by ·Comments Off on Twentynine Palms (2003, Bruno Dumont)

Earliest Dumont I’ve seen and my least favorite, which suddenly makes me hesitant about the two that just came out on Criterion. Also our second movie in a row with a girl peeing on camera. I’d heard this might be a horror, and it’s not, it just has really bad vibes.

David and Katya ride around the American West in his hummer, listening to twangy French songs, never wearing seatbelts. She gets unaccountably sad after asking what he’s thinking and he says nothing. They have splashy hotel pool sex, sulk at each other about basic things, later do some nude rock climbing. He’s a film person of some sort, and yeah this is what I imagined film people do between shoots. The sex and the fights both escalate and she almost leaves one night. Then out of the blue, truckers drive them off the road, smash his head and rape him, and I guess back at the hotel he loses his mind and kills them both.

Katya was in major films by Claire Denis and Leos Carax before her premature death. David’s been in a couple things, but most importantly, when he wears his round sunglasses and lets his hair flop around, he looks like Michael Showalter’s Doug from The State.

Doug and Katya:

by ·Comments Off on Notes on Notes on Film (Norbert Pfaffenbichler)

Notes on Film 01: Else (2002)

Five-panel video up top, starring a woman in what look like camera tests, sometimes holding numbered cards, while down below the word IF transforms into THEN and ELSE via lines slowly sliding. Big string music, the sliding lines are fun but the woman is far more eye-catching. The URL in the credits has expired.

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Notes on Film 05: Conference (2011)

A cacophony of cinematic Hitlers, one after the other, their voices replaced by distorted static which gets louder according to how much each Hitler is shouting. After a Mel Brooks appearance we see film leader then a Hitler in a movie theater, so maybe all these Hitlers are being screened for another Hitler. The footage has all been processed with some heavy grain so it’ll match better.

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Notes on Film 04: Intermezzo (2012)

Escalator chase scene from Chaplin’s The Floorwalker remixed to a rock song. “Play Loud,” it says, so I did.

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Notes on Film 06A: A Messenger from the Shadows (2013)

Another multi-film montage, but this time Lon Chaney instead of Hitler – an improvement. The montage is fun, but really works because of the great music and sound design. More distorted-Hitler when people talk on the phone, at least one piece of actual sound footage. Love the climactic death-and-destruction montage.

Watched all these because of a rave article in Cinema Scope 56 about Notes on Film 06B, which takes the Lon Chaney approach but with Boris Karloff, and which I cannot find.

by ·Comments Off on The House That Screamed (1969, Narciso Ibañez Serrador)

This is aka La Residencia, but I already have enough horror movies with generic titles like House, so I appreciate the English version. All these movies that have big music and lazy credits as some fancy people arrive at a large house by carriage, I never think they’re gonna be good. This one was… alright. You’re not even sure it’s a horror movie until, as in Halloween, all the bodies are discovered in the final five minutes.

Before that it’s a boarding school drama, with a stern headmistress, a new girl, a bitchy kissup girl, a couple suspicious employees – and the principal’s son who hides in the walls and cuts up the girls for parts. The movie is Spanish, set in France, spoken in English. I was surprised the movie killed the new girl – a couple of the deaths were fun, including Isabelle’s slow-mo stabbing in the garden.

L-R: defiant girl, strict principal, kissup girl

The director died just last year, also made the acclaimed horror Who Can Kill a Child? Principal Lilli Palmer was in The Boys From Brazil. New girl Cristina Galbó went on to Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. The boy in the walls starred in Deep End.

Isabelle with the boy in the walls:

by ·Comments Off on Fright Night (2011, Craig Gillespie)

This is how to do remakes – start with a disreputable movie, cast a good lead and a hammy villain, and have as much fun as possible. Add a couple twists (vampire needs to be invited to come inside, but there’s nothing stopping him from setting your house on fire to drive you out) and some real dodgy digi effects, you’re done. I don’t feel strongly about it either way.

I guess this guy stars in Kick-Ass:

Anton Yelchin is our guy, with mom Toni Collette, girl Imogen Poots, and nerdy childhood friend who has grown apart Chris Mintz-Plasse. When new neighbor Colin Farrell vampires the latter two, Anton escalates to the world’s foremost authority on the dark arts, Vegas magician David Tennant. Oh wait, the screenshots are confusing on this matter, maybe he doesn’t get Poots, or he does get her then they turn her back – either way, the magician will have none of this nonsense, then steps up when convinced of the reality.

by ·Comments Off on Midsommar (2019, Ari Aster)

Mostly shot in Hungary, haha. I’d been saving this Sweden-set horrorfilm for our own trip to Sweden, but with our flight cancelled and SAS absconding with our ticket money, suppose I’ll just watch it now. Florence Pugh, known for having the most emotionally expressive face in the business, mostly expresses sullen sadness here after her whole family dies then her boyfriend who wanted to break up with her reluctantly lets her join his friends’ trip to visit a psychedelic pagan cult in rural Sweden.

