The Signal Watch blog

Dracula Watch: The Horror of Dracula (1958)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 03:03:13 +0000

Watched: 10/13/2026

Format: DVD

Viewing: Unknown

Director: Terence Fisher

Part of the Hammer horror explosion, The Horror of Dracula (1958) may be a horrendous adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel, but it is a banger of a movie. And as Hammer knew immediately, Peter Cushing could flip the evil intensity he'd shown as Victor Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein the year prior and create a bonafide horror hero out of Van Helsing, while Christopher Lee looked at Bela Lugosi and said "hold my beer".

This Dracula is not some smooth bastard here to make off with your virgins, this is the first in a series of movies where Dracula is a straight up menace who is not going to do a bunch of magic tricks to scare you - he's just going to murder you with his bare hands and scary eyeballs.

It has bits of the book, but feels like someone forced to tell the story of Dracula who saw the 1931 movie once while blitzed and is cobbling pieces together as they go. I have to accept that that's fine as I do like the movie for what it is - an earnestly told story with the actors leaning into it.

Storywise, subsequent installments would build out what an absolute bastard this Dracula is, and Cushing would delight as the iron-willed Van Helsing. The follow up doesn't even have a proper Dracula - it's a different vampire.

Anyway, if you're looking for a bit of Dracula that isn't all cheesy melodrama, this is your choice. No romantic subplots here, no oceans of time. Just vampiric dickery and a Dracula who loves making a dramatic entrance.

I may just feel compelled to watch these Draculas again.

Noir Watch: Loophole (1954)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:33:00 +0000

Watched: 10/12/2026

Format: TCM on DVR

Viewing: First

Director: Harold D. Schuster

I dunno.

I hate to speak ill of a movie with Dorothy Malone and Charles McGraw in it. But Loophole (1954) didn't make a lot of sense.

Our set up: Barry Sullivan plays a bank teller. Clean as a whistle. A war vet.

One morning, the bank is visited by a fleet of bank examiners - 10 arrive at one time to perform a surprise exam. But a clever fellow, Tate (Don Beddoe), slips in behind them as if he's part of the group. He manages to blend in and while his accomplice (Mary Beth Hughes) distracts Sullivan, our crook snags almost $50K from Barry Sullivan's drawer - roughly $621,000 in today's dollars.

To make the movie happen, our hero doesn't tell anyone. He just goes home for the weekend, like that money is going to just show up.

I don't buy it. If you saw that money was missing, it clearly has legal implications and will cost you your job. You're telling your boss, or calling them at home and absolutely not leaving the bank. You are removing any hint of suspicion.

Then, Charles McGraw is assigned the case - and he's a hard nosed detective for the bond company. He thinks Sullivan did it, and even after it's clear Sullivan didn't do it - months later - he still thinks he did, and is trying to cost Sullivan every opportunity for work by telling employers Sullivan is a crook. It's *clearly* slander, opening McGraw and the bond company up for a lawsuit. I mean, I've seen real life detectives refuse to believe they're wrong no matter what evidence is there, but McGraw is a private detective, not a cop. He's got no coverage.

Dorothy Malone plays Sullivans very, very, very supportive wife.

The last 1/4 is just as messy as Sullivan tracks down Beddoe and makes horrible choice after horrible choice. Like I said, I just didn't think this movie made much sense. The best part of that section of the movie is Hughes turning on Beddoe and trying to take control. She's an absolute gem here.

As Noir Alley host Eddie Muller pointed out - the highlight here is really the two women in the movie who kind of keep it going. I've seen Sullivan in several movies now, and he's... fine. He's just never my favorite. But he is a good choice here - his height working as a defense against McGraw's intensity.

I've seen worse, it's just not a movie that is so bad it's memorable or good enough to think about by the end of the week.

Mod Horror Watch: Spider Baby, or The Maddest Story Ever Told (1962)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 03:54:50 +0000

Watched: 10/11/2026

Format: YouTube (watch it here)

Viewing: First

Director: Jack Hill

Usually the way Halloween-time spooky-movie-watching occurs is I pitch a few movies and Jamie picks one based on how well one of them suits her mood. But this time I said "your challenge is to pick a Halloween or horror movie without any input from me".

Not too very much longer after, she said "Spider Baby". And I said "beg pardon?" For I had never heard of Spider Baby, or the Maddest Story Ever Told (1962).

Jamie put on a trailer for the movie, and I groaned when I saw Lon Chaney Jr. But, still, it wasn't Glenn Strange, so we take what we can get. But then, Jamie said "it has an 88% critics rating on RT, and a 75% audience rating", so we fired it up.

This movie was a delight. It made me think of JeniferSF repeatedly. She'd enjoy this one.

It's a sort of riff on the Old Dark House motif, of a house full of weirdos living their lives in a ramshackle place, unsuspecting travelers drop in, and things get crazy.

Here, the people in the house carry an affliction that, at age 10, makes them start reversing course in intellect. The occupants are a mix of three young adults who act like young children and then some aunts and uncles in the basement who are basically feral.

With the passing of their father, the children are left in the care of the family chauffer, Long Chaney Jr, who takes his duties very seriously. And then some distant cousins come to collect what they believe to be their inheritance. And things go sideways.

The movie is an interesting indie feature, written and directed by Jack Hill who would did Pit Stop, which we've covered here before. He also did Foxy Brown and Coffy, which I watched for Pam Grier-reasons in the past.

Hill used Sid Haig in Pit Stop and Beverly Washburn as well. It has Mary Mitchel and Karl Schanzer, who I just saw in Dementia 13. Carol Ohmart I know from House on Haunted Hill as Vincent Price's venomous wife.

It's called Spider Baby because one of the girls who is really regressing has a fascination with spiders and associates herself with them, including "playing spider", which means wrapping up her prey before "stinging' them.

Anyway, it is *fun*, and darker and funnier than I was expecting. Worth it for Sid Haig's wardrobe change alone.

Horror Watch: Carnival of Souls (1962)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 15:50:01 +0000

Watched: 10/10/2026

Format: Criterion Disc

Viewing: Second

Director: Herk Harvey

I'm the guy who thinks Carnival of Souls (1962) is a great movie. I liked it so much after the first time I saw it, I bought the disc. I sent money to star Candace Hilligoss and got a signed picture.

For me, this is a terrific, gothic American horror story. And (spoilers) I dig that the explanation leaves more questions than it answers.

Hilligoss is *great*. With a camera shoved in her face almost non-stop, she carries the film with a mix of bewilderment, iciness, and desperation. She's not an easy heroine. She's not likeable. She's not a final girl. But she's *compelling*.

The script places Hilligoss's Mary Henry with feet in the world of the mundane and the spiritual - she's to be an organist at a church. She declares it's just a job, it has no religious significance to her - and whether that was her stance before or after she went in the water, we don't know.

But now she's a lost soul, slowly realizing she's a spirit among the living, her human wants and interests dissipating - knowing she should want human contact, but spinning away from even the sleazy kindness offered her, as well as the friendship of the church.

It's sort of a great novella or short story of a film. No, the budget isn't spectacular, and you have to accept the limitations, but it's nonetheless effective.

Anyway, I know this is one that a lot of people came to thru Riff-Trax or whatever, but that's because it was out of copyright. There are weaknesses aplenty - only Hilligoss and Sidney Berger were regular talent. And this was Hilligoss's second time on screen. I dunno, I find the stilted delivery of everyone around Mary to feed the vibe.

If you tell me it's a bad movie, I'll say "it's an inexpensive movie, sure" but would defend what it's doing as what I find interesting in horror versus someone slashing kids at a summer camp.

Horror Watch: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 - Freddy's Revenge (1985) / Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street (2020)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 14:33:16 +0000

Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge

Watched: 10/09/2026

Format: HBO

Viewing: First

Director: Jack Sholder

Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street

Watched: 10/10/2026

Format: YouTube (link here)

Viewing: First

Directors: Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen

My guess is that because A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985) is kind of interesting and tries to do character stuff, the fans hate it.

I'm first to confess, I really don't know the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. I've seen the first one a few times now, and the third one once. But I just wasn't terribly interested in horror growing up. At the time kids are getting into it, I was like "gimme Dracula or I have no time for your tomfoolery". And then, when I was 14 and finally rented The Exorcist and The Shining, was like "Hey, THIS is horror? These movies are great".

My tastes have shifted, and I've come around on some of this stuff.

Anyway, I was ten when A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 came out, so I did not see it.

Watching it now, I was surprised at how different it is from the first movie, and a different flavor of horror altogether. It's about a young man whose family moves into Nancy's house, and he into her room. Nancy is gone, having gone crazy following the first movie, and now he's figuring out that Freddy Krueger was real.

This time, Freddy is trying to take over the mind of our hero, Jesse (Mark Patton), I would guess to do very Freddy things using Jesse's body.

It feels more like a movie about demonic possession than a wise-cracking asshole invading one's sleepytime.

It wasn't too far into the film that I remember thinking "huh. This feels like it's got some interesting subtext - maybe queer subtext in the context of the 1980's." As happens, I broke the movie into two halves, watching the second half the next day. I mentioned to Stuart I was liking the movie so far, and he said "Then you gotta watch Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street."

And that confirmed for me that I wasn't alone in my reading.

But, honestly, I was mostly trying to place the red-head in the movie playing "girl love interest" and it was Kim Myers. Kim Myers played Pam on Seinfeld for one episode. To this day, in this house, we still just shout "PAM!" sometimes.

The movie isn't entirely thoughtful, but it's also working hard to not just be a photocopy of the first Nightmare on Elm Street. It turns Freddy from something who just pops up into one's dreams and kills them into a parasite, something malevolent that will replace you and maybe put people you care about in harm's way. All *sorts* of analogies can be made here as our hero, Jesse, can't even really fight back.

It's very much a Freddy movie, but also - you can't keep repeating this formula whereas I think you can come back to the first one more readily. It's two different flavors of helpless nightmare horror, and this one is a bit more existential - you're not just getting murdered in creative ways, you're having an existential crisis.

Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street (2020) tells the story of Nightmare on Elm Street 2's star, Mark Patton. It's a look at his rapid rise and how the movie ended up blowing up in his face at the same time he lost his partner to AIDS as the disease ravaged the world - and these days it does seem what happened with the AIDS epidemic is something that seems shockingly forgotten or considered ancient history.

The doc picks up the ideas I was kicking around a bit and digs deep - how gay coded was the film? According to who you ask, it's very gay. And within the audience that reads the film that way, we have factions that support a gay horror film and others who rage against the idea. In the 1980's at the height of AIDS and gay panic, that wound up impacting Patton, who chose to pack his bags and split from Hollywood after the movie and his personal tragedy.

As a doc looking at a specific person, it's pretty solid. Mark Patton is a *survivor* in the truest sense of the word. He did get full-blown AIDS just as the medications to treat it arrived, but it doesn't mean he wasn't horribly ill for some time. But he also survived what 1980's Hollywood tried to do to him and has found what seems like a solid life and love.

What I think would make an excellent spin-off, and it might exist, is a doc on queerness in horror. Hell, have Peaches Christ host it.

All in all, it's worth the hour and forty minutes.

