by ·Comments Off on The First Omen (2024, Arkasha Stevenson)

The only movie this year that I’ve begun at 4:00am. I was sick and unable to sleep, and when the rooster next door started crowing I thought “might as well put on the longest, slowest movie I’ve got.” The new nun in town is NT Free of that M. Night TV series that I can’t figure out whether I would enjoy or not, and the wide-eyed elder nun is Aquarius star Sonia Braga. NT discovers her new convent to be as suspicious as that Cuckoo hotel, as the movie brings Rosemary’s Baby (or more generously The Sect) into its Omen backstory and impregnates the youngest nun with the devil.

All movies set in Italy involve a dramatic encounter with an art restoration:

Bilge called it “actually good” and Nayman qualifies “never quite great.” But I have prequelphobia, and as much as I love quoting “it’s all for you” from the original, the callbacks here annoyed me more than the high-quality performance and hair stylings of NT pulled me in. Also appreciate the ally priest being recast as the dad from The VVitch, and the opening-scene death of the U.S. President of Rumours, anyway.

by ·Comments Off on Cuckoo (2024, Tilman Singer)

Hunter Schafer (Kinds of Kindness) just lost her mom and is reluctantly stuck with her dad’s family for the season, working for suspicious Dan Stevens at a secluded German hotel where people are always barfing in the gift shop. Sometimes there’s an attack or a freakout and the whole movie gets stuck in a fluttery time loop. She’s joined by Lando (Jan Bluthardt from Singer’s also-cool Luz) who wants to eliminate the alien creatures Dan is fostering, which include Hunter’s half-sister, so she’s now trying to save her family from both these men and the evil mom-aliens with her one good arm, a knife, and a half-working walkman as protection from alien time-screams. Gets a little bit too explainy – I’m looking for my bizarre rural euro-sci-fi to be narratively calibrated somewhere between this and Earwig.

With this and Longlegs, murderous moms are in vogue:

Hunter’s music sounds cool, too:

by ·Comments Off on Longlegs (2024, Oz Perkins)

Agent Lee Harker (a Draculized Harper Lee, played by The Girl Whom It Follows) has a hunch that gets her partner killed, and instead of getting mad at her the FBI declares her to be psychic and puts her on the decades-long case of a phantom serial killer who convinces dads to murder-suicide their families. She eventually discovers tall pale T. Rex-fan Nicolas Cage, who smashes his own face while revealing that his accomplice was Agent Harker’s mom (Alicia Witt, Crispin Glover’s Hotel Room partner). Mainly I want to know why the agency’s forensics dept. confidently says that the killer (Cage) never entered the homes, when the long late explanation of mom’s participation shows the killer (Witt) entering all the homes. Directed by the grandson of Scarface’s boss, whose next movie might be an adaptation of the cover story of King’s Skeleton Crew and whose previous movies I can’t decide whether to watch or to 1/10th-watch.

This just in: Robert Rubsam in Mubi.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 28: SHOCKtober 2024

Secret Window (2004, David Koepp)

Our first-ever Criterion Channel pick, to see if this movie is as silly as I remember it (yup). “The only thing that matters is the ending,” says Johnny Depp (Yoga Hosers), justifying our little project, a welcome rejoinder to Bill Pullman last year. Maria Bello (A History of Violence) arrives at Depp’s trashed place and the camera isn’t sure what to do while she looks around. Depp is lurking in a pilgrim hat doing his Southern John Turturro impression, having scratched “shooter” into all the walls. She tries to escape but has fatally forgotten how cars work. Tim Hutton (The Dark Half) shows up too late and they both get shovel-murdered and buried in the cornfield, closing on Depp relishing his homegrown corn, a meta-commentary on this corny movie, which I watched in theaters even though Koepp’s Stir of Echoes wasn’t good.

–
The Watchers (2024, Ishana Night Shyamalan)

On to HBO, which I probably won’t have for long so let’s max out our enjoyment (heh). Dakota Fanning (Coraline) and Georgina Campbell (Barbarian) are waiting in a roachy house when the real Georgina arrives, turns out their friends are being possessed by shapeshifting humanoid ancient insect creatures. Now the new Dakota arrives, calls herself the daywalker, and discovers she’s part-human, hmmm. “I’m so glad it’s over” says Dakota later to her identical twin, but their CG parrot knows it’s not. I’m on an M. Night kick and was sorely tempted to watch this new one from Lady Raven’s sister, but just saved myself 90 minutes

–
Godzilla II, King of the Monsters (2019, Michael Dougherty)

Sequel to the Gareth Edwards remake, starts and ends with people shouting names in rainy wreckage. Just as the family unit of Kyle (Day the Earth Stood Still Remake) and Vera (Orphan) and Millie is reunited, Rodan flies Gz into space then drops him like a bomb onto the city, then Mothra intervenes and gets vaporized. Vera sacrifices herself using an electro gizmo to lure King Ghidorah away, then Molten Godzilla rises and explodes KG and the whole city. Rodan arrives late, missed the whole fight. I saw Zhang Ziyi for two seconds! Unfortunately, Dougherty directed the great Trick ‘r Treat.

–
Godzilla vs. Kong (2021, Adam Wingard)

Godzilla is fighting Mechagodzilla, Kong is awakened with a small nuclear device and a deaf girl with Rebecca Hall tells Kong to help out, so he does. Tables turn on Kong, computer guy Brian Tyree Henry helps out, and our guys fuckin destroy Mecha-G. This must be a different city, since most of the buildings are standing. I’m glad Kyle is still alive, since he was in the Peter Jackson Kong, uniting cinematic universes through his pointless presence. This movie looks more fun than the others – I actually forgot that after not liking Wingard I started liking him again.

–
Godzilla × Kong: The New Empire (2024, Adam Wingard)

It’s gone fully cartoon, as all manner of CG monkeys and lizards fight in Narnia or somewhere, until Evil Anti-Kong escapes to the beaches of Brazil, followed by Power Glove Kong, Gz, and Ice Gz, who all destroy Rio, then team up to PG-13-slaughter Anti-Kong. The humans in these movies always seemed like time-wasters but now I see that without any grounding presence, all that’s left is loud empty colors. A lasting peace between giant apes and lizards is achieved, and Mothra and Rebecca Hall are still alive, fwiw.

–
Saw 7 aka Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (2010, Kevin Greutert)

The timer’s countin’ down and a bunch of saps are stuck in killer traps. Sean Patrick’s nipples aren’t strong enough for him to stop Gina Holden (death non-escaper in Final Destination 3) from getting cremated alive. Meanwhile, Mandylor from the last couple movies puts an exploding head trap on Jigsaw’s secret assistant Jill, then gets taken down by Jigsaw’s secret-secret assistant… Cary Elwes, sure, why not.

–
Jigsaw (2017, Michael & Peter Spierig)

And it’s over to Netflix for the prequel. Their fast-forwarding is slower than HBO’s, but the thumbnails load properly so you get a nice sense of the movie leading up to the last ten minutes. No clear winner. Two dudes are locked in laser collars, but Dr. Logan’s collar is fake, trying to get the corrupt detective (Callum Rennie of Hard Core Logo and Goon 2) to confess his corruption. It seems Jig had let the doctor live, now he’s jigsawing people himself, and his clip-show flashback explanation of this takes up the whole ten minutes. Directed by Australian twins who made an Ethan Hawke time travel movie, and the new writers would also take the next two Saws… one of which is on Hulu, who has the smoothest fast-forwarding of all…

–
Spiral: From the Book of Saw (2021, Darren Lynn Bousman)

Max Minghella is already in the midst of backstory infodump, telling Chris Rock how he killed
a bunch of dirty cops and wants to apply the ITIL continual improvement process to the city police department, but Chris is more concerned that his dad (chief dirty cop Samuel L. Jackson) is hooked to a blood-removal device, which transforms into a suicide-by-cop machine. Max just takes an elevator out of the abandoned factory surrounded by SWAT and the movie ends, what?

–
Pearl (2022, Ti West)

Mia Goth repression prequel to X, which wasn’t great, and reviews of this and MaXXXine didn’t convince me that it’s a trilogy worth the time. Bouncy haired girl Mitsi is over at Pearl’s place, admits to getting the dancing role that Pearl wanted, but they’re cool, still friends, oh no Pearl is chasing her with an axe. Some pretty good split-screen body-choppin’ shots.

–
Madame Web (2024, S.J. Clarkson)

Okay, just for the heck of it, the year’s most mocked superhero movie. Dakota Johnson has slow-mo future-sight spidey-sense among a meteor shower of CG metal scraps in a sparks factory. Oh boy, Tahar Rahim plays an evil spider-assassin, until a giant letter P falls on him. She astral-projects to save her useless friends, then they have to save her from drowning, and Adam Scott shows up during hospital recovery. The friends are terrible: Reality Sweeney, Isabela Romulus, and Ghostbuster Celeste, and it ends by teasing a sequel where all of them become heroes. Half of the writers also wrote Morbius, haha.

by ·Comments Off on Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922/1968, Benjamin Christensen)

Is it artistically kosher to re-release a silent film replacing the intertitles with narration and scoring the scenes with weirdo jazz? Why yes, it should be done all the time. There are still plenty of dialogue titles in the reenactment scenes, Burroughs only acts as historian narrator, but it’s still a half hour shorter than the original so his buddy Balch (of Towers Open Fire fame) cut plenty. Good movie in any form, and maybe the only early 1920s film with an ass-kissing parade. The narrator assures us that according to modern psychology none of these women were witches; they all had hysteria.

I watched this between Cuckoo and The First Omen – Satan is having plenty of children:

Been caught cookie-stabbing:

by ·Comments Off on Curse of Chucky (2013, Don Mancini)

A respectable and effective back-to-basics story, cutting itself free from the previous sequels by simply setting a new Chucky loose in a house full of new victims, then belatedly explaining how the various movies tie together.

Delivery of a mysterious doll, screaming ensues, and gramma is dead and the doll forgotten. Wheelchair single mom Mika (Fiona “daughter of Brad” Dourif) is joined by her horrible sister (“Mother Mortis” of the Insidious series) and her husband (a Hallmark Christmas movie actor) and the local priest (Adolfo Martinez of sci-fi rip-off The Terminators) so we’ll have more people to kill off. The priest suffers a car-accident decapitation, the babysitter is electrocuted via laptop and horrible sister is stabbed in the face. Husband thinks Mika did all this, until Chucky smashes his face with an axe. Mike decapitates the doll but that’s ineffective, and he wheelchairs her through the second-floor railing. While she’s bleeding out he explains that he was close with her late mom, and she’s the one who called the cops leading to the toy store chase at the beginning of part one. Now that we’ve established continuity we can have late-movie cameos by Jenny Tilly and the original Andy, all still alive at the end as Mika is shipped to the hospital for the criminally insane.

by ·Comments Off on Uzumaki (2000, Higuchinsky)

Rewatching this standout from the great J-horror wave in anticipation of the troubled new animated version. At the time I enjoyed this enough to check out Higuchinsky’s follow-up (Long Dream, not as cool as The Jaunt) – now the mix of bizarre happenings with cool lighting and soft-focus soap opera reminds me of House.

Kirie’s boyfriend knows the town is spiraling and suggests they run away together but she doesn’t take him seriously and stays until it’s too late. His dad (Ren Osugi, Nightmare Detective chief, Shin Godzilla prime minister) becomes dangerously spiral-obsessed until he suicides in the washing machine, and mom (Keiko Takahashi, star of Door) develops extreme spiralphobia as a result. Meanwhile kids are becoming snails and growing mad spiral hairstyles. A reporter talks to the kids and does some research, has a breakthrough, and before he can tell them, Kirie’s ridiculous classmate who likes surprising people (Sadawo Abe of Yatterman) jumps in front of the reporter’s car and they both die. Closing apocalypse is shown via stills, presumably from the comic.

The lead girl showed up a decade later in Norwegian Wood. Denden is the local cop – I think he shot his partner in Cure – and among the schoolkids are the stars of Ring Virus and Ring Spiral (appropriately). Potentially useful list of “the best horror cartoonists” found on Lboxd: Ito, Burns, Carroll, Umezu, Corben, Freibert.

by ·Comments Off on The Happening (2008, M. Night Shyamalan)

I figured double-featuring this film maudit with The Sixth Sense would mean that at worst, only half of my evening would be wasted. Most people agree this is terrible, but as an established Trap enjoyer, maybe I’d join the sickos calling it a masterpiece? Turns out I’m in an even smaller group: those who thought it was fine. A solidly constructed, terrifically shot thriller showcasing the most idiotic human behavior. Maybe idiocy is the point – this isn’t humanity at its finest, it’s the same dummies who choked the planet into violently defending itself – but there’s no excuse for those two stupid boys knocking at the cabin until they get shotgunned, or for Zooey Deschanel. All told, a slight improvement on Long Weekend (The Happening of the 1970s, which shows up on best horror lists).

Opens with the Cabin in the Woods girl on a park bench as the mass suicides begin in the densest cities and spread into ever less-populous spaces. Marky (whose brother Duddits was in Sixth Sense) is dismissed by Principal Cameron, then he and Zooey take colleague John Leguizamo’s daughter so John can go on a doomed hero mission towards his wife in New Jersey (the garden state, oh no). The three get a ride from hotdog-obsessed plant growers. Marky tries to make everything about himself, but the hotdog husband (Turturro’s evil brother in O Brother) has a good sense of what’s going on, while TV news hosts blame the government. Later they get a meal from an ornery white-haired woman (The Horde’s psychiatrist in Split) who refuses all news from the outside.

“Be scientific, douchebag” – the movie has a healthy sense of humor about itself, Marky talks to a plastic plant like it’s holding him hostage, and of course characters try to run away from the wind. Some disquieting death scenes via gun and glass and lawnmower, multiple oblique 9/11 references. Victims’ language malfunctions right before death – this the same year as Pontypool.

Adam Nayman in Cinema Scope calls it “deeply stupid”:

This idea of needing to split off from the herd to survive is endemic to the apocalypse sub-genre, but it has a greater significance for Shyamalan. Simply put, the guy has an isolation fetish … when Elliot concludes, “We’ve got to get away from other people,” it’s more than a plot point: it’s the author’s rallying cry.

by ·Comments Off on The Sixth Sense (1999, M. Night Shyamalan)

Most notable thing here after watching Trap a couple times last month is how still and quiet this is, a properly haunted-feeling movie completely unlike M. Night’s post-Signs style. Besides being seen as a weird loser at school, Haley Joel is always swinging between unease and complete terror as he’s visited by the recently-dead. Child psych Bruce helps HJ develop ghost communication strategies, and HJ helps Bruce realize that Duddits Wahlberg murdered him last year and that’s why Bruce’s wife Olivia Williams doesn’t speak to him anymore. Toni Collette is too young in this – she’s excellent as HJ’s mom but doesn’t look Collette-ish enough yet.