I watched 9 movies last week:

Copyright HAG ©2009

• Roger Ebert called The Life of Oharu “the saddest film I have ever seen about the life of a woman.” And he isn’t wrong. The movie arguably lays that sadness on a little strong, visits a melodramatic amount of suffering on Kinuyo Tanaka’s Oharu, but as Ebert notes, it’s “all told as a sad memory of fate,” and is incredibly affecting because of that.
• There is a sort of confused dreaminess to Roger Corman’s The Terror that isn’t uninteresting, but that’s probably just an artifact of its incredibly stitched-together production. It started out as a movie to be made in two days. It eventually took nine months and only feels like a movie made in a weekend.
• Not everything about Omen works, much less works together, but it’s bold and exciting filmmaking telling stories I haven’t seen before.

• Brian Tallerico argued that Little Woods “could have been a truly great movie” if only it “had trusted its two leading ladies just a little bit more.” It’s a strong enough debut film, but with performances that are even stronger.
• I’d heard History of the Occult described as the movie that Late Night With the Devil was trying to be. I do think this earlier Argentinian version plays with the similar format in more interesting ways, and does a lot more than just get the period detail right, but I’m not sure it’s a better (or worse) movie because of it.
• The Woman in Cabin 10 is a passable suspense thriller, at best. Keira Knightley is good, but she deserves a lot better, as does the audience.

• The Creeping Flesh describes itself as “More frightening than Frankenstein! More dreaded than Dracula!” Which is, of course, not even close to being true. It’s an interesting, well-acted, but muddled and slightly cheap-looking horror diversion.
• Call Northside 777 is surprisingly compelling for a movie that’s just Jimmy Stewart’s newspaper reporter following up leads on a cold case.
• He is, it has to be said, a very Good Boy. Of course, the movie around him isn’t perfect. Its story and characters are thin, and it doesn’t resolve in anything like a satisfying way—though, spoiler warning, the thing you’re maybe worried about happening doesn’t happen—but it’s a clever and effectively scary experiment in perspective. And Indy the dog is, no lie, absolutely incredible.

I also rewatched The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which I think I liked a lot more on this second viewing. Of the six vignettes, I think my favorites are “The Gal Who Got Rattled” and “Meal Ticket,” but there’s a case to be made for all of them.

I watched 6 movies last week:

• There’s a lot of swordplay in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers, but not a lot of fun. The movie isn’t entirely charmless—there are hints of sly performances all around—but the plot is meandering, and the characters are drawn so thin it’s a wonder they don’t jus shred entirely each time one of those swords lands.
• Red Sonja is a vast improvement over the 1985 version, but it’s still not very good. The script is clunky, and the effects are weak—the movie at every turn straining against its obviously low budget and looking like a cheaply produced TV pilot. Which is kind of a shame, because most of the acting is actually not bad, and there’s a potentially interesting story buried beneath all the clanging swords and chainmail.
• There’s a little of the “bury your gays” trope running through The History of Sound, which is maybe unfortunate, but I don’t think works against the film too much, and to its credit isn’t its focus so much as the beautiful, patient, and tenderly acted love story at the center of the film.

• Your mileage may vary with Grace of My Heart, depending on what you think of the songs—which to me, with maybe just one or two exceptions, are just fine, but rarely the equal of the songs from the eras which they’re emulating. And while I think the performances are all good, even when the characters they’re in service of border on parody, the movie simply throws too much at you, tries to span so many decades of popular music, that no stories or characters ever feel in any way developed.
• Terrence Stamp and Samantha Eggar are good in The Collector, but I’m also not sure there’s a lot more to say about the film than that.
• Brian Tallerico rightly points out that Eddington is designed to be divisive and provocative, adding that “even if you hate it, it’s kind of done its job.” And, well, fair enough, I suppose, and mission accomplished, because I really did not enjoy the movie. I can admire the skill with which it’s made, the strength of its performances, but in the end it felt like just an unpleasant, hollow, and even borderline irresponsible exercise.

I also re-watched The Goonies, which is just such an indelible childhood touchstone, and Galaxy of Terror…which is not. There’s a lot that’s really fun about the latter—the cast isn’t bad, Cameron’s production design is legitimately really good, and Corman was a genius at stretching a dollar—but ooh boy, there’s a lot that’s less than great about it. But yeah, of the two, I much prefer the former.

