About Fred

Weekly Movie Roundup

I watched 6 movies last week:

House of Evil The Hitcher Dark Night of the Scarecrow
  • 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 Bird Evil Dead Burn
      • 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.

          March/April 2020

          I had every intention of updating this blog again in March—for who, I don’t know, but the intention certainly was there. But then, as maybe you’ve heard, the world went a little insane.

          Everyone here is fine. I have at least one friend who’s had the coronavirus (or at least has had to assume she did, because testing? what’s testing?), but my family and I remain healthy, knock on wood. I hope you are too, hypothetical blog reader.

          I started working from home on March 9, back when that still felt like maybe an over-abundance of caution, but only a week before it became the company default, and only two weeks before it became New York state law. (You may be surprised to learn that academic publishing is not considered essential services.)

          I’m not 100% sure about that timeline—to be honest, two months into quarantine and social-distancing, I’m not 100% sure about the whole concept of time at all. But it sounds about right. I’ve definitely been working from home since the beginning of March, just about a week after I came back from London (and amazingly didn’t get the virus in the over-crowded fustercluck that is JFK customs).

          It’s been a weird adjustment, but mostly because of the weird, nerve-wracking circumstances under which this has all happened. I was already working from home a couple of days a week, and day-to-day not a whole lot has actually changed. It’s just days as a whole concept that’s gotten a little hazy.

          Anyway, there’s not much else to report. If nothing else, this whole pandemic has kind of eliminated “what’s new?” as a topic of conversation. So let’s just talk about the books, movies, and stuff I enjoyed in the last couple of months.

          I’ve only read two books in March and April, and both of those were audio book memoirs read by their authors: Michelle Obama’s Becoming and Simon Pegg’s Nerd Do Well. The First Lady’s book was easily the better, more interesting of the two, but Pegg’s is amiable and has some good jokes. I’m was hoping to have read more books, four months into the year…but again, you might have heard: there have a been a few other things going on.

          I read a few short stories in March, but I missed more days than I would have liked, and was terrible about keeping track of them. However, these are the ones I enjoyed most in April:

          • See You on a Dark Night” by Ben Peek (Nightmare Magazine)
          • “A Moonlit Savagery” by Millie Ho (Nightmare Magazine)
          • “Of Marrow and Abomination” by Morgan Sylvia (PseudoPod)
          • “Let Those Who Would” by Genevieve Valentine (Levar Burton Reads)
          • “A Kiss With Teeth” by Max Gladstone (Levar Burton Reads)

          I watched 63 movies in March and April. Rather than list each of them individually—I’m keeping a list here if you’re interested—maybe I’ll just list my top five favorites:

          And maybe also the worst 5 movies I saw in March and April:

          And finally, here’s the music I listened to in March and April:

          February 2020

          I went to London with my parents and sister in February. Ostensibly to celebrate my mother’s 70th birthday earlier in the month, we had a week in the city, visiting local sites like Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the National Gallery, the Tower of London, and the British Museum. We also took in tea at the Savoy, as well as productions of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and Phantom of the Opera.

          I posted a whole bunch of other photos here:

          Meanwhile, I read 6 books in February:

          • This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki
          • Giant Days (Vol. 1) by John Allison
          • Zero (Vol. 1) by Ales Kot and others
          • Bitch Planet (Vol. 2) by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro
          • March (Book Two) by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell
          • Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker

          I didn’t read as many short stories—that week of travel is partly to blame—but there were a few I particularly liked:

          And I watched 23 movies in February.

          And finally, here’s the music that was new to me in February:

          January 2020

          It’s been two years since I posted anything here, and I make my triumphant return to weblogging really only to post about the media I consumed in the last month. This is mostly just going to be a place for me to keep track of this for my own piece of mind.

          I’m making a real effort to read more books this year, and in January I read two more than I did in all of 2019:

          That’s

          • Gideon the Ninth by Tasmyn Muir
          • Here by Richard McGuire
          • How To Be Happy by Eleanor Davis
          • Check, Please! Book 1 by Ngozi Ukazu
          • Marvel Masterworks: Doctor Strange – Volume 5 by Steve Englehart, Frank Brunner, and Gene Colan
          • The New Voices of Science Fiction edited by Hannu Rajaniemi and Jacob Weisman
          • Freddy the Detective by Howard Hughes
          • Bitch Planet, Vol. 1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro
          • March: Book One by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell
          • Transcendent 3: The Year’s Best Transgender Themed Speculative Fiction edited by Bogi Takács
          • Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes
          • This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

          I mostly enjoyed them all–though Freddy the Detective, an old children’s book that was bought for me as a gag gift, maybe isn’t the lost classic its cover asserts, and there were more than a few typesetting errors throughout.

          Richard McGuire’s Here is a genuinely astonishing graphic novel, while Ngozi Ukazu’s Check, Please! was a delightful surprise. Muir’s novel, which I read for my book club, was a whole lot of fun, and I’ll definitely read its sequel. And I was really impressed by Linda Holmes’ first novel. I’m familiar with her writing from Pop Culture Happy Hour, and here voice definitely comes through in the prose, but the nicest thing is how none of the characters or their problems feel contrived, despite the ostensibly romantic-comedy plot.

          Which leads into my favorite short stories from the month. I’m still trying to read a new (to me) short story every day:

          I watched 19 movies in January:

          And finally, here’s the music that was new to me in January:

          2017: A Year in Review

          Things that happened in 2017:

          • I turned 40. That was weird.
          • I revisited State College, Pennsylvania, where I used to live thirteen years ago. That was weirder.
          • My parents got a new dog, Finn. So by extension I got him too.
          • One of my uncles passed away. He was 83.
          • I went to Florida. I went to Paris. I went to Finland. I went to Charlottesville. I went to San Antonio. I liked all of those places.
          • I published three short stories, including one I sold over a year ago.
          • I saw 150 movies. That might be a lot. These were the ones I liked most:
          • I read 339 short stories. That’s not bad, but less than in years past.
          • I read 25 books. That’s better than I thought, to be honest, and a little up from recent years. But I still like to be reading more.

          • I listened to some music. These were the songs I liked most:

          And that was 2017. Nothing of any other consequence happened that year. Nope, no sir.

          So yeah, obviously things were kind of a mess globally, politically–and will likely continue to be so for some time–but things were also fairly okay personally. I’ve had better years, maybe, but I’ve had worse. I’m hopeful for 2018. Partly because…well, you’ve gotta be. But I really do think it’s going to be a better year.

          I hope it is for you too!