I watched just 5 movies last week:

• The sudden and unexpected loss of his girlfriend Lynn Shelton understandably hangs heavy over the Marc Maron documentary Are We Good?, but I’m not sure that it brings any new insight to that loss that Maron hasn’t already discussed at length in his own comedy specials and interviews surrounding them, and it often crowds out other biographical details and moments for revelation. It’s difficult to tell if it’s the filmmakers or Maron keeping the other at a distance, but that distance is frequently felt, and while there are funny and touching moments throughout the documentary, it’s unlikely to tell you anything even the most casual fan of Maron doesn’t already know, and hasn’t seen him discuss better elsewhere.
• I had some fun watching Mausoleum—but not, I must stress, because it’s anything like a good movie. The entertainment comes purely from the ridiculous and unintentional comedy. As a horror movie, it makes some very bizarre choices, some no doubt due to limited budget, but nearly all extremely bad.
• Often more restrained than lurid, at least until the end, when everything goes fully off the rails, The House with Laughing Windows makes for an odd but often haunted giallo at times.
• I think I appreciated what Masters of the Universe was trying to do more than what it did. The movie looks great, and a lot of the humor lands—but not all of it, and enough doesn’t to leave the whole thing feeling a little flat.
• Disclosure Day does a lot of very interesting things, and it does them both very well and at breakneck speed, and yet it never fully came alive for me.

I watched 6 movies last week:

• The sadly departed Sam Neill is easily the best thing in The Final Conflict (subsequently known as The Omen III), but I’m afraid I can’t go as far as to say that his performance in it is good. There are brief moments in the movie, and in Neill’s performance, when it feels like maybe something interesting is going to happen, but nothing interesting ever does, and the movie just peters out at the end.
• The violence in Is God Is isn’t cathartic in the way you might expect a revenge thriller to be—indeed, as Cortlyn Kelly of Roger Ebert.com put it, “it looks so warm, playful, and inviting outside, but the air is chilled and urges us to retreat to where we came from.” And yet the movie is sharp and unflinching, and the performances are really great.
• I had a lot of fun watching Demons 2, but that’s not because it’s a good movie—because it is most decidedly not. It’s deeply silly, though I’m not sure how much anyone involved in making the movie understood that. I think I had more fun with it than the first movie, which I don’t remember liking much at all, but really only in the “so bad it’s good” kind of way.

• Forbidden Fruits has some genuinely clever and funny bits scattered throughout, and a terrific cast, but it does not come together as anything in the end. There’s some really great writing here, but also some really bad writing as well.
• Obsession does exactly what it says on the tin, but it does it in some really unexpected and often uncomfortable ways. By turns darkly funny and deeply disturbing, with a fantastically unsettling performance by relative newcomer Inde Navarrette.
• Penny Serenade takes some surprisingly depressing turns, and risks careening off into melodrama, but both Cary Grant and Irene Dunne are very good in it.

I also rewatched They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, which is a bleak but fantastic movie, and Mothra, which is fun but, honestly? Could use more Mothra.

Last week, I watched 9 movies:

• I’ll admit, I didn’t know MST3K had riffed The Deadly Mantis when I first sat down to watch it, but nothing has ever made more sense to me than that. If 1954’s Them! is everything you want a 1950s sci-fi monster movie to be, then The Deadly Mantis is everything you expect a lousy Them! knockoff to be.
• The Fastest Gun Alive takes a little too long to get properly started, with some scenes that don’t quite add to the whole, but it’s a decent morality play of a Western, with some nice performances, particularly a supporting turn by Jeanne Crain.
• You think you know the beats that Sugar is going to hit, then it slides past some with a curveball or two, and goes off in several unexpected directions. I’m not sure if it’s a home run, necessarily, but it’s a good day at the ballgame.

• The Long, Hot Summer feels like warmed-over Tennessee Williams. Most everyone involved circles around a good performance or two, but characters wash in and out, the film often doesn’t look very good, and none of it ever really comes together as much of anything.
• The Gospel According to St. Matthew tells its story very simply, with no pomp or circumstance—or even necessarily any belief—and that’s what makes it all the more powerfully told.
• You could look at It! The Terror from Beyond Space as a precursor, or even possibly an inspiration, to the later Alien. But that makes this overblown TV episode feel like less of a snoozefest than it is.

