by ·Comments Off on The Devil’s Rejects (2005, Rob Zombie)

After 3 From Hell, I’m revisiting the original movie and this sequel for probably the last time. Part one was a good time, introducing a Texas Chainsaw-style murder family who slaughters tourists. Part two is just torture and torment (our three killers and their pursuer William Forsythe taking turns as torturers and torturees), part three is needless rehash.

Along the way Brian Posehn gets killed, the guy from The Hills Have Eyes is hanging out with Ken Foree, Danny Trejo and someone else call themselves The Unholy Two, a film critic is called in to analyze character names (all stolen from The Marx Bros), Callahan from Police Academy substitutes for Karen Black, and everybody dies (or DO they).

by ·Comments Off on Hardware (1990, Richard Stanley)

This is clever in its visual transitions and I like the early bits of the soundtrack composed of chill slide guitar (and Iggy Pop as a wacky DJ), but ultimately feels like a cool robot design with a movie loosely hung around it.

Dylan McDermott (also of future-robot movie Automata) and his sidekick Shades (of Jarman’s Edward II) bring the scavenged head of a self-healing military attack robot to Dylan’s off-again girlfriend Jill (Phantasm II). She puts on some Ministry before integrating the head into one of her artworks (Spielberg would use the same band to convey dystopian junkyard aesthetics a decade later).

Three guesses which one is Shades:

Unfortunately the robot was built as part of a government program to kill all the humans, and it reactivates to complete its mission. First it lets the girl’s creeper neighbor (Wm Hootkins of Death Machine) make a slow fool of himself before it megakills him. Jill lowers her body heat to undetectable levels by jumping into an open-door fridge for five seconds, then they throw the robot in the shower and it does the whole “I’m melting” bit.

by ·Comments Off on 2019 Shorts

It Has to be Lived Once and Dreamed Twice (Rainer Kohlberger)

Soothing sea of television static and electric popcorn sfx. Soft voiceover wanted to tell us about carbon dioxide on earth, and the background noise of living, but I was adrift until an evil racket woke me up at the halfway point. She goes on about the nature of thought and matter and individuals while the image features a Frankenstein face melting in a digital snowstorm.

Blake Williams in Cinema Scope:

A half-hour sci-fi essay on posthumanism, cinema, and artificial intelligence, the work all but announces itself as its generation’s La Jetée. Beneath a monotonous voiceover (written by Kohlberger and spoken by British-German singer-songwriter Anika) that drowsily questions the nature — and the disappearance — of being and thought (“Something is not right…”), we find Kohlberger’s most complex assortment of digital textures yet. Drawing from an image bank that the artist says was generated from approximately half of science fiction cinema history, it has to be lived flips through channels of deeply crushed visual information, the frame a radioactive wasteland of scrolling zebra patterns and lo-fi grey goo. The effect is one of radical liminality, caught in transitions between form and formlessness, declaration and lyricism, foreshadowing and aftermath … We see things we know we’ve seen but no longer recognize, and consider thoughts constructed from sentences that themselves know they cannot achieve clarity (“Everything we’ve received so far has been confusing or incomprehensible”). Short of generating images that might be determinably “real” or artificial, it has to be lived meets both sides halfway, documenting the afterlife of subjectivity from the perspective of sentient objects. Like the glitch aesthetic that these images have settled into, this is a promise of failure at the end of the age of the individual, presented with a fundamental ambivalence that is as frightening as it is pacifying. If everything we know and hold is destined for renewal and reprocessing, subject to boundless capacities to be reconfigured into anything, then who is to say it all won’t be even better than before? For in an age where everything is an image, the sky may well be the limit.

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Palace of Colours (Prantik Basu)

Narrated creation myths over very colorful shots of landscapes, natural rocks, painted walls
Such a peaceful 26-minute movie it might take you a couple hours to watch due to pausing for a nap in the middle.

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27 Thoughts About My Dad (Mike Hoolboom)

Listed everywhere as 27 Thoughts About My Father, but the film itself and the full transcript at the director’s website say “Dad.” Mike tells his 27 stories about Canadian immigrant (via Holland via Indonesia) engineer dad while the early visuals are his experiments with light and focus, trying to create Malick scenes and/or advertisements. Some scenes are extremely digital, and the scene that’s all shots from 2001: A Space Odyssey made me wonder if the earlier shots were from actual Malick scenes and/or advertisements.

