by ·Comments Off on Cult of Chucky (2017, Don Mancini)

Good sequel, tying together all previous plots, while also allowing Chucky to multiply, while also being an Elm Street 3-style psych-ward-set serial killer thriller.

Andy is back, torturing his own personal Chucky head after a cute girl from the latest Final Destination breaks up with him. Wheelchair Nika is still alive too, so is her niece (now Mike Flanagan’s Carrie) and Jennifer Tilly-as-herself and the doll version of Jennifer Tilly, and hey, why not bring back the girl from part two, it’s a party.

Andy gets himself committed by attacking a guard. They charles-lee-ray Nika. Evil wins, kills everyone and gets away with it. I would’ve been happy to watch a couple more movies like this, but apparently the followup was a three-season TV series, and I simply don’t have that many hours to devote to Chucky.

Claire, getting Very-Long-Engagemented:

In the asylum is:
Schizophrenic Multiple-Malcolm (a cop in The Long Walk)
Confrontational Claire of Cube 2: Hypercube
Mom-wannabe Madeline of House of the Dead
Angela who thinks she is a ghost (of both Violent Night and Silent Night Deadly Night Remake)
Nurse Ashley of Malcolm McDowell Silent Night
Nurse Carlos of Jessica Alba The Eye Remake
McDreamy-lookin’ Dr. Foley of The Viewing

by ·Comments Off on Nana (1926, Jean Renoir)

Everyone loves actress Nana (the Whirlpool of Fate orphan, and the director’s wife), including Count “Dr. Caligari” Muffat, horse breeder Count “Robert Macaire” Vandeuvres, and Macaire’s useless nephew Ray (The Three-Sided Mirror). Nana, in turn, likes whoever she can use to get ahead, and that’s Muffat, who gets her the starring role in a play but can’t stop her from being laughed off the stage. In the end, everyone in this movie who acted normal about anything was spared – unfortunately that’s nobody.

Nana with her Count:

Somehow Nana is even worse as a courtesan, needing to ham up every interaction as if she’s still onstage. If you watched this and The Odyssey back-to-back, you’d have to conclude from the crowds of suitors that all men except Matt Damon are pathetic. Nana’s three suitors are in a desperation spiral, and it’s tough to keep track – you tell yourself at the beginning “the Count is the guy with the preposterous mustache,” but there are multiple Counts and a preponderance of bad mustaches. The horse breeder tries to throw a race to gain enough cash to win the girl. When that fails he drinks poison then falls down, starting a fire that burns up his horses. The nephew is overwhelmed by how pathetic this all is and unalives himself with Nana’s scissors. Muffat’s wife left him long ago, is now depressed about her life with an annoying playwright. Finally Nana gets smallpox and I lost track of whether she took the count with her.

Nana with Horse Guy:

Based on a Zola novel that gets remade every decade or so. The Silent Film Music Shuffle Mix was played, and Dirty Three’s Ocean Songs came out the winner.

Nana with the annoying nephew:

by ·Comments Off on Three Extremes (2004, Miike & Park & Chan)

Dumplings (Fruit Chan)

Bai Ling of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is abortionist-chef Aunt Mei, and her latest rich customer is from Don’t Go Breaking My Heart 2. I once watched the feature-length version of this on bootleg DVD, which defeats the point of bathing in all the lovely green shades brought out by Christopher Doyle, shooting a WKW movie without the blurry slow-mo. The movie’s other point is to gross you out with all the baby-eating, which evokes Monty Python’s crunchy frog sketch. Customer wants to look youthful forever so her bigshot husband Tony 2 will keep liking her, and maybe eating babies is the answer? Nice peek into early-century medicine, doctor handing out mood-altering pills to pregnant women.

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Cut (Park Chan-wook)

Opening long-take of a vampire film-in-the-film, the camera doing that post-Fight Club thing where it has to float through objects. Later, the vampire film’s director (the No Other Choice guy) has been tied up on the same set, while an extra from his films explains his class resentment while chopping off fingers from the director’s pianist wife (the chef/daughter of Oldboy). The extra has got an overcomplicated revenge plot (and a nice dance routine), and everyone ends up confessing too many things until the wife gets close enough to bite her kidnapper’s neck off, then the director strangles her while she’s still immobile.

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Box (Takashi Miike)

Writer dreams of a man burying a box, then has a long, slow conversation with her agent. Writer is near-catatonic, flashbacks reveal she was half of a contortionist circus act whose act involved two sisters who could fold themselves into two small boxes. One night she locked her sister in the box and attacked their keeper with a dart, then the place burned down. Sorry to make the movie sound exciting – it’s mostly her moving very slowly while feeling trauma, reliving the fire again and again, until her dreams/visions allow her to apologize to the dead sister in the box after being berated by the circusmaster.

by ·Comments Off on The Iron Rose (1973, Jean Rollin)

Couple meets at a wedding and chase each other around giggling, then have a nice time nude in a crypt. When they return to the surface, the cemetery is closed and deserted and their attempts to leave end up in loops, until he gets shitty, starts slapping her around and trashing graves. They make up, and get busy on a pile of bones. I still don’t love these vibes-only Rollin movies but don’t mind rollin’ with one every couple of years. The actress would go on to almost produce a Tara Reid movie, while he would star in City of Pirates and Tale of Springtime.

by ·Comments Off on Accident (2009, Soi Cheang)

Sourfaced Louis Koo leads a hitman squad, staging deaths as accidents, along with older Uncle, female Woman, and Lam Suet. They pull off their latest job – electrocution via kite string – but Uncle is losing his marbles, then an out-of-control bus plows into Lam Suet. Louis starts tailing people involved with the job, convinced his team is being taken out by a rival. He thinks Woman is against him so he kills her, then their final client falls from a window. Gorman: “Master of the surveillance state goes crazy when the apparatus is turned against him, then has an epiphany about the cruel vicissitudes of pure chance.”

