Month: August 2023

Last week took yet another unexpected turn—Covid—so again, only two songs made my #nowplaying mix:

It was a weird week, and in it, I watched 9 movies:

• It would probably be a spoiler to say that The Caller has a twist ending, if the whole movie didn’t feel like it was constantly building to several surprising twists, or if any of the twists the movie takes were even close to predictable. I don’t know that its ending makes a lick of sense, but it’s too bizarre not to watch—and probably best seen completely blind, beyond even the limited information IMDB gives you.
• Likewise, Cobweb feels like it’s building to a twist from the first frame, even if it never really delivers or knows what to do with that twist once it’s revealed. There are a lot of good performances and atmosphere here—Samuel Bodwin may be a director to watch—but it doesn’t add up to enough in the end or know when to stop.
• The Big Trees wasn’t well received at the time, and it’s more than a little rough around the edges, but I think it has some nice performances, particularly by Edgar Buchanan.

• The question you have to ask yourself, when watching Meet the Feebles is: would any of this be funny, or even remotely interesting, if the characters weren’t all puppets? Or is the “joke”—probably the only one—that they are puppets? This is a desperately crass and unfunny movie, earning points over something like 2018’s The Happytime Murders only because its terrible, one-note idea occurred to Peter Jackson first. It’s not bad because it’s rude or disgusting; it’s bad because it mistakes rude and disgusting for comedy.
• Xtro doesn’t entirely work, not least because its story feels very much patched together, but it does have some incredibly disturbing body horror special effects and does some really interesting things. It never rises above being an early ’80s B-movie, but the critical reception at the time—Roger Ebert wrote, “It’s movies like this that give movies a bad name.”—seems way out of proportion with the movie itself.
• The Mackintosh Man isn’t exactly great, and not a whole lot happens in it. But the cast is pretty good, as is John Huston’s direction, and even if the script was dashed off by Walter Hill just to get out of a legal dispute, it has some amusing and clever moments.

• Sex, Lies, and Videotape can’t shake off its early ’90s indie vibes—this is the movie that arguably kicked off the modern “indiewood” era—but at its heart it’s a pretty simple, well told story of sex and regret.
• The Little Hours has such a weird premise—it’s a medieval black comedy loosely based on The Decameron told in an anachronistic style with contemporary dialogue and behavior—that it’s even weirder when the movie turns out to be so funny and surprisingly touching.
• The Prisoner of Zenda is billed, obviously, as a dual role, but that maybe suggests there’s more split-screen and other camera tricks on hand than there actually are. Ronald Colman does a good job of distinguishing the characters, but he’s more often the one of the two throughout the film. Which doesn’t make it any less enjoyable. The plot is pretty simple, but the characters are a lot of fun.

I also re-watched 1997’s Cube, which I enjoyed, even if it does very much feel like the mid-’90s low-budget Canadian sci-fi horror movie that it is.

The week took an unexpected turn, so there were only two songs on my #nowplaying playlist this week.

I watched another 6 movies last week. It got off to a very rough start, but I think the week ended well:

• I probably expected too much from a movie called Your Sister Is a Werewolf, but holy hell is Howling II bad.
• Krull is dull. There’s probably a version of this material that could appear hokey but charming, dumb and derivative but silly and fun. But this version of it is just so very boring.
• Frankenhooker plays more than a little like “Re-Animator, but if it was bad.” The movie is at its best when it fully embraces its cheap and gag-like absurdity, but its best is still no better than hit or miss. Having now seen three of Frank Henenlotter’s movies, they’ve all impressed me in the same way: never exactly very good, but too weird and occasionally imaginative to be completely terrible.

• Die, Monster, Die! has a little bit of gothic atmosphere, a fun if goofy title, and a pretty good performance by Boris Karloff. Sadly, it doesn’t have a lot more than that, and doesn’t do enough with what it does have.
• It’s been a while since I’ve seen the previous two movies, but I think I can safely say, at least in this moment, that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is my favorite of the three. It’s an incredibly effective send-off for these characters—some of whom I’m sure Marvel will force to return—and a genuinely affecting story of found family and kindness. It’s often also really funny and easily the best movie that Marvel has made in quite a while.
• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is less focused than Into the Spider-Verse. But even if it feels sprawling and even a little too loose at times, it never once feels padded, and it’s endlessly inventive and visually astounding.

I also re-watched Shaun of the Dead, which I haven’t seen for close to twenty years. It still really holds up, remarkably effective as both a comedy and a horror movie.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from this past week: