by ·Comments Off on Dead Heat (1988, Mark Goldblatt)

After Hiruko and White of the Eye, I’m accidentally on a late ’80s kick… help.

Straightman Treat Williams and his wacky partner Joe Piscopo (Wise Guys, SNL) are in trouble with their cop boss Robert “The Cowboy” Picardo for being reckless out of control loose cannons who do not follow the rules. At a sketchy science lab investigating some major crimes committed by zombies armed with machine guns, PR Hotgirl Lindsay “Sister of Mark” Frost fails to distract them and Joe easily finds the zombie reanimation chamber – and just in time, since Treat gets himself killed in another room.

Lot of fishtank drama in this movie:

“Rich dead people, what does it mean?” Funny, I’m reading Don DeLillo’s Zero K, which asks the same question. But here the screenplay is just something you’ve gotta get through, an obstacle to the heart of the movie, which yearns to show us more reanimated corpses with machine guns (and admittedly good makeup), now including Treat. The PR woman joins them, saying she didn’t mean to be evil. When she belatedly admits that she’s also dead, the company keeping her alive as long as she’s useful, she corpse-rots immediately. Now they need a new hotgirl on the team, and fortunately we’ve got Treat’s ex, morgue attendant Becky.

Treat, Gremlins Salesman, and the zombie army:

More stuff: the zombie chemicals run through Chinatown, where the Gremlins salesman makes a getaway by turning on a lightning machine which reanimates all the chickens and ducks and pigs in his butcher shop. The zombie company is run by Dr. McNab (Kolchak: The Night Stalker) and PR woman’s father, VHS Vincent Price. You expect the happy ending is gonna be finding a way to keep Treat unalive so he doesn’t rot like the PR woman, but no, everyone ends up dead, and when a cornered Kolchak shoots himself, they reanimate him just so they can kill him again. Good commitment to the bit, though overall the movie doesn’t move swiftly or smartly. Director Goldblatt was better known as editor of James Cameron and Paul Verhoeven and Joe Dante movies (the evil company here is called Dante).

The split-second before John Le Carre’s “Smiley’s People” took a bullet intended for Joe Piscopo:

Treat’s final form:

by ·Comments Off on 3 Bad Men (1926, John Ford)

Pretty Girl loses her dad on the way to the gold rush, gets semi-adopted by Bad Men (her name for the notorious wanted criminals). Bad leader Bull decides what she needs is a husband, so they “hire” an Irish guy after a good scene of checking the bar for eligible men. Sure, they don’t respect land rights, and sometimes do some robbing and killing, but it’s quickly clear that the Bad Men are better than the whitehat sheriff of the town where everyone stays while waiting for the gold rush to begin (there’s an official start date/time, so it’s literally a race).

Soon, Bad Bull is leading a revolt against the corrupt sheriff, who wants to burn down the church full of women and children. Turns out rescuing babies by tossing them out the window of a burning building wasn’t invented by Hard-Boiled. Then our romantic couple needs to be saved from a pursuing gang of evil cops.

High-hatted Spade stays back to hold the pass against the sheriff’s men, delaying them by 15 seconds. Soft-hatted Mike does a better job, holing up in a gunpowder cabin and taking ten men with him. Then Bull kamikazes the sheriff, leaving the romantic couple safe.

Bull’s goodbye:

The romantic leads were in Fig Leaves by Hawks the same year, and the Irish guy would star in Sunrise the following year. Not much on the other guys except for Softhat Mike, who had small parts in most movies, including the Preston Sturges pictures. Ford semi-remade this a couple decades later, not the only time he’d do that. Hits from my silents playlist: Mogwai, Os Mutantes, Cyro Baptista… a Kraftwerk biking song during the church fire, a blast of Squarepusher during the gold rush race, and Coil over the finale. Really the only thing that didn’t work was a track from Tron Ares – I must remove all the movie soundtrack albums from my movie soundtrack mix.

by ·Comments Off on The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Castle Lord Masahiro Motoki (lead of Gemini and Bird People In China) betrays the country’s bigwig warlord and imprisons his messenger (Cloud scammer Masaki Suda). Lord MM hopes for victory with help from some alliances, but the movie isn’t focused on military strategy but minor mysteries that plague the lord until he has to ask his imprisoned envoy for help: a murder, a transformed severed head, a missing teapot. All this non-action culminates in an extended confession by the lord’s wife (Yuriko Yoshitaka from Noriko’s Dinner Table) who staged all three mysteries. She and the prisoner convince lord MM to run away from the castle and live a long life drinking tea instead of continuing to fight. Movie looked great, my first Kiyoshi movie in theaters since Tokyo Sonata, but it does go on, I wasn’t so invested in the mystery plot, and I had to laugh when I realized it’s showing some of the same events as Kitano’s Kubi.

by ·Comments Off on Chronovisor (2026, Auen & Walker)

Like Bohdanowicz and D’Ambrose remaking Blair Witch – a research film with cathartic psychedelic ending and good thriller music throughout. “Filmed in gorgeous 16mm” per Hard Light but I dunno, I thought the interiors looked like hell.