Koo between the Election movies and Breaking/Romancing. Woman was Anthony Wong’s wife in Motorway. Lam Suet was Lam Suet. Uncle was a Sammo/Jackie Lucky Star who died last Halloween. Next year we should have a Devil’s Vendetta / Ghost Snatchers double-feature in his honor.

by ·Comments Off on Anything That Moves (2025, Alex Phillips)

Liam is the local male prostitute, biking between clients, everyone in town paying each other for sex on an app called Snaxxx. His girl Thea is having sex with guy Ray whose kid colored his face with marker, then she pops back into Ray’s apartment real quick and maybe murders him in the brain. Soon all their clients are dying, and Liam is the prime suspect.

There’s a tiny bit of style via split-diopter giallo murderer shots and film-end flares, but I don’t mean to make the movie sound cooler than it is. Already on the run, Liam kills a rapist cop with a rock to the head. Turns out all those closeup on crucifix necklaces weren’t random artsy camerawork, as the cop’s weirdo religious partner is the serial killer. All nearby sex workers are activated via snaxxx alert to come to Liam’s rescue and defeat the crazy cultist, who also appears in this year’s Night Nurse, which I had on the queue but now I dunno.

by ·Comments Off on Resurrection (2025, Bi Gan)

I thought from the film description that the Dreaming Deliriants would be the heroes but the first one we meet, hunted through his illusions, is a stooped decaying opium gobbler asking to be put out of his misery. He has a film projector in his guts, making this a double feature candidate for Cigarette Burns. His guts project him into his favorite silent film and mine: The Sprinkler Sprinkled.

Hat Cop breaks out a murder suspect during the prison ball. The suspect Lady-From-Shangahis himself into a mirror room, escapes the cop and stabs him in the ear – there’s much more ear stabbing in this movie than I would prefer. Think I see the train car from the short.

Twenty years later he’s an ex-monk named Mongrel helping to loot a temple, has the power to destroy rocks with his fingers. He spends the night and meets the Spirit of Bitterness who wants to reach enlightenment by hearing how the guy killed his rabid father.

Ten years later the Deliriant vanished into nothingness, but we see him at a bus station – he’s a scammer who picks up a kid to do card tricks. This ends with a cinephiliac long-take section where he spends the last night of 1999 with a vampire girl he just met. Then the hunter from the beginning(?) infiltrates his final dream to make him think he’s at his mother’s side. This feels like a reference to Spielberg’s AI, but also, the Sprinkler gets Sprinkled yet again. I know this all reads as nonsense, but these are the notes I took while watching this movie, and I’m sticking with ’em. Music by M83 in a rare side gig from his brother Yann G‘s movies.

A true cinephile uses all the aspect ratios:

by ·Comments Off on Blue Heron (2025, Sophy Romvari)

Older brother Jeremy is acting up, parents are worried. Little sister Sasha is probably more focused on living her life, dad sees family as a distraction from his computer. They go see herons at a nature center and learn that after the birds raise their kids, the bond between parents dissolves, hmmm. Jeremy goes missing, is found by mom, shoplifts and is brought home by the cops, is sometimes sweet and mostly blank or hostile. Child psychologist is little help, the parents agree that he’s an asshole. Then a lady arrives holding a clipboard, that’s never good. “She suggested that she takes him away and I said yes.”

Sudden flash-forward and Sasha is a filmmaker presenting the case of the brother to a current-day group of social workers. What do we know now that we didn’t know then? Then Grown Sasha is the clipboard woman, stepping back into her house to visit Young Sasha and her parents.

Sophy for Sight & Sound:

I love when a film brings you into an experience rather than just telling you a story. It asks you to dissect the construction as you are participating in the watching of it.
…
It’s quite nihilistic in some ways. You want there to be an outcome that benefits the characters, but I’m a realist. I wanted to show the artistic exploration, but then cut short the emotional catharsis because it’s not a rescue mission that she goes on. If anything, it’s a research mission. Oftentimes when you do research, you don’t find what you’re looking for.

by ·Comments Off on Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970, Elio Petri)

Our guy slashes his girl’s throat during sex Gone Girl-style, but she’s too respectable to bleed more than an ounce or so. The flipside to Police Python, which also starts with a police chief killing his girl, this chief explains his moral power-play games to himself on tape, then manipulates the murder investigation away from himself, then toward himself, with no apparent difference in results. “We must know everything, control everything,” he rants, “Repression is our vaccine,” he exclaims. Movie gets more slippery and subjective, and is quite watchable despite our protagonist, but most importantly it’s got one of Morricone’s glorious soundtracks, a nice repeating theme full of boioioing noises.

This is also how I solve crimes: