by ·Comments Off on Doctor Sleep (2019, Mike Flanagan)

“Running away from myself, I guess.” From the moment Ghost Scatman appeared to dump exposition, we know this is gonna be a big obvious movie. This was my token stinker of the month, which I watched in segments while falling asleep after having watched a proper movie… most of my notes consist of the timecode where I left off, and variations on “movie is so bad.”

“I know that head of yours is like a radio sometimes” – nice True Stories reference. Shining-era flashback actors are recast, and present-day Danny (Ewan McGregor) teams up with his 12-step sponsor (Cliff Curtis of M. Night’s Last Airbender) and a young psychic named Abra. Meanwhile, King turns this into a mini-Stand, the villains also gathering. We get an intro to Rose The Hat’s vampire gang who feeds on shining-kids when Rose (Rebecca Ferguson of the Missions: Impossible) recruits Snakebite Emily Alyn Lind (who was in Enter The Void when she was six, oh my) outside of the Plaza Theater (!) and we meet the others, led by Carel “it is happening again” Struycken, who soon dies of shining-starvation.

Billy dies when our heroes ambush the baddies, killing most of them, then Danny leads Rose to the Overlook to trap her somehow. He chats with Lloyd the bartender doing a mild Jack impression, played by the E.T. kid (another Spielbeg-Kubrick crossover so soon after Ready Player One). Danny blows up the hotel (what, again?) to kill the vengeful ghosts that killed Rose, I guess. Think I heard a Dark Tower reference… definitely noticed one house address was 1980 (ugh). Real TV-movie energy with very talky villains – the actors seem game, so I’ll blame this on King and Flanagan.

by ·Comments Off on Threads (1984, Mick Jackson)

Thought it’d be fun to watch an apocalypse movie during an actual apocalypse, but it was not. Early scenes set up a couple families with typical problems (Jimmy’s girl Ruth tells him she’s knocked up) while global news stories play out casually on background televisions and title cards ominously tell us the population of Sheffield. Then – nuclear war!

Jimmy likes birds, and his brother dies in the blast along with the finches. The families are separated and never reunite in the chaos. The movie flashes forward in regular intervals, family members dying of illness and starvation, finally ten years later, Ruth blind and ravaged by fallout. In other news, the producers bought the rights to Johnny B. Goode, and they’re damn sure gonna play it.

by ·Comments Off on The Resurrected (1992, Dan O’Bannon)

Another Lovecraft movie to go with our Re-Animator duo (and with the same composer). A man named Ward has made a bloody impossible escape from some institution, detective March is closing the case via dictaphone in flash-forward, then there’s… a flashback from the flash-forward? March is the boring, lumpy John Terry (of a Timothy Dalton Bond movie), his client Mrs. Ward is the unnaturally terrible Jane Sibbett (of a Mary-Kate and Ashley movie). Too much voiceover, maybe to make up for the dialogue recording being pretty bad – overall competence here is low, though eventually there’s a doppelganger, a living skeleton, and some good monstrosities, so it’s not a total waste of time.

John Terry… and John Terry… in A Bronx Tale

Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope 83 called this movie “superior” and “neglected,” so maybe I was just tired and unappreciative. O’Bannon is of course the Alien creator who also made Return of the Living Dead. Corman’s The Haunted Palace, the first IMDB-credited Lovecraft-based feature, is an adaptation of the same story, featuring Vincent Price, Elisha Cook Jr., and surely far less blood.

by ·Comments Off on The Devil’s Nightmare (1971, Jean Brismée)

Nazi baroness dies giving birth in bombarded Berlin, the movie unconvincingly marrying perfect interiors with very rough stock footage. The baby is murdered, then in color the present-day baron speaks of a family curse, and a dirt-digging reporter gets her car pitchforked and runs headlong into the woods.

From here out, it’s your traditional story of a busload of people arriving at a haunted castle then getting killed one-by-one by a hot succubus in a revealing black dress, while the alchemist baron and his butler gradually parse out secrets. Not a generically bad horror movie though – it’s pretty much excellent from start to finish, including the ending where the devil deals with a priest to trade his soul for the bus people, then they all awaken and immediately die in a fiery bus crash.

Mouseover to manifest a succubus:
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Brismée’s only feature, unfortunately! The writers made some 70’s porn, and this script was remade in 2012 by some low-budge Massachusetts residents. Rififi star Jean Servais plays the baron, Erika Blanc (The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave) the succubus, and Daniel Emilfork (OMG, Krank from City of Lost Children) the devil.

Naughty Krank:

by ·Comments Off on The Queen of Spades (1949, Thorold Dickinson)

A pretty ok movie, mostly notable for all the definite articles in the credits:

We’re in Russia – all the names and signs and newspapers are in Russian, then halfway through the movie they decided the setting was well established and signs start appearing in English. Captain Anton Walbrook (year after The Red Shoes) visits the card games every night but never plays because he’s determined not to lose. So he visits a creepy bookseller to learn some useful tips:

The creepy bookseller is overdoing it:

Anton learns about a terrible old woman who knows the supernatural secret to winning at games of chance (their big card game is just betting 50/50 on a single-card draw). He pretends to be interested in the pretty girl (Yvonne Mitchell of Sapphire) who works for the old lady (Edith Evans, Ghost of Christmas Past in the Albert Finney Scrooge) by plagiarizing love letters, gets close enough to threaten the old lady, who promptly drops dead, then idiot Walbrook tells the girl his whole scheme. He gets the secret of the cards from the dead woman, wins a fortune then loses it all (and the girl) the same night. Shocktober 2021 Challenge: no more movies from the British, they are simply frightened by everything.

by ·Comments Off on Lucifer Rising (1972, Kenneth Anger)

Between Demon Brother and Scorpio Rising, I got my titles mixed up and assumed I’d already seen this, either on the DVD or at an Eyedrum screening – but nope, and it’s so good, possibly the culmination of all Anger’s 50’s experiments into his 60’s rock & roll culty stuff and beyond.