Crampton Watch: Fraternity Vacation (1985)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 13:06:52 +0000

if the poster gives you a sinking feeling, that is the right reaction

Watched: 10/08/2026

Format: Amazon

Viewing: First

Director: James Frawley

This movie is bad.

You go into it knowing it's bad. But then it's very bad, and there you are. But you were the one who hit play on the movie, so you have to just sit with who you are and what you're doing with your life.

Fraternity Vacation (1985) is part of the horned-up young adults having wacky misadventures films of the 1980's. But it comes along at a point where there were so many of these dumb things, there's a punchlist of things that need to happen more than there needs to be a plot.

Dudes have to arrive and stare at girls in swimsuits, high fiving and ogling.
Dudes run into whoever the rich guys are who will be our antagonists.
Blonde girl will be identified as "the one*.
A hare-brained scheme will be hatched to land *the one*.
Antics.
A crusty old guy hassles our party dudes
Someone has a genuine romance shown to be more real than just looking at boobs and saying "aaooooooogah!" (you can tell by treacly piano music)
A crowd party scene
A rally for some reason where truths are revealed. Very stupid truths.
Everyone is friends.

Our tale: a pair of frat dudes are basically financed by Willie from ALF to take his son to Palm Springs for a long weekend. If they successfully get the son laid, the frat house gets a jacuzzi. The nerd in question is that tweaked guy from Fright Night. One of the frat guys is pre-fame Tim Robbins who is doing his best.

The movie also has Lloyd Braun from Seinfeld, Dean Wormer, Marcy from Married with Children, comedian Charles Rocket, Britt Ekland, and the blonde from Walker Texas Ranger as Blonde Girl Prime.

Crampton plays a character who probably has a name, but she's just sort of in and out of the movie 3 or 4 times. She is playing "hot blonde girl #2".

This movie was an excuse to have some brief nudity in a movie and give people something to watch after 10:00 PM on HBO. The plot involved things that are not just illegal, they're just gross (photographing a woman without her consent, through her windows, in the altogether and basically forcing oneself on someone else). The '80's, man.

Insanely, director James Frawley is, in theory, the director of The Muppet Movie. And producer Denise Di Novi worked on the film as some sort of executive. She has rightfully kind of buried this on her resume.

This isn't Crampton's first movie - incredibly, that's Body Double. It is her second movie, Re-Animator being her third. She seems like she's having fun. I'm glad someone did.

Crampton Watch: Dead Night (2017)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:33:00 +0000

Watched: 10/07/2026

Format: Amazon?

Viewing: First

Director: Brad Baruh

Someday I should go to Fantastic Fest here in Austin. JAL does it every year, and it's a whole scene. I guess a decade ago Dead Night (2017) was included, and co-star Barbara Crampton was actually there with some of the rest of the cast. That would be great.

Dead Night seems like a movie that made sense on paper, and would work great as a horror comic book. As a movie, it has some structural issues that maybe keep it from knocking it out of the park, because it's well acted, had a good location/set, and - in the end - the overall concept is something I liked.

But I didn't think much of the movie for maybe the first thirty minutes. As we made the turn into the last ten minutes or so I thought "well, that was kind of clever". It didn't knock my socks off, but I was impressed with the notion of the movie.

A family of four with a terminally ill father is going to stay at a get-away cabin for one last family hoorah. The son is a recent high school graduate and the high-schooler daughter brings her pal. Things are a bit tense due to Dad's condition and Mom's general stress-levels. They're also out of cell-phone range as part of the fun.

We start seeing some footage of a very 00's and 10's-type true crime series detailing how the mother went crazy and killed her family with an axe. So already we know - well, that's how this ends.

But then the dad, who has been looking for wood comes back from the forest with Barbara Crampton in tow, passed out. She was just out there in the dark and snow when we found her, which is odd as, previously, we'd flipped from more true crime coverage (starring a straight-faced Daniel Roebuck) to a campaign advertisement for Crampton running for office.

But the family doesn't recognize her as anyone in particular and tries to help her, and she suddenly seems fine - maybe a bit overly energetic and a tad rude.

Did I mention we also keep seeing weird, uncanny beasties in the woods?

Anyway, what unspools is not what the true crime show thinks happened. At all.

SPOILERS

Crampton, who is kind of hilarious in this, turns out to be a witch - or at least in league with witches. And she violently turns the family, one-by-one, into murder zombies all chasing down the mom. The witches are using televisions as a sort of scrying pool, and seeing the future - a future they can manipulate. So, the TV show we saw was not, technically, out of chronological order - and that ad for Crampton's campaign is directing the witches what to do next to manage coming events.

The cast is surprisingly good and well-directed. This is not someone who just grabbed some friends and said "we're gonna put on a show!" And Crampton is kind of a delight.

vote for me. I'll just get on with it and bring The Darkness

But, the movie had some odd pacing issues and whatnot. It's the kind of thing that's usually way worse in indie horror movies that I don't wind up writing about because I turn them off 5 to 20 minutes in (I'll finish one of these and then talk about it in the coming days). But everything feels distended for the first thirty minutes and then, suddenly, the film takes off and doesn't slow down for anything. Normally I'd call that a win, but it becomes just a series of things happening.

In some ways, this feels like a short film someone made last for 85 minutes. That extension includes a flashback scene to the 1960's that made me think I'd seen this before until I realized I was thinking of Night of the Creeps.

I had been concerned this was a movie that flew Crampton out for 2 days of shooting and thrown her on the poster to draw sales, but she's in the movie a considerable amount. I believe the woman who plays the mother, Brea Grant, is both a UT grad (Go Horns!) and the director of Crampton's more recent film, Grind, which I have not seen yet.

Signal Watch Reads: Caves of Steel (1953)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:33:00 +0000

I have a few books I return to every once in a while. Frankenstein. Fahrenheit 451. The Hunter. Red Harvest.

But in this century, I haven't come back to Caves of Steel, a book I read first in Sixth grade and probably last looked at in 11th grade. Which is odd. If you asked me if I liked it, I'd have given you a definite thumbs-up.

At the time, I was aware I was reading something published more than thirty years prior - but that wasn't entirely new to me. I'd read kids fiction and non-fiction books written in the fifties. I was aware of the 1950's and 60's belief in atomic energy, which had fallen apart in the wake of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. As a young child, I'd read speculative non-fiction about where we were headed - and firmly believed that humanity's future would be one of robotic pals, cybernetics and star-faring pioneering.

Well, two out of three ain't bad.

Caves of Steel met me after I'd read some Bradbury, and at the time, the two sci-fi writers I understood to be the giants were Ray Bradbury - who was a weaver of myth and humanist more than a sci-fi writer - and Isaac Asimov, who was a hard-core OG science-fiction writer. He held degrees, was a professor, and held in high regard.

If Bradbury was the poet of the Midwest who saw deep into humanity's heart, Asimov was the prognosticator with a scientific bent, interleaving multiple disciplines. In the mid-80's, he was considered a bit of a seer for the future of technology and its issues and promise.

In 8th grade Computer Literacy class, we were even taught Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. I, of course, already knew them by heart and recited them to my class, understanding them in the context of a handful of Asimov's robot books.

Yup. I was an 80's nerd saved from wedgies only because I was a foot taller than my classmates.

Re-reading Caves of Steel was truly a journey of getting back in touch with that kid who walked around with his robot books, not quite ready for adult matters, but curious to read what seemed like adult fiction. And it was sort of mind-boggling to realize what a touchstone this book, and likely the film Blade Runner, had to have been for my squishy kid brain.

Caves of Steel is about a police detective (see where we're headed?) who is partnered with the first humanoid-passing robot (and there it is) in order to solve a murder. The results of their investigation will have galaxy-spanning consequences.

As readers of Foundation will know, Asimov used fiction less to tell compelling character-based stories and more to kick around hypotheticals about a future with technology the way he saw it headed. And, no doubt, Asimov was keeping up with the latest.

Toward the end of his life, he gave this interview on AI (1991).

If Bradbury seemed to understand almost magically what it was to be 12-years-old (do yourself a favor and read Something Wicked This Way Comes) Asimov seemed like the informed scientist spinning yarns to teach you something you didn't know you were learning along the way as his characters sorted through ethical and philosophical debates. His books were not logic puzzles, but they were guideposts to better pondering things as they were and how this meant things might be, and what we'd have to consider.

Starting with the short stories Asimov published together as I, Robot (a must read), humanity's resentment of robots and their positronic brains and superior bodies becomes the grounding for where we're headed. Mankind fears replacement as a species to a lesser degree than it resents the certainty that what humans do will no longer be the work of humanity, it will be left to more efficient machines who do not tire or take sick days or want promotions or a better life.

In no way does all of this feel incredibly immediate.

The world of the book takes place a few thousand years from now. The United States remains intact as some sort of entity, but across the world, people have moved into cities, and the cities have become gigantic singular structures that people never leave. They may travel to another city, but they never go outside. Weather and sunlight are unknown to them. Thus, "caves of steel".

Homo Sapiens have split into two factions, Earthers who live in those cities, and Spacers, the descendants of the colonizers on a few dozen worlds across the galaxy. While humanity on Earth is headed for collapse as over-population looms ahead of them, the spacers have created a society in which genetic perfection is required or the baby is, ahem, dealt with. But they've also pushed their engineering and have a navy that can pretty much take down Earth without tremendous effort if needed.

Problem: the Spacers are deeply immunocompromised as they have not been raised on Earth with Earth diseases for several generations.

Essentially, Spacers and Earthers are at an odd stalemate where the Spacers hold some power over Earth and want to introduce robots into Earth culture.

Outside the walls of the cities, robots toil to produce the food of the staggering 6 billion population - which now exists on a variety of yeast products? (You will get so sick of the word "yeast" by the time you finish this book. Yeast. Yeast. It's like I can't even hear it anymore.) Inside, the people live on strict schedules and careful rationing.

Elijah Bailey is our 42 year old police detective with a teen-aged son. He's married to Jessie, the very model of a 1950's housewife, which is maybe the most dated thing in the book.

After the murder of a prominent Spacer roboticist, Bailey is teamed - to his dismay - with R. Daneel Olivaw, a near perfect replica of a human on the outside, but inside, all machine. He has been programmed with a "justice" circuit, and will apply his robot logic and abilities to assist Lije.

Yes, this is a buddy-cop pairing story. That it was not made into a movie in 1987 is utterly baffling.

What you need to know is that it's essentially Lije Bailey sorting through the nature of humankind, the natural aversion to technological upheavals, the logic of robots and what is and is not possible with a robot built with a positronic brain that would go up in smoke if not for the Three Laws of Robotics.

The story tracks the slow change of Bailey from a typical Earther, distrusting of robots, to feeling there's a future where he could even consider R. Daneel a sort of friend (there are three more books) as Elijah and Daneel talk through the cultural aspects of the case - Earther, Spacer and robot.

Returning to the book now - it's a bit of a mess as a mystery. You'd clock the murderer immediately, and the book is so focused on keeping the circle of characters small, there aren't any real red-herring suspects. It's going to be less about who and more about the how and why. As a procedural, you'll wonder why they don't do things like visit the crime scene, but do spend hours discussing a shift in human/ robot relations. And that's really the point.

