finds blood on his coat. He has no memory of what happened to him after Phyllis made her offer and gave him some more drinks.

Blackout (also known as Murder By Proxy) is a tidy little British b-noir, directed by Hammer stalwart Terrence Fisher.

The police will naturally suspect Casey, as Mr. Brunner was quite rich, and as he’s now married to Brunner’s only child, he’ll take control of the estate. The police will never believe Casey’s story of how Phyllis propositioned him on her own, so naturally, he takes it upon himself to try and find out what really happened.

It is here that what starts out as a rather excellent film turns a little more pedestrian. Casey will track people down and ask a lot of questions and get far too many easy answers. Because this is a film noir, we know that Phyllis has something to do with it. He’ll figure that out too, but also because this is a noir, he’ll keep falling for her act. Guys in noirs always get suckered in by a beautiful dame. It is such a shame too because Maggie is clearly the better woman, and she falls in love with him the moment she takes him in that first night.

The detective work never quite thrills or travels down new paths for this sort of thing, but it is still quite entertaining. I am reminded of Terrence Fisher’s work in numerous Hammer Horror films. Those weren’t typically great, but they were sturdily made and enjoyable enough. So it is here. It is a very good film. It doesn’t quite reach great status, but if you are a fan of film noir, I wouldn’t miss it.

When I was in college, I went to the movies pretty much every weekend. Sometimes two or three times. I saw absolutely everything that I had even the slightest amount of interest in. I probably did have interest in Demon Knight when it came out, as I liked horror comedies. But I honestly don’t remember. What I do remember is watching it in the theater and absolutely loving it. 

Demon Knight is branded as a Tales From the Crypt story. Tales From the Crypt originated as an anthology horror comic in the 1950s and was hosted by the Crypt-Keeper, a wise-cracking corpse. It has been revised in various formats over the years, including an HBO series that lasted from 1989 to 1996. I’d never read any of those comics, and I don’t think I’d watched any of the HBO episodes, but the Crypt-Keeper would pop up in commercials and things, so I was definitely familiar with the brand.

Demon Knight was successful enough that they commissioned a sequel, Bordello of Blood, which came out a year later. I hated that film. So much so that it completely turned me off the whole Tales From the Crypt thing, and I never watched anything from them again. I never even came back to Demon Knight. So I haven’t seen it in 30 years.

It is one of those films I’d periodically think about, and I’d think I should revisit it, but for whatever reason I never did. It seems to be a movie that’s more or less been forgotten by the culture. I never see anyone talking about it. There are lots of other movies like this – some I did watch when they came out, some I didn’t – that get brought up periodically in online discussions. Those I usually seek out and watch again. But the lack of discussion about this one meant that anytime it would pop into my mind, it usually popped right back out again.

I cut the cord years and years ago. I own a lot of DVDs, but I do subscribe to various streaming services. I’m one of those people who subscribes to one service for a month or two, and then I’ll cancel it so I can subscribe to something else. I figure there is only so much stuff you can watch in any given month, so why spend all your money subscribing to every service?

A couple of months ago, Starz had one of those super deals where you could subscribe to an entire year for like $20. I’ve subscribed to Starz before and remembered it being okay, so I signed up. Tonight is the first time I’ve actually watched anything on their service since I subscribed. Most of the stuff they have is of no interest to me, and the stuff I am interested in I’ve already seen and own on DVD.

But while looking for a horror movie to watch, I found this and decided to finally give it another go. Actually, what I really did was watch The Mothman Prophesies on Starz, the Richard Gere flick from 2002, but it was so god-awful I decided I didn’t want to write about it for my Friday Night Horror Movie, and I dug around Starz some more and found this.

For the first ten minutes or so I wished I hadn’t. This was not what I was wanting; my fears that it would not live up to my memories were coming true. But then I was able to click my brain off. I was able to enjoy the film for what it was actually doing, not what I wanted it to do.

What it does is create an incredibly goofy, violent, goopy, and funny little horror story with lots of comedic elements and some pretty good practical effects.  Billy Zane is having the time of his life, too.

Zane plays a demon called The Collector, who is after a guy named Frank Brayker (William Sadler). Brayker has a powerful artifact known as the key, which the demons need to take over the world, but which also contains some of Christ’s blood, which can kill the demons. 

Brayker holes up in an old mission turned hotel, and the film becomes a base-under-siege story. Also in the hotel are an assortment of people, including the sassy owner (CCH Pounder), an old man (Dick Miller), an ex-con (Jada Pinkett Smith), an asshole (Thomas Haden Church), and others.

The film doesn’t do anything particularly new with the concept. There is lots of infighting, attempts to sneak away, and a traitor, but it does it with gusto and a real sense of fun. I remember when I first watched it, one of the joys was watching Thomas Haden Church play a character completely different from the good natured goof he played on the TV show Wings. Here he cusses, drinks, and has a prostitute attach battery clamps to his nipples!

The demon designs are good, and it is a real treat to see how many practical effects they used. CGI was just getting started at this point, and there is some use of it here, but mostly the demons are made of real stuff, and the gore is visceral (and the blood was made out of glow stick juice!). 

This is a film that understands it isn’t going to win awards. The Oscars will not be calling. But it does what it does well and has a blast doing it. I had a lot of fun watching it, too.