Why do I do these things?
MISTAKES WERE MADE
OK so first of all, Hitler’s Girl (2013) is barely a movie. It’s mostly unrelated footage of director Paul Katturpalli on vacation in Yellowstone, Niagara Falls, etc. The rest is a pseudo Crash wannabe with the main plot (if there is one) centering around a college student whose Jewish girlfriend discovers that his grandfather was friends with Holocaust architect, Eichmann, and breaks up with him. We only watched this because we saw another Katturpalli movie (that will appear later on the list) and we thought we found another Breen. And he kind of is. But far less ambitious.
Bloodstone (1988) an extremely bad riff on the Romancing the Stone style movie where young sexy couple has an exotic adventure and sociopathically murder many men and remain blissfully unfazed and probably bone at really inappropriate times.
The pluses: Rajinikanth rocks (and he should be the hero!!!) and there is one (1) pretty nice car crash.
The minuses: there’s a lot, but Charlie Brill’s Kermit the Frog take on Indian people is pretty insufferable, so much so that the perplexing badness of the performance actually somehow eclipses the vicious racism of it. I actually kinda feel for him. He thought this was his Peter Sellers moment. And he totally biffs it.
Given the cast, Deadfall (1993) is an impressively bad film. Christopher Coppola doesn’t seem to understand mysteries, thrillers, neo-noir, or suspense. You got one weird Toni Clifton-inspired performance from Nicolas Cage for a bit (the only reason to watch it), and then you’re stuck with an achingly uncharismatic Michael Biehn for the rest.
Hell High (1989) is a fairly run-of-the-mill high school/teacher revenge thriller, but they really needed to recast the teacher to make this something somewhat good, which is a shame because it showed some promise at the start. After a solidly child-scarring prologue that ought to give our heroine the proper pathos needed to develop her into a full character, the movie veers off to be about a gang of high school bullies and their group dynamics. You know where it’s all heading, but it takes its time. Also slime is a thing. Slime is naturally occurring. Never evaporates. Will remain constant for decades. Slime. Yeah, I don’t know what they meant. In the end, slime aside, Hell High is an ersatz facsimile of the far superior Class of 1984.
A FORGETFUL BLUR
A true blur. I don’t seem to remember much beyond copious amounts of female decapitations and a cozy grandpa Lucio Fulci ambling around aimlessly playing himself. Cat in the Brain (1990) is unique. Fulci wanders from scene to scene and is haunted by grisly visions of murder (but moreso, his therapist). I guess I prefer his earlier giallo thrillers over this meta-commentary on violence in cinema (or rather a slight satire on the brouhaha surrounding its effects on society).
Demon Wind (1990) is a decently fun Evil Dead ripoff. Genuinely impressed by the film’s audacity to continuously introduce new characters. Can someone explain what happened to his head at the end? The monster was cool.
Patrick Swayze is Pecos Bill, and this movie, unironically, is the version of American idealism I choose to believe in. Tall Tale (1995) is a lightweight family adventure that uses classic American heroes like John Henry (Roger Aaron Brown) and Paul Bunyan (a diabolically miscast Oliver Platt). I give a lot of points for the innocent concept and its heart being in the right place, but I cannot in good conscience say this is good.
In a high concept sci-fi adventure horror comedy where Dennis Quaid is a saxophone playing, horse track junkie who gets recruited to save the president of the United States by entering his dream world and facing off against nightmare imagery and the bad guy from Warriors, Christopher Plummer not blinking remains the most impressive aspect. Dreamscape (1984).
WHAT JUST HAPPENED?
We watched The Astrologer (1975) aka Suicide Cult, directed by James Glickenhaus. But it was an accident. We were trying to watch The Astrologer (1976), directed by Craig Denney. The Astrologer is supposed to be super bad and weird. The Astrologer turned out to be too. But The Astrologer, I think, is supposed to be the weirder and funnier one between itself and The Astrologer. We’ll try to find The Astrologer next time. In the meanwhile, The Astrologer was also pretty bad and weird.
Look, The Mummy Theme Park (2000) is another movie that is barely a movie, but I actually gotta give them some credit for their in-camera tricks to make rooms look bigger. What can I say? I’m a sucker for model work.
Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (1973) doesn’t make much sense, and it looks like a very stinky sort of place, but using a nasty old amusement park as your horror backdrop is always fun. Feels like a weird dream. A weird, stinky, yucky dream. I especially liked when the dad blows up his RV (offscreen) and afterwards it’s just a boxspring and few pieces of wood somehow.
Charles Band’s Blood Dolls (1999) is an intriguing one. In a movie that has an insane billionaire with a cartoonishly tiny head, a spiritualist clown butler, an eye-patched dwarf in a tuxedo, and a gaggle of caged punk rock chicks who provide the diegetic soundtrack, and a plot revolving around the nature of power and love, the eponymous blood dolls are the least weird and least interesting thing here. It’s wild and insane. Not sure who this is for. But it swings for the bleachers, and you gotta respect that.
SOMEHOW COMPELLING
There’s no surprise Blood Tide (1982) isn’t fondly remembered. It’s a very slow creature-feature that has only 4 seconds of creature in it. BUT, it does have James Earl Jones absolutely chewing this movie apart and adding so much gravitas, ethos, and subtext to the script and characters (both his own and others whom he endows with backstory through his totally off-book performance). Jones is killing it. He’s drunk and in Greece shooting a B-movie, and he’s having a blast acting everyone under the table. He is utterly beguiling, and the fact that the movie itself doesn’t seem to grasp that is a tragedy. Who this movie chooses as its protagonists is deeply misguided.
Lila Kedrova, another treasured veteran thespian, is also bringing a lot to a nothing, throwaway role. Her scenes with the completely wooden (but lovely) Deborah Shelton are actually laugh-out-loud hilarious. Lila is doing great work with a role that required nothing, while Deborah is just a cinder block. You get whiplash watching them together.
Anyway. Not a good movie. Almost no monster and pretty stupid. But cool location, and recommended just to see a true craftsman like James Earl Jones bring so much cosmic life and energy to a film that simply does not deserve it. Lila Kedrova too, though she’s not in it much.
A John Carpenter movie about the end of the world featuring Victor Wong, Donald Pleasence, and Alice Cooper really ought be better than Prince of Darkness (1987). It has some cool visuals speckled throughout, but it squanders a neat premise and just feels a little too slow and devoid of compelling characters.
Cat People (1982) is a super horny and incestuous spin on werewolfism from the twisted mind of an Episcopalian. It’s weird and yucky and, despite kind of disliking it, I think I sort of respect it(?). That arm getting ripped off death was genuinely shocking. Couldn’t shake it for awhile. Wished it had like 30% more were-cat transformations and cat antics and like 80% less incest, but them’s the breaks. Paul Schrader, you little weirdo.
Fatal Deviation (1998) is a homemade Irish kung-fu flick that’s pretty lo-fi and silly, but there’s an earnestness that’s hard not to like. A man (James P. Bennett) returns home to find out who killed his father. Bad filmmaking, poor writing, and sick karate kicks ensue. Unlike a lot of bad movies that are fun to watch for their misplaced hubris, Fatal Deviation is more just watching a few good old boys having a bit of fun in their hometown. In that regard, it’s closer to Wakaliwood than Wiseau. This movie comes from a pure love of the genre it’s homaging, and less of an arrogant display of ineptitude.
THE MIDDLE BIT
Gilda (1946) is your boilerplate classic noir. There’s a lot in here that had been done better already in other films, but Rita Hayworth is having some fun.
Who has even heard of Carl Reiner’s erotic thriller spoof, Fatal Instinct (1993)? Armand Assante not getting to become another Leslie Nielson is a bit of a tragedy. Sean Young also gets it. She’s great. It’s no Naked Gun, but it’s that same comedy wheelhouse and there are a few sight gags that really got me.
Watched this one for Boris Karloff, who gives a great performance. Isle of the Dead (1945) is perhaps novel for the time as it centers around the horror of disease, death, and the susceptibility of the mind to superstition.
We finished rewatching the Alien Quadrilogy! There are no more Alien movies. None. Don’t worry about it. Given the seemingly limited new places the franchise was willing to go, making it sillier and grosser was at least a choice. Alien Resurrection (1997) is steeped in 90s French cinéma du look style (thanks to City of Lost Children director Jean-Pierre Jeunet at the helm now) and reeks of 90s meta snark (thanks to Joss Whedon’s script). It’s a mixed bag; more watchable and fun than Alien 3, and that’s something! Taken on its own as just a goopy science-fiction thriller with the odd touch of humor and Ron Perlman, it’s actually pretty solid. Forget about those first two movies. Those are long gone. This is 1997 now. And I know it’s controversial, but I think the new xenomorph design they went with for the end is effectively scary and weird. Good monster.