Written in 1953, it's misogynistic even for its time. Jessie, the one real female character, is written like she has a child's brain and emotions and it's hard to see why Lije is in love with her. Other female characters are an assortment of "types" for Lije to roll his eyes at. Which is odd, as Asimov's initial hero in other works is Dr. Susan Calvin, a no nonsense roboticist. One wonders what pressures there were in the period where it was published. I don't recall too many other women portrayed this way in Asimov's fiction, but it's been a while.

Asimov didn't anticipate things like personal computers, the internet, surveillance cameras and more. He seems to think 8 billion is an outrageous number of human lives on the planet, and that we'd only meet in a few thousand years. We're over 8 billion *now*.

Anyway, engineering and science catch up with you fast. We're as far from this book as the book was from 1880 when Edison's lightbulb was patented, so fair's fair.

What endures are the archetypes of Elijah Bailey the very human cop and his robot pal, R. Daneel Olivaw. And, I think, the understanding of man's nature that provides the fundamental underpinnings of the book.

People are comfortable in their grooves, even as the water temperature rises and they begin to boil in place. But they also maybe rightfully have technology forced upon them that will take food out of their mouth - and the out of touch folk above are usually happy to force it on them in the name of progress.

What was coded as an odd mix of techno-shock manifesting mirroring racism in this book has trickled into our own world. Half-jokingly, people have dubbed AI and robots as "clankers". And I suspect it's just a matter of time before data centers start having little accidents that lead to fires as people push back. And, yeah, there's *not* a lot of compelling reasons for robots to get involved in city-life on Earth in the book without taking jobs, and maybe the application *is* clumsy (do we need robot shoe sales persons?). Do we need AI shoved in our faces every minute? Some people with better cars than mine think so.

And in this way, of late, my mind has returned a bit to Asimov's robot work. So it was nice to revisit these characters and this book.

Eva Marie Saint Merges With The Infinite

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 12:33:00 +0000

Actor Eva Marie Saint has passed at 102.

I primarily know her from North by Northwest, Superman Returns and On the Waterfront.

Hell of a career and a heck of a life.

DCU TV Watch: Lanterns

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 03:48:44 +0000

After Episode 1 of DC Studios' Lanterns, I wrote a post with some early general impressions and my Green Lantern commenting credentials. Enjoy.

I didn't want to do episode-by-episode coverage because, frankly, all you're left to do each week is say "remember the part where he did the thing? That was cool" and then speculate a whole lot.

But, as one can expect, the internet reaction to the show has been wild.

A whole lot of people are furious at the lack of tights on the show. People are surprised that an 8-episode TV show - that has offered up production stills and ads for months, clearly showing our two Lanterns on Earth, with tag lines about them looking into a crime in small-town America - did not pull a switcheroo and become Power Rangers.

People gotta weigh in. We don't get a sense of ownership over the thing we like if we aren't there to comment early and often.

And I get it. I had to live for years with major motion pictures featuring a version of Superman that seemed it had been rebooted by a 13-year-old whose dad went out for cigarettes and didn't come back. I didn't care for that take. But I also didn't make myself everyone else's problem.

Nerd question #1: Is this a story pulled from the pages of any particular DC comic book? No.

Nerd question #2: Does it use the basic Green Lantern set-up and characters? Yes.

Nerd question #3: Is it different form the comics in some ways? Also, yes.

But so is every film and TV show of Superman and Batman. It's just part of the tapestry of following these characters through their media evolution. Knowledge is who all has played Superman, wisdom is knowing it's all just part of a complex history that overall feeds and expands what these stories are. You're seeing how myths grew in the oral tradition in real time.

For Lanterns, bits are taken from a variety of comics. We have mention of Abin Sur, we have rings choosing Hal (off-screen). John's origin is intact but widely expanded, John has his own moral compass, and sort of tapped out of being GL for a while. But it does, honestly, lean heavily on fairly SOP detective TV and fiction.

Look, I have been through my own wave of love for all things Green Lantern, but my take is this:

The space cops are almost always far more interesting on Earth than in space. DC's actual comic books and their stories and writing struggle with this fact. At some point the Green Lantern comics kind of settled into an endless circle of the Corps ending (for a variety of reasons) and reforming. We've blown up Oa. We've blown up the Guardians. We've blown everyone up and been down to one Lantern. We get a new editorial team and rebuild off-screen.

Generally, whichever Lantern you're discussing is fighting some abstraction in space, and it's just not that interesting, which is a wild thing to say, but apparently true. So to make it interesting, the tales become further distended from anything recognizable or relatable and become increasingly batshit, which is fun once, but has the nutritional value of circus peanuts. It can feel like superhero MadLibs reading a Wikipedia entry about any particular Lantern.

The point of comparison HBO used for marketing, that Lanterns was like True Detective, turned out to be surprisingly true. And that's fine. There are definite structural and narrative echoes. While I enjoy the occasional cosmic GL adventure, I also didn't mind the effort to be as different from the Ryan Reynolds' Green Lantern as possible (we are not rehabbing that mess here).

By making this unorthodox choice in comparison to more Super Friends-like fare, this show is part of a long lineage of neo-noir detective stories. There are a few shows that take place in small towns like this. One could just as easily have pointed to 2 or 3 seasons of Fargo. Until the lasers and aliens show up, I suppose. But at its heart, Lanterns is a windy mystery used to tell an origin story - and John will be all the more interesting when he shows up in Man of Tomorrow and we've spent eight hours with him and know who this guy is.

Most of the first five or so episodes are set in 2016, our Hal is in his fifties. He's been a fighter pilot and test pilot. He's been Green Lantern since 1996. Our John Stewart has been training to be Green Lantern his whole life, and he's roughly late 20's in 2016 and 30's in 2026.

But the kicker at the end of pilot, which takes place now-ish, is that Hal was murdered. We're figuring out what happened in a town where everyone is a suspect (but we're smart and know it will be a named character).

I think across the board, people love Kyle Chandler as Hal. I did. YMMV as to whether this is dead-on or not. I think it's enhanced, but at it's core, that's Hal - a very messy guy with a lot of bravado covering up the fact he's shattered inside. It does use some of the ret-conning from the comics from when Hal came back (that's a whole other story), and that's *fine*. That's how this works. Chandler has been a solid fixture of television and movies my whole adult life, and it's a great treat that he took the role and then nailed it.

Aaron Pierre was not the only possible choice for John, but, damn, man. He sure is John - at least the one in my head as he's been presented this century. Not many guys you can believe are an ex-marine architect, but this guy is it. If people have complaints about the show, I really don't see how casting Pierre could be one of the problems. There's not just a quiet intelligence to how he plays the role, there's a thoughtful emotional intelligence that makes you buy everything that happens and cheer for the guy who is not overly charming or a hugger.

I don't think I need to say too much about Kelly Macdonald. If you don't know her, you've missed out on some great movies and television. She's a phenomenal talent, and the small-town Sheriff stuck in the middle of all this space-faring nonsense is remarkably pragmatic and grounded.

So - does the mystery work?

Yes. The question of who killed Hal was open from the first episode and seemed like it could have been anyone. He was just that kind of guy. And that the mystery really is only explored over the last half of the season is probably a good thing. Our roster of named characters and why they may have wanted to bump Hal off is both very broad and very specific. For goodness sake, Sinestro is out there somewhere (played amazingly Sinestro-ishly by Ulrich Thomsen), or the waitress who can corner John and shake him down. There were a lot of angles.

That John is not a detective, just a smart, driven lead does manage to make it all work, even if we don't quite get what he's up to at every turn until it pays off. And like good detective fiction, he knows the answer before we do.

Like some of the classics of hardboiled fiction, it's also not a pat ending with a shoot out with the big bad. The eruption of violence happened much earlier and was the peak of the story's *action* but not the narrative peak. The finale is much different, quieter, resolving as many loose threads as we can. We don't get John standing like a bad-ass over a bloodied perp - that's not the kind of story this is. Instead, we have justice in terms of who we've learned the characters are, not legal proceedings or shoot-outs.

Does it work as science-fiction?

I'm pretty steeped in Green Lantern lore, so I don't know what does and does not work for other people. I think it works. But at the end of the day, despite the space elements, the traditional Green Lantern comics, Golden or Silver Age flavors isn't sci-fi in the strict sense, it's fantasy.

There may be *reasons* that the rings do what they do, but they're closer to hand-waving and wizardry than working through an extrapolation of scientific advances or an allegorical look at events past or present. It's space-folk with magic rings. Dressing it up with space sectors and a rigid managerial hierarchy doesn't change that.

In the context of Lanterns, however, it *is* allegorical. The show doesn't shy away from any number of themes, including the Black male experience in America and the grind of years of service to any organization that demands total commitment (without giving nearly enough back), moving on from what you've known, and more.

And, of course, merging the two genres with the eventual reveals of who did it and why, is both a solid noirish twist and brings humanity to what could be dry sci-fi pondering.

I liked the show well enough to give it undivided attention on Sundays for the duration, maybe minus a Cubs game or something, but I'm pretty sure we kept up. That's not nothing. I am too old and been in this game too long to watch without looking at the gears of what something is, ponder the pieces of what the megacorporation making the show is doing.

I just don't really get bothered if someone wants to try something new, even if it's not for me. But this sort of landed in my sweet spot. I like a bit of neo-noir. I like superhero stuff. I felt like I was watching the grown-up thing DC thought it was doing in 2013, but with real grown-ups telling a story that wasn't mistaking a bodycount for a narrative aimed at adults.

DC Studios wisely decided not to spend $40 million an episode making what some folks seem to think they should have been doing. And, honestly, asking normies to sign up to watch a show in space or fighting Hector Hammond or Black Hand or Sonar or whatever was going to immediately limit who was going to try this show. But a mystery show? That treats the superhero elements like part of the show's lore? That's catnip for people looking for a new show for Sunday night.

Ie: Sorry, all of you guys who think James Gunn really put his foot in it *this time* - that show was never for you. It was not a show for nerds. It was a show for grown-ups who like a good murder mystery. Maybe your mom would like it? I bet she'd like those two handsome fellows and a good whodunit.

But what Gunn is clearly not doing is following the path that Marvel has done - which is allowing all the genres of Marvel to co-exist, but requiring they have that particular Marvel feel. Instead, we've had this, we've had Peacemaker, we've had Creature Commandos, Superman and Supergirl. We're getting what seems to be an aggressive attempt to differentiate the slate. We'll see how long that lasts.

But Lanterns was pulling in 19 million viewers per episode, globally, which are *astounding* numbers in our current era. I would expect John gets a second season.

Horror Watch: Backrooms (2026)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:33:00 +0000

Watched: 10/04/2026

Format: HBOmax

Viewing: First

Director: Kane Parsons

During lockdown, I went down a lot of YouTube holes. One of the ways I wasted my hours was watching "urban exploration" - videos of people going into facilities and structures which have been abandoned.

These videos cover everything from empty hospitals with equipment collecting dust to prisons with rotting bars to defunct mega-construction projects in China. Some folks hit old forts and underground military bunkers left over from the Cold War. And houses - often mansions, that have simply been left to rot.