• Psycho IV: The Beginning is probably a better-made movie than Psycho III, but I liked it a lot less, and I didn’t even like Psycho III very much.
• Song Sung Blue is largely sweet and charming, with good performances by the two leads.
• Ebirah, Horror of the Deep was also apparently riffed by MST3K too—though under its American title, Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster. And, honestly, that makes a whole lot of sense too. The movie could use a whole lot more Godzilla and sea monster, a less complicated and cobbled-together script, and more fun.

Last week, I watched 6 movies:

• ‘Round Midnight is a film full of small, tender gestures and quiet moments of connection and loneliness.
• Summertime acts mostly as a travelogue for Venice. Which might be more of a problem if I didn’t like Venice so much. The movie is more than a little dated in places, and it meanders more than it has a plot, but it also has a really nice performance from Katharine Hepburn that gets at the quiet loneliness of her character.
• Hokum, like Oddity and Caveat before it, is exceptionally creepy, sharing not just writer/director Damian McCarthy’s propensity for one-word titles but the way he plays with folk horror tropes. I just wish, like I also dd with those two earlier movies, that it was in service of a more coherent story.

• The Sheep Detectives is delightfully sweet, occasionally sad, often very funny, and a surprisingly decent little murder mystery.
• Caged Heat feels like it should be judged against the standards of its genre, the women in prison exploitation movie, more than against the standards of later Jonathan Demme movies. The problem is, I haven’t seen any of the other movies in that genre, and I have seen many other (much better) Demme movies. There are interesting ideas here, a first-time director working within the confines of the genre and his budget, but it’s not necessarily worth watching just as a movie.
• It has the thinnest of premises, but the songs and dance numbers are more than decent in Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and it’s a fun, well directed little musical.

I also re-watched three movies:

• Peeping Tom
• Theater of Blood
• The War of the Gargantuas

Peeping Tom is the best, a genuinely great movie about filmmaking and violence, ahead of its time. The other two are a lot of fun, but both very silly in their own way.

Last week, I somehow hit upon watching horror movie sequels, and I watched 8 of them. It did not go very well:

• Ready or Not 2: Here I Come takes the very simple (and kind of silly) premise of the first movie and really runs with it. Never mind that there isn’t a lot of room to run with, necessarily—did I mention it was a silly premise?—but it’s more fun than it has any right being, thanks largely to supporting players like Sarah Michelle Gellar and Elijah Wood.
• Dracula’s Daughter doesn’t really work as a sequel to Dracula, much less specifically the 1931 version, but it tries doing some interesting things that let it stand on its own.
• Children of the Damned looks decent enough, and flirts with a few interesting ideas, but it mostly just swaps between talking too much or not at all.
• The first movie in the series was a little confused in its tone, so I guess Slumber Party Massacre II just does what any sequel would do and ramps everything up several notches. But the end result is borderline incomprehensible. It’s not so much that it isn’t scary as a horror movie—though it isn’t—it’s that by the end it’s entirely unclear what, if anything, is actually supposed to be happening or why. The rock and roll themes, while easily the best part of the movie, feel half-baked and tacked on, and the whole thing is just a weird waste of time.

• When a Stranger Calls Back doesn’t just have gaps in its logic, it has wide chasms. There are moments, early in the film, that almost work, largely because they simply replicate the things that almost worked about the first movie, and I think the cast, particularly Jill Schoelen, is pretty good. But the twists the movie takes are just so laughably bad.
• In their review, Empire said A Return to Salem’s Lot “is offensively bad in every department and should be left to rot in a vault somewhere.” They were being far too kind.
• Anthony Perkins acquits himself reasonably well as a director with Psycho III—sometimes because of, sometimes in spite of, the knowing nods to Hitchcock—but the movie never justifies its existence, not even as well as the second film in the series, and the whole thing falls a little flat.
• Fright Night Part 2 is confused and kind of lifeless for most of its run, then ends kind of badly. I don’t have amazing fondness for the first movie, but I remember it being a lot more fun than this.