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.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from last week:

I watched 6 movies last week:

• The Boogeyman feels so tediously familiar, and not just because of its generic title or because I’ve read the Stephen King short story on which the movie is (very loosely) based. Its plot calls to mind a dozen other horror movies of recent years, and even its moments of specificity feel generic—chosen not because they add an interesting twist on the formula, or even because they’re lifted from King’s (light-on-plot) text, but because they’re simply ticking boxes of the sort of things movies like this are supposed to have. It’s not badly made, and the main cast do a decent enough job, but it seems like it would only be interesting if you’d never seen a horror movie before.
• I think I enjoyed Meg 2: The Trench better than the original, but I say that only because I remember practically nothing about the original except that there was, probably, a giant shark. There are a few scattered moments of half-hearted Ben Wheatley-style horror in this one, but none of them are given a chance to breathe. And while there’s some enjoyment to be taken from the ridiculousness of the last act, it’s never ridiculous enough and never rises above the limited cleverness of your average Sci-Fi Channel shark movie.
• The Vampire Bat never really surprises you about where it’s going, but it’s a short enough ride that it’s not without its charms.

• The Last Broadcast is creepy, if a little crude and unevenly paced, but it’s mostly undone by a last-minute twist that might have worked in a different movie, but which bere feels tacked-on and unconvincing.
• Somebody made a remake/sequel of Friday the 13th in 2009. Having now watched it, I can say yes, that’s definitely a thing that somebody did. I don’t think it’s necessarily worse than any of the original films—of which i’m not the biggesr fan—but it’s definitely not better, nor does it offer any reason for rebooting the series in the first place. The slickness of its early 2000s production always feels at odds with the grimy…for lack of a better word “charms” of the originals.
• “What isn’t strange, when you think about it?” Despite the witches and the gore, You Won’t Be Alone isn’t a horror movie—except maybe it is, and the horror is simply being alone and human in this world. It’s a quieter and more contemplative movie than I’d expected, an often beautiful folk tale about outcasts and belonging.

I also re-watched The Exorcist. If there’s a better horror movie, I have yet to find it.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from last week:

I watched 7 movies last week:

• Sole Survivor is creepy but very dull. Wnile it’s well shot, the movie never entirely makes sense, with side-plots and characters that do little but pad out the runtime.
• Dust Devil is a nightmarish fever dream. Which means it doesn’t always make complete sense, but it is full of unsettling and striking imagery.
• Blue Sunshine isn’t very good. Some of that’s down to the acting and obviously limited budget, but the movie also touches on themes that were handled a lot better by other directors before it—like Romero in The Crazies, Cronenberg in Shivers, or in just about any ’70s paranoid thriller, to be honest. By the end, the stakes start to feel increasingly low, and the characters woefully undeveloped.

• Some pre-Code films are less interesting for anything they have to say than for what they seem to be getting away with, subject matter that seem slightly more risqué than films made only a few short years later. Thirteen Women is such a movie: I’m guessing you didn’t see as many film plots so cavalier about poisoning young children post-Hayes, but the movie itself is fairly dated and boring.
• I’m just going to come right out and say it: I don’t think The Craft is a particularly well written movie. I think the cast is good, and I suppose there’s a lot to be said for its theme of female empowerment. But I also don’t think Roger Ebert was too far from the mark when he wrote that “Many of the scenes in this movie have no attention span—do not remember any of the other scenes—and exist only on their own terms.”
• Talk to Me has its share of violent jolts and jump scares, but it’s the smaller things, like the characters and the performances, that I found most surprising. Sophie Wilde is particularly good at creating a character with whom we immediately sympathize, even as we begin to like increasingly less.

• The Blackening is funnier than it is scary, but it’s usually pretty funny.

I also re-watched 1963’s The Haunting—which, for a movie that’s so much simply about watching characters act frightened, is incredibly frightening. It remains one of the best haunted house movies ever made.