The videos are always marginally disturbing. Buildings are *designed*. They have purpose where form meets function. You can see the massive expense for these places, from the labor needed to build them to the equipment and furnishings. And then... something happened and everyone went away.

The buildings, tunnels, etc.. are left to decay. America's former malls are a wild thing to behold. Nature reclaims what it can, rain comes through ceilings, vines and mold grow in odd places. a layer of dust a half inch thick may have formed in the older examples.

What's haunting is that people occupied those spaces, worked, lived, fought, loved and did everything else a body can do in those spaces until that *something* happened, and all the life in that building was told to cease.

And so I didn't understand what I was looking at the first time I saw a Backrooms video. It was just the next item up proposed by the algorithm. It looked like just another one of these videos, until it obviously was not.

And if you don't know what you're watching at 2:00 AM while a backrooms video unspools, it is a wild ride. This is the first one I watched. Watching the original Backrooms videos the first time was as close to the experience of that opening weekend of Blair Witch Project as anything I've experienced since the late 90's. Until, of course, you realize "oh, okay. How clever."

The videos were created by a 16-year-old wunderkind named Kane Parsons - now 21. I will get out in front and say - this movie is a shockingly strong debut from a guy with what seems minimal formal training, who did not come up through the ranks - he just had a vision and proved out his concept online. He will go on to do mind-blowing things.

Anyway, someone decided to give the kid a Hollywood budget and let him go nuts. Which, in today's actuary-driven Hollywood, is nothing less than a miracle.

That said, the power of the original videos was that they seemed like genuine found footage, and they had a certain verisimilitude tucked in among the guys jumping fences and dodging security to walk around the aforementioned locations.

But knowing it's all a movie? Where do you even go with that?

The videos don't really have characters or arcs. It's just uncanny footage that *feels* spooky because it doesn't make much sense. It's the Lovecraftian chill of seeing things beyond your understanding, and experiencing dream-like environs in real time. And I don't know about you, but my dreams regularly are about opening a door and finding out "oh, there's a whole extra floor in my house I never noticed before. I should show Jamie."

So, does it work as a movie?

Yes and no.

If you're looking for an *experience*, I think Backrooms (2026) fits that bill. Much as I enjoyed Gravity in 3D but don't ponder the story it told and have had no desire to rewatch it on my television, what will stay with me about Backrooms will be the imagery. A combination of what seems to be abandoned retail space (ooooooOOOooo! eerie!) and then oddball shapes and organization to the space with inexplicable placement of furniture and retail fixtures and furniture of decades past gives it a definite dream-like quality. See: The Black Lodge.

A strong element of Parsons' YouTube videos was the notion of endless liminal space (something generations younger than Gen-X seem freaked out by), especially empty showrooms in need of a cosmetic overhaul. There's a sort of dingy early-90's-ness to Parson's view, which in turn is the remnants of the 70's and 80's that are ready for the scrapyard.

Expect beige-ish/ yellow walls, drop ceilings with buzzing overhead fluorescents, and carpet in need of a clean. And then... Escher-esque reshapings of those spaces, littered with cast-aside relics of the past, and that same furniture to jut incomprehensibly from the walls themselves.

The movie makes the point you can't describe something no one has seen, so I'll stop here.

The story sets up characters in crisis, a therapist (Renata Reinsve) and her patient, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Clark is going through a divorce and living in a furniture store he manages. His life is coming apart. It's said he drinks too much though we never see it. He has not been able to pursue his dream of being an architect, something he got the degree for, because his wife was likely suffering from depression and unable to finish the law degree she sought and he couldn't stop his job to go take his own risks.

I won't get into "oh, an architect! How symbolic!" because it's really solid thinking for a first-timer.

His therapist recalls a past that involved some sort of abusive parenting that led to our therapist having her own spell with a complete mental collapse in her youth.

I don't know that anything about the characters works very well, although they're well-played by the actors. It's the type of movie where no one thinks not to do the very inadvisable thing. No one bothers to get witnesses or back-up or call the police. And, okay. That's the kind of movie it is to keep the ball rolling. But it just makes me think the script needed a few more passes and some guidance from someone more seasoned.

I am okay with a movie this odd that doesn't explain anything. I've seen Possession. I get that's part of what makes Phantasm work. To draw a different comparison, I've seen Stalker a few times. But this movie decides to explain itself, and with all things uncanny - see all of Stranger Things - it just makes it seem small and kind of ridiculous.

Forcing a story on The Backrooms was always going to be hard. And this feels very of-today. It's basically the same maze we got in The Void in Thunderbolts*. Therapy. Unmanaged trauma. You get the picture.

I can see why The Kids(tm) like it.

What I've not seen discussed, and eventually struck me as funny, is that what seems to creep out the filmmaker is the notion that not everything is new. The aesthetic of this movie is that the past is an undiscovered country and walking among the ruins of that past conjures feelings.

I get the liminal space thing to a degree,* but it also feels like a product of finding spaces that are without immediate sensory input that triggers an explanation of itself is what the viewer is to find unsettling. We do not trust a room with the furniture cleared.

But the movie also feels like an unconscious product of what I think is not something I dwell upon, which is whether a space has been *updated*.

I've seen in other YouTube videos younger people who range from tut-tut'ing to outright pearl clutching in their travel videos that a hotel, etc.., in modern America, has not spent the money to stay trendy and changed to what is the latest in design. And we've been watching with quiet wonder as Millennials bought their homes and decided what they needed to do was make them monotone, painting brick and wood black and gray, color a thing of some other past (I hear the pendulum is swinging) and not approved of by influencers.

Anyway, as the economy tanks, get ready for a whole less refurnishing to keep up with trends.

And maybe because my generation grew up in the wake of the 20th Century where we knew we were in the bones of the past, as we were constantly reminded how great the prior decades had been, and our childhoods were spent in the 70's and 80's financial crashes (we had them, too, youths!), it just never seemed *that* weird to walk into a space with stained drop ceilings, thirty-year-old carpets and bad lighting. Showing me showrooms of 1983 is just that, at some point.

Even outside of his creepy space, Parsons would have us creeped out by a furniture store that looks like it should have shuttered five years ago. Or someone sleeping in a bedroom set that was on-trend when Miami Vice was a hit. The real terror here is a lack of foot traffic in retail space when you can just buy a couch on Wayfair.com.

Like in his original series, he adds an uncanny horror-monster, but this one is so on-the-nose, you're reminded that the author of the text was an 18 or 19-year-old. One is just starting to be haunted by their past, perhaps, at this age. (Hold on, kids, because it just keeps piling up over the years!)

Anyway - the movie is... fine. It's an amazing achievement for someone so young and untrained. Parsons could go very, very far, but I'd recommend he pair with an older writing team for any extension of this project. I expect a lot of what feels derivative in the movie is more along the lines of convergent evolution (and that whole dining table scene surely felt like a mix of three or four things I've seen before).

What I don't see is what people were saying about this movie being about AI. That feels like overlaying the current social issues onto something that it was not intended to support.

I will admit, at some point I kind of lost focus. It's the problem of showing me the same thing over and over in a two hour movie and having characters with no real arc.

The ending was relatively satisfying in a way, but also just made me think "oh, they're going to do like 10 of these things". So, get ready for something to have "lore" that would be much better off without it.

*In real-life, the closest I've ever come to this was working at the library, and my pal Shay, the security guard, mentioned "well, you know, the building has tunnels". Which I did not know and had worked there for years. So he took me into a meeting room we used all the time that had two locked doors at the back. He opened those, and there was another set of doors, which opened into a massive, multi-story space. Essentially it was a machine room the size of an auditorium, designed for HVAC management, but also had space enough for a shop if you needed one, and had access to the legendary tunnels beneath the university campus. What graffiti that was there was written in pencil and was from the 1980's as fresh as had it been written the day before. Stark white and oddly *clean* for a space I expect people entered maybe 10 or so times a year.

Sci-FI Watch: Project Hail Mary (2026)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 15:31:55 +0000

Watched: 10/03/2026

Format: Amazon Prime

Viewing: Second

Director: Lord & Miller

I've already seen Project Hail Mary (2026) once in the theater this year.

The book and movie are favorites here at League HQ, especially with Jamie. She wanted to pick a movie, it had been six months since we'd seen this one, so I was in agreement.

I will say, as much as I enjoyed this movie again, it was one I'd say should have been seen on the big screen. It's a sensory experience from the elaborate visuals to the sound to the score. It's good at home, but it was something else in an auditorium.

I have heard the social media chatter around this movie is very weird, with edge lords who are mad that our lead character is a relatable human being instead of a gritty kick-ass guy, and then the folks who can only relate to media by turning it into wank material frustrated that there's no one to "ship" Grace with other than a rock.*

Sigh.

Anyway... I am not going to write up a movie again that I liked perfectly well, already discussed, as well as discussing the book.

*apparently a kick-ass, brilliant woman (with a lovely shade of hair) who gets shit done is not an option

Horror Watch: Weapons (2025)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 23:12:22 +0000

Watched: 10/03/2026

Format: HBOmax

Viewing: First

Director: Zach Creggar

Y'all, I did not think Weapons (2025) was a good movie, so if you love it, you might as well either close this post or leap to the comments to tell me I didn't get it.

Weapons was a big f'ing deal when it came out. Horror fiends lauded it, and it's still tracking at an 81 on Metacritic. So, I know that much like Taylor Swift, it's me. I'm the problem.

I didn't look into it much, but I suspect that what people love is Amy Madigan as Aunt Gladys - a role which won Madigan an Oscar. So that's a sign of something. But I am also not surprised Amy Madigan did a good job at acting, because I know who Amy Madigan is.

With the evidence of two movies, this one and Barbarian, I also think Zach Creggar is excellent at coming up with a compelling first act but actually bad at doing anything with the premise he's set up.

At some point, this movie became *tedious*, and that is not a word I use lightly.

The film is so recent, I won't bother with a synopsis. I will say I was surprised that in addition to Madigan and Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Aldren Ehrenreich and Benedict Wong were in the film. I hadn't known they were. I'm not sure anyone else is doing anything particularly interesting (except for how Wong is always interesting just showing up), but it helps along the movie that there's actors in it who can help carry it along.

Of all the complaints I might have had about Weapons "I don't know whose movie this is, and I don't understand why I have to watch it over and over inside the movie" wasn't what I anticipated discussing.

A close second sure wasn't "where is the FBI?" and "no one thought to wonder where the kids were going and track them on doorbell cams?" And that is followed swiftly by "what was Aunt Gladys actually doing?" Because her plan is stupid.

And that's really the thing. Everyone in this movie sort of seems like they've had a partial lobotomy, and to tell the story Creggar wants to tell, nothing works the way it would.

There's no press when 17 elementary-aged children go missing all at once? This would be a headline story for *weeks* across the country. The FBI doesn't step in? State cops? It's just the Barney Fifes of this town claiming they can handle it? And no parents screaming to anyone who can hear? And no one notices some *very weird shit* is happening with the one kid left?

Why doesn't anyone wonder where the kids went? Why aren't the police looking at all the videos to see what Brolin figures out?

I can see movies getting it wrong because we'd never seen a classroom of kids die, but we've seen that now, way way way too much. So I don't even know what this is. Is the inaction part of Aunt Gladys' doing? It doesn't seem like it. It just seems like everyone exists in a movie bubble where if they did the ten logical possible things one could do, the movie would be over.