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Cezanne (Luke Fowler)

Rapidly edited shots from mostly outdoors, sometimes the title/name appears, light atmospheric birdsong on the soundtrack.

by ·Comments Off on 1975 Shorts

Firing Range aka Polygon (Anatoliy Petrov)

Professor’s son died in colonial wars, the prof invents an autonomous tank that can detect fear and sets it loose on his own army in revenge. Nice little sci-fi war drama, too bad about the grotesque rotoscoping. Not the Old Man and the Sea guy, this is a different Petrov, and okay it’s from 1977 not ’75, sometimes my dates are off.

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Great (Bob Godfrey)

Comic attack on the British empire, very good illustrations with Monty Python-style motion gives way to slightly more traditional animation full of newspaper-caricature characters, and settles into focus on Brunel, a builder of very large bridges and ships, with photographed segments and musical numbers. Not one of my favorite things, but I also believe there should be more farcical musical bio-pics of obscure historical figures. Won the oscar over Sisyphus and a Bafta over Caroline Leaf. A very naughty Brit, Bob is also known for Instant Sex and Kama Sutra Rides Again.

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Perspectives (Georges Schwizgebel)

Roughly drawn figures keep changing form and direction over nice colored backgrounds and oppressive piano music.

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Ventana (Claudio Caldini)

Thin rectangles flit past over some ambient music. Made me sleepy.

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Sincerity II (Stan Brakhage)

Playing with the dog in the yard, playing with the wife in bed. I thought my copy was faded and orange with exposure problems, but sometimes you’ll get a clear, balanced shot or a strong blue-green, so who knows. Sincerity was Stan’s multi-part “autobiography” composed of footage shot by himself and friends. With ten minutes left we start seeing Stan himself, and the editing goes haywire. Naked children, a family train vacation, some trick photography play with the kids, a visit to Canyon Cinema. Silent; I listened to the latest Mary Halvorson album since her group is playing Roulette tonight.

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The Seasons (Artavazd Peleshian)

Opens alarmingly with a man and a sheep going over a waterfall. Then the frame is taken over by clouds, then a mountain – maybe the title was mistranslated from The Elements. Cattle and sheep drive, men and horses getting a truck unstuck from rainy mud, a hay-sledding party, a sheep-sledding party. After all the hard work, everyone (even the sheep) get fancied up for the wedding of the man from the waterfall scene. No narration, but a couple of intertitles – postsync sound and nice orchestral score. Ah, this is Armenia, the title refers to the Vivaldi music, and it’s shot by The Color of Armenian Land director Vartanov.

by ·Comments Off on Alien: Romulus (2024, Fede Alvarez)

Fede specializes in remaking beloved horror movies by aping the style of the originals and repeating their most famous line of dialogue in a slightly different context. He doesn’t fare as well creatively with Alien as he did with Evil Dead. He also made The Girl in the Spider’s Web so this is technically his second bad sequel to a not-great* David Fincher movie. Meanwhile this week everyone’s watching the new Alien prequel TV series from the guy who made se/pre/quel series of Fargo and X-Men.

A new group of British-accented attractive young people is stuck on a sunless planet in debt to the Evil Company, until they have the good idea to board a doomed low-orbit space station and loot it of cryo-pods to escape their fates. But it has been abandoned by everyone except Fake Ian Holm due to alien infestation. The first of the bozo thieves gets chestburst only four short minutes after getting facehugged, then the aliens multiply extremely quickly, while lead girl Cailee fights for her friends, her life, escape, and her defective robot friend who sometimes gets possessed by pro-company programming.

Featuring the stars of Priscilla, The Long Walk, Feline, and Madame Web, it’s all expensive-looking at least, though Fake Ian Holm looks like shit. I love how analogue all the space tech is: lights flickering, vidscreen color separation, audio recordings slowing down. The final boss is a skinny new alien-human hybrid, as if part 4 never existed, which I’m sure a lotta people would prefer.

*For the record:
Good: 1, 2, Resurrection, Prometheus
Bad: 3, AvP, Covenant, Romulus

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 31: SHOCKtober Revisits Part 1

Happy SHOCKtober 2025! This is only the fourth episode of The Last Ten Minutes to feature screenshots, but more to come.

