More movies. All the time.
21. This stilted Italian sword-and-sorcery schlock is aided by Mario Bava’s far-out colors and lighting. It’s Hercules in the Haunted World (1961). It’s got its moments – one of the few appearances of Procrustes (a hilariously specific villain with my favorite arbitrary rules in Greek mythology…in this movie he’s also a rock monster for some reason). But mostly, it’s a snoozer. Sorry, Reg Park, but my heart belongs to Lou Ferrigno.
20. The Ten (2007) is an anthology comedy film from the people behind Wet Hot American Summer and The State that sends up each of the Ten Commandments. Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog, this is not. It’s not as funny as the other projects these guys have worked on either. It’s a hit and miss, somewhat dated comedy with an all-star cast and a handful of funny moments. We watched it as a goof.
19. I love me some classic Hammer horror, monstrous ghouls, and Caroline Munro. That said, Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter (1974) isn’t one of the more memorable combinations of these normally delectable ingredients. These characters are not great at their job. The suave Captain Kronos and his hunchbacked scientist sidekick take their blessed time catching a soul-sucking vampire. There’s some mystery about the vampire’s identity and how to kill it…which is really dragged out. The action doesn’t really start until the very end. You could watch this…or you could watch Fearless Vampire Hunters instead (a bit sharper and much better theme song).
18. The woods looks creepy enough in this well acted horror flick. The Ritual (2017) has atmosphere, good chemistry between its actors, and a wonderfully unique creature design…but it doesn’t do much and isn’t really scary. I love monsters. So why does this lose me once the monster actually shows up? A big, goofy monster that just spikes you onto a tree branch because of cult stuff just isn’t that scary. Perhaps worth checking out because everything leading up to the finale is very well done.
17. Seth Rogen gives a wonderfully watchable performance as an Eastern European immigrant from 1919 who accidentally brines himself and wakes up 100 years into the future in An American Pickle (2020). Rogen also plays the man’s great grandson. The premise is marvelously whimsical and unique and poised to do amazing things…but ultimately gets rather squandered, quickly devolving into a story of petty tit for tat revenge between two characters that could have been anybody. When it’s tender and when it’s weird and fully unpacking the concept of confronting your heritage, it shines. I really wanted to like this one more. This concept deserves more. But even at its most uninspired, it still has a woolly Rogen doing a fun accent.
16. God and Satan are on a train as the porter shows them stories of humans at their most depraved, and they bicker over whose soul belongs to them. This is Night Train to Terror (1985), a bonkers Z-grade horror anthology that makes absolutely no sense. And then I learned that it’s actually three separate movies that were edited down to be one single film (couched in a ham-fisted cosmic framing device). I found most of the stories cheap, sleazy, and hard to follow. Just the way I like it sometimes. It’s got some interesting ideas (I thought the death cult in story 2 was a neat premise) and some wonky stop-motion effects. At the end of the night, it’s only mostly a waste of time. The film even makes fun of its own hapless viewers with the repeated rock stanza: “Everybody’s got something to do. Everybody, but you!”
15. In the wake of the success of Smokey and the Bandit, Sam Peckinpah attempts to capture the spirit of the American trucker movie with Convoy (1978), starring Kris Kristofferson, Ali MacGraw, and Ernest Borgnine. Something about the 70s, man. These movies made the trucker lifestyle look like the coolest, sexiest, most American thing you could possibly do. While Convoy starts off pretty strong – several trucker buds are on the run after beating up some bad cops in a glorious bar brawl – the plot gets a more complicated than perhaps necessary and loses a lot of momentum and direction once the convoy actually starts. Like An American Pickle, I was in love with what this movie could have been.
14. Sir Ralph Richardson is a sinister crypt-keeper who shows a few lost souls some piercing glimpses into their sordid selves in the original adaptation of Tales from the Crypt (1972). Based on the EC horror comics, this fright flick runs the gamut of typical morality tales of terror. Hammy acting and Chick Tract-esque simplicity aside, it’s an effective relic of horror anthology history that boasts some nice camerawork and a heartbreakingly adorable performance from Peter Cushing. You gotta love the clever titles for all the sequences when the credits role. A far better and more coherent – if a bit more conservative – entry into the genre than Night Train to Terror.