I have to assume Aunt Gladys (who I assume is in no way Alex's actual aunt and that was also some dark magic nonsense) was hanging onto the kids as part of some vampiric hoo-hah to sustain her longevity. But why take a single class? Why not just nab kids from across a major metroplex? Is Aunt Gladys dumb, too?

Anyway, it all just felt like Creggar had this idea for an opening and an idea for an ending (which is, admittedly, not bad) but everything else in between is dumb. It is a dumb sandwich.

A good, weird character can make a movie - I'm the first to admit that. But I usually expect it in something a bit more camp. And I guess this is supposed to be camp?

Structurally, I don't mind some non-linear storytelling. I think I'm a guy who whole-heartedly embraces it. But here, we just keep retreading the same story. There's no reason for it. It's all flash and zero substance, which makes it, I hate to say, just sort of bad writing. It feels that Creggar thinks we're all so dumb we need to be shown every goddamn thing that happens when, I assure you, I would have gotten it with a line or two because I'm not a fucking idiot. You're not going to believe this, but I understood our baddie got to Marcus before we stopped the whole damn movie to show it.

Anyway. I am unclear on why this movie was called Weapons. I don't know why Josh Brolin saw an AR-15 in the sky, and at this point, I don't much care.

If you drop in the comments and tell me "everything can be answered by magic" then this is a dumb movie where the witch could have done many other things that were less stupid, but I do like that she had literally the same bathrobe as the one my mom had in 1982.

Horror Watch: Sleepaway Camp (1983)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 14:39:13 +0000

Watched: 10/02/2026

Format: Amazon

Viewing: First

Director: Robert Hiltzik

So, all I knew about Sleepaway Camp (1983) was this image:

And that 43 years later, it seems like this movie still has an enthusiastic cult following.

I also saw it was part of Prime, so... why not?

Well, the "why not?" is probably good taste and better judgement, but this is The Signal Watch, and we're in short supply on both.

In some ways, it was kind of fun seeing a movie this unpolished from 1983, as it's about when I really remember noticing what people were wearing and this is what teens looked like when I was 8 or so. Fashion changed *fast* through the 1980's.

Kudos to the screenwriters for coming up with a pretty solid twist that, once you put the pieces together, really does work better than the movie has made you think it will. And if you're me, you're pretty surprised there was a twist at all.

But, let's be honest, the second Aunt Martha walks on screen in this movie, we know *something is up*. Kudos to the late Desiree Gould for having her own very oddball camp movie going on in a movie about summer camp.

Angela is a quiet girl who saw her father and brother killed in front of her in a boating accident. She went to live with her aunt and cousin, and is sent to a summer camp with the cousin.

Camp is pitched as a sort of post-Meatballs romp with horny teens, foul language, and what looks like not much to do. Angela seems catatonic when she arrives, but eventually warms up a bit when a boy camper hits on her.

Oh, and the head chef and a camper die under mysterious circumstances that maybe are accidents - only we saw the killer at work through their Jason-like POV.

Yeah, one by one, people get picked off after being generally bad but Mel, our camp manager, is not calling it for the summer no matter how many campers get killed.

SPOILERS

I will point out, the *very first* kill will both feel justified and likely not make its way into the movie now as our mysterious murderer is a pedophile working in a kids' summer camp.

But the movie also dispatches guys who are kind of bullies/ teen-agers with the same gusto.

They attempt to push one other suspect on the story as a red-herring, but ain't no one buying it's Cousin Ricky.

Maybe the oddest bit in a very odd movie is Judy, also around 14, seems pre-occupied with our Angela. Like... why? We get that she wants *all* the attention from boys, but mostly Angela seems like a bump on a log. I mean, it's hilarious she's such a b, but the movie really leans into it. And I appreciate a solid early-80's side-ponytail.

Of course the big thing is the "oh, Angela is a boy" surprise at the end that is handled with all the grace one expects from a low-budget 80's slasher. But also - I don't really recall anyone thinking transgender folks were dangerous in the 1980's. But between this movie and Dressed to Kill (which is a pretty solid DePalma joint), apparently we at least thought it was a sign of madness. I mostly remember by the time I thought about the topic in college, being worried some people were going to get beat up for no reason, but that's just me.

What's indelible is that final imagery of Angela (see the image above) and that Angela wide shot where she's standing naked and is very much physically a boy. Like, it packs a punch. But also has a very "oh, thaaaaaaat explains it" vibe the movie is selling that I guess I just have to live with.

Apparently that wide shot was a local college kid they paid and got drunk enough to do it, wearing an Angela mask they'd made complete with glass eyes. Every once in a while you could see where the money went for this movie, and it was dumped into a few practical FX.

The real Angela was played by a 13-year-old Felissa Rose who grew up to be in something like 200 horror movies and appeared in maybe 10 movies in just 2026. Respect. She also does horror cons aplenty, and is... not funny looking.

Was the movie scary? Not remotely, but it does have some thrills. Was it entertaining? I may find the gender-bending premise of Angela's madness horrendously insensitive, but it's a surprisingly well-plotted twist. And, moreover, the movie is subtly weird, and that's better than scary in my book.

Totter Western Watch: The Vanishing American (1955)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:33:00 +0000

Watched: 10/01/2026

Format: YouTube

Viewing: First

Director: Joseph Kane

The Vanishing American (1955) is based on a Zane Grey novel that is supposed to be pretty good. The novel is about a Navajo kid taken from home, raised by White folks, sent to college and the collision of his worlds.

This movie uses a tad of that as background for why it's male hero is more relatable to our female lead (Audrey Totter) but focuses on... the hot blonde and her land dispute. Because it's 1955, people, and we don't want to make the audience feel things when we could just be having a rollicking adventure.

The cast is, also, of course, populated by a mix of folks, some actual Native American, some Hispanic folks and our hero is a white guy in a wig. A guy who hates shirts.

there are worse looks than Totter's cowgirl get-up

Totter plays a woman of tremendous resolve who has inherited what seems a dumb piece of land in the middle of the desert, but she knows it's the only water for miles, a spring, and she can use it for grazing land.

Vandy, the "Navajo" above, basically leads her back to town where she finds out that, surprise, stuff is super shady on the edge of civilization and the local boss is also flat out abusing and SAing young Navajo women. Totter's first act of rebellion is protecting one young woman by keeping her in her lodgings and then helps her escape.

But, yeah, this is a very pro-Indigenous Peoples film and is not shy about what a bunch of shitheels white people could be on the frontier when the locals had their backs to the wall.

Sure, I put it on as an Audrey Totter movie, but saw it also had Jay Silverheels (who is on screen for like 10 seconds), Lee Van Cleef (who is a very young man here), Glenn Strange as a Navajo leader (I know), and Gene Lockhart as Gene Lockhart, but in the west.

And, for reasons, it has Hank Worden playing a Navajo. But it's always nice to see Hank show up.

I figured out finally that I recognized Forrest Tucker from F-Troop. Scott Brady, who plays Vandy, is recognizable, but I had to look him up to know where I knew him from, and the answer is: guy was in everything, including Gremlins.

Totter is a good choice for the iron-willed Marion Warner. We've seen her as someone not putting up with bunk plenty of times, and she doesn't have to stretch far in the role to make it work.

The movie wants to engage in ideas - like the tragedy of how separated the Navajo are from the world to their East, and the unwinnable conflict as settlers are backed by cavalry. It just tucks it in there from time to time without ever connecting the dots. But it's also not blinking at what is being lost.

Oddest, the movie features a romance between an anglo woman and a Native American man. Sure, he's played by the very white Scott Brady, but I can't recall seeing that in a movie prior to this one and in the thick of the 1950's movie scene.

Unfortunately, it's just... not a great movie. Maybe not even "good". It's only 90 minutes and between a few key scenes, it feels like it's just spinning its wheels. While not particularly imaginative, it is filmed in Utah and is able to capitalize on the scenery. But this ain't John Ford.

And, mostly, I don't know why you take a book that's a social critique and then hollow it out for a movie.

I *do* wonder if Sergio Leone saw the start of this movie and said "I have a better idea!", because there's a few minutes of this movie that feel dangerously close to Jill's arrival at Sweetwater in Once Upon a Time in America, which is one of my favorite films, and perfect (I am not taking debate on this topic at this time).

Happy Birthday, Angie Dickinson

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 12:33:00 +0000

Today is the 95th birthday of screen legend Angie Dickinson.

Because of my personal tastes, my favorite of her movies is Point Blank, which I saw at the Castro in San Francisco many years ago with Jenifer, Dug and K. Dickinson was in attendance and kept the audience of about a thousand enthralled.

As a Rat Pack adjacent young star, Dickinson is sort of the avatar of the connection between mid-Century American cinema and what would come after in film and television.

If you've never seen Point Blank, fix that.

Horror Catch-Up Watch: Obsession (2025)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:33:00 +0000

Watched: 09/28/2026

Format: Peacock

Viewing: First

Director: Curry Barker

I only knew a few things before going into Obsession (2025):

It made an insane amount of money (~$520 million) on a modest indie-horror budget
I knew Inde Navarrette from the excellent Superman & Lois where she played the daughter of Lana Lang

I guess I also knew that Navarrette's character, Nikki, was obsessed with some guy and magic was involved. And the audience was primarily young people and a few older horror-heads who wanted to see what the fuss is about.

Obsession (2025) isn't just a young person's movie, it's a young person's movie of the modern age of young people.

Today, on two separate occasions, one of my youthful neighbors posted to the neighborhood facebook page. The first post was a photograph of a man laying facedown on someone's landscape of river stones and asking if it was okay to call 911. She was met with a chorus of "yes, call 911" The second was an hour later. I guess the guy recovered/ woke-up and was now ambling around in a bit of a daze but also trying locked doors on cars and basically obviously trying to steal things. Again, she posted "should I call 911?"

Like, lady, we have been over this, but, also, yes. You are watching someone in need of help committing crimes. How are you not doing anything and hoping you don't have to take action?

And that's kind of like this movie.

I don't understand exactly how old these characters are. They seem to be 21, but they otherwise seem to be teenagers? Some living with their parents? I guess that's the state of young adults in 2025. I wouldn't know.

The behavior of the characters is certainly that of high-schoolers and early 20-somethings. We're still harboring secret crushes everyone but the object of our affection knows about. We're getting by on low-wage jobs and somewhat circling the drain.

Our lead (I will not say hero), Bear, is crushing on Nikki, who is in his friend circle. He's being told by his pal, Ian, to just tell her how he feels. But he can't. Because he's a coward (sorry if you're offended, cowards). He hits the local crystals and hoodoo store to get her a new crystal necklace and, instead, buys her something called a One Wish Willow, a novelty gift that will grant the purchaser one wish. Pretty silly but fun.

But when, like a coward, he chickens out and doesn't tell her he likes her when the moment is completely right, he takes the stick and breaks it and wishes she'd love him more than anything else in the world.

If you just imagined that monkey's paw with a finger closing, you are *correct*.

Immediately Nikki seems different, and to his utter shock, it's worked. And so pleased is he that he ignores some red flags roughly the size of the state of Colorado.