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Silver Bullet (1985, Daniel Attias)

Holy cow, it’s Gary Busey, visiting a “wizard of weapons” (per narrator) who uses some pretty non-magical tools (just normal gunsmith tools) to create the titular bullet. Everyone is overdoing everything. Uncle Busey schemes to get rid of the kids’ parents for the full moon, the wolf attacks, they shoot it, case closed (didn’t realize until Trevor mentioned the wolf was Big Ed). Where’d all these 1980s people end up? The girl grew up to be Anne of Green Gables, the boy to be Corey Haim, and Attias won awards for directing prestige TV.

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The Dark Half (1993, George Romero)

Timothy Hutton doppelgangers face off kicking each other in the nuts while a flock of finches swarm the house and Amy Madigan (the witch from Weapons!) is tied to a chair somewhere. Isn’t “hero writer vs. villain arguing who gets to write a story ending” reused from Misery? Cop Michael Rooker arrives to untie Amy but more importantly he lets the finches in and they eat Evil Hutton (good fx as he’s reduced to a skeleton). Adapting this into a movie was a bad idea but the acting and overall look are higher caliber than Silver Bullet. Hutton was also in Ghost Writer and Secret Window, has a real thing for dumb movies about split-personality authors.

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The Mangler (1995, Tobe Hooper)

Here it is, the “king” of the shouldn’t-have-been-adapted stories, as three drunk(?) people think they’ve succeeded in exorcising the killer laundry machine, then it starts chasing them down some stairs. The priest-guy (also a priest in Hooper’s Night Terrors) gets mangled, Buffalo Bill (his voice!) escapes, and his girl falls into the hands of laundry-machine cultists. Movie got two sequels, I assume ironically. I watched this in the theater in ’95, maybe this is why nobody wanted to hang out with me.

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Sleepwalkers (1992, Mick Garris)

Angry Alice Krige (who specializes in playing witches) bites off Officer Ron Perlman’s fingers and twists off his arm, sets another cop on fire, knows exactly where to aim a pistol to cause cars to explode with a single shot. She kidnaps Shelley (in her Twin Peaks follow-up), taking her to dance with her mutant zombie son Charles in a house surrounded by cats. Turntable plays “Sleep Walk” by itself as Charles attempts to suck her soul. What is it with King and soul-sucking cats? But Shelley turns the tables (err, knocks Charles down and gouges out his eyes) and cats jump on Alice until she spontaneously combusts, but not before she makes time to kill one more cop. Mick’s first of seven King movies is set in Indiana, not Maine, disappointing.

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Watchers (1988, Jon Hess)

This was my favorite Dean Koontz book, and I think Watchers II (a remake masquerading as a sequel) was the better adaptation, but nobody’s got that for download. Supergenius Scrabble-playing dog and his boy Corey Haim are under assault by Michael Ironside, who claims to be a labmade perfect killing machine but gets immediately wasted by a couple of noobs. Now they’re attacked by an evil gorilla (psychically linked to the dog, if I recall?), and they waste it too, easy peasy. Director Hess went on to make Alligator 2: The Mutation, Corey’s sister was Frank Zappa’s niece.

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Humanoids from the Deep (1980, Barbara Peeters)

A girl with her tits out is beating a humanoid (seaweed-people with external brains) with a rock. The setting is a marina carnival on fire with a few-seconds-long tape of screaming citizens on endless loop. For some reason I thought this was James Cameron’s first movie (that was Pirahna 2: The Spawning). Doug “The Virginian” McClure and Vic Morrow and some pretty girls with short careers all survive.

Nice tile:

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Dog Soldiers (2002, Neil Marshall)

Are the dogs soldiers, or are soldiers just fighting giant dogs? Trevor: “The whole military seems to be made up of clones of Mike from Spaced.” Surrounded in a house with breakaway walls, the humans fight with pots and pans, aerosol cans, etc. One guy always has a blue glowstick in his mouth, and I know there’s gonna be a payoff… ah nope, he just likes glowsticks. If Brits call bathrooms “the closet” what do they call closets? Spoon gets eaten, another guy is starting to wolf out, so he stays behind and blows the cabin using the gas stove, still time for one more ugly-looking fight. Marshall went on to be one of those almost-cult horror guys making almost-good movies until he faded to Hellboy-remake status.

