by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 35: SHOCKtober 2026

Evil Dead Burn (2026, Sébastien Vanicek)

Oh right, it’s the New French Extremism sequel, which is actually none of those things. Lot of severed body parts lying around as the girl kills a final zombie with a lawn tool then sets the place ablaze. Nice photography when the girl stands still and there are no CG beasties around, but any action is shot and/or edited like shit. I think her trauma is speaking to her in the form of a crumbling demonified husband who wants to get her holy dagger. The director made Infested (which has the same poster as this movie!) and the girl was a lead in Climax.

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Night Swim (2024, Bryce McGuire)

Someone is being chased by a demonified abusive family member, is this the same movie? Another girl is rescuing a kid from their ghost-filled lake-sized swimming pool. They attack Wyatt Russell with a bat and he simply barfs out his demon, then sacrificially swims back into the ghost pool to save them all. Mom was Kerry Condon from The Banshees of Inisherin, the director looks like Eli Cash in his promo shot.

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Primate (2025, Johannes Roberts)

The latest monkey rampage movie. Girl is being beaten up by the monkey while her deaf dad arrives home, oblivious. Eventually two girls and the dad are all getting beaten up at once in their broken-glass house by the monkey, who appears to be a guy in a fursuit as often as he’s a CG beastie. Doesn’t look like there’ll be a Primate 2 unless whatever substance turned this monkey into such an asshole is still out there, somewhere. I’m not even mad about this one, it looks like a fine monkey movie. The director made the pretty good buried-alive segment of V/H/S/99, a fake Resident Evil, and a couple shark attack pictures.

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M3GAN 2.0 (2025, Gerard Johnstone)

Allison Williams is wearing a powersuit in psychic contact with her own robot, as the new hyper-evil military robot Amelia murders tech boss Christian. The kid Katy is back, with a good bit that I thought would be a RoboCop reference but was actually a Steven Seagal joke. Gerard gets to do his signature camera-cartwheel during the robot battle, which features all the best cyber sound effects and cheesy 90s good-vs-evil cyborg stuff, before all robots are destroyed by an EMP blast. Then it ends with a congressional hearing about the future of AI, boo.

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The Menu (2022, Mark Mylod)

Anya is tormenting gourmet chef Ralph by asking him to make a basic cheeseburger then taking it to-go and tipping a penny. I forget what this movie was about, but I assumed cannibalism was involved? It seems kinda boring. But hey, John Leguizamo is here. As Anya speedboats away, the rest of the customers and staff turn out to be a death cult, suicide-by-smore. The director worked on Da Ali G Show, which is making a comeback.

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Perpetrator (2023, Jennifer Reeder)

I’ve seen a couple of Reeder’s shorts but I’ve heard the turn to genre features has been rocky, let’s see. Mom and kid are rehashing their traumas, whispering. Then at a school assembly, more traumas get rehashed, crying. A couple people spontaneously bleed, the whole auditorium starts swearing in unison, then the mom and kid rip some white guy’s heart out. Whatever was happening here, at least it’s a unique take.

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Humane (2024, Caitlin Cronenberg)

Girl is badly cut and the family tries to do that movie thing of searing the wound shut with a red-hot kitchen implement, but it doesn’t work. Cops arrive to round everyone up. Head police/company guy Enrico Colantoni (Stigmata) isn’t very careful and gets captured by the medical experiment family then killed by BlackBerry inventor Jay Baruchel. I don’t mind when battered bleeding victims take bloody revenge on their tormenters at the end of a movie, but apparently that’s not what this is, and they’ve been attacking each other?

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AGGRO DR1FT (2023, Harmony Korine)

“I smell the blood of a dead man,” growls the villain. “Let’s do this!” This movie has a plot and characters, it’s not just vibes? The dialogue and action are garbage beneath the really unique visuals, so they should’ve stuck with vibes. Watching this on mute over a mix of Zorn music would help, but not enough. The regretfully violent good guy kills the annoyingly violent bad guy, both of them over-narrating, then a dwarf machete gang plays catch with the baddie’s head. I think the repetitive and terrible dialogue might be a gag, but I haven’t seen a more tedious last ten minutes since Source Code. The hero was in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and Travis Scott fortunately went on to better things.