The film is largely predictable, and relies on style and performances because not only can we generally see where this is going, we can see see the plants that will be used later on in the movie.

And, yeah, there's some good stuff in the movie. There's one genuinely scary scene where our lead wakes up and Nikki is watching him from the corner. If you've seen the movie, you know of which I speak. But I also don't know why he doesn't just turn on a light.

And that's the kind of movie it is.

I also really liked that the crystals store employees are such dismissive jagoffs to our lead, and that the helpline is so unhelpful. More of that spirit in the movie would have maybe made for a slam dunk for me.

And if you're wondering why I mentioned the 911 question on the neighborhood facebook page... I don't understand why our lead doesn't seek help. Like, I think about The Exorcist and how Reagan goes through tests and whatnot...

Maybe it's a question of budgets, but it becomes a huge question why the @#$% this guy doesn't take Nikki to get help. You don't make this movie until this decade without a scene in an ER and a doctor checking Nikki over. And now I guess this seems reasonable to the audience to just watch their friend unravel? I mean, the kids in The River's Edge were more caring and proactive about their situation.

And, yes, our lead knows what he did and used magic, which he previously did not know existed, but... also, what's his plan here? I'd think the demonic walking and screaming and urinating oneself would be a concern. And certainly a turn off.

And that's really the horror of this movie - what a useless sack of shit Bear is and how he lets it tear down the woman he supposedly had feelings for. And I do believe there's a huge underlined thing here about "nice guys" that speaks to the youth in a way I'm not quite grokking.

I don't think Bear is a villain - that's an easy read but feels lazy. A lot of horror puts people through the ringer for just existing. He's a cautionary tale as an ineffectual dope. Would it be nice if he were better explained as a character? Yes. But it ain't that kind of movie, kid.

In this way, Obsession feels like a short film that's been stretched to what feels like a very, very long runtime for what it is.

All in all, I get why people, especially The Youths(tm), liked it in a way I didn't quite get with, say, Barbarian. And I absolutely get how Navarrette is going to be big after this. She was always the best of the young actors on Superman and Lois, and I wish her well. But she needs a role where she's not pined after by some nerd.

But if there's one thing I don't believe? That whisp of a kid was opening that door covered in duct tape with one hand.

Forgot to Post Watch: Miller's Crossing (1990)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:18:58 +0000

Watched: 09/09/2026

Format: YouTube Movies

Viewing: ha ha ha ha

Director: The Coen Bros.

I forgot to post that I watched this movie a couple of weeks ago. I don't even know which day.

So, no post. Here's my podcast on the film from a few years ago when we were podcasting. Thanks, JimD, for the excellent time back in the day.

Marvel Watch: Infinity War (2018) and Endgame (2019)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:33:00 +0000

Watched: 09/26 and 09/27

Format: BluRay and Regal Cinemas in 3D

Viewing: Unknown/ Unknown

Director: The Russos

I don't know that we've ever truly reckoned with what Marvel pulled off across 22 movies between 2008 and 2019. Instead, we've spent the post-Endgame years grappling with how Marvel seemed to overproduce Marvel content leading to a lack of cohesiveness as the films and shows became uneven and diluted.

For the youths who are now young adults, what bugs me the most is that they take what Marvel did between 2008 and 2019 *for granted*.

Look, in no way was it obvious that one could make almost two dozen movies, each film working independently, but also all building to some capstone movies that had a complete and character driven arc for their lead characters while making more money than the GDP of many countries.

My guys, when I was coming up, if a sequel to *one* movie was any good, we lost our minds. And we knew by the third movie, we were usually in trash territory. The 1980's franchises you think are how it works, like Indiana Jones, are the exception and that's why they're the ones we still talk about. We do not talk about many, many other series.

I mean, look, I love me some Superman, but the incredible fall off between Superman: The Movie and Superman IV is well-documented and must have been painful for many involved. And that's an example of a well-liked franchise!

That people now make fun of Marvel, like it's somehow embarrassing to have enjoyed what they did? Yes, Infinity War and Endgame are *insane* movies to try to walk into as stand-alone films, but as I am now arguing: judging the MCU by any standard movie-measuring rubric just makes you silly.

And that's a problem. Admittedly. It's... work. But so is anything that's long form. And unlike most long form things (ie: TV series) this had an ending that actually wrapped itself up.

I went ahead and got tickets to see Endgame again as its being re-released in preparation for Doomsday, with all new footage at the end. Jamie suggested we use our evening before to re-watch Infinity War, which I do feel was necessary. Yes, I remembered Infinity War pretty well, but a refresher was necessary as its now been several years since I sat down with it. According to this here blog, it's been since 2019.

And that's a whole other problem.

Part of what made Marvel work for the first decade was that there were only 20+ movies and while it was a lot, it was possible to take a month or two and watch everything. There's now, like 50 movies and TV shows with multiple episodes per show. And I'm not including Daredevil. And they've maybe paid off half of the plants for future projects, the rest dead in the water (remember Harry Styles as StarFox? Eternals post-credits, anybody? ...anybody?).

I also don't just sit and watch Marvel movies over and over like I did. Most of the latest phase ones, I've seen once. And I don't rewatch TV series, mostly. So how fresh is any of this in the minds of people who have taken to very casually watching Marvel, knowing a truck will back up shortly with more Marvel than they can handle?

But, yeah, Marvel really pulled it off for a while there. It wasn't perfect. There's some odd choices in there. But Infinity War and Endgame both feel earned in a way that few things in movies ever really seem.

Infinity War pulls all those threads together from the 18 preceding films, and Endgame revisits key moments, putting new spin on the characters, showing how they've grown and changed, or how they can revisit those old wounds with new eyes. People may not *like* that this happens with a an array of super-science nerds, aliens, wizards, Hulks and talking woodland animals, and fair enough. In some ways, that should make it deeply unrelatable and therefore *bad*.

I don't care.

Infinity War still lands. It pulls together threads that have been appearing since Avengers, drawing in our wide net of characters, scattered and already in a bad place.

It's a comic book movie that actually does what some of the best comic stories do - takes you to a point where all is lost, despite the best efforts of these gods in brightly colored clothes. It's worse than the conclusion of Empire Strikes Back, which is mostly a *personal* dark chapter - that movie does not end with the Rebellion in tatters, for example. Now we have a challenge that isn't just about knocking the right heads to win the day.

Endgame is a monster of a film that drags you back through the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to both make the plot work, but also wrap up character arcs for our first Avengers. And, really, everyone ends in a pretty satisfying place (RDJ smartly making sure they wouldn't recast him).

And maybe that's what people haven't liked as much about Marvel since Endgame. Have any of the characters been given the same ability to grow and change since? Example: We got one very promising Shang-Chi movie, and then Marvel decided against all reason to put the character on ice. We could be three movies in right now, headed for Doomsday.

It feels a lot more like shorthand or storylines cut off at the knees. I *liked* Marvels for what it was, but was it a reasonable sequel to Captain Marvel? Not really. Did Sam get a fair shake as Captain America? I think we can agree - no, he did not. I didn't hate Thor: Love and Thunder the way the internet did, but I get that it felt goofy after Endgame.

Instead of the stories being about character growth, the movies became about the Marvel U and how many characters we could cram on screen. And I think, really, that's what I was thinking about as we spent 6 hours and change watching Infinity War and Endgame.

So, was it worth it to see the extra features?

1. First, we thought we'd seen all of the extras and bailed. There are three. Just FYI. We saw two.

2. I mean, maybe? But it also made me realize we're going to be somewhat obviating everything that's happened between Avengers: Endgame and Doomsday except for maybe three movies and one show. And that is wild when the *mass* of Marvel product has happened since Endgame. But we'll see.

3. It was maybe a mistake to actually retire Captain America, Iron Man, etc... but old 'heads knew that when Marvel tried to move on.

The other thing I pondered was how incredible these movies still are from an FX perspective. Rocket still works seamlessly into scenes, maybe better than some other things I've seen in the 7 years since. The environs are all *designed* in a way things could be but aren't in other movies (cough... Supergirl... cough...).

Sometimes it's all too much - I still hate the magic disappearing helmets. People zip-zapping across the cosmos like it's nothing can feel like nothing means anything (why were Tony and Nova stranded? In every other sequence, it feels like it takes ten minutes to jump across the galaxy).

But these are stylistic quibbles. Thanos was so well conceived as a big bad, and structured so well into the Marvel U for so long, repeating it was always going to be hard. And, to be honest, I was kind of disappointed when they decided to try to go with Kang. And hadn't we just done timey-wimey type stuff? Enough of that.

Hopefully Doomsday will bring an end to the multiversal shenanigans for a minute. I think we can agree, that's gotten to be overused.

Anyway, we'll see what happens this Christmas with Doomsday, I suppose. I do wonder how much tolerance for straight comic book nonsense people have if they aren't invested in the characters as characters first.

On a presentation note: I accidentally bought tickets to a 3D showing. I still think 3D is more of a problem than it's worth as I stop noticing the 3D usually 15 minutes into the movie. Also, until the movie was 1 minute in, we were the only people in the theater. I am still mad that one guy showed up and we didn't get a private screening we could talk over.

I also apparently have the bladder of a small puppy, as I got up to pee twice. Working from home has spoiled me.

Crampton Watch: Poison (2001)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 15:33:53 +0000

Watched: 09/27/2026

Format: Amazon

Viewing: First

Director: Jim Wynorski

Always a good sign when a movie has been given multiple names. This one is listed as Poison (2001) on IMDB, but is also listed as Thy Neighbor's Wife, but I found it - for free - on Amazon as Midnight Vendetta.

Why did I find it? I was thinking "man, it's been a while since I watched a Barbara Crampton movie." And while I am not gearing up to see *every* Barbara Crampton movie, stranger things have happened.

Don't worry, as we enter the spooky season, we'll work in more Crampton who has camped out in horror films and is really working a lot, so it'll keep me busy and off the streets.

Poison is part of the post-Hand that Rocks the Cradle barrage of domestic thrillers that spun off into a whole thing on the Lifetime network. The basic idea is: women, your home is not safe from a seductress, who also *has murderous intent*.

Here, our seductress is 90's MTV gameshow host and B-movie actress Kari Wuhrer. She's married to a guy who must get a deal done to secure a Vice Presidency with his company, so he has Wuhrer sleep with him. The next day, her husband loses his job and sorts out that they hired an unwitting Barbara Crampton instead.

In a funk, and after telling Wuhrer everything, he drives a classic car off a cliff, apparently with trunkload of gas, as the car really goes up.

Crampton (who is maybe just under 40 here) is playing the mother to a college-aged son and an 18 year old daughter, and for reasons, they go ahead and say she's the age she is instead of fudging it. She's not living in domestic bliss. Her daughter is trying hard to be a floozy and her son is about to get kicked out of college for bad grades (but is away).

Crampton pleased with the fine work of new maid

They have a maid in the form of a B-movie pin-up girl (Peggy Trentini). And Crampton is married to a functioning alcoholic with a mullet and a Don Johnson beard played by Jeff Trachta.

Wuhrer decides she needs revenge. Explosively so. So, Wuhrer breaks into the home of the guy who fired her husband and causes a gas leak, which then makes the ex-boss's house go boom.