The trip is for Chidi’s research, and I sorta buy his part in the academia subplots, but not Pugh’s boy Christian (get it? Jack Reynor, the cool older brother in Sing Street). Christian doesn’t read as a grad student, and unapologetically tries to steal Chidi’s research topic just by saying so, with no background or theory or actual, uh research, except for questioning the locals after it’s already clear to us that they’ll all be sacrificed in some ritual or another. I waited three whole hours for him to get Kill-Listed after reading somewhere that those two movies have the same ending, but he was burned alive inside Chekhov’s Bear instead, which is nowhere near the same thing.

Reynor, Pugh, Chidi:

Will Poulter (The Little Stranger) is “the shitty friend” according to my notes, but there’s tough competition – all these dudes deserve a good burning. It’s a great looking movie, so I didn’t mind the three hours even if I wouldn’t wanna watch it again. Katy should not watch it at all – between the bad relationships and graphic head injuries, it’s about the least-Katy movie I watched all SHOCKtober. The lengthy version I watched adds more close-ups of smashed heads (good for me, bad for Katy) and 20+ minutes of Chidi going on about his thesis (vice-versa).

by ·Comments Off on The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988, Wes Craven)

Bill Pullman goes to Haiti to investigate a zombie rumor with the help of a local doctor – but he didn’t expect the DOCTOR to be a PRETTY LADY, he tells us in voiceover. Pullman has been good in comedies (Spaceballs the year before this) and dramas (or whatever Lost Highway is) but I don’t buy him for a second here. The pretty lady is Cathy Tyson of Mona Lisa, and she and Paul Winfield almost make the movie worth watching.

The day after our guy makes sweet love to the pretty doctor, the government declares martial law and to show him they’re serious the local badman (S African Zakes Mokae of Dust Devil and Dilemma) pounds a nail through Pullman’s scrotum, but Pullman persists, and gets Mozart (Lodge 49 star Brent Jennings, I didn’t recognize him!) to mix him up some zombie powder to bring home. Everybody either dies, or dreams they’ve died, or comes back to life, and the silly explanatory titles at the beginning and end trying to frame this buncha nonsense as news/science don’t help anything.

by ·Comments Off on Maniac (1980, William Lustig)

Right after a double murder on a beach we wake up screaming with a dude who sleeps next to a bloody mannequin head in a room full of lit candles, who then puts on the same hat and gloves the killer wore. Coincidence?

It’s no coincidence and there’s no mystery, our dirty dude Mr. Zito (Joe Spinell, Italian-American tough-guy regular in Rocky and Godfather movies) is clearly the maniac, and next he runs up to a car where Tom Savini is macking on a girl and explodes Savini’s head with a shotgun. Zito’s got a mommy crisis, and tries to calm the voices by mounting murdered women’s scalps on his mannequins.

Watched this because it appears on horror lists, but without high hopes since the same director’s Maniac Cop wasn’t too good… but this was! It takes some turns – Zito’s no moron, can handle himself in conversation and goes on a proper date with a hot photographer, half attempting to live a normal life and half finding new victim opportunities. A tense stalking scene in a subway restroom is an all-timer. Good ending too, as he’s apparently tormented by the mannequin voices into doing himself in, the useless cops arriving too late.

by ·Comments Off on Audition (2000, Takashi Miike)

“Isn’t it a terrible world?” One of the most honestly messed-up movies. Still very good, but it does take its time, when you know what’s coming. We’re halfway through the two-hour movie before it shows its hand with the sack in the apartment, and there’s only 20 minutes left when Asami puts on the rubber gloves.

Our dude is Ryo Ishibashi, the wide-faced star of Suicide Club and a couple Grudge movies. His filmmaker buddy who sets up the fake auditions is Jun Kunimura, who I’ve seen in 15 movies and has appeared in 150 more. And Asami is Eihi Shiina, of Eureka and Harmful Insect, but probably better known for schlock like Tokyo Gore Police.

L-R: movie buddy, our dude

L-R: creepy sack, Asami

Forgot about the wheelchair-bound music teacher (Miike regular Renji Ishibashi, also of Ronin-Gai), and that she severs one of our dude’s feet before his son shows up and knocks her down the stairs.

by ·Comments Off on Fourteen (2019, Dan Sallitt)

None of the critics I follow can say anything against this movie, since they all had cameo roles in it, so allow me be the truth-teller who finally declares that this movie is… really good. I fell hard for Sallitt’s The Unspeakable Act and lead actress Tallie Medel, so it’s no wonder that I’d warm up to this one, which lands in a different way. It jumps casually forward in time through two women’s lives, like a more devastating Bob Byington story, until the weight of accumulated details hits hard in the back half of the movie – hard enough that going through the screenshots has made me emotional, and I have no further comment, even though my notes say I’m supposed to reread the thing in Cinema Scope 78 after watching this.