What movies are you watching?

[epilogue]

One day I'll muster up the energy to try Even Horizon again. I'd love to see if I can get any value out of it a second time. So many people love it.

[bart]

Dear Evan Horizon

[BurtReynolds]

Smashing Machine. Boring movie about a boring guy.

[epilogue]

Smashing Machine. Boring movie about a boring guy.

Literally nothing about that movie looks interesting to me.

[epilogue]

The Safdie's decided to make solo movie and (ironically?) the each decide to make "sports" movies. And that one (the Rock one) looks awful and uninteresting and by the numbers and yet somehow the Chalamet ping-pong thing looks like a lot of fun! Of course the Chalamet thing has the Chalamet fatigue factor, which I get, but I can't hold against the movie. I'm excited for that one.

[BurtReynolds]

It's not as by-the-numbers as one would expect, but it's so obsessed with realism it forgets to tell a story. Steadfastly refuses to be interesting.

[Ms Harmless]

Smashing Machine. Boring movie about a boring guy.

Literally nothing about that movie looks interesting to me.

I would be really interested in a very wildly new Rock performance (I root for him as a dude even though his movies are boring) but it doesn't look like we got one

[epilogue]

Smashing Machine. Boring movie about a boring guy.

Literally nothing about that movie looks interesting to me.

I would be really interested in a very wildly new Rock performance (I root for him as a dude even though his movies are boring) but it doesn't look like we got one

Right?

This looks like the opposite, like he's just trying for that Oscar.

[VinylGuy]

After The Hunt.

What a mess. Guadagnino needs to make a good movie someday.

Roberts is good though.

[The Argonaut]

Going to the cinema shortly for a double feature: Roofman followed by the new Kelly Reichhardt joint The Mastermind. Wish me luck

[The Argonaut]

Going to the cinema shortly for a double feature: Roofman followed by the new Kelly Reichhardt joint The Mastermind. Wish me luck

Ended up being a thematically connected double feature about not-great-thieves on the "run". Mastermind was great

[VinylGuy]

I wanna see both but The Mastermind premieres this week, so im exited about it.

[Simple Torture]

The new John Candy documentary on Amazon is a fucking sledgehammer. Watch at your own risk.

[Buby]

The new John Candy documentary on Amazon is a fucking sledgehammer. Watch at your own risk.

Sledgehammer to the heartstrings.

[Matters]

Great doc. Candy wouldn’t even be considered fat today.

[Simple Torture]

Great doc. Candy wouldn’t even be considered fat today.

Holy mother of Christ when they put all of those interviews together of people asking him about his weight, I could see a little bit of him die every time. He handled it with what I’d call a bitchy grace—never actually clapped back at anyone, but made it clear that it wasn’t what he was there to talk about.

[spike]

Great doc. Candy wouldn’t even be considered fat today.

Holy mother of Christ when they put all of those interviews together of people asking him about his weight, I could see a little bit of him die every time. He handled it with what I’d call a bitchy grace—never actually clapped back at anyone, but made it clear that it wasn’t what he was there to talk about.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been as bad if his name was John Broccoli.

[VinylGuy]

The Realm.

masterpiece. Another Sorogoyen classic.

[LoathedVermin72]

The Spooky Season festivities have begun:

Spoiler: show

-The Deadly Spawn: Disappointing. The special effects are very impressive but they are all this movie has going for it. It has the worst symptom of incompetent amateur filmmaking: being drastically under-edited and dragging on interminably. This thing is sooooo sloooow.

-Forbidden World (rewatch): This movie absolutely fuckin’ rips and I can’t believe it doesn’t have a huge cult following. Definitely the best Alien knockoff ever. Gnarly gore effects. So entertaining from beginning to end.

-Nightmares in a Damaged Brain: Good lord, this movie is DEPRAVED. And viciously violent. Reminds me of Maniac and Angst in its downbeat, unsettling, uncompromising portrayal of a serial killer. Good stuff right here.

-Dark Places (1973): Enjoyable, lowkey Brit horror elevated by a great cast (Christopher Lee, Joan Collins, Herbert Lom, Jane Birkin, etc.).