13. I’m not sure if I’ve seen a movie more hellbent on breaking down the methods of subtle deception within nonfiction filmmaking. Well, Orson Welles’ F for Fake, maybe. But here it is used to also show how the very way we talk about the past has the same manipulations of framing. Further Beyond (2016), directed by Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, presents itself initially as a documentary about an Irish adventurer named Ambrose O’Higgins who traveled to Chile in the 18th century. As it goes, however, it also becomes, simultaneously, a deconstruction of the artifice of the presentation itself. You get sucked into the way we tell stories and recount the past and ponder on the mechanics of documentary filmmaking. The limited budget is far from an impediment here. It’s a gentle little film that tucks you in for bed under a cozy blanket while reassuring you that everything is, in fact, only one version of reality.
12. Robert Mitchum might be one of the few men capable of staring down and intimidating the stately Gregory Peck. Mitchum’s casting as the chilling ex-con, Max Cady, out for revenge against the lawyer (Peck) who put him away – not to mention the moody black-and-white photography – are what make Cape Fear (1962) a classic thriller. The movie really taps into primal fears, as well as the frustration of feeling impotent to stop the evil that is encroaching with ice cold calculation. The ever-present threat of physical and sexual violence is palpable. Peck’s character is a bit of an idiot and his plan is cockamamie, reckless, traumatizing, and results in a murder and the movie sort of sidesteps all that because, hey, a man’s gotta do anything he can to protect his family, I guess.
11. I remember catching this on TV a lot as a kid. Re-watching City Slickers (1991) now that I’m closer to Billy Crystal’s age in the film, I get it even more. It’s the quintessential male mid-life crisis movie. Three buddies (Crystal, Daniel Stern, and Bruno Kirby) go for a two week cattle drive adventure. This naturally leads to several comic moments and some harrowing personal growth. It’s at its best when the guys are just riffing about life and making snarky remarks that reveal their character. Jack Palance is perfectly cast as the tough-as-nails cowboy, Curly, who imparts his sage wisdom that the secret to life is just one thing. It’s an enjoyable and still funny comedy from a bygone age – the early 90s.
10. Gave Monster House (2006) another watch with some kids. It’s just a real efficient little Halloween kiddie horror. The spooky old house in a quiet neighborhood eats people. And three kids have to stop it. I like that essentially it’s all set on one street. Cut the fat. Get to the house being creepy. Some funny lines and clever plot elements help it along. It’s simple, smooth, and fun. The motion-capture may come off as a bit of a weird choice, but it just sort of adds an extra layer of surreality. The character design feels like your on mushrooms.
9. Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) is an eerie shaggy dog mystery about missing girls from a fancy schmancy Australian school in 1900. It’s a slow-moving, trancelike yarn that is pleased to meander and stop…and then meander some more as we observe various characters reacting to the tragic disappearance. It is a little comical to me that everybody is only ever concerned about Miranda because she’s the hot one.
8. I’ll come clean. This is pretty cheesy, but what can I say? I’m a sucker for pulpy pre-Code 1930s genre movies. Chandu the Magician (1932) is as absurd as its title suggests. A white guy (Edmund Lowe) has trained for years in India to learn the ancient arts of astral projection, teleportation, and general magical trickery and discovers that the yogis that trained him want him to stop an evil mastermind named Roxor (played by Bela Lugosi) who has kidnapped his mad scientist brother-in-law in order to use his death ray to conquer the world. All of this is laid out in the first two minutes. Chandu’s also got a crush on an Egyptian princess. This is the type of exotic nonsense movie that tells its story efficiently and with some good atmosphere and does not overstay its welcome.
7. We absolutely loved Twin Dragon Encounter. Two good old Canadian boys with lustrous mustaches and a martial arts studio take their girlfriends camping in Ontario and wind up going toe to toe with an adorable group of militia men with a nebulous agenda. It’s such a perfectly lovable bad movie that just makes you feel good. Naturally, we had to see the sequel. The McNamara boys are back in Dragon Hunt (1990). The budget is bigger. There are establishing shots and close-ups now. It employs Eisentstein’s montage theory to evoke feelings and create tension. And this movie has stakes. It’s wonderfully great fun. The bad guy from the first film is back and he’s got a metal hand. He wants revenge. So he sets up an insanely elaborate plan to capture the McNamaras and force them to do a sort of Most Dangerous Game scenario where they have to defend themselves against wave after wave of ninjas and beefy boys. This sequel doesn’t have the innocence and sweetness of the original. The twins actually kill people in this one. A lot of people. Brutally. They straight up harpoon a labradoodle with a makeshift spear and leave it to bleed out to death. It does get a little tiring by the end, but it’s always good to be back up in the Muskoka woods with the boys and their thick, thick mustaches.