I watched 13 movies last week.

• I started the week with Ballad of a Small Player, which was mostly forgettable. Despite good performances, especially from the now always more than dependable Colin Farrell, the movie doesn’t really have a lot to say.
• And I ended the week with Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Here, too, I think the performances are the highlight—particularly Jacob Elordi as the Monster—but the film is also gorgeous enough that I’m a little disappointed I didn’t see it on a big screen.

In between, I watched 11 movies in the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes series. They made 14 films altogether, but I’d previously seen the first two (The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes), which were made before the rights were acquired by Universal, and for some reason I’d also seen the last (Dressed to Kill), so this was a full run of the series for me. They’re all mostly just okay, diverting and pleasantly short, and Rathbone and Bruce are both a lot of fun in the roles—even if the latter maybe overplays Watson as the bumbling buffoon—but not a one of them is really remarkable, or any great shakes as a mystery. The attempt to modernize Holmes and make him a foe of the Nazis—begun with Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, but largely abandoned in all but a few details a few films later after Sherlock Holmes in America—never really works. Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon was probably my favorite, while the hypnotism-heavy The Women in Green was easily my least favorite, a fun turn by Henry Daniell as Prof. Moriarty notwithstanding.

But they’re all kind of vaguely charming, even if none of them really stands out.

I also rewatched One Cut of the Dead, though, which is a whole lot of fun.

• The science and policework in Doctor X is a little hokey, but the movie sure does look great.
• A House of Dynamite does everything it sets out to do, and does it fairly well, it’s just kind of a shame it doesn’t try to do anything more. The movie is very tense but a little hollow.
• I think the NYT‘s Roger Greenspun summed And Soon the Darkness up well when he wrote, “Until the disappearance and for a while afterward everything goes very well toward building tension with understated effects. But eventually, by mere repetition, the understated effects begin to look like poverty of the imagination.”

Red Rooms is not what I would call an enjoyable film—as it stares long and hard into the abyss—but Juliette Gariépy’s inscrutably calculated performance is never short of riveting.

• The problem isn’t that I find Jim Varney’s schtick in Ernest Scared Stupid annoying, it’s that I don’t find it remotely funny.
• The Bat is a little silly, a little oddly convoluted, but Vincent Price is a lot of fun.
• Like a lot of good horror, Together does the very simple thing of taking a metaphor to its extreme and gory conclusion.

I also re-watched Doctor Sleep, though this time around the slightly longer director’s cut. I’m too far removed from my original watch of the theatrical cut to say if it’s any better, but it felt much the same: a lot that’s really good, particularly the performances, but also a rushed plot and a fetishizing of Kubrick’s Shining that for obvious reasons isn’t in King’s novel.

I watched another 6 movies last week:

• Who Can Kill a Child? is incredibly grim, and not remotely subtle—I could have, for instance, done without the extensive documentary footage of actual starving and dying children that opens the movie—but it’s also upsetting and haunting in equal measure.
• There’s a compelling idea at the heart of Parents, but the movie doesn’t know what to do with it. “Is it a satire, a black comedy, or just plain horror?” asked Roger Ebert. “The right note is never found, and so the movie’s scenes coexist uneasily with one another.”
• Not to spoil anything, but Come to Daddy goes off in much stranger directions, and much more quickly, than I was expecting. A lot of that strangeness seems only for its own sake, but the movie certainly wasn’t entirely what I was expecting.

• The Blob updates a classic, but actually kind of boring, 1950s classic with a creepy 1980s vibe. That doesn’t always work—these can feel less like characters than random names on a call-sheet—but there are a bunch of genuinely scary shots throughout.
• Altered States is very silly, but it takes itself seriously, which surprisingly very much works. “I can tell myself intellectually that this movie is a fiendishly constructed visual and verbal roller coaster,” wrote Roger Ebert, “a movie deliberately intended to overwhelm its audiences with sensual excess. I know all that, and yet I was overwhelmed, I was caught up in its headlong energy.”
• The Tingler is enjoyable camp, largely thanks to Vincent Price, which is good, because as an actual horror movie, it’s goofy and convoluted and not especially compelling.

I also rewatched Ghostwatch. I don’t know how real the movie actually seemed to UK television viewers on Halloween night in 1992, but the documentary feel and very slow build is quite effective.