Movies movies movies. I’m not addicted. YOU’RE addicted.
Chuck Vincent’s Warrior Queen (1987) stars Sybil Danning as a noblewoman in ancient Pompeii wandering from one curtains and balsa wood set to another until Vesuvius erupts. What could have been (and should have been) a Titanic-esque ticking time bomb of Roman intrigue and feminism-tinged political drama building until historical inevitability, ultimately sidesteps all this potential for more lascivious ambitions. What’s a handier Deus ex machina than a volcano erupting? Give us tension. Give us prophecy. Instead, the film just sort drifts shapelessly between gratuitous rape scenes and pilfered footage from other movies. Also stars an especially yucky Donald Pleasence.
🎃 A crazed cartoonist unleashes true evil when it turns out his inked artwork brings ghouls to life! It’s a premise that’s been done, but, as a cartoonist myself, it’s one I can get behind. Cellar Dweller (1987) squanders its concept, in part, by killing off reliable horror mainstay Jeffrey Combs in the first two minutes and leaving us with the much less engaging or likeable Debrah Farentino as the new plucky cartoonist. The monster is rather lazy and doesn’t do much beyond nonchalantly chewing. The art school setting could have been nice (Munsters star Yvonne De Carlo plays the cartoon-hating Mrs. Briggs, who runs the retreat). Alas, a mostly boring and witless nothing of a flick, but the fiery finale was so silly and incomprehensible that it became pretty funny.
Leslie Nielsen’s entire career trajectory changed after 1980’s Airplane. The serious actor had amazing comedy chops. The Naked Gun series, would be his highlights. After that, you get weaker flicks like Wrongfully Accused, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, and Spy Hard (1996). I watched all these on TV as a kid because Leslie Nielsen’s deadpan idiot character was funny, even if the movies weren’t great. Spy Hard has a lot of gags, and maybe 10% of them work (and most of that is owed to Weird Al Yankovic’s Bond-style song at the start of the movie). I can handle bad jokes you can see coming a mile away and hot bimbos being hot, but to me it’s just depressing to see old guys like Andy Griffith, Charles Durning, and Barry Bostwick giving career-worst performances, and simply unable to rise to Nielsen’s comic level. Spy Hard is a weird hybrid of feeling lazy while also being exhausting for how much it throws at you (but ultimately unsatisfying with how little sticks). You’ll get your fix for Ray Charles, Hulk Hogan, and Fabio cameos, I guess.
The plot to Xanadu (1980) is something. An artist (Michael Beck), whose job is to repaint existing posters exactly but bigger, gets fed up because he wants to be a real artist. He quits his job, but also hates making stuff by himself. But his lack of inspiration causes several muses to pop out of some graffiti (the main muse played by Olivia Newton-John). Instead of inspiring the artist, she just kind of rollerskates around, and he becomes obsessed with her and wants to bang her. Enter 68-year old Gene Kelly as some sort of retired clarinet millionaire. The artist tells him he should open the club he’s always wanted to, and they decide to make it an upsetting combination of a 1940s big band dance theater and 1980s rock and roll club. Still not sure where the muse fits into any of this. The club Gene Kelly opens at the end makes no sense and is scary actually.
Oh, and it’s also a musical. Written by Electric Light Orchestra. Don’t get too excited. There’s way more rollerskating than singing.
🎃 Stephen King’s directorical outing owes a lot to his muse: cocaine. Maximum Overdrive (1986) asks us to imagine a world where cars come to life and want to kill us sometimes. OK. Done. What now? Well, now you have to contend with being stuck in a gas station with a completely devoid-of-charisma Emilio Estevez. But fret not! What Estevez lacks here in charisma, he more than makes up for in being sweaty. Maximum Overdrive has some fun car stuff at times, but is such an aggressively brainless movie that it’s actually impressive that it is watchable at all.
What a weird movie. Fun and Fancy Free (1947) is an anthology with only two stories, and multiple narrators with multiple bookend schticks. It starts out as a tale told by Jiminy Cricket (who has apparently been alive since the 1880s when Pinocchio takes place). He tells the story of a circus bear named Bongo who returns to the forest. Not really into the story of Bongo or the apocryphal bear lore of romantic slapping, but it’s nicely animated and fine.
