I watched 5 movies last week:

• Never Let Me Go gets off to a slightly slow start, but it’s a lot fun when it settles into a (early Cold) war thriller, and the cast is very good, even if Gene Tierney arguably doesn’t get enough to do throughout.
• The Doctor and the Devils is mostly just a little boring—some good performances but probably at least one too many characters, and little to no humor.
• SCTV: The Greatest Show You’ve Never Heard Of doesn’t feel entirely dissimilar to a dozen other comedy documentaries Netflix has put together in recent years, but it’s nonetheless incredibly joyful and rewarding. As Richard Roeper writes: “This is a no-frills film, relying on those golden-old clips, the warm, witty, and insightful memories of comic giants, and the sharp observations of modern-day talents. That’s more than enough.”

• The Hidden Room, otherwise known as Obsession, is surprisingly bad. It’s a well shot, sometimes even tense, thriller, with some solid performances, but it’s built on such contrivances, with a plot’s so dumb but wants to convince you at every turn that it’s exceptionally clever—to the point that characters will often literally just say so.
• I’ll say this much for The Snow Demon: it’s probably as good as you can expect a movie this bad to be. Make no mistake, it’s awful, an absolute waste of an hour, as uninteresting as it was unscary, but it was semi-competently made, with an actor or two who are probably capable of better, which for this kind of no-budget affair is saying…well, not a lot, but something.

I also rewatched Lifeforce, which isn’t a very good movie, but is arguably an ambitiously weird bad movie.

For my spooky season sins, last week I watched several horror movies, leaning heavily towards horror anthology movies. It…didn’t go great…

• V/H/S/Beyond was obviously the most polished and modern-looking of the bunch, and yet I may have found it the least memorable. Of the five main stories, I think the last one, “Stowaway,” is maybe the strongest, but I think it’s actually the central found-footage conceit of the series that lets it down in the end, and doesn’t let the segment explore its own ideas or come together as cohesively as it might have otherwise.
• The Uncanny is just kind of dumb. The first segment is maybe the strongest, while the final has a hammy Donald Pleasance, but none of it is especially interesting, much less scary.
• Tales That Witness Madness isn’t remarkably bad, but neither is it remarkably good. There are a couple of very confusing segments—the weird time travel of “Penny Farthing,” for example—and a questionable, almost racist concluding one, and the movie as a whole largely squanders its game cast. But I’ve seen worse.

• Encounter with the Unknown is worse. The best the movie can boast is the ten minutes it convinced Rod Serling to devote to some voiceover. These are three very creaky tales not told particularly well on a shoestring budget, padded beyond all reason and particularly dull.
• Hallowarrior is not exactly a fun movie, which is a problem because sometimes it’s very much trying to be just that. It’s a weird mix of The Walking Dead, The Strangers, and Home Alone, and some of that mix works, thanks to a pretty good cast and a simple location, but not all of it does.
• Castle of Blood feels like it has a more complicated plot than it does. But it has a creepy, ghost-filled castle, and enough Italian Gothic horror to keep you entertained.

Luckily, I also rewatched Alien—which, y’know, never pass up an opportunity to do that—and the really fun Happy Death Day.

I watched 5 movies last week:

• Kundun doesn’t necessarily approach its story as a believer, and isn’t necessarily hagiography either—a fundamental belief of Tibetan Buddhism is that the Dalai Lama is a man, albeit the reincarnated spirit of the enlightened bodhisattva—but it is very much a lives of the saints portrait of that man and his biography, and as such keeps the audience very much at a distance. The movie is quiet and contemplative, often gorgeous and very well made, but it lacks the energy of so much of Scorsese’s other work, even his other religious movies.
• Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend had a well-documented troubled production, with test audiences demanding a bloodier horror movie than what Craven delivered, and then the studio demanding cuts when Craven made those changes. The result is an awkward mess. The plot holds together better than might be expected, with only a few spots of clearly missing characters or scenes, but it’s not a plot that’s handled particularly well, and which ends in just the most ridiculous way possible. I haven’t seen all of Craven’s movies, and the ones I have seen admittedly weren’t all perfect—they can’t all be Elm Street or Scream, right?—but I think I can safely say without fear that Deadly Friend is easily the worst one I’ve seen.
• “Sometimes you can feel the artistry in a movie that doesn’t work,” Matt Zoller Seitz wrote about Sacrifice, and boy howdy was he not wrong. It’s too weird and ambitious and stacked with talent to not be interesting, with some occasionally very funny or clever beats, but it never remotely works as a movie.
• You may be shocked to learn that a movie with a title like The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer is more than a little dated. The three leads—Grant, Loy, and Temple—are all charming, but it’s very much a movie stuck in late 1940s social norms and slang, and as such the comedy hasn’t aged quite so gracefully.
• How you feel about Anguish may depend on how clever you think its piled-on, nesting-doll meta narrative is. Personally, I found it almost immediately tiring, when it became apparent that was all the movie was going to do.