Mubi:

The object is the titular Chronovisor, a device invented by one Father Pellegrino Ernetti that could allegedly pick up signals from long-past events and visualize them, as if translating history from waveforms into a crudely visualized form of TV. But both Ernetti and his invention are real, part of a historical rabbit hole the American filmmaking duo stumbled down and constructed a fictional edifice around, resulting in a film about the act of reading which slowly transforms into, by film’s end, video art.

by ·Comments Off on Hiruko the Goblin (1990, Shinya Tsukamoto)

After the relentless Tetsuo movies this one is going for an Obayashi contrast: demonic possession and rushing camera blur and bodily explosions amidst a medium-paced, brightly colored daytime plot with upbeat made-for-TV music. A few good stop-motion and matte painting shots, then after the initial goblin attacks the movie has lost its juice, and they’re just spraying flying spiders with a can of wd-40. Feels like a studio with a bland cursed-high-school story hired an edgy young filmmaker to helm, and each side brushed against each other’s limitations.

The goblin is hard to deal with, since people who see it tend to chop off their own heads. Student Masao has an exploding growth on his back, a Tsukamoto specialty. Disgraced Archaeologist Hieda (Yumeji / Mr. Katakuri) shows up at a high school with homemade ghostbusting equipment, summoned by a professor who then got Evil-Deaded by the goblin’s-eye camera. Masao and Hieda and the school janitor (the non-bald doctor in Dogra Magra) have to piece together the mythology and save the world from evil, I suppose.

by ·Comments Off on White of the Eye (1987, Donald Cammell)

Good bright color and 1980s slow motion, bad Pink Floyd music. Women be shoppin’, then be gettin’ murdered at their homes in Tucson. Was it possible for artists working in the 1980s to not produce an “80s movie?” Certainly not in this case, and the music is largely to blame. Cammell pulls off some great angles and edits, like a glitchy Nic Roeg movie, and overall I felt bad not liking it after reading this.

David Keith is an audiophile home stereo installer, who drives an ugly green van while listening to opera. The cops start questioning him about being nearby the recent savage serial killings, leading his wife (Bronx blonde Cathy Moriarty) to ask questions, leading to marital discord. Her husband is very upset about being considered a possible murderer, although he is the murderer, and now he sets out trying to murder her and their daughter. If you’ve seen a 1980s movie, you know this will all lead to machine guns and explosions, somehow. The husband is the Firestarter dad, while the murder investigator is from Christine. I checked to see if I could find enough Stephen King movie veterans to form a pattern but just ended up with The Keep, Matinee, Witch Hunt, and Return of the Killer Tomatoes.

by ·Comments Off on TV/Q3/2026

Smiling Friends season 3 (2025)

Animation-wise episode six is the greatest, one of multiple agency origin stories.

Beef House (2020)

Pretty good fake sitcom. The People’s Joker director worked on this.

by ·Comments Off on Funny Games U.S. (2007, Michael Haneke)

Hadn’t watched the original in so long I’ve forgotten most of it, so why not refresh my memory with the remake, which everyone says is exactly the same movie but in English. No missteps noted in the adaptation, this worked out great for everything except the actors’ reputations. I’ve only seen one movie each by tormented parents Naomi Watts and Tim Roth (not counting Twin Peaks season 3) in the last two decades but maybe that’s a me-problem. Tormentor Michael Pitt was tenth-billed in Seven Psychopaths (so, not a psychopath). His softer-spoken (briefly-dead) co-conspirator is Brady Corbet, who was just getting started, first starring in all the big arthouse dramas and now directing them.

Family members attempt escape, all are caught and executed, just another stop on these guys’ tour of lake houses. When these movies first came out I wasn’t familiar with Naked City, which plays a couple times, but now I realize the movie is about two cool John Zorn fans struggling to put up with regular society.

by ·Comments Off on Whirlpool of Fate (1925, Jean Renoir)

Checking out the Renoir silents with my faithful playlist of weird jazz. Cute riverboat girl Catherine “Nana” Hessling loses her dad to a random fall overboard and becomes the ward of her abusive uncle. Things aren’t gonna get any better from here, if the film title is to be believed. She meets a charismatic poacher named Weasel who provokes the locals into burning his house down, the girl left crying while Weasel skips town with her dog. But the girl doesn’t deserve all this torment by 1920’s standards, she hasn’t done anything wicked or evil like have sex with a man, so after she has some cool hallucinations (Melies cauchemars, lizards and anti-gravity) she’s discovered by a nice rich boy who helps fight off the uncle when he tries to return.