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Baby Invasion (2024, Harmony Korine)

This one’s in twitch livestream mode, the Burial music glitchy and low. Someone’s pissing on a boat. The babies say “let’s go” and “let’s roll” but not “let’s do this.” It’s all onscreen text in the game simulation, no spoken dialogue, so at least that’s an improvement over DR1FT. Long-take first-person camera through 3D tunnels, more Wolfenstein than Eisenstein. I think the twist is it was a game-in-a-game, and God kills the elite baby squad with his lightning hands.

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The Toxic Avenger (2023, Macon Blair)

Toxie has a magic green murder wand, and has teamed up with a girl who keeps whacking people with a toilet. Movie keeps glitching or flashbacking mid-scene. Evil Elijah Wood is vanquished, movie has really good color, and some of the jokes land – what more could you want?

by ·Comments Off on Shorts Month 2026: A

The Artificial Humors (2016, Gabriel Abrantes)

Half-hour short about a soccer ball-shaped floating robot, its AI programmer, and the girl it’s in love with. The three of them leave the village where it’s been training and go to Sao Paolo, where it’s reprogrammed to be a successful stand-up comedian. Big movie music, seamless effects, cool parrots.

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The Marvelous Misadventures of the Stone Lady (2019, Gabriel Abrantes)

Another very slick-looking half-hour short that ultimately feels simpler and less interesting than his best work. An obvious comparison would be Night at the Museum, if I’d seen that.

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Lupo the Butcher (1987, Danny Antonucci)

“Sonamabeetch I keel you” says the butcher as he accidentally chops himself to death. Good animation – this got the director a string of MTV gigs, then he created Ed, Edd n Eddy. Marv Newland was involved in this somehow.

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She Puppet (2001, Peggy Ahwesh)

Someone is playing Tomb Raider, not very well. Feminist(?) machinima, Lara Croft dies over and over, with the exact same sound effect, and sometimes different narrators reflect on the nature of humanity. Made me wish I was watching the one Spaced episode where he feels like drowning things. Sun Ra and Michael Snow both appear in the credits.

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Il Capo (2010, Yuri Ancarani)

Wordless HD close-up on the guy on the ground who directs the heavy machinery tearing up a marble quarry. I learned that they shovel sand and rubble under the slab to give it a cushion to land on. Closeup on the guy’s hand with missing fingertip was a nice callback to Lupo the Butcher. Played True/False the same year as The Interrupters, The Arbor, and Fake It So Real.

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Aliens (1993, Michael Almereyda)

“David Fincher didn’t know what the hell he was doing.” Cameraman films two kids playing an Aliens video game under an Aliens poster. They have a distracted, casual conversation about massive box office hits and Sam Raimi movies, making UHF references.

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To The Unknown (2017, Michael Almereyda)

That’s more like it – piano and poetry (by Kenneth Koch) as Almereyda films a crippled cat on different days.

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Moonshine (1918, Roscoe Arbuckle)

A strange one, with meta intertitles, referring to the actors and stunts and extras. Our guys are lawmen after a gang of underground bootleggers. Arbuckle keeps getting captured, and does a quick pillsbury-doughboy giggle whenever they poke him in the belly with a rifle, then fakes his own death and is immediately recaptured. Alice Lake gets into the stunts as well, Al St. John is a reliable foil.

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Swing Shift Cinderella (1945, Tex Avery)
The Screwy Truant (1945, Tex Avery)
The Shooting of Dan McGoo (1945, Tex Avery)

A good batch to watch together, since they all reference each other. Wolf & Hotgirl are main characters in Cinderella and McGoo, and she does a wolfy song and dance in both. Wolf appears with Bugs Bunny knockoff Screwy Squirrel in Truant, which borrows the opening title gag from Cinderella, Droopy plays Dan McGoo, and a lotta wolves and dogs get hit with a lotta hammers.

by ·Comments Off on Billion Dollar Brain (1967, Ken Russell)

1960s movie about the threat of artificial intelligence, shot in high style for a British spy drama, which is medium-low style for a Ken Russell picture.