I also rewatched 4 movies:

• Silver Bullet: I liked it a lot less than the version I hazily remember watching when I was maybe ten or eleven. Some of that was the makeup and effects, which aren’t the worst I’ve seen but aren’t very good, but it’s also because it holds together better as a collection of scenes—hence the hazy memory—than as a narrative plot.
• Halloween III: Sure, it isn’t a good Halloween movie, but really, only the first Halloween is a good Halloween movie. This entry is sometimes ridiculous, sweaty and low-budget, but it’s really creepy and always a lot of fun.
• Contact: I’ve probably rewatched this more than once before, but it’s still a great movie, probably one of Zemeckis’ best, and certainly his best movie from the 1990s. At the same time, it is very much a ’90s movie—integrating real television news and media personalities, to say nothing of then president Bill Clinton, lends the film a real verisimilitude, one of its key strengths, but that also makes it feel weirdly dated, or at least out of time, in some respects.
• Night of the Living Dead: Just a great horror movie, one that feels so much like a turning point in the genre, modernizing the zombie or ghoul, while also birthing a subgenre and everything that was to follow.

I watched another 6 movies last week:

• M?rama is intense, at times very dreamlike, a beautifully shot debut from writer/director Taratoa Stappard and a fierce performance by Ari?na Osborne.
• At the time, the New York Times wrote that The Car “has all the ingredients of a parody, although someone has made the mistake of doing it straight.” It’s so very bad—not because the premise is inherently ridiculous, but because it tackles that premise in the least interesting ways possible. The effects are bad, the acting is worse, and the story hews so closely to the Jaws formula without coming close to understanding why Jaws worked.
• The Naked Kiss is incredibly frank about some very difficult subjects for a movie made in 1964. But at the same time, because it was made in 1964, it doesn’t always tackle those subjects in convincing ways and strays much further into melodrama.

• Veronika Voss is a fascinating movie for anyone who thinks Sunset Boulevard is too much of an upper.
• Mademoiselle Fifi is a simple tale of resistance with a strong performance by Simone Simon.
• I hated The Car so much that I of course decided to watch another movie by the same screenwriters made just five years later. Murder by Phone is marginally better—if only because the effects, while ridiculously bad, are at least not cheap, and because the acting, while trapped in poorly formed characters and a confused and nonsensical plot, is at least mostly consistent. But it’s still a very lousy movie.

I also rewatched The Shawshank Redemption, which I’ve seen a bunch of times, but not start to finish recently; Halloween II, which benefits by probably being the least bad of the bad Halloween movies, but which is still very bad; and The Night of the Hunter, which is just a really fantastic, sometimes almost surreal and dreamlike, thriller.

I watched 6 movies last week:

• To call House of Evil (or the handful of other names by which it’s called) a Boris Karloff movie is being far too generous. Actually, calling it a movie at all may be as well. Confusingly chopped together, ponderously slow, dubiously dubbed, and never convincingly interesting or scary, this is one of four Mexican horror movies Karloff leant a few weeks of his acting talents to in the year before his death. While his performance is easily the best part of the movie, it’s not his finest work, lasts for only a brief handful of half-formed scenes, and doesn’t feel much connected to the rest—which is a weak riff on killer toys.
• Roger Ebert called The Hitcher “diseased and corrupt,” which I think is a bit much. But even if I didn’t find the movie as morally reprehensible as he seemed to, it is a nasty piece of work—sometimes beautifully shot against the open natural landscape, but often more cruel than clever or tense, taking a plot that worked much more effectively with a faceless menace in something like Duel and muddling it.
• Dark Night of the Scarecrow is surprisingly good, and it’s amazing for a 1981 network television movie. There are a few moments when it stumbles a little, where it might have benefitted from a feature-film budget, but it does a lot with very little, building tension just through the story and performances, particularly from Charles Durning.

• Miroirs No. 3 is odd, often unsettling or unclear, but I feel like that’s sort of the point. It’s a contemplative chamber piece of a movie—literally in its last scenes—and while it doesn’t resolve anything, it does give you a glimpse into the interiority of these characters.
• I’m not sure Bird always works, in its weird blend of fantasy and reality, but there’s a strong central performance from newcomer Nykiya Adams, and the movie treats characters usually left at the margins with real understanding and empathy.
• I didn’t have high hopes for wrote Brian Tallerico, “replaced by relentless bodily devastation that occasionally winks at the audience in a can-you-believe-there-are-sickos-that-thought-of-this manner. It gets exhausting early.”

I also rewatched 6 movies, all of them horror movies:

• The Fog—What it maybe lacks in story, it makes up for and the some in an atmosphere of dread and well-drawn characters.
• Hellraiser—I’m not the biggest fan of the series as it progressed, and I think this initial outing isn’t always successful, but there is something to the bloody and transgressive viciousness of it that suggests Barker was best equipped to bring his visions to the screen.
• Halloween—I love the simple and quiet simplicity of this movie, and there’s a reason it’s still one of my favorite horror movies of all time.
• Lake Mungo—I’m not sure everything here works, and in the end some of it feels like it was just there for misdirection’s own sake, but it’s an expertly crafted scary movie, and, weirdly, one that doesn’t leave you feeling scared.
• The Descent—It’s tense and terrifyingly claustrophobic, but I feel it becomes significantly less interesting once the monsters show up.
• Carnival of Souls—I don’t think it’s the movie’s fault that you can see the twist coming several miles away; it just subtly influenced a lot of filmmakers going forward. It’s still a beautifully shot movie, full of ethereal and haunting images and score.