-Night of the Demon (1980): Has its moments (mostly the inserted death scenes), but when it comes to wacko no-budget Bigfoot horror, I’ll take Shriek of the Mutilated all day every day.

Continuing:

Spoiler: show

-The Blair Witch Project (rewatch): I've always been kinda lukewarm on this one but it finally clicked this time. Totally effective, thanks largely to the deeply convincing performances by the three leads (the immersive, experimental way they filmed this has a lot to do with that, I imagine). The new-ish restoration by Second Sight is terrific.

-Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror (rewatch): Absolute classic. One of the most batshit wacko of all the '80s Italian horror movies, and that's saying something.

-The Ice House: Total dud. Such an annoying script and directed just as annoyingly, with every line of bafflingly obtuse dialogue delivered with an aggressively sly tone as if each word is loaded with some kind of sinister double meaning. Exhausting, obnoxious, silly, and dull. I love a lot of the old BBC Christmas Ghost Stories but this is probably the worst of the lot.

-Dawn of the Dead (1978) (rewatch): Really nothing left to be said about this. An immortal classic. A movie I watched so much in high school that I kinda feel like it doesn't have many surprises left to offer me anymore, but that's okay.

-Horror Hospital: Never quite finds the right tone. It seems like it was going for comedy, but it only rarely establishes that vibe. Fun and ridiculous Michael Gough performance and one delightfully out-of-left-field scene, but I wish this were better.

-Night of the Living Dead (1990) (rewatch): Didn't like this when I first saw it, but I was ready to embrace it this time. Nope. Still kinda sucks, unfortunately. Too straightforward of a remake but drained of all the original's surreal, nightmarish magic. With Savini at the helm, you'd think there'd at least be a hefty dose of gore to bring something new this time, but you don't even get that. Just a shrug of a movie.

-Return of the Evil Dead (rewatch): A few nice gore moments, one wonderfully shocking sequence, and a lot of boring filler shots. I want to like these Blind Dead movies more than I do.

-The Ghost Galleon: Good fucking lord what a snoozefest. ONE kill scene?! In this whole slog?!

-The Dunwich Horror (rewatch): Another one I was hoping would improve this time. It did not. Fun to see Talia Shire pop up.

-The Dead Next Door (rewatch): Some nice splatter FX here and there, but kind of cloying overall. Worse than I remembered it being.

-The Cell (rewatch): Yet another dud that was even worse than I remembered. The mind-fantasy stuff is nothing but empty visuals with no punch, and the real-world scenes are utterly inert. No juice here at all. Tarsem Singh sucks.

-I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) (rewatch): Finally, something that hits! Absolutely loved this this time around (and Sony's 4K disc is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen). Great cast (Jennifer Love Hewitt and Anne Heche are particularly good), great vibes, with excellent direction and editing - this thing hums along so smoothly.

Continuing:

Spoiler: show

-I Still Know What Did Last Summer: Well, this has precisely zero of the qualities that made the original good. Plainly a rushed cash grab that turns FPJ's character into an asshole for some reason and does nothing well. I swear they "discover" the same four corpses like three times. That's all you got?

-The Conjuring (rewatch): Still very effective (this and Insidious are two of the few horror movies that actually scare me). Well-directed and well-cast - Wilson, Farmiga, Taylor, and Livingston are all inspired choices. Unfortunately, all the Warren hagiography and weird Christian propaganda still keep me from fully embracing it, but a very strong horror movie regardless. Easy to see why this spawned so many sequels and spinoffs.

-Event Horizon (rewatch): Love this movie forever. Still rips. Though I will say it kinda loses steam in the last 15 minutes. Ultimately a minor complaint considering how much ass this movie kicks overall.

-Demons 2 (rewatch): The first half hour of this is amazing. Gorgeous production design and cinematography assist some of the most fascinating use of dream logic in all of Italian horror as the film's narrative progresses because characters are, essentially, watching their own film on TV. The movie bleeds into itself in a surreal, brain-twisting ouroboros. But, sadly, once the demons arrive and start wreaking havoc, everything becomes routine and the pace slows to a crawl. Too bad. That first 30 is probably better than the first Demons (which is a classic), but the last hour is much worse.