The Appointment (1981) is a British film that boldly asks: what if you were a middle-aged English man and you were possibly attracted to your teenage daughter but then you had to give evidence for an inquest to defend your firm on the same day as your daughter’s violin recital, and also three years earlier another random girl was sucked into a garden and police built a fence rather than solve the crime, and NOW you and your wife are having the same dream that rottweilers keep appearing and causing you to crash your car? What if that though? Like but what would you do? Anyway, this movie is a puzzlingly banal family drama that culminates in a truly spectacular car accident sequence. I may not really get the point, but I appreciate that this much time was devoted to such an odd project.
Yes, that is a bloodied Kyle MacLachlan with a flame-thrower. The Hidden (1987) is a classic detective thriller, but the killer is an adrenaline junkie space slug that hops from one human host to another. There are some things I would have liked to have been done differently, but I can’t fault a movie this direct and earnest. I wish the whole movie was William Boyett just stealing cars, eating steak, and taping up his body.
Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig return to the Knives Out world with Glass Onion (2022). It’s a fun, star-studded, twisty-turny, Agatha Christie-styled whodunnit. My only real beef is that it’s hard to outdo the surprise delight of the first movie or seeing that world through the eyes of Ana de Armas’ character. But, as someone who loves a classic detective story, it definitely scratches an itch.
PEEKING
I dig Andrew Callaghan and most of what Channel 5 (previously All Gas No Brakes) does. This Place Rules (2022) is their consolidation of the cultural vibes at play in America leading up to the January 6th attack. I may prefer their shorter YouTube interviews and minidocs, but this documentary does have enough going for it to make it well worth a look. It doesn’t cover new ground, but rather more intimately treads familiar territory in a more brutal and humanizing way.
If you ever wanted to see Guillermo del Toro’s monster-y aesthetic rendered in glorious stop-motion animation (and who wouldn’t?), Pinocchio (2022) is here. Co-directed by Mark Gustafson, this retelling sort of shifts the tale to be about fascism, death, and the importance of disobedience. I may have a few gripes with pieces of it, but on the whole it’s wonderful to see such a richly realized and original take on a classic.
Some might have watched Wendell and Wild (2022) for Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key as the eponymous demons. I love Key and Peele. But I watched this for Henry Selick’s twisted animation. Selick’s animation team is really pushing the limits of the medium. Astoundingly good character design and sumptuous worlds wondrously realized. The story is also pretty dense (perhaps scattershot even) and full of ideas with a lot to say.
Weird: the Al Yankovic Story (2022) is the biopic Weird Al Yankovic deserves. It captures that sense of irony and goofiness abundant in his songs, and Daniel Radcliffe’s performance is absolutely heroic. Magnificent.
I respect how unabashedly unromantic this film is. Swept Away (1974) is brilliant, but also a very hard watch. The classic set up of a spoiled bourgeois girl and a beleaguered communist sailor getting stranded on a desert island is ripe for wacky rom-com hijinks. Lina Wertmüller’s film is decidedly a much more nasty depiction of hypocritical class warfare as it gets consumed by latent retrograde gender politics…that are also ultimately stupid, abusive, and doomed. The comedy is supremely dark and steeped in things that are perhaps too real to truly laugh at. It can be, at times, uncomfortable. But that’s kind of it, isn’t it? Life is a mess and everyone is hypocritical and deeper than you think. I’ll recommend Seven Beauties over this one for folks interested in Wertmüller.
HIGHER GROUND
Legendary kaiju director, Ishirō Honda, works on a smaller scale for Matango (1963), aka Attack of the Mushroom People. It’s a shipwreck survival story that employs interesting fungal props
Chef (2014) is what happens when you make Jon Favreau direct too many big budget studio blockbusters. This is his best, and one of his smallest. It dares to ask the question: why are you doing what you are doing? What does the art really mean to you? What is important in life? It’s a wonderfully positive story about doing what you love, learning from your mistakes, and drooling over food porn.