Then it shifts narrator perspectives when Jiminy reads a little girl’s mail (illegal, by the way) and decides to secrety crash her party across the street (not cool, Jiminy). The party is creepy as hell. It’s a live action segment where radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his puppets, the snarky Charlie McCarthy and mentally challenged Mortimer Snerd, are entertaining the child actor Luana Patten. Jiminy Cricket doesn’t really do much beyond touch their food and listen to the story. Call the police, Jiminy. Luana was invited to a puppet man’s house at night without a legal guardian. This is not normal.
Mickey and the Beanstalk is far from my favorite Mickey cartoons, but it has a psychotically unhinged Donald Duck and that’s always funny. I also appreciate the grander scope of this tight adventure. Really not digging Walt Disney’s voicing of Mickey here. Missing that youthful spunk. I like the harp’s song and the vine growing sequence and Donald’s manic freakout where he tries to murder a cow with an axe. Good stuff.
For me the real irksome thing is the Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy stuff interrupting Mickey and the Beanstalk. I’ve never really liked Bergen and McCarthy (they ruin W.C. Fields’ You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man for me)
Here’s where I had to do a bit of research. I remember watching the Mickey and the Beanstalk segment on a VHS taped off of TV as a kid. It was narrated not by Bergen, but by Sterling Holloway (Kaa, Winnie the Pooh, the Cheshire Cat, etc.). This version makes a few edits. I also recall another version narrated by Ludwig von Drake (maybe my favorite minor Disney character), which makes a few different edits. I like Holloway’s cozy read, and there’s something anachronistically charming about the von Drake stuff (animated and recorded a few decades after the original short). Then I discover there is yet ANOTHER version of the Mickey and the Beanstalk narration. With Shari Lewis and Lambchop! I guess they wanted to stick with the original ventriloquism vibe. I have not seen it, but would like to find it.
Miracles (1989) is apparently Jackie Chan’s favorite film he’s done. And I can understand why. It’s got some great period costumes, gangster shootouts, excellently choreographed action fight scenes, and Anita Mui. But not enough. It’s more of a cheeky comedy melodrama than a straight action movie. I love a good Jackie Chan flick, and the fights that are present are great, but I guess we just weren’t in the mood for a farce. Give us more action. Or at least a few more songs.
🎃 In The Addiction (1995) Abel Ferrara uses vampires as a metaphor for heroine addiction and also as a metaphor for losing faith in this slowburn drama that serves mainly as a place for Ferrara to plug in all of his favorite quotes and concepts from an Intro to Philosophy course. There’s some good stuff in here, but it’s weighed down by how overwrought and philosophically eloquent everyone is about everything at all times. Also, the constant images of real world death are a bit much. I get it. Mankind is the real vampire. Or something. Lily Taylor, as a grad student who is becoming a vampire (aka a heroine addict, aka an annoying 13 year old atheist), will be waxing philosophical and then BAM. We hard cut to piles of real corpses in Vietnam and Holocaust. And stay on them for a long time.
Perhaps a bit too soaked in Catholic guilt for some, but I do sort of admire Ferrara working out his demons so nakedly. Also, nobody hams up a scene like Christopher Walken when he wants to.
I love Bob Hoskins as well as peeks into Roma culture (although Emir Kusturica is the real filmmaker to check out for that). I watched The Raggedy Rawney (1988) because it’s one of the few movies Bob Hoskins directed. It’s a wartime drama about a young boy (Dexter Fletcher) who runs away from the army, poses as an insane witch woman (a “raggedy rawney”), and fenagles his way into a gypsy camp. I wish we got a little more more into the head of the titular character. He’s the character the movie keeps at the furthest distance. The drama is good, Bob Hoskins’ mustache is luscious, it’s got some solid actors doing good work (Zoë Wanamaker, Zoë Natheson, and Ian McNiece), and a moving finale.
It is sensitive mode Hoskins, and I wonder why he wanted to tell this particular story. It’s good, but don’t expect a Long Good Friday or Mona Lisa type of mad dog performance from the guy.