Continuing:

-The Perfume of the Lady in Black: Not what I expected! Always thought this was a ghost story, but it's something much darker, much more psychological. Mimsy Farmer carries this - she's been great in everything I've ever seen her in. It actually reminds me a bit of another of her movies, La traque (which is a masterpiece). Both are very sad films that deal with a woman who is failed by - and destroyed by - the people around her. This is nowhere near as good as that film, but still solid.

-The Resurrected: Immaculate Spooky Season vibes here: set on the East Coast during October, with constant overcast skies, wind, and rain. I enjoyed this a lot despite some of the FX payoff being sorta awkward; the designs are cool, but the weirdly juttery execution is odd. Chris Sarandon is always fun to watch.

-The Haunting of Rosalind: Deadly dull shot-on-tape TV movie with a young Susan Sarandon. It was cool to see so many behind-the-scenes roles here being filled by women (extremely uncommon in the '70s), but I wish the results were more interesting.

-The Horrible Dr. Hichcock: Another deadly dull movie. Gothic horror with no sense of atmosphere, which means it's pretty much worthless. It's filmed almost entirely in one house, but you never get any sense of the geography of the place or the surrounding property. It feels like they were trying to pass off an urban building as a rural mansion and it doesn't work at all.

-End of Days (rewatch): Silly fun. Gabriel Byrne plays a pitch-perfect Satan. Peter Hyams's cinematography is stunningly gorgeous and Kevin Pollak is fun and offbeat casting, but I think they went way too big with some of the action set-pieces, leaving the movie struggling to find an identity somewhere between a gritty supernatural thriller and a big-budget action movie. Doesn't really work but I enjoyed it anyway.

-I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025): Absolutely godawful. Script feels like it was generated by AI. The young cast is uniformly horrendous. Zero vibes at all. Painfully lame kills; clearly directed by someone with no love for the genre. Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. both still look great and it's nice to see them again, but it's not enough. Really scraping the bottom of the barrel of nostalgia-bait here.

-The Curse of Frankenstein (rewatch): My favorite Hammer film and one of my all-time favorite films, full stop. I never tire of it. Flawless script, all-timer Peter Cushing performance. I love everything about it. A deeply evil movie. So much fun every time.

-Horror of Dracula (rewatch): Another Hammer classic. What can you say?

-Rasputin: The Mad Monk (rewatch): Christopher Lee's greatest performance, and maybe an all-time top 10 performance by anyone. He transforms his entire physicality and crashes through every scene like a wrecking ball. Barbara Shelley keeps up, though - she's always great too.

-Rape Squad: The kind of brain-twisting relic that could only come out of '70s exploitation: a genuinely sympathetic look at rape culture in the women's lib era that takes the audience through the trauma and humiliation of how sexual assault and harassment is treated...but one that also indulges in titillation and uncomfortable sleaze at the same time. This kind of semi-contradictory, uneasy stuff is what I love about exploitation, and while its Movie-of-the-Week-esque direction keeps me from ranking it among the very best of the genre (Cannibal Holocaust, Thriller: A Cruel Picture, I Spit on Your Grave, etc.), it's still a compelling work nonetheless.

-In the Mouth of Madness (rewatch): Boy did this hit hard this time. Feels like it has some kind of depressing new relevance for America in 2025. The feeling of society somehow losing its grip all around you, the feeling of being alienated from everyone you live among, the absurdity of the human condition run amok - not knowing whether to laugh, cry, or scream in terror. Some of the greatest Carpenter doom vibes ever. Side note: Sam Neill is inspired casting.

[epilogue]

-In the Mouth of Madness (rewatch): Boy did this hit hard this time. Feels like it has some kind of depressing new relevance for America in 2025. The feeling of society somehow losing its grip all around you, the feeling of being alienated from everyone you live among, the absurdity of the human condition run amok - not knowing whether to laugh, cry, or scream in terror. Some of the greatest Carpenter doom vibes ever. Side note: Sam Neill is inspired casting.

Nice.

I haven't seen this movie since its original release. I had the poster on my wall for a long time. The details of the film are lost to me now but I do remember that I really loved it at the time (which my friends absolutely did not!). Thanks for inspiring me to revisit the film, which I'll try to do this weekend.