by ·Comments Off on Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974, Francesco Barilli)

Silvia runs a lab of brightly colored liquids in bubbly beakers, and in the evenings she alienates her boyfriend then has traumatic flashbacks to the time she saw her mom having sex with some guy. Paura all around. You gotta watch at least one nonsensical Italian movie per shocktober.

Finally something happens: friend Francesca shows up dead in the tub. “They said the water must’ve been too hot… her heart couldn’t handle it.” Then Silvia splits in two, her adult and child selves having a conversation like the poster of The Tale. Young Self kills the neighbor’s cat, Older Self kills the neighbor. They murder a few more sexual harassers, and all seems to be going well, then Young Self pushes them off a roof, leading to a culty final scene where the men she’d killed gather around her body and eat her guts.

Barilli also made Hotel Fear (Pensione paura), his cowriter worked on Who Saw Her Die?, and the DP shot the Carmelo Bene movies and Padre Padrone. Older Self is Four Flies star Mimsy Farmer, and oh no, Young Self grew up to star in Ghosthouse.

Follow the trail to the titular perfume:

by ·Comments Off on Enemy (2013, Denis Villeneuve)

“Very slow and brown” is all I wrote originally. Is there more to say? The two Jakes are married to Sarah Gadon (Antiviral) and Mélanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds), and all that really happens from their doppel-discovery is they end up wife-swapping, then maybe one couple crashes their car and the other becomes spiders, or more likely a single Jake is having an identity crisis and/or an affair. Please bring us an HD remaster of the Kurosawa movie instead.

by ·Comments Off on Bring Her Back (2025, Danny & Michael Philippou)

People seem unhappy with this movie because it’s full of cliches, is All About Trauma, and it torments and abuses and murders children. But I had a pretty good time watching Sally Hawkins learn about demonic resurrection rituals on bootleg VHS then bumble around until her plan gets so out of control that she kills herself. Also fun because both Foster Mom Sally and her cat-strangler son are dangerous, and we don’t learn until late that she has got him possessed by demons and wants to do the same with her new blind ward Piper, painting P’s older brother Andy as a problem child to get him sent away. And her cat is named Junkman, pretty good name.

by ·Comments Off on Quatermass and the Pit (1967, Roy Ward Baker)

The Quatermass movies are like Knives Out, not really sequels, just the continuing otherworldly adventures of Dr. Q – same studio a decade after the last one, but everyone here is new except the writer. The doctor (Andrew Keir, a Hammer guy who tended to play priests and professors) is recruited by a military bomb squad and taken to subway station Hobbs End (“hob was once a sort of nickname for the devil”) where ancient apeman skeletons and a mysterious vessel have been excavated. The film title evokes Poe, but the pit is just a subway tunnel.

Dr. Q and the Colonel

Doing Science:

After they uncover locust aliens who decompose into green goo when the air hits them, the military reluctantly admits this maybe isn’t a nazi bomb, and the doctor thinks Martian insects kidnapped abnormal prehumans and enlightened them. A worker goes down alone and a wind storm ensues, he comes prancing outside with his arms held out like a preemptive parody of Weapons, not clear if he is alien-possessed or just British-terrified – remember, a British person can be driven mad by the smallest inconsistency. The assembled scientists and priests agree that whatever mystery they’ve uncovered, it is Evil.

Roney poses with an artist’s rendering of a big-brained apeman:

Crystal mantis pods:

Reporter Barbara Shelley (Village of the Damned, The Gorgon) is sensitive enough to see the invisible martians so they put a brainwave helmet on her and videotape the psychic visions from her “susceptible brain,” then Dr. Q screens the tape (actually some kids’ home movie of plastic mantises fighting on a rockpile) and tries to convince the government that humans have got alien-inherited genocidal tendencies (partly true). “People don’t believe nothing nowadays unless they’ve seen it on the telly.”

Finally with the station full of TV crews and passersby the ship comes violently alive. The Colonel (Julian Glover, lately of Tar) gets hypnotised by the commotion and melts, everyone else starts doing mob violence, until Q’s science-friend James Donald rides a construction crane to electrocute Mantis Satan and save the world (these movies usually end with Dr. Q identifying some great evil then setting it on fire).

My fifth Roy Ward Baker movie, and if I ever watch a sixth then I’ve officially got problems. Though in its best moments this had shades of Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness.

by ·Comments Off on Wake In Fright (1971, Ted Kotcheff)

A teacher attempts to go on holiday, but unfortunately he is the dumbest, drunkest idiot in all Australia. He is Gary “U.S.” Bond of Growing Pains (the Hammer horror, not the comedy series), a Blind Faith fan who hates his job and hates ordinary fuckin’ people. During a train layover in a thriving town, he gets sucked into a game of high stakes heads-or-tails and loses all his vacation money so has to look for work instead of proceeding to the shore. But some locals are very happy to host the stranger and keep him drunk. White-suited Tim’s daughter Janette wants to make out with the newcomer, but he throws up instead. Finally he settles for having a bromance with Donald Pleasance, the only other intellectual in Australia. He never actually wakes in fright, but with twenty minutes left he wakes in disgust. Gary escapes, but continuing to be an idiot he accidentally hitches a ride to the town he just left, then thinks he has to kill Pleasance, or maybe himself. Not a horror movie, it turns out (unless you count the scene where a bunch of kangaroos are shot and stabbed to death), just another in a long line of Australian movies about how it brutally sucks to live in Australia.

