by ·Comments Off on Alien: Romulus (2024, Fede Alvarez)

Fede specializes in remaking beloved horror movies by aping the style of the originals and repeating their most famous line of dialogue in a slightly different context. He doesn’t fare as well creatively with Alien as he did with Evil Dead. He also made The Girl in the Spider’s Web so this is technically his second bad sequel to a not-great* David Fincher movie. Meanwhile this week everyone’s watching the new Alien prequel TV series from the guy who made se/pre/quel series of Fargo and X-Men.

A new group of British-accented attractive young people is stuck on a sunless planet in debt to the Evil Company, until they have the good idea to board a doomed low-orbit space station and loot it of cryo-pods to escape their fates. But it has been abandoned by everyone except Fake Ian Holm due to alien infestation. The first of the bozo thieves gets chestburst only four short minutes after getting facehugged, then the aliens multiply extremely quickly, while lead girl Cailee fights for her friends, her life, escape, and her defective robot friend who sometimes gets possessed by pro-company programming.

Featuring the stars of Priscilla, The Long Walk, Feline, and Madame Web, it’s all expensive-looking at least, though Fake Ian Holm looks like shit. I love how analogue all the space tech is: lights flickering, vidscreen color separation, audio recordings slowing down. The final boss is a skinny new alien-human hybrid, as if part 4 never existed, which I’m sure a lotta people would prefer.

*For the record:
Good: 1, 2, Resurrection, Prometheus
Bad: 3, AvP, Covenant, Romulus

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 31: SHOCKtober Revisits Part 1

Happy SHOCKtober 2025! This is only the fourth episode of The Last Ten Minutes to feature screenshots, but more to come.

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Silver Bullet (1985, Daniel Attias)

Holy cow, it’s Gary Busey, visiting a “wizard of weapons” (per narrator) who uses some pretty non-magical tools (just normal gunsmith tools) to create the titular bullet. Everyone is overdoing everything. Uncle Busey schemes to get rid of the kids’ parents for the full moon, the wolf attacks, they shoot it, case closed (didn’t realize until Trevor mentioned the wolf was Big Ed). Where’d all these 1980s people end up? The girl grew up to be Anne of Green Gables, the boy to be Corey Haim, and Attias won awards for directing prestige TV.

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The Dark Half (1993, George Romero)

Timothy Hutton doppelgangers face off kicking each other in the nuts while a flock of finches swarm the house and Amy Madigan (the witch from Weapons!) is tied to a chair somewhere. Isn’t “hero writer vs. villain arguing who gets to write a story ending” reused from Misery? Cop Michael Rooker arrives to untie Amy but more importantly he lets the finches in and they eat Evil Hutton (good fx as he’s reduced to a skeleton). Adapting this into a movie was a bad idea but the acting and overall look are higher caliber than Silver Bullet. Hutton was also in Ghost Writer and Secret Window, has a real thing for dumb movies about split-personality authors.

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The Mangler (1995, Tobe Hooper)

Here it is, the “king” of the shouldn’t-have-been-adapted stories, as three drunk(?) people think they’ve succeeded in exorcising the killer laundry machine, then it starts chasing them down some stairs. The priest-guy (also a priest in Hooper’s Night Terrors) gets mangled, Buffalo Bill (his voice!) escapes, and his girl falls into the hands of laundry-machine cultists. Movie got two sequels, I assume ironically. I watched this in the theater in ’95, maybe this is why nobody wanted to hang out with me.

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Sleepwalkers (1992, Mick Garris)

Angry Alice Krige (who specializes in playing witches) bites off Officer Ron Perlman’s fingers and twists off his arm, sets another cop on fire, knows exactly where to aim a pistol to cause cars to explode with a single shot. She kidnaps Shelley (in her Twin Peaks follow-up), taking her to dance with her mutant zombie son Charles in a house surrounded by cats. Turntable plays “Sleep Walk” by itself as Charles attempts to suck her soul. What is it with King and soul-sucking cats? But Shelley turns the tables (err, knocks Charles down and gouges out his eyes) and cats jump on Alice until she spontaneously combusts, but not before she makes time to kill one more cop. Mick’s first of seven King movies is set in Indiana, not Maine, disappointing.