Several European women get kidnapped by a female Mongolian chieftain and just kind of hang around with them and observe their lives. What starts out as a stagey, gay variety show on a train eventually shifts almost into a documentary about life on the steppe. Ulrike Ottinger’s Joan of Arc of Mongolia (1989) is long and odd and has its own energy and style, but if you get on board, it will take you to places movies don’t often go. Ottinger’s films are definitely unique, and I’m interested in exploring more.
Wolf’s Hole (1987) is an odd little Czech riff on teen horror movies. Directed by Věra Chytilová (Daisies), it follows several high schoolers as they go to a mysteriously isolated ski camp run by a guy (Miroslav Macháček) who is clearly up to something. Although a little slow and misleading, it had a really compelling mood and solid kid performances. There is a sense of dread and unease that never lets up, and, while I might have liked a more spectacular ending, it was a cool subversion and ultimately more hopeful and optimistic than a lot of American slashers. Maybe because it’s actually about living under Soviet occupation and not shocking kills. An interesting, moody curiosity. More snow horror, please.
Here’s the other Paul Katturpalli movie. Clash in the College (2011) is the kind of incoherent garbage that we love around here. Recommend. So what is it? One passive Indian man’s seemingly detached interpretation of American ideological differences and the drama that can come out of that. Somehow the sound and editing remain the most egregious. Anyways, all the stars.
Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s Party Girl (1995) might as well be called “Parker Posey: the Movie”, because Parker absolutely makes this. She plays Mary, a loosey-goosey rave chick who winds up working at her godmother’s library and must learn how to turn her life around. It’s a breezy setup, but the wacky 90s indie style really hit the right combination of nostalgia buttons. Shot in two and half weeks on a budget of $150,000, it’s a reminder of what indie films can accomplish. Daisy’s mother, Sasha von Scherler, also gives a very nice performance as the tough but caring godmother.
THE COOLEST STUFF
Needs more Barabra Steele! That being said, Mario Bava’s first movie, Black Sunday (1960), is a pretty richly atmospheric gothic horror with plenty of stark, spooky shadows, an awesome castle setting, and a truly horrific prelude. Still needed more Barbara Steele.
It’s a simple, little tale about friends breaking up, but also it’s about The Troubles, and even more it’s director Martin McDonagh returning to Ireland and taking Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson with him. The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) is one of them gently sad and funny yarns (i.e. very Irish). It’s gorgeously shot and very well acted and made me feel sick. I love McDonagh’s rough and snarky hitman/crime movies, but there’s a steadier hand here that trusts the audience a bit more to go along for a little ride. Kerry Condon maybe steals the show with her handful of scenes. It’s not exactly Fatal Deviation, but ah, it hits me in me heart, it does.
Elem Klimov’s harrowing Soviet anti-war film, Come and See (1985), has gotten a lot of attention in recent years among certain extremely online cinephiles. I had put it off so far because I knew it would be heavy and couldn’t find anyone to watch it with. The story concerns Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko), a young Belarusian boy with wide-eyed aspirations of leaving his podunk hamlet and attaining glory and adventure on the battlefront. War is not glorious. War is not an adventure. War is hell. War is the worst of humanity. The film chronicles the grisly horrors or war through the terrifyingly evolving visage of Flyora. You watch as innocence leaves him. You watch as he becomes things he never dreamed of. You watch as he becomes a shell. Heartbreaking, soul-crushing images abound, yet the film never takes us into a single battle. These are only the skirmishes and small interactions on the far outskirts of greater and much more terrible battles taking place elsewhere. It’s a masterpiece.
Hands down, Frank Henenlotter’s best film. It has to be. Brain Damage (1988) is a grungy, gross science-fiction horror-comedy about an ancient, silver-tongued, brain-eating space parasite and symbiote who manipulates his human hosts to get the delicious brains he craves. But the whole schlocky veneer is really just goopy subterfuge for a fascinating and humanizing allegory for addiction. It’s fast, clever, slimy, and if you’re like me and you enjoyed Basket Case and Frankenhooker, treat yourself to this mad magnum opus. Henenlotter brings an intelligence to schlock that is rare and I daresay artful. Perhaps that’s the most subversive thing of all.
This Won't Be For Everyone 