Then, despite the fact Crampton had *nothing* to do with Wuhrer's husband getting fired, Wuhrer targets Crampton's house (why Wuhrer leaves the guy alone who banged her while her husband waited is never discussed).

First, Wuhrer Norman Bates the maid and hides the body in the garage freezer. Then, she poses as the agency that sent her, and gets herself placed as the new maid. From here, Wuhrer starts a campaign to mess with Crampton's family. Why she doesn't just blow them all up, too, is never explained.

Convenient to the plot, Crampton is a diabetic and no one in the family likes her. She's too bossy and asks things like "don't be an alcoholic" and "maybe don't dress like you're going clubbing for school". Girl is just trying to make that money.

Anyway, Wuhrer begins individually mucking about with everyone while admittedly keeping a neat house.

This is a movie that has some B-movie edge of Cinemax late-night performers in it, and sort of lives in a gray zone of trying to make sure it was going to get picked up for late night cable by ensuring it has boobs a-plenty in it, and some sex scenes. If I roll my eyes at The Youths thinking sex in movies is cringe, this is certainly evidence in their favor.

Perhaps plot makes this necessary, but the movie also has no idea who the main character is. Like, if I needed to give someone an example of a movie and why even a 3rd person POV is important as we decide who we're focusing on, I'd use this as an example. Is it Wuhrer? It is Crampton? Is it the husband?

In the end, I think this was a movie with one big trick that it saved for the last scene and they wrote a whole movie to get to that point, trying to figure out how to fill the other 88 minutes. Like, it's a good idea for a movie ending - a real twist. But then they twisted themselves in knots getting there.

But is was kind of what it was, and reminded me so much of what was on premium cable in the wee hours of the long, long ago.

SPOILERS

The entire end of the movie is basically easy to undo as the maid left the son alive, and he would be able to say "no, that maid has been missing for months, I was banging that lady". So I'm not really sure what would have been achieved. Like, the very next day, the "ha ha! The villain got away with it!" bit would fall apart.

Youth Watch: Untamed Youth (1957)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 03:12:56 +0000

Watched: 09/26/2026

Format: TCM

Viewing: First, I believe

Director: Howard W. Koch

This movie exists to accidentally stumble through two important social issues, but was mostly there so we could watch Mamie Van Doren shake it in various states of (un)dress.

It's a movie capitalizing on the rising issues of juvenile delinquency and the exploitation of agricultural workers. In this case, those workers are delinquent young adults (not teens) who get pinched by the local law for breaking minor infractions or all-together made up infractions. Then they are pressed into service as indentured servants.

If you follow farm labor issues... not a lot has changed. We still pop some farmer every once in a while who has a bunkhouse full of terrified people who can't figure out how to get out of there.

And, in the 1950's, we'd invented the idea of the "teenager" as a demographic and they were driving their parents crazy with their rocking and rolling and whatnot. And all they wanted was a hep time, daddio. I suppose there were also eyes on beatniks who liked *jazz*, and that was probably a bit worrisome as well.

Sisters Penny (Mamie Van Doren) and Jane (Lori Nelson) are cooling off in a pond (naked of course), when the Sheriff pulls up and brings them in as "vagrants" despite the fact they're just pausing on their way to Los Angeles. In court, the judge gives them the option of 30 days in jail or 30 days on a cotton farm.

It's a set-up. The girls get there and are told they'll only make $2 a day, and they'll be taking expenses out of their pay, including clothes appropriate for cotton picking.

What is supposed to be a tough movie about exploitation instead has some rock n' roll tunes so we can watch the youths having fun. It really looks like a good time, minus the girl who drops dead because she neglected to mention she's pregnant and is working in the sun all day.

What's impressive is how villainous the villain is. He even dresses in all-white outfits and walks two Dobermans. He's married the town judge in secret, and has her finding everyone guilty and sending them to his farm so he basically has no labor expenses. He claims he'll charge everyone else $200 if anyone runs away, but it *is* kind of hard to see how this place isn't seeing their farm hands just walk away in a pre-electronic era.

The movie is more or less there for some enterprising person to deconstruct for it's relationship with women of post-war era. I did idly wonder if Russ Meyers watched this movie and said "I know what I want to do with my life".

In addition to Van Doren, this movie has someone I don't know I've ever seen before, Jeanne Carmen, who I guess was good buddies with Marilyn Monroe. She seems to be a cut above the other actors, but doesn't get much screentime.

Apparently this movie has a cult following and was an episode of MST3K, which absolutely tracks.

It also is just cruising along and then drops a racial slur out of nowhere in the last three minutes, like we're supposed to agree that Mexicans coming into our country as agricultural workers is somehow worse than the exploitation we've just seen - and without any notion that we need to worry very much about what awaits those Mexicans.

Anyway, it's otherwise a good time. I'm not mad at it, and I got to see how cotton harvests work. Apparently there's a lot more shimmying than I knew.

Bug Watch: Tarantula (1955)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 18:06:50 +0000

Watched: 09/25/2026

Format: YouTube

Viewing: First

Director: Jack Arnold

The only issue with this movie is John Agar.

I mean, there's the general issue of John Agar being John Agar and I'm still mad about how he was to Shirley Temple. But he's also a terrible actor. He has exactly one line delivery, whether he's inappropriately abandoning his medical practice to hit on Mara Corday or a tarantula the size of a battleship is walking toward him.

And it's a shame, because the movie has a few other actors - Leo G. Carroll who is dialing it in, and is still acting circles around him - and Mara Corday, who is doing her best to get Agar to do something other than just stare straight ahead and speak in a clipped, 1950's manly voice.

The plot: a guy suffering from a horrendous disease (acromegaly) is found in the desert outside a small Arizona town. He's traced back to being the science-pal of Leo G. Carroll. The two are performing experiments in a McMansion on the edge of town. Agar is suspicious as the town doctor. And rightfully so, as it turns out Leo G. Carroll is using atomic power to... well, he has a guinea pig the size of a rottweiler and a tarantula the size of a beach umbrella (why? Just... why?).

Anyway, there's a third fellow in the house, and he also has acromegaly and fights Carroll, which causes a fire and the tarantula escapes.

About this time, Mara Corday shows up, way overdressed for all the science she's about to do.

Honestly, the tarantula looks amazing for the 1950's. It's almost all done with post-production compositing, dropping a real tarantula over the top of other real film. Simple enough, but effective. And there is a big puppet tarantula for a few key scenes, but unlike The Black Scorpion, it's used sparingly (and borrowing heavily from King Kong).

I actually recommend this one, with the caveat that I recommend it within the framework of what it is. Them! is still the best one of the "atomic mutant animal" movies to me, narratively. But Tarantula feels *pure* in what it is, a mad scientist movie with a big 'ol monster and a dullard of a lead with a knockout playing "woman". I mean, it checks all the boxes. And knows to get out as soon as the threat is neutralized.

I will admit, I lost a bit in the end looking up what kind of jets they were showing and was right, they showed two separate jets. (always check the Internet Movie Plane Database). I will take partial credit for recognizing one as The Shooting Star, but failing to remember it's "the Lockheed P-80".

But, look, this is a 1950's sci-fi feature with a horror bent. You're not here for Academy award-winning acting or scripts. But it is fun. Especially when Agar isn't on screen.

I dunno. It's a movie about a tarantula that keeps changing sizes because scape is hard, but it's very large.

And I have now seen every movie mentioned in "Science Fiction / Double Feature" from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Please clap.

Stanwyck Watch: Jeopardy (1953)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 04:03:32 +0000

Watched: 09/23/2026

Format: TCM Noir Alley

Viewing: First

Director: John Sturges

I don't know how you can't be blown away by Barbara Stanwyck. Just an incredible talent. I might be a fan of, say, Marie Windsor, but I know when someone got Stanwyck, she was going to deliver in a way maybe only 1 or 2 of her contemporaries could.*

It's not like our preferred mode of horror and thrillers these days isn't "nice suburban people suddenly confronted with someone who will kill them". And Jeopardy (1953) is absolutely in that mode.

Anyway, this isn't a deep drama. It's a fast-moving noirish thriller with a small cast, life or death stakes, and proof that kids are just bent on self-destruction, and keeping them safe is probably more trouble than it's worth.

Stanwyck co-stars with first Barry Sullivan, who plays her husband. They're on a roadtrip from southern California into Mexico to go fishing with their young son, do some camping in a remote spot Sullivan found long ago.

SPOILERS

Their kid goes out on a rotting pier and needs help returning. Sullivan goes to help him, and in doing so, falls and traps his leg under a fallen beam. And the tide is coming in.

Stanwyck is sent for help, when she comes across Ralph Meeker, an escaped con on the run. Maybe 60 seconds too late she realizes this guy is a raging psychopath on the run.

Meeker isn't above hitting a Stanwyck, and he's clearly just off his nut. He sees a chance, and runs some cops off a dirt road, flipping their car.

In a scene that made my eyebrows raise to my hairline, Stanwyck - who has realized she's probably not getting out of this alive, and if she doesn't sort this out, her husband is going to drown in the pounding waves while her young son watches, decides to seduce Meeker.

Friends, I am 97% sure she has sex with Meeker to get him to go along with her plan. She convinced him he should go where her husband is and rescue him to get his clothes (Meeker's in prison duds), his car and his ID, and she'll then go with Meeker.

So, how does she convince him?

I assumed this would be a pretty straightforward movie about pluck and resolve in the face of terror winning the day. But it's not - it's a movie that says "how far would you go to save your husband and child?" in the bleakest terms (and in Stanwyck's V.O.). And we kind of know - no one is ever going to know what she and Meeker did, because Meeker will be dead in a day or so, and she'll never tell.

A *lot* gets implied in noir, or even stated outright (but never shown). And then with a star of Stanwyck's stature... she picked a hell of a way to quit retirement, which Stanwyck had tried for a few months before coming back to movies. I'm just surprised they went there. It's absolutely something you'd read in a book from the time that would get softened or blown past in a film adaptation.

Maybe there's another reading that got past the Hayes office, but.. yeah, this is some dark, dark stuff, and that tagline on the poster above, "she did it because her fear was greater than her shame" pretty much closes any debate.

Clocking in at a trim 69 minutes, there's zero fat on the movie. And because, to this viewer, everything happening is really all leading to a single act that occurs off-screen and is never directly acknowledged, it's a movie that is exactly as long as it should be, moving along at a terrific clip.

I do have questions about how part of it was made. Barry Sullivan was clearly sitting in water somewhere with waves - maybe a studio lot pool. I don't know. But he's essentially getting his ass kicked by very real waves of some sort for 45 minutes of the movie. I hope he was paid handsomely.

Today, this plot would be Act 1 of a movie, but more likely the pilot of a new prestige series that would get two seasons and you'd never hear about it til it was canceled. But it's a reminder of how movies were consumed at one point - like paperback novels, meant to be watched for the the thrills and what could be deep character introspection - after all, what happens NEXT to these people? - is never really the point. It's what one woman did in a crisis.

