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.

by ·Comments Off on Possum (2018, Matthew Holness)

Our miserable-looking guy must be Sean Harris, villain of the last two Missions: Impossible. The miserable old man is his uncle, Alun Armstrong, a Dickens miniseries regular currently appearing in a Martin Freeman show called Breeders which is annoyingly not about the careers and home lives of the Deal sisters. These two speak in unsubtitled British, when they speak at all.

Sean has trauma… and a Babadook picture-book of his trauma… and he carries around a satchel with a trauma-spider inside. I guess Sean finally stands up for himself, pushes his uncle aside and frees the local kid that Uncle had imprisoned. That brief burst of energy comes at the tail end of a long movie of people walking in a horrified daze through their miserable lives. Holness is Garth Marenghi, and having successfully proven he can make very serious things, I hope he dials it back a bit, or combines his talents a la his costar Richard Ayoade.

by ·Comments Off on At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul / The Unliving

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964, José Mojica Marins)

Opens with a woman talking to the audience, Elvira-style, then the screaming sfx over the opening titles make it feel like this is gonna be a campy carnival ride of a movie. It’s not really, despite the TV Batman scene transitions, must just be José “Coffin Joe” Marins having as much fun in the editing room as he appears to be having in the lead acting role. The dubbing (and everything else) isn’t technically great, but it’s an honestly eccentric movie, up there with Death Bed on the pile of horrors with justifiable cult reputations.

Joe/Ze is the most feared man in town since he has no faith, and no compunction about violence and murder. He’s also a rude, shitty guy – at the beginning his woman tells him something, he replies “you have talked enough,” and walks out. He goes to the bar, cuts off a guy’s hand, whips another guy terribly, then returns home and kills his wife with a tarantula, then a second later he’s getting all moral on a random man. Seeking an heir, he kills his friend and rapes her girl, but she commits suicide – then the doctor wants to investigate the friend’s death, so Ze pokes out his eyes and sets him on fire.

After dude has been so terrible you’d think the last ten minutes of him screaming and running from vengeful ghosts would be more rewarding, but that fact that he lives to appear in a sequel gives the impression that Marins wasn’t serious about the comeuppance, he just enjoyed being bad for ninety minutes. Even on my standard old DVD, the avenging ghost’s stop-motion granite aura looked rad.

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The Unliving (2010, Hugo Lilja)

I had some extra time, checked out a nice HD copy of this half-hour Swedish short. Nice twist on the ol’ zombie apocalypse. Mark and Katrin are in love – he installs wiring in zombie brains turning them into docile workers, she goes on raids into the city and nailguns zombies to walls so they can be captured and brought to Mark’s lab. They’ve each got problems – she kills a coworker who gets bitten, which is against the rules – and he spots his own mom and brings her home instead of drilling her brains, which is definitely against the rules. I assume their bosses are corrupt and there’s a whole gov’t conspiracy going on and this would’ve been expanded had they ended up making a feature version, which it feels like this very much wants to be… I kept stopping myself from being impressed with the massive amount of work put into this short because it ends up feeling like an overpriced advertisement for something, or an extended trailer for a miniseries. Or maybe I’m just cynical – it has some good character bits, like Katrin coming home, seeing her partner’s zombie mom, and stress-eating cereal. The director and writer finally got their break into features with 2018’s space adventure Aniara.

by ·Comments Off on Unfriended (2014, Levan Gabriadze)

“What is a troll?”

Cyberbullies get murdered by ghost of their victim, five stars. Much of the terror here is in degraded video and waiting for sites to load. Unfortunately when I think of this movie, instead of the cool stuff like the one guy’s suicide by blender, I keep lingering on the last two seconds, which unwisely leave the desktop and show us the ghost. But movie also had positive outcomes, getting me to put the post-it note over my laptop camera again. Fun how the movie sets up Blaire, whose desktop we’re in, as a friend, paints her as a victim, then as her friends turn against each other and die, it’s revealed that she’s just as bad, and finally worse.

Blender boy is Terri from the movie Terri, and two of the girls are TV stars. The director is from Georgia (the country) and his followup was an “animated documentary” about a painter/puppeteer. The writer worked on the Sleepy Hollow series, and the gaggle of producers are the only ones who returned for the sequel.

How did Karl Krumpet’s 25-second vacation video get eleven million views??

by ·Comments Off on How to Disappear Completely (2013, Raya Martin)

Protools’d dance tracks… story of daughters having sex with their dad… story of a family with a chicken for a son (being told to a chicken). The main girl keeps coming across men with guns, and later she portrays a gun in a school play. Dammit, all the men are at a cockfight, can these stop being in movies? The title comes an hour into an 80-minute movie, which ends with low-fi handheld video of boys wrecking a cemetery then kidnapping some girls. It wasn’t horror… I don’t know what it was, overall mysterious and worth the 80 minutes.