How can you hate a country whose only features are cockatoos and drinking?

by ·Comments Off on Scream 3 (2000, Wes Craven)

RIP Liev and his Gossip Girl-friend, as the new killer goes around tricking people with an electric voice-cloner. Lance Henriksen and Roger Corman are working on their Stab trilogy, a cover version of “Red Right Hand” playing on set, when Detective McDreamy comes to investigate why cast members are being killed off IRL. The two casts mix as Parker Posey, playing Fake Gale Weathers, is dating Dewey and tailing the real Gale for character tips, and all the worst characters get slashed as our old team takes their place. They all end up on an old Hollywood mansion as the movie becomes increasingly nonsensical, the closest to Freddy dream-logic these things have been (complimentary), topped by a pre-taped appearance by the rules-explainer-guy who wants to explain how trilogies work in the event of his death in part two. Killer is film director Scott Foley, McDreamy’s Grey’s Anatomy coworker.

by ·Comments Off on Ick (2024, Joseph Kahn)

This has got one of those modern sound mixes where the dialogue is buried, too bad, but the one-star reviews were wrong, Kahn is back baby! [an hour later] Okay, they buried the dialogue because it’s bad, lot of embarrassing culture war stuff, but most of the visuals are still good, Kahn is kinda back baby! This week I watched two Superman-adjacent movies about townspeople zombied by gooey creatures, and this one doesn’t come off great when closely compared to Slither.

The ick has been around for decades, suddenly becomes hostile and starts zombifying people, leading washed-up science teacher Brandon Routh to summon his old hometown-hero energy and fight back with student Grace (who played Young Supergirl, appropriately) plus fellow losers The Goth One and The Arty One. Big year for guys going on adventures with high schoolers who they believe to be their illegitimate daughters. At least we all learned about some key figures in existentialism.

by ·Comments Off on V/H/S/99 (2022)

Framing story starts out as some kid’s stop-motion army-guy video, nice.

1. Phony from top to bottom, a punk band goes to the basement venue where another punk band died in a fire three years ago on this very night, and gets murdered by ghouls. Director Maggie Levin “is a filmmaker with rock n’ roll roots” per her bio, argh.

2. Better: sorority pledge (girl from Synchronic) is buried alive as a hazing thing, cops chase off the aboveground girls as a rainstorm is coming through. Synchronic Girl meets a sinister ghost while buried alive while drowning while covered in spiders, oof, and all the other girls get supernaturally leaky-coffin’d next. Director Johannes Roberts made two killer shark movies and a failed Resident Evil reboot.

3. Some underlit Nickelodeon game-show called Ozzy’s Dungeon is Double Dare meets torture porn. Donna competes in a doomed wish-fulfillment game that nobody has ever won, then her surviving family turns the tables on the host, taking him into the victory cave(?) beneath the set to meet the fat-suit wishmaster, but apparently the girl’s wish was to explode the heads of her family members, like a cut-rate version of The Viewing. Directed by Flying Lotus themself.

4. Older brother Dillon of the stop-motion kid is a horny teen who films himself skating and doing pranks. Their friend Boner is an apocalypse prepper – this turns out to be unimportant, as focus turns to the hot medusa across the street who turns the boys into statues for attempting to install spyware on her new imac. Only good joke in the movie is the package delivery service being called DUI. Tyler MacIntyre also made the pd187-approved Tragedy Girls, and looking up the lead actress is how I found out someone remade Castle Freak.

5. Coven is doing a summoning ceremony, but demon Fircus interferes and drags the cameraman Troy and Nate to hell, where they meet Mabel the Skull Biter, the movie’s only good character, and scramble to return to the surface when the coven’s portal opens at midnight. Also the movie’s best segment, the only one that doesn’t look like shit on purpose, so I assume it made the top ten of Vulture’s ambitious V/H/S segment ranking… nope, Dowd got it all wrong. The Winters also made a haunted house livestream influencer movie starring Mabel.

by ·Comments Off on Szamanka (1996 Andrzej Zulawski)

Movie is off like a shot, the credits and characters both in a big hurry to get going. Iwona (a non-actor, whoa) is a chaos demon who should be followed by a cleanup crew at all times, Michael (star of Blind Chance) is a creep professor whose fiancee is out of town, and together they get the amour fou in this sordid missing link between Possession and Cosmos. Possibly the most sex-crazed Zulawski movie, though with too much synth and marching band music.

He is an anthropologist studying a just-unearthed shaman mummy, so I figured it would awaken and kill them all. I did not see it coming that she would smash his head and Hannibal his brains, then a minor character would set off a small nuclear bomb.