*yes, I mean Davis and Crawford

Kubrick Watch: Barry Lyndon (1975)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 01:33:00 +0000

Watched: 09/21/2026

Format: TCM on DVR

Viewing: First

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Somehow I'd never seen Barry Lyndon (1975). I assume some part of my brain would look at the film and say "it won't be fun, and it's 3 hours" and would tap out before I could hit play.

In the past 20 years or so, the common wisdom I received in the 1990's - that the movie was dull or not Kubrick's best - seems to have evaporated and the film has received serious reconsideration. But aside from "people in ruffles cavort in what looks like the second half of the 18th Century", I had no idea what the film was about. That said, every film student knew that Kubrick's movie was shot with very special lenses, using only candlelight in many scenes -something unheard of in film production. And I knew Barry Lyndon was supposed to be one of the most visually stunning movie ever produced, which... I mean, Kubrick. You get that as part of the package.

I am the first to confess, I am not a reader of 19th century books - not since college, anyway, and usually then as coursework. The film is a loose-ish adaptation of a novel by Thackeray, released in the 1840's but set in the mid 1700's. There's whiffs of other things I've seen or read that let me know what's in the book and therefore the movie, and I'm reminded of Tom Jones a bit, as well as Great Expectations. But that's a real basic bitch reading, I'm guessing.

Still, it's the episodic adventures of a young man moving through a life where titles and social standing are all that matter, and occasionally getting laid (tastefully and off camera).

Much has been said about the look of Barry Lyndon. And that is all true. It is absolutely painterly in its use of light, of color, of framing. It looks very much unlike other mid-70's cinema and wears its influences from the preceding centuries openly. I'm not steeped in art history, but I've been to a museum or two, and even I could see what Kubrick was up to, recreating how figures were captured, scenes were composed, light fell. It's a very image-forward film, hanging on often languid shots to allow you to take it in, a lost era re-created so completely one might find it immersive.

I am not on record as a Ryan O'Neal fan, nor will I be one today, but will say that he had a window in which he made some excellent movies, either by luck of being cast or what he brought. And I feel like Kubrick saw something so baffled and dead-eyed in what O'Neal could do, he really is the ideal casting for someone barely in touch with the events surrounding him, maybe too dull in some ways to do much but coast along on the currents of fate, which keep him bumping and swirling for the first Part of the film.

O'Neal is rarely asked to do much more than look pretty and have a somewhat vacant expression. Redmond Barry - who will become Barry Lyndon - is not the sharpest crayon in the box. He sees himself as a would-be gentleman, always on the verge of a great destiny, and he is somewhat cunning. But he is riding the tides of fortune from when he is ejected from his home (and even that is engineered, he learns later), his actions sometimes having great impact, but almost never what he intended.

It takes him from bucolic Ireland to the front lines of the Seven Years War (one I know only the North American aspect), to the courts of royals and into marriage with a woman far above his station.

Across the board, everyone's bringing their A-game. Oddly, aside from O'Neal, the only actor I recognized was Patrick Magee, who plays the Chevalier. One will note that Philip Stone who played Grady in The Shining also appears.

What I can't believe is my lack of familiarity with Marisa Berenson, who appeared in Cabaret, but who I otherwise haven't seen. But apparently she is an American who went to Europe and stayed there to make movies.

I know some find Kubrick's distance from his subjects aloof or off-putting. I don't (so there!). He's not shoving anyone at the lens and insisting you love them via the intimacy of a close-up of a beautiful face. It's camera as 3rd person limited omniscient, and it's up to us to sort out the film. And this may be a bit challenging.

Barry Lyndon is at least a comedy in part, but also a tragedy for many characters, and a commentary on class and chasing a better station. Who has more bills than those who throw their fortunes around? Even when you achieve the role you imagined for yourself, is that enough? Or do you both want more, and fail to avoid the trials and tribulations of life? And, in the end, who you are deep down is often what truly matters.

This is, at the end of the day, a movie I feel necessitates a re-watch. I was too caught up in the visuals at times to always listen to the dialogue as closely as I probably should have, to see everything the movie had to offer. And I was trying!

Is it my favorite Kubrick? No. Do I get why people rave about it? Yes. And I suspect the more I may see it, the more I may enjoy it.

Texas Watch: Friday Night Lights (Pilot)

noreply@blogger.com (The League) — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:18:30 +0000

Jamie has been along for the ride on DC's Lanterns. Thanks to her proximity to me and my occasional, intrusive-thought driven monologues, she probably knows more about Green Lanterns than she ever bargained for in this life, so she was primed.

But she also has been a Kyle Chandler stan since back in the day. I get it.

Anyway, that much Kyle Chandler reminded her of the pilot for Friday Night Lights.

Both of us got vaccinated Friday and are slugging it out with our white blood cells, so when she put it on, I was in full support.

I'll argue two things:

The pilot for Friday Night Lights is maybe the best pilot of any TV show I've seen.
Friday Night Lights captures Texas, at least the Texas of its era, the best of any movie or show.

Mechanically, the pilot is excellent. It introduces everyone, sets their status quo and their anxieties and desires. It introduces the stakes of football in this town, and shows how football is a cultural center for the town, right down to how religion is worked in (which I know non-former-jocks don't get, but this is very real). It also shows what it's like to be on a team, when you spend a lot of time with people you may not necessarily get along with, but form a sports-friendship.

And it's delivered in a healthy mix of snippets of conversations in a collage of scenes that both show and tell.

The show seems to exist entirely inside the magic hour, when teams practice, when games are set to start - I have my own memories of walking into a local stadium as the sun was setting. Paired with the dreamy music of post-rock band Explosions in the Sky, it gives the show a feeling of instant nostalgia.

Dialogue is natural and written in the patter of Texas, as well as people who stew in sports jargon, both on the field and when talking to the press. I think the accents work. Texas accents are all over the place, mixes of regional from the Deep South to the Central Texas thing I get after a few cocktails, to more of the East Texas drawl.

The people look and act like how they were 20 years ago, anyway, before the state became flooded with out-of-staters.* I firmly believe in Coach and Mrs. Taylor as the former high school Homecoming King and Queen, now making their way well past the glory days, but steeped in the culture of sport and small town living.

From a storytelling perspective, the pilot is tight as hello, laying all of this out, and then turning on a dime in the last fifteen minutes. If we thought we knew what the show would be, it's just changed a lot. The last fifteen minutes are the inciting incident that will take us through a season of TV.

Real emotional stakes for characters that are not particularly exotic. We're reminded - these are high schoolers, and that young man will never be the same again.

So. Is Texas as football crazy as the book, movie and show of Friday Night Lights indicate?

I live in a mid-sized city with a top-ranked NCAA football school. So, high school football is out there, people care about it if they have kids of a certain age, but the focus is on University of Texas football. And, yes, Saturdays during the season are pretty nuts if you head toward campus. And in Houston, people care about the Texans. A lot. And, yeah, a local channel shows high school games on TV, but I cannot imagine the viewership is high. It's just a fun thing to do.

Texas is not unique in its football culture. It's an extension of what you can find in the South, and parts of the Midwest. Ohio State is Ohio State. I know what Bears fans are like.

But, no, grown adults do not worry about high school football where I live - outside of conversations about college recruits, etc... But in West Texas? I'd buy it. There are some smaller universities out that way, but I don't know that anyone really cares. I only know about the feelings about high school football through the book of Friday Night Lights, and then some schools in Austin are pipelines for college recruitment (certainly Westlake, which produced Drew Brees).

But the general feel of Texas is right in a way that's hard to quantify. People do love it here even when they hate parts of living here. There's a reason that "Texas Forever" has become an unofficial motto, thanks to that show. It's no secret that it often takes an outsider to come in and see a place for what it is, good and bad, and not be afraid to show it as the locals are just too close to it.

If you watch, wondering "why the hell do all of these people care about football so much?" - welcome to my life up to age 21 or so. I find it a feature, not a bug.

They've named the lead of the pilot Jason Street, after legendary UT quarterback James Street. Because they want real game footage, the Dillon Panthers wear the uniforms of the Pflugerville Panthers (Pflugerville is a bedroom community that is its own township north of Austin). In the pilot, they play a team bedecked in the uniforms of the Westlake Chapparals, which is the rich kid public school in West Austin.

There's the wealth disparity in plain site in the kinds of houses people live in here, to real locations around town where I've grabbed a cheeseburger or ten (EZ's was great, and I am sad it closed a few years back). But mostly, I know these people. I can remember high school well enough to remember the parents who went too far sometimes, the kids from less well-off situations trying to get by, mumbling their way through explanations they shouldn't have to give.

But the reality of the situation and the tragedy that befalls the Dillon Panthers feels deeply real. A single incident on a single play leads to lifelong consequences for Jason Street. I absolutely knew what was coming this time, and I was still wrecked.

If there's two criticism I have, the first is that it's clearly Texas winter in the first episode, probably in January or February, not the furnace that Texas actually is when the season starts in August/ September. The second is that Texas has a massive Hispanic population that exists in every socioeconomic bracket. The sky is the limit here. Yet, you only see Hispanic kids as background characters and I think zero Hispanic adults. That's a misstep and could have easily been remedied.

Of less note is that college-bound athletes get different treatment not just at school, but they get recruited, they go to camps costing thousands. People go into deep debt on the pipedream that Junior will be picked up and play college ball. And that's nowhere to be seen here. Maybe that's not happening in Permian Basin, where the book was written. But by the 00's, it was a reality for many quarterbacks. They're treated like horses getting ready for Churchill Downs.

Also, if football is that big of a deal, Dillon would have a much bigger stadium. That looks like a JV or practice stadium to me. (One does wonder what will become of the culture and those massive stadiums as Texas' government is trying to dismantle public education.)

The cast is excellent, and if you told me that the one younger actor who would do super well out of this show, given the immense talent in place, was Jesse Plemons, I'd have just stared at you. Not that others haven't continued on, and don't have real work. Certainly Adrianne Palicki seems like she's everywhere, and once in a while Minka Kelly appears on my screen. I just saw Taylor Kitsch in something on Netflix, and he was great, honestly.

The show would eventually pivot schools and we'd get Michael B. Jordan and Jurnee Smollett.

But the casting of Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton as two very married people may be some of the best casting I've ever seen. These two, plus Amy Teagarden as their daughter of a more literary persuasion, really do make it work. The pilot doesn't give Britton much to do, and she hasn't broken out as a character with equal screentime here, but you can see the bits of great work that already pop up.

Anyway, if you followed along with my blogging while the show aired, this is well-covered territory.

So, yeah, Friday Night Lights would have a stellar first season, a second season that was cut short by the writer's strike (and thank god, because some idiot tried to make it a cheesy soap opera before reverting to what made the show work), and would carry on for a few years as some top flight network TV. I think it lasted as long as it could have/ should have. The Taylor family went through big changes, we even changed schools rather than watch a new herd of kids coming up. It fell prey to a few TV goofs along the way, but overall ended very well.

Twenty years later, I'm endorsing 4 of the 5 seasons of the show.

Will I rewatch it? No. That's like 100 hours of TV, and not even Connie Britton's perfect hair can make me do that.

*20 years ago, you could count on the people around you being from some part of Texas, often a fellow alumnus of your university. Now, it's from all over, and that's fine. It does mean what is *Texas* has been morphed, diluted and changed.