6. Where have you been all my life, Phantasm (1979)? Directed by Don Coscarelli, this cult horror favorite boasts a bunch of fun and original ideas. Grave robbing! The Tall Man! Flying death orbs! Other dimensions/planets(?)! Either this is exactly your kind of thing or it isn’t. I won’t say too much, but I definitely want to see the rest of the movies in the Phantasm universe.
5. I dug Midsommar, but was intimidated to watch Ari Aster’s earlier film, Hereditary (2018). Mainly because I knew it would be depression horror, which I find can be emotionally draining. Maybe I was just in the right headspace, but this slow-burn horror flick hit every intended mark upon my viewing. I felt sick, sad, disgusted, horrified, and genuinely impressed with the performances (particularly Toni Collette, who absolutely brings it). It kept me guessing with clever surprises and twists all the way to the end. It is an extremely well-crafted film with equal portions tragedy and terror, and I’m glad I finally got around to it.
4. Like good drugs, a lot of what makes a movie great or special is the set and setting of the viewer at the time of viewing. And holy cow, did The Keep (1983) meet me just right. Genuinely a spiritual experience at the time. It’s flawed and messy, sure, but it’s got a weird hold on me now. We went in expecting a sort of Cannon style Indiana Jones horror knockoff. Instead, we got a WWII supernatural thriller retelling of the Golem legend with complex moral and religious themes and a wonderfully entrancing, and willfully anachronistic, Tangerine Dream score. It doesn’t all quite come together and a lot of things are left unexplained (I later learned that Michael Mann’s original cut was 210 minutes long, so the hour and a half version isn’t exactly the whole story), but that kind of almost lends itself to the ethereal mystery of this curious creation. Great locations. Great monster. Features Scott Glenn, Ian McKellen, Jürgen Prochnow, and Gabriel Byrne.
3. Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Cher play three single small town women just starting to realize that they might have some magical powers in George Miller’s The Witches of Eastwick (1987). Their chemistry is great and they never looked better, and they are abetted by an explosively watchable performance from Jack Nicholson, who plays a mysterious man who arrives out of nowhere to seemingly answer all of the girls’ wishes. Yeah, he’s the Devil. If a sexy fantasy-comedy about women discovering they’re witches and banging Satan before going to war with him (all directed by the guy who did the Mad Max movies) doesn’t interest you, then I guess we’re just different people.
2. With pastiches of Tati and Truffaut, Wes Anderson deftly cobbles together an erudite and visually dense anthology that celebrates art, youth, food, France, and – most importantly of all – journalism. It may be in vogue to critique Anderson’s twee dollhouse aesthetic overwrought in quirky symmetry, but I loved every cakey bite of The French Dispatch (2021). Gorgeous to look at; musical to listen to; overflowing with asides, ampersands, and addendums (both literary and optical). This expensive looking production recounts the death of a French-based American periodical publisher and celebrates his life and journalistic impact through the retelling of several previously published articles (that would appear in the final issue of The French Dispatch). It would be pointless to explain the plot further. It’s not so much what is being said, so much as how it’s being told – a perfect analogue for both the influence of writers on their stories and filmmakers on their films. Style over substance? That’s actually the point. A sprawling cast, charming Alexandre Desplat score, and all the clever, artistic flair you’d expect and more. If you were down with increasingly stylized whimsy of Moonrise Kingdom and Grand Budapest Hotel, then you’re going to enjoy this.
1. Cryptozoo (2021) is exactly the kind of movie I dream of and wait for. Dash Shaw’s earlier film, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, was excellent, and this is the perfect follow-up. Imagine a psychedelic Jurassic Park but with the fearless illustrative style of indie comics and vintage pulp sci-fi covers. A zoo for cryptids is under threat and a brave woman and her team must save it, but the imagination behind this film goes well beyond inventive creature design and unconventional animation choices. Cryptozoo deals with themes of exploitation, fetishization, stigmatization, conservation, capitalism, compromise, war, the failure of good intentions, and a world not knowing what to do with the diminishing number of unique things in it. So many ideas and so much visual flourish, all so cleverly and expertly executed. And I cannot say enough nice things about the hypnotic score by John Carroll Kirby. I know when I’ve found my candy, and I know it won’t be for everyone, but Cryptozoo is a rare and precious beast.
This Won't Be For Everyone 