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Underworld / Transmutations (1985, George Pavlou)

Masked baddies shoot green gas into their own face, then onto our (presumed) mutant heroes. These guys are terribly incompetent villains – they keep pointing guns but not firing them, and end up sabotaging each other’s plans. Some glowy-eyed woman repeats “show me your dreams” at the baddie leader over and over again, then scans him to death, the music one shimmery note taped down on a synth. Was this an early version of Nightbreed? At least two of these actors were in Dennis Potter movies. Great color on the remaster, glad I waited forty years to watch the last ten minutes of this.

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Rawhead Rex (1986, George Pavlou)

Howard (of Stephen King TV movie Rose Red) finds a bloody man whose dying words might be the key to defeating the evil demon, then a priest yells for Howard to “get the fuck out” of his church – there’s the Clive Barker we all love. The church houses a hellish horror… oh no it’s just a rock. Rex looks deliciously fake with his light-up eyes, and since he’s a puppet and can’t move, the priest has to lean into him to get bitten to death. Useless Howard gets knocked around by the monster then a lady picks up the rock and unleashes its lady-magic in the form of 1980s light effects. Meant to be the first in a series of Books of Blood adaptations, but fortunately the following year Clive took things into his own hands with Hellraiser.

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TerrorVision (1986, Ted Nicolaou)

I kinda remembered this movie’s theme song, but it’s much less sinister and more new-wave than I recall, and the movie is more knowingly goofy and popping with color. Two kids with machine guns are busy defeating the monster with electricity when a spacesuit alien beams in to explain what’s going on, but a random party guest executes him and the monster eats everyone, haha. Wouldn’t have guessed that this would be the best-looking movie of the bunch.

by ·Comments Off on Come Drink With Me (1966, King Hu)

The second time I’ve watched Tsai/King movies back to back, this time by accident. Pale guy in white robe (Chen Hung-Lieh) kidnaps the governor’s son Master Chang until Golden Swallow (Jade Fox herself) shows up to set things right. But she gets poisoned, then rescued by Drunken Cat (House of 72 Tenants star Elliot Ngok Wah), whose archrival Abbot Liao Kung (One-Armed Swordsman villain Yang Chi-Ching) teams up with the pale guy for a showdown. The action in this is slower and less fluid than usual, but the people on the internet say it’s actually great, so what do I know.

Swallow vs. Pale Guy:

Abbot vs. Drunken Cat:

by ·Comments Off on I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006, Tsai Ming-Liang)

We got another The Hole situation, a girl living alone one loose floorboard away from the catatonic guy (played by short-haired Lee) in the apartment underneath. Meanwhile a local guy (this is Malaysia, where Tsai comes from) takes in a foreigner (played by long-haired Lee) who got himself beat up in the street, has to wash the mattress whenever the foreigner soils it, which is often. Overall more grime and desperation than usual (preceding the great Stray Dogs) though it ends with a lovely dream

The woman upstairs is Chen Shiang-Chyi of Stray Dogs, ticket taker of Goodbye Dragon Inn. Chris Fujiwara wrote of people “staying human under the most hostile conditions” in the final writeup of the Defining Movies book.

by ·Comments Off on TV/Q3/2025

Key & Peele season 1 (2012)

Holds up well. President’s anger translator… adjusting one’s blackness… how white guys fight… cinephiles talking loud at the movies… magical negro battle… making fun of Jaden Smith… food competition show contestant gets stabbed… Lil Wayne gets stabbed… insult battle with mom’s doctor… rapid-fire code-switching… Peele expressing enthusiasm about the movie Candyman a decade before remaking it… “I said biiiiiiiitch.”

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I Think You Should Leave season 1 (2019)

Most of the jokes come down to Tim talking too much and digging himself into deeper holes (or: a hotdog man in a car accident). Elderly Will Forte botches his lifelong plan to take revenge on Tim on a flight… Fred Willard is an inappropriate organist at a funeral… Tim Heidecker is a music snob at a party.

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Upright Citizens Brigade season 1 (1998)

The hot chicks room, the bucket of truth, the unabomber… protection poo-stick… the title and titular line, writing nonsense lyrics for Disney movies, Dee Snider cameo… ass pennies… teamster puppet show… mixing taped performances with live shows with guerilla theater… Amy playing every female character.