So much of 70s Australian cinema is just warning people not to go. “We’re weirdos here, mate. Real sickos,” they told us. Everthing’s dusty and hot and distant and the folks in the smaller towns, well, they’re all mad. The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) is an early Peter Weir movie about a small community with an economy that requires car accidents to function. It’s not as fast-paced or exciting as Mad Max or as intense as Wake In Fright, but it does operate on a similarly weird wavelength. Most of the runtime is about a car crash survivor being informally adopted by the mayor (John Meillon), which is not particularly interesting. It’s a slow wind up to the wild car finale.
🎃 Slasher films full of too many hot, buxom, young, horny teens for ya? Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981) has got you covered. This story’s murder victims are all fat, middle-aged, male farmers who hate people with mental struggles. For a TV movie in a genre loaded with stereotypical lackluster entries, this one is pretty solid. A basic setup, some great performances (Charles Durning, I’m lookin’ at you), and some creatively horrific deaths involving farm equipment. Admittedly, Darkman‘s Larry Drake appearing as a “Simple Jack” type threw me off, but I soon recovered.
Ryan’s Babe (2000) is what we wait for. It’s a classically bad movie that is just as puzzling as it is incompetant. I assume this is just how all Saskatoonians see the world. Anyway, it’s a must-watch and any description I could give won’t do it justice.
Neil Breen is back, and we were lucky enough to finally see one in theaters! Cade: The Tortured Crossing (2023), shot completely on greenscreen, was a special treat, but perhaps a note of diminishing returns… And our first moments of doubt. But perhaps that doubt is more in ourselves than in Breen.
If, in years to come, it is revealed that Neil Breen, as a man, is a hoax – that the entity that is Breen is all merely an elaborate performance art piece and the films are just one of the many extensions of this performance dreamed up by a team of Breen engineers (Breengineers, if you will), but have taken a life of their own, perhaps even beyond their initial intentions – I would not be mad.
Whether Breen is exactly who he appears to be, whether he is an avant-garde experiment, whether he is a flawed but ever evolving entrepreneur grasping vaguely at what people love about him and tapping into waves of self-awareness, I truly do not care. If it is a trick, it is a great one. If it is all real, as I continue to humbly suspect, perhaps an even greater one.
🎃 Cults and murder and Halloween. It’s Jag Mundhra’s Hack-O-Lantern (1988)! A somewhat infamously bad movie with a title that says precious nothing. It’s dumb fun that, if you’re in the mood, will surely scratch a trashy Halloween-y itch or two.
Now I am become old, the gets tired watching a superhero movie. I absolutely loved 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It was fresh and fast and so imaginative and gorgeous. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) is no less technically impressive and smart, but I feel like I aged 10 years watching it. It’s a great movie with loads of astounding visuals, dizzying action scenes, sharp wit, and a nice arc for Gwen Stacy’s character. But after a time, it was just too fast and furious for me and I needed a nap. Maybe it’s a masterpiece every bit as good as the previous film. All I know is I felt exhausted.
🎃 The Black Cat (1934) marked the first (but not the last) time Universal monster icons Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff would star in a movie together. It was only natural for the studios to pit Dracula against Frankentstein (the two most popular horror movies of 1931). Lugosi is a Hungarian (how appropos) psychiatrist who survives a taxi wagon accident along with a newlywed couple and winds up at the futuristic mansion of the Satanist (Karloff) who killed his wife.
Extremely, loosely “suggested by” Edgar Allen Poe, this classic horror melodrama is decent enough for the time, but suffers from a clinical location (gimme a spooky castle over this pristine, sterile house), a plodding plot, and the fact that Lugosi and Karloff, while amazing in their own rights, are kind of weird together. Their acting styles and powerful personas clash, and not in a way that services the story. Something just feels off about their chemistry. Still, I love both these men and it’s always fun seeing them.
🎃 Teruo Ishii’s Horrors of Malformed Men (1969) is a bit of blur to me now. I was tripping balls on cold medicine at the time. But that actually seems like the perfect headspace to enter this strange Japanese horror movie. I knew nothing about it going in, except that the cover art intrigued me. Sometimes you gotta trust your instincts. Malformed Men has some trashy twists and turns and some weird, culty body-horror type surgeries, but it’s a gradual windup. You gotta be patient.