Caine covering up Karl and Francoise:

Villain Ed Begley is a wacked out texas oilman whose computer tells him how to overthrow communism. Oskar Homolka is the KGB man trying to stop him from starting WWIII. Karl Malden and Francoise Dorleac are getting rich playing multiple sides, toting a carton of eggs injected with lethal viruses. Guy Doleman is the British spy boss trying to retrieve the eggs. And all of these groups befriend and/or kidnap special agent Michael Caine, who doesn’t exactly solve the case, but is at least present while it solves itself.

Nazi-coded Texan:

by ·Comments Off on Mission: Impossible 8: The Final Reckoning (2025, Christopher McQuarrie)

This is what I imagine the Fast & Furious movies are like: filling the gaps between action scenes with sappy talk and meaningful glances between friends and family. When everyone shuts up about how meaningful are their relationships and how many times we’ve saved/endangered the world, the highlight is two nearly wordless action scenes in vehicles. In the submarine I think Cruise says one thing (“torpedo tube”), and the plane fight gets better when Esai stops supervillain-monologuing.

by ·Comments Off on The Shrouds (2024, David Cronenberg)

Making up Vincent Cassel as Cronenberg and having him mourn his late wife could’ve gone so hard into self-indulgent territory but instead this soft dialogue drama (with Crimes lighting and lots of handheld images-on-screens) gradually careens into paranoid techno-thriller territory with plenty of sex and hardly any murder. Ends with nothing resolved, in the middle of a dream sequence. Short but powerful bursts of Howard Shore music which have either introduced new sounds to his toolkit, or else the Movieland’s speakers have blown out. Diane Kruger plays the dead wife (missing an arm in dream/flashback), and her conspiracy-horny sister, and the AI built/puppeted by the sister’s ex-husband Guy Pearce. Choice lines about sex and flesh and surgery, and Vince (a supposed visionary who outsourced everything and takes no real action here) is told he’s made his career out of bodies. Japan and China and Korea and Iceland and Hungary all figure in. Need to watch this two or three more times.

by ·Comments Off on Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004, Mamoru Oshii)

Very CG movie, but that feels appropriate for the content. Some idiot corporation has produced a bulletproof kung-fu sexbot, and the cybercops have to stop the killing while negotiating different levels of reality, like a boring eXistenZ.

by ·Comments Off on The Doll (1919, Ernst Lubitsch)

Closeted heir marries an AI, relevant again 105 years later. He intends to, anyway, but the robot inventor’s assistant (a kid, the funniest character and best actor, who keeps trying to kill himself by drinking paint) busts the doll, and the inventor’s daughter covers by pretending to be the heir’s sex robot until they can repair it. Everything is gleefully artificial – the costumes and sets and acting all preposterous. I didn’t jibe with the organ soundtrack on the blu-ray, so – per the director’s original intent – I put on Nine Inch Nails Hesitation Marks as the soundtrack. I find myself playing Hesitation Marks all the time lately, Lubitsch knows why.

by ·Comments Off on The Second Act (2024, Quentin Dupieux)

Meta-movie where the actors keep “breaking character” between takes because they are playing actors who are appearing in the first movie directed by AI (represented by a button-down man in a white void on a laptop screen). Louis Garrel is meeting Léa Seydoux for a date, she brings her dad Vincent Lindon, Louis brings his friend Yannick, who he’s hoping Léa can date instead. Manuel Guillot the waiter can’t handle the performance pressure and kills himself in his car (in character), then after the shoot he kills himself in his car. As a final meta-touch, it closes by showing us the extremely long track setup for the opening tracking shot. Filipe: “It does not really have much to say about AI or industry, but as a vehicle for a terrific group of actors who are as usual all-in in the filmmaker’s concept, this a very good time.”