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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.

• Berlin Express does some interesting things, set (and filmed) in that narrow window of Allied-occupied Germany following World War II, even if its plot bounces around a little too much.
• I enjoyed Normal a whole lot less than I expected to. It’s too convoluted, despite what should be a fairly simple setup, and it throws away characters and jokes without a second thought, or doing much of anything interesting with them. I’ve often liked Ben Wheatley as a director, but much less so when he goes for the shootemups.
• Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror is a sweet delight of a documentary, talking to just about all of the surviving cast, who all have wonderful things to say about the experience of the musical and movie, and looking at Rocky Horror‘s genuine impact in the world at large.

• I’m not saying Meteor is so boring as to make you welcome the collision of a cataclysmic fireball into the Earth, but I’m definitely not not saying that. It’s a remarkably unimpressive movie.
• I really enjoyed Project Hail Mary. Maybe it plays it a little safe, as far as science fiction goes, but it’s genuinely funny and affecting, and I had a blast.
• I don’t think I can say The Paradine Case is the worst Alfred Hitchcock movie, but only because I watched Under Capricorn a month ago. This one has some good performance, but they’re not in service of much more than a very stagey, overcomplicated plot and some unlikable characters.

I also rewatched two movies, the first accidentally, having not remembered I’d already watched it until midway through, and the other on purpose. The first was The First Deadly Sin, which is an unremarkable serial killer plot, some weird comic-relief side characters, but a fantastic, quiet performance from Sinatra, his last leading role and one of his best. The second was Kwaidan, which is just a remarkably haunting movie with beautiful staging and incredible sound design.

I watched 8 movies last week:

• The Leopard Man isn’t one of the best Val Lewton-produced movies for RKO, but it’s a well made B-movie, directed by someone who also directed the best Val Lewton-produced movies.
• Sudden Fear gets a little silly, but the performances are fantastic, and it’s genuinely suspenseful.
• The MGM Kildare movies are hokey and dated, but they’re also pleasantly diverting and sometimes very funny. The Secret of Dr. Kildare is no exception.
• Tasha Robinson, then of the AV Club, had it right about Repo! The Genetic Opera when she wrote, “It’s like nothing else out there, but there’s a perfectly good reason why.: Despite some impressively garish and gaudy visuals, the songs are mostly loud but lousy, the acting is inconsistent, and the story, such as it is, is repetitive and thin to the breaking point.

• I’m not sure Marty, Life Is Short is deeply revealing as a documentary, but it’s very sweet and honest and funny.
• Crack in the World is a goofy ’60s disaster B-movie, never quite schlock, but decent performances and good fun.
• Creatures the World Forgot is an interesting idea for a movie, no so interesting in execution.
• The Snow Woman was shorter than I expected, but also a sad an ethereal folk tale.