🎃 We had a time trying to guess which character was played by actor/writer/director/producer James Bond III. Depending on who we thought at any given moment, it drastically altered the overall tone and flavor of where this weird story was coming from. About 35 minutes in we confirmed who James Bond III was. Def by Temptation (1990) is a moralistic urban horror about a succubus that tempts people astray. It’s hard to score this one exactly as it’s a bit scattershot, but we definitely liked a lot of individual scenes. And what is a good movie if not a collection of pretty good scenes?
🎃 Romero meets the Ramones! Zombies are attacking and only Japanese rock group Guitar Wolf (…and overcoming transphobia) can the world be saved in Tetsuro Takeuchi’s Wild Zero (1999). It’s wild and wacky, and would make an excellent double-feature with 1998’s Bio-Zombie.
🎃 Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture (1991) is a super weird movie that’s gonna be hard to dissect in a blurb. It takes a specific brand of American Christian eschatology and treats it completely soberly, crafting a psychological slow-burn horror flick through the lens of that theology. It’s about doubt and faith and fanaticism and probably a whole lot more. It’s low-key, but also harrowing. Tolkin said while inroducing the film for Trailers from Hell that people came away from the movie in 1991 either happy it portrayed religion as true or happy it portrayed it as false, or angry about either of those two reads. Essentially, interpretations are numerous.
Mimi Rogers plays Sharon, an atheist call center employee and swinger who finds God and embarks on an apocalyptic journey that challenges her new faith at every turn. It is a provocative film for a lot of reasons, and I definitely had a lot of feelings about it while it was unfolding. Having grown up with evangelicalism (and having been shown the pre-Left Behind series, Thief in the Night and its sequels), the movie truly felt like a sermon I had heard many times before – but it was different this time. It was not the fantastical Christian Twilight Zone-esque cautionary tale. At least, not exactly. Tolkin doesn’t believe any of this stuff. His rather matter-of-fact presentation of the events doesn’t pass judgement on any of the characters. It lets things happen and leaves the moral determinations and the reality of it all up to the audience.
Weird this was even made. Also stars David Duchovny. Would pair well with Bill Paxton’s Frailty. True as it ever was, no one does Christian movies quite like a non-Christian.
What a cozy, silly man Steve Martin is. LA Story (1991) is a very personal and gentle romantic comedy with touches of surreal humor and magical realism. A weatherman (Martin) starts to receive messages from a freeway billboard that helps him win the affections of an English journalist (Victoria Tennant). It’s sweet and is about fate and love and Los Angeles and, it would seem, one of the closer peeks into Steve Martin’s head.
🎃 Finally saw David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979). I don’t want to give much away, but I will say that, like a lot of early Cronenberg movies, it starts as a strange, slow quasi-mystery; depicts Canada as a perpetually slushy and overcast dystopic snowmare* [*nightmare but with snow]; and gets wildly, weirdly gross once you start figuring out what’s going on.
For me, what elevates this above Shivers and Rabid, is the star power of Oliver Reed. Cronenberg starts putting actors with more gravitas in his movies (Michael Ironside, James Woods, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Walken, Jeremy Irons, etc.), and, for me, it really adds to the film. I love Cronenberg’s bizarro body-horror concepts and themes on identity, but inserting a more captivating actor into the story really sucks you in more. What can I say? I’m an actor boy. The Brood does start slow and cryptic, but once you get to the third act, it’s pretty hard to say the ride wasn’t worth it.
🎃 Thirteen Women (1932), directed by George Archainbaud, is an estrogen-fueled, pre-Code, proto-slasher flick and it rules. The sinister magic at work isn’t a masked killer with a knife, but merely the power of suggestion…which appears to work murderously well on the poor, horoscope-obsessed victims. Someone is killing women! And in surprisingly creative and grisly ways for a movie made in 1932.
It is a bit “has aged poorly” in a few key aspects. Myrna Loy plays an evil Indonesian swami who was the victim of cruel racism in her school days. Naturally, she’s a supervillain now. For some reason, Hollywood kept casting Myrna Loy as an Asian woman in this part of her career. Thank God she eventually moved from Fu Manchu to The Thin Man. She’s actually a much better comic actor than a dragon lady trope.