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Watchers (1988, Jon Hess)

This was my favorite Dean Koontz book, and I think Watchers II (a remake masquerading as a sequel) was the better adaptation, but nobody’s got that for download. Supergenius Scrabble-playing dog and his boy Corey Haim are under assault by Michael Ironside, who claims to be a labmade perfect killing machine but gets immediately wasted by a couple of noobs. Now they’re attacked by an evil gorilla (psychically linked to the dog, if I recall?), and they waste it too, easy peasy. Director Hess went on to make Alligator 2: The Mutation, Corey’s sister was Frank Zappa’s niece.

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Humanoids from the Deep (1980, Barbara Peeters)

A girl with her tits out is beating a humanoid (seaweed-people with external brains) with a rock. The setting is a marina carnival on fire with a few-seconds-long tape of screaming citizens on endless loop. For some reason I thought this was James Cameron’s first movie (that was Pirahna 2: The Spawning). Doug “The Virginian” McClure and Vic Morrow and some pretty girls with short careers all survive.

Nice tile:

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Dog Soldiers (2002, Neil Marshall)

Are the dogs soldiers, or are soldiers just fighting giant dogs? Trevor: “The whole military seems to be made up of clones of Mike from Spaced.” Surrounded in a house with breakaway walls, the humans fight with pots and pans, aerosol cans, etc. One guy always has a blue glowstick in his mouth, and I know there’s gonna be a payoff… ah nope, he just likes glowsticks. If Brits call bathrooms “the closet” what do they call closets? Spoon gets eaten, another guy is starting to wolf out, so he stays behind and blows the cabin using the gas stove, still time for one more ugly-looking fight. Marshall went on to be one of those almost-cult horror guys making almost-good movies until he faded to Hellboy-remake status.

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Underworld / Transmutations (1985, George Pavlou)

Masked baddies shoot green gas into their own face, then onto our (presumed) mutant heroes. These guys are terribly incompetent villains – they keep pointing guns but not firing them, and end up sabotaging each other’s plans. Some glowy-eyed woman repeats “show me your dreams” at the baddie leader over and over again, then scans him to death, the music one shimmery note taped down on a synth. Was this an early version of Nightbreed? At least two of these actors were in Dennis Potter movies. Great color on the remaster, glad I waited forty years to watch the last ten minutes of this.

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Rawhead Rex (1986, George Pavlou)

Howard (of Stephen King TV movie Rose Red) finds a bloody man whose dying words might be the key to defeating the evil demon, then a priest yells for Howard to “get the fuck out” of his church – there’s the Clive Barker we all love. The church houses a hellish horror… oh no it’s just a rock. Rex looks deliciously fake with his light-up eyes, and since he’s a puppet and can’t move, the priest has to lean into him to get bitten to death. Useless Howard gets knocked around by the monster then a lady picks up the rock and unleashes its lady-magic in the form of 1980s light effects. Meant to be the first in a series of Books of Blood adaptations, but fortunately the following year Clive took things into his own hands with Hellraiser.

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TerrorVision (1986, Ted Nicolaou)

I kinda remembered this movie’s theme song, but it’s much less sinister and more new-wave than I recall, and the movie is more knowingly goofy and popping with color. Two kids with machine guns are busy defeating the monster with electricity when a spacesuit alien beams in to explain what’s going on, but a random party guest executes him and the monster eats everyone, haha. Wouldn’t have guessed that this would be the best-looking movie of the bunch.

by ·Comments Off on Come Drink With Me (1966, King Hu)

The second time I’ve watched Tsai/King movies back to back, this time by accident. Pale guy in white robe (Chen Hung-Lieh) kidnaps the governor’s son Master Chang until Golden Swallow (Jade Fox herself) shows up to set things right. But she gets poisoned, then rescued by Drunken Cat (House of 72 Tenants star Elliot Ngok Wah), whose archrival Abbot Liao Kung (One-Armed Swordsman villain Yang Chi-Ching) teams up with the pale guy for a showdown. The action in this is slower and less fluid than usual, but the people on the internet say it’s actually great, so what do I know.

