About Fred

I watched 8 movies last week:

• I know this is going to upset some people of a certain age, millennials just a handful of years younger than me, but Hocus Pocus is not a good movie. I understand how someone might think it is, if they’d watched it repeatedly as a child on VHS, and it’s not mean-spirited in any way. But Roger Ebert was right when he described watching it “like attending a party you weren’t invited to, and where you don’t know anybody, and they’re all in on a joke but won’t explain it to you.”
• None of the ten Tales of Halloween are abjectly terrible, but not a single one is in any way remarkable or worth seeking out on its own. Horror movie anthologies are almost always hit and miss—I’m not even that big a fan of what’s supposed to be the best of the modern lot, Trick ‘r Treat—but I’m already having trouble even remembering any of these particular tales.
• Reptile is smart and tense and suspenseful…until it just kind of isn’t. The cast is good throughout, particularly Del Toro, but the mystery never comes together as anything more than boilerplate, isn’t shocking in its revelations, and in retrospect isn’t much of a whodunit at all. As A.A. Dowd writes, “the movie often plays like the work of someone who caught Zodiac or Gone Girl on cable years earlier and is trying to recreate it from memory, getting some of the sickly sleekness down but remaining foggy on the specifics.”

• Showing Up is understated and low-key, flirting with many big moments that would probably be the centerpiece of—or even threaten to overwhelm—other movies but never making more of them than they are. It’s a lovely character study, and another terrific collaboration between Michelle Williams and director Kelly Reichardt.
• I really enjoyed Thelma, which marries horror tropes to the European art film, and which, as Manohla Dargis wrote, has “a great talent for making loneliness visceral and visible, for showing how pain can make the world disappear.”
• Superman and the Mole-Men is corny and dated, but I think Steve Shives does a good job of detailing its charms (and its limitations), even if I didn’t like the short movie quite as much as him.

• Lynch/Oz makes the occasionally interesting observation—and lord knows it’s full of interesting film clips—but it’s hard to be convinced by any of its surface-level film criticism, none of which rises above the (already well-established) fact that David Lynch likes The Wizard of Oz and has referenced it in his own work.
• I like the cast a lot, and the movie dances around some interesting thoughts about love and loneliness, but Fingernails is pretty underbaked as a story.

I also re-watched Videodrome, which I probably haven’t seen in something like thirty years—back when VHS was still a going concern and James Woods was a bankable movie star. The movie is admittedly a little dated, and it’s never been my favorite Cronenberg. But for all his faults as a human being, Woods is a compelling screen presence, and the movie pokes around at a lot of the fascinating body-horror pre-occupations in a lot of Cronenberg’s work.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from last week:

• Drawing parallels between vampirism and drug addiction isn’t necessarily profound, but it’s more deeply defined than any of the other parallels The Addiction seems to be drawing, like betweeen the choice of good over evil and mankind’s propensity for brutality and genocide. (The footage of actual war atrocities, in particular, is both too on-the-nose and in rather poor taste.) It’s not wholly uninteresting, and a very brief appearance by Christopher Walken livens things up for a moment, but it’s less than the sum of its parts.
• Let’s be honest, you watch Final Destination for the Rube Goldberg-like death traps and the creepy Tony Todd performance, and then you’re a little disappointed that neither of those are in the movie as much as you might have expected. It’s entertaining enough, although I’m not sure the internal logic it sets up entirely makes sense—but also feel like it would have been pretty easy to remedy that with just a few small tweaks.
• Soft & Quiet edges a little close to self-parody, but small, well-observed details in the performances keep it on a even keel. I’d recommend going in not knowing much of anything. At the same time, having the movie unfold in real time is perhaps both a strength and a weakness: it shows just how easily these things can escalate and spiral out of control…but then it also needs everything to spiral out of control very quickly. It’s a courageous and timely film, forcing the viewer to confront some real ugliness and brutality, but with both honesty and empathy.

• It’s strange to think that Unfriended may be too much a movie of its time, impressive for the way it uses then-modern-day internet technology to frame the horror story, but maybe seeming a little less impressive with each passing year, as the specifics of that technology continue to change. There have also been other later movies that have taken similar approaches (like Host and Searching), and Unfriended may just be a victim of being first, and no longer seeming as novel. That said, in the moment, the movie is often very scary.
• Phantom of the Rue Morgue is an effective enough Poe adaptation.
• I didn’t enjoy Halloween 4 even a little bit, so I’m not sure why I expected that to be any different with Halloween 5, but it wasn’t. This time around, with the so-called “Revenge of Michael Myers,” the movie doesn’t make one bit of sense. And while I understand I’ve probably now committed myself to watching Halloween 6, just because that’s how my brain works, I assure you I’m not the least bit happy about it.

• Friday the 13th: The New Blood is really only any fun when it goes full-on “Carrie vs. Jason,” pitting him as unkillable, machete-wielding zombie against a final girl’s telekinetic powers. The movie was reportedly butchered (no pun intended) in editing, eliminating most of its gory set-pieces and leaving not much of interest in its place.

As it happens, though, I also re-watched the original Friday the 13th and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. While it never rises above being a cheap knock-off of better, scarier slasher movies like the original Halloween, I’ve now seen enough bad cheap knock-offs to at least recognize a good one when it comes along.

A short #nowplaying mix from this past week:

I watched 7 movies last week:

• Flesh for Frankenstein can’t decide if it wants to be a parody of gothic horror or a transgressive counterculture send-up, but it doesn’t have a good enough script or acting to be either. Udo Kier sure chews a hell of a whole lot of scenery in it, though.
• I’m not entirely convinced the ending works, not least because I think I preferred the ending the movie seemed to be building towards just before that. But I can’t deny that The Wailing is a chilling, often terrifying meditation on evil.
• It’s strange to me how many critics and viewers of Two Evil Eyes seem to prefer the Dario Argento half of this Poe-inspired horror double-bill. George Romero’s “The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar” never rises above workmanlike, but it’s serviceable and entertaining, whereas Argento’s “The Black Cat” is muddled and sluggish, with possibly Harvey Keitel’s worst-ever performance. It doesn’t even betray much of Argento’s visual style, so I’m at a loss to understand the appeal.

• Stephen King was being kind when he called The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave an “Italian turkey.” The movie’s ending is somewhat interesting, but only because it takes a wild left turn that suddenly forgets everything that came before it, not because it’s in any satisfying on its own.

Bad Things is well cast, and I like the way it turns its mundane location into an unexpected source of real dread. But the movie gets a little lost in the weeds of wondering what is and isn’t delusion. It’s an intriguing modern queer take on The Shining, with interesting things to say about trauma and some very eerie moments, but it never quite came together for me.

• A Dark Song draws a lot out of just atmosphere and minimal sets, and it’s an eerie little thriller about grief and vengeance and forgiveness.

• The Raven is silly but charming, with a delightful cast.

I also re-watched The Exorcist III, which I think falls apart near the end—and might even have done so without all the studio interference. But it does a lot of things right, and Blatty asks honest questions about the nature of good and evil.