Volcano eruption… fiery title rising from the ocean with nice reflection (how’d they do that)… baby alligator… bare-breasted woman in Egypt cut against colorfully-robed wolfy cult guy. I can’t accurately narrate what happens next, but I watched it a couple times.

I think that is an unknown dude named Haydn with the staff of light, and Metallica vocalist Marianne Faithfull beneath the sphinx.

Also rewatched Bobby Yeah, confirming that it is one of the greatest things that has ever happened.

by ·Comments Off on About Endlessness (2019, Roy Andersson)

Vignettes, sometimes connected… or maybe they’re all connected, but since they’re all populated with similarly pale-faced middle-aged people, I can’t recognize recurring characters. A chill, pleasant-voiced female narrator redundantly tells us the basic idea of each scene – I think she might be the person flying over the city in the opening scene / poster shot.

People are sad or tormented or drunk. Not sure it’s all happening in the same era – I was not expecting Hitler’s bunker, for instance. Not sure it all adds up to anything either – “I saw a man who had trouble with his car,” then geese fly by, a choir rises, movie ends. Maybe it’s less of a movie than a mournful motion painting to quietly contemplate.

Michael Sicinski on Letterboxd:

Apart from the major throughline of the priest (Martin Serner) who has lost his faith — a problem that a totally-administered society has no time for — there is a complete lack of narrative progression in this film. One could take it as a formal return to Andersson’s commercial-advert style, or a series of short films yoked together under a general theme … we are intended to experience them not as sequential but as a core sample of humanity … his title is a clue: this is a film that could conceivably go on forever.

by ·Comments Off on The Vanishing (1988, George Sluizer)

Can’t seem to remember if I ever saw this before – 90% sure that I did not, and that I saw the Kiefer Sutherland remake back in the day. I do remember the girlfriend disappearing at a gas station, the boyfriend searching for years, finally meeting the kidnapper and being given the option of finding out exactly what happened to the girl by experiencing it himself, or never knowing… he chooses the former, and is drugged then buried alive.

But it’s a 100+ minute movie and there’s more to it… like a scene at the beginning where the couple runs out of gas in the middle of a tunnel, and he abandons her in the darkness, some nifty foreshadowing. The man having a new woman in the years-later section of the movie is vaguely familiar – she’s tolerant of his continuing search for his ex, to a point. The main thing I’d lost is that the kidnapper has a major role in the movie. We see him deciding to kidnap people, then figuring out who/when/how. He takes notes and keeps time when knocking himself out with ether, ripped off by Piercing. So the moment when he gets a woman at the gas station to come to his car almost feels like a triumph of luck and planning.

Sluizer’s best-known worked ended up being the two Vanishings. He made other features with respectable actors, dunno why they are obscure. Then he was in the middle of filming with River Phoenix when River died, and Sluizer resorted to making Stephen Baldwin movies. Lead actress Johanna ter Steege turned up in Immortal Beloved and a Philippe Garrel movie.

by ·Comments Off on One Cut of the Dead (2017, Shin’ichirô Ueda)

A really cleverly constructed movie, would be fun to watch again. Either I never read much about this, or I’d forgotten, but I assumed the first half of the movie was the entire movie, so the end credits appearing halfway through came as a surprise, and the second half was pure joy.

Starts out with a film crew making a zombie movie, which is already going badly when they’re invaded by actual zombies and have to fight to survive – all in a single take. The young leads are struggling as the director unloads on them for being inauthentic. They chill with the makeup artist (who happens to be studying self-defense) when the crew outside begins to get attacked. The director is so excited – finally, something real – and runs around in manic glee with a handheld camera. A rooftop showdown ends with the female lead killing her costar and the director with an axe. The single-take idea is cute, and it’s all timed well, but the movie has poor color and lighting…

But the second half has normal editing, and reveals that this isn’t even a horror movie… the director is really a director, taking on an assignment for a one-take zombie horror, the lead actress and makeup artist from the first half are actually his family. On shoot day for the movie, the table read goes badly, lead actress refuses to do anything gory, two actors are in a car accident and can’t come to set, and the cameraman gets uselessly drunk. So, family and crew fill in as actors, and everyone improvises new lines and situations while it’s all being filmed live. All the cameras and identity shifts (an actor plays an actor playing a zombie who becomes a zombie) must have been hard to keep straight.

This was barely even supposed to be a movie – a low-budget workshop film shot in 8 days that turned out amazing. Hardly anyone has seen Ueda’s other features, though Matt Lynch saw his follow-up Special Actors and called it disappointing. The Director followed up with a kids movie, and his daughter did a voice in that Xenoblade game I’m always playing.