Swallow vs. Pale Guy:

Abbot vs. Drunken Cat:

by ·Comments Off on I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006, Tsai Ming-Liang)

We got another The Hole situation, a girl living alone one loose floorboard away from the catatonic guy (played by short-haired Lee) in the apartment underneath. Meanwhile a local guy (this is Malaysia, where Tsai comes from) takes in a foreigner (played by long-haired Lee) who got himself beat up in the street, has to wash the mattress whenever the foreigner soils it, which is often. Overall more grime and desperation than usual (preceding the great Stray Dogs) though it ends with a lovely dream

The woman upstairs is Chen Shiang-Chyi of Stray Dogs, ticket taker of Goodbye Dragon Inn. Chris Fujiwara wrote of people “staying human under the most hostile conditions” in the final writeup of the Defining Movies book.

by ·Comments Off on TV/Q3/2025

Key & Peele season 1 (2012)

Holds up well. President’s anger translator… adjusting one’s blackness… how white guys fight… cinephiles talking loud at the movies… magical negro battle… making fun of Jaden Smith… food competition show contestant gets stabbed… Lil Wayne gets stabbed… insult battle with mom’s doctor… rapid-fire code-switching… Peele expressing enthusiasm about the movie Candyman a decade before remaking it… “I said biiiiiiiitch.”

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I Think You Should Leave season 1 (2019)

Most of the jokes come down to Tim talking too much and digging himself into deeper holes (or: a hotdog man in a car accident). Elderly Will Forte botches his lifelong plan to take revenge on Tim on a flight… Fred Willard is an inappropriate organist at a funeral… Tim Heidecker is a music snob at a party.

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Upright Citizens Brigade season 1 (1998)

The hot chicks room, the bucket of truth, the unabomber… protection poo-stick… the title and titular line, writing nonsense lyrics for Disney movies, Dee Snider cameo… ass pennies… teamster puppet show… mixing taped performances with live shows with guerilla theater… Amy playing every female character.

by ·Comments Off on Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande (2022)

Feel-good story of a short-lived British band whose albums lived on for decades on the dance floors and they belatedly got their recognition via a reunion tour. If that sounds like the recipe for a very standard rock doc, yep, that’s exactly what we get. I don’t see a lot of dancing at Big Ears, so let’s wait and see what venue they’re playing in ’26 before making any decisions – a Mill & Mine show might be really fun.

by ·Comments Off on After Life (1998, Hirokazu Kore-eda)

It’s me, the cynic who didn’t love After Life, a movie which appears to have stolen Brain Candy‘s plot of people re-living their happiest moment and turned it into a dry, quiet portrait of a bureaucratic limbo (and film studio). It’s also me, the guy who lost it at the end, when one of the counselors who’d refused to pick a happy moment for decades, relents: “I’ve learned I was part of someone else’s happiness. What a wonderful discovery.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen for Criterion:

One could ask all kinds of things about the functioning of this process: Who’s doing the recording, and where are the cameras? How extensive are the archives? Instead of a god, is there only an archivist or archivists, working endlessly without judgment? But these are questions that After Life quite happily declines to answer. Kore-eda refuses to get bogged down in unnecessary details that might be interesting in world-building but that are extraneous to his central focus on character and feeling, as well as on the decision-making that has enormous consequences for individuals.

by ·Comments Off on Housekeeping (1987, Bill Forsyth)

Unusual tone: quirky people in absurd situations, but not a comedy, as signaled early on when mom drops off her two daughters at grandma’s then drives herself off a cliff. When Grandma dies a couple of ill-suited aunts take over, then eagerly hand off to wandering aunt Sylvie (Swing Shift‘s Christine Lahti, excellent), who moves in with the kids and (kinda) takes care of them. Still not a comedy, the kids grow apart as one wants to fit in at school and the other wants to stop even attending school. When things get tense in town, Sylvie responds per family tradition: by running away, taking the remaining kid with her.

Mom’s last ride:

Burning down the house on their way out of town:

by ·Comments Off on Deborah Stratman: Land, Birds, Circuit

O’er the Land (2009)

Military marching, war reenactments, an RV sales pitch, immigration cops, narration by a guy who ejected from a plane and bounced through a thunderstorm.

Guys who refer to machine guns as “freedom”
Firefighters, flamethrowers, waterwall

Wild birds in some kind of audio experiment
If i understand the credits, the archival-sounding stories were performances

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Ray’s Birds (2010)

Ray runs a raptor center – Stratman films his public demonstrations and splinters them into fragments.

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Hacked Circuit (2014)

The first voice we hear is someone getting a crank call from a flock of birds, so there are birds in all her movies. High-tech studio where a foley artist is recreating sounds from The Conversation. Our camera roving, invisible, goes into the studio and back outside in a loop, and jeez, that wasn’t a single take, was it? Michael Sicinski saw it at True/False.