The movie does highlight a deep flaw within astrology (that I imagine even subscribers of would undoubtedly admit), and that is the pliable susceptibility of the mind. If you are looking for something, you will almost certainly find it, whether it is there or not. I’ve never seen astrology used as a murder weapon before, and it’s pretty intriguing how Thirteen Women employs it. Although, this is less of a Derren Brown exposé of superstition, and more a cheap, pulpy thriller. It even has a train in it.
Quentin Tarantino, love him or hate him, hasn’t made a bad movie. Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) is a sharp homage to many of the movies that made him. Uma Thurman is the bride out for revenge, hacking her way through Vivica A. Fox, Chiaki Kuriyama, Lucy Liu, and every last member of the Crazy 88 to get to the man who done her wrong: Bill. It’s a fast, pulpy, hyper-violent revenge thriller streamlined to its essentials so that the movie can focus on delivering stylish visuals inspired by wild retro flicks. Cue the 5, 6, 7, 8’s!
Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor (2000) is a Swedish tragicomedy played out in numerous vignettes that occasionally overlap. The humor is pitch black and quite haunting. It examines the cruelty and banality of modern life in Sweden, and how it is tainted by the crimes of the past and the uncertainty of the future, but all at an arm’s length, almost as if it all were being presented as an especially grim (and rather Scandinavian) Far Side cartoon. It marks the beginning of Andersson’s trilogy of similarly styled features which include You, the Living (2007) (which is quite good) and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014) (I need to see it).
🎃 I think I’m obsessed with David Robert Mitchell now. I absolutely loved the criminally underseen neo-noir Under the Silver Lake, and I was quite taken by his earlier horror film It Follows (2014) which I have now seen.
For a supernatural horror like this to work it needs: 1. an intriguing monster, 2. clear rules, 3. let the discovery of those rules unfold a bit like a mystery. Check, check, and check. I’m just a sucker for monsters and their rules. To make it great it needs: 1. clever concept couched in a topical metaphor, 2. great cinematography, 3. Disasterpeace does the soundtrack. Triple check again.
Apparently Mitchell is currently working on some sort of “dinosaur movie set in the 80s” starring Oscar Isaac and Anne Hathaway. Please, let this movie be made. I need this.
While I really like Kill Bill Vol. 1, I love Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004). Uma’s back and going after Michael Madsen, Darryl Hannah, and ultimately David Carradine. This sequel tones things down and slows things down and morphs into a very different kind of movie. While the first movie had a comically high body count, this time the Bride ultimately takes only one life. It’s a more pensive movie, with more consequences, more tragic backstory, and more lugubrious soliloquoys. I don’t know if anyone has ever had more fun telling a story than Tarantino. The inevitable violence is teased out, but has more power and weight to it. If Vol. 1 was an 70s exploitation movie steeped in old school Japanese revenge flicks (Lady Snowblood, for one) that would work just as well as a silent film, Vol. 2 is a talky, slowburn western peppered with nods to classic Chinese kung-fu. Together, they are a fantastic showcase of the power of various cinematic styles and how those styles inform the telling of a story, even one so simple as a basic revenge plot.
🎃 Jerzy Skolimowski The Shout (1978) tickled me in ways that I find quite easy to pinpoint. Listen, my review of this is probably beyond rational. This a genre I love: weird guy insinuates himself into normal man’s life and cucks the bejeezus out of him – think Cul-de-sac, Bone, Borgman, What About Bob?, etc. And it’s from a time when cinematic protagonists had hyper specific, unusual jobs. In this case, John Hurt plays an experimental electronic composer. I love those details.
A mysterious man (Alan Bates) claims to have learned dark Aboriginal magick. There is a scream that can be uttered that can kill a man. Is it true or merely the rich braggadocio of a lunatic? Or perhaps he is not insane, but merely exceptionally manipulative. Or again, is it real? What does he want?
Skolimowski’s direction is bonkers from the start. Lots of bold and bizarre choices that suck you in and thrash you around. The sound design as well is very intentional and great. John Hurt and Susannah York are well cast, but the real reason this movie is so beguiling and strange is because of Alan Bates’ dangerous, unhinged performance. He keeps you on the edge of your seat and surprises you at every turn.
Happy Halloween 🎃
This Won't Be For Everyone 