by ·Comments Off on 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026, Nia DaCosta)

This one is set 28 days later than 28 Years Later. Our kid Spike has been kidnapped by the Jimmy Gang run by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, spends most of the movie semi-panicking since his new friends have a kill-or-die policy and they like to torture local homeowners to death for no apparent reason. They plan to grow in numbers and take over the land, but their plan seems mathematically challenging, since you have to kill a Jimmy in combat to become one. Spike Jimmy does make friends with Girl Jimmy (Erin Kellyman, a ghost in The Green Knight), who finds out about Ralph Fiennes and thinks he might be Crystal’s dad Satan.

Fiennes, meanwhile, spends his days hanging out with anesthetized alpha-zombie Samson, and spends his nights dancing to Duran Duran in his bunker. He makes a deal with Crystal to put on a show and impress the others. But things start to turn sour in Jimmyland, with loyalties in doubt, then Jimmy kills the Jimmy who was gonna kill our Jimmy.

Dr. Ralph and the Jimmys destroy each other, leaving zen zombie Samson partially dezombified, and Jimmy Spike running off with Jimmy Kelly. Being an immediate sequel with no new characters, DaCosta (Candyman 3) goes through the motions of setting up part three part three, which is apparently gonna star the ur-Jimmy Cillian Murphy.

by ·Comments Off on Help! (1965, Richard Lester)

I’m on a 1960s rock & roll kick. Rewatched this a few months after Anthology, getting some nice HD screenshots of Eleanor Bron, including when I seen her in the arms of Paul saying “I can say no more.”

by ·Comments Off on Quatermass and the Pit (1967, Roy Ward Baker)

The Quatermass movies are like Knives Out, not really sequels, just the continuing otherworldly adventures of Dr. Q – same studio a decade after the last one, but everyone here is new except the writer. The doctor (Andrew Keir, a Hammer guy who tended to play priests and professors) is recruited by a military bomb squad and taken to subway station Hobbs End (“hob was once a sort of nickname for the devil”) where ancient apeman skeletons and a mysterious vessel have been excavated. The film title evokes Poe, but the pit is just a subway tunnel.

Dr. Q and the Colonel

Doing Science:

After they uncover locust aliens who decompose into green goo when the air hits them, the military reluctantly admits this maybe isn’t a nazi bomb, and the doctor thinks Martian insects kidnapped abnormal prehumans and enlightened them. A worker goes down alone and a wind storm ensues, he comes prancing outside with his arms held out like a preemptive parody of Weapons, not clear if he is alien-possessed or just British-terrified – remember, a British person can be driven mad by the smallest inconsistency. The assembled scientists and priests agree that whatever mystery they’ve uncovered, it is Evil.

Roney poses with an artist’s rendering of a big-brained apeman:

Crystal mantis pods:

Reporter Barbara Shelley (Village of the Damned, The Gorgon) is sensitive enough to see the invisible martians so they put a brainwave helmet on her and videotape the psychic visions from her “susceptible brain,” then Dr. Q screens the tape (actually some kids’ home movie of plastic mantises fighting on a rockpile) and tries to convince the government that humans have got alien-inherited genocidal tendencies (partly true). “People don’t believe nothing nowadays unless they’ve seen it on the telly.”

Finally with the station full of TV crews and passersby the ship comes violently alive. The Colonel (Julian Glover, lately of Tar) gets hypnotised by the commotion and melts, everyone else starts doing mob violence, until Q’s science-friend James Donald rides a construction crane to electrocute Mantis Satan and save the world (these movies usually end with Dr. Q identifying some great evil then setting it on fire).

My fifth Roy Ward Baker movie, and if I ever watch a sixth then I’ve officially got problems. Though in its best moments this had shades of Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness.

by ·Comments Off on 28 Years Later (2025, Danny Boyle)

Dad and son leave their tidal island home for a coming-of-age venture into zomb territory, and when their short trip gets derailed and extended they end up meeting skull collector Ralph Fiennes, a doomed Swede, and evil acrobat messiah Jack O’Connell. Second-most interesting part of this movie is learning that the rest of the world is normal modern, with internet and uber eats, and only England is zombie-quarantined – the most interesting is that Boyle is image-making here, not just telling a family/zomb story, and this has got more trick shots/edits in the first four minutes than the entirety of last week’s zombie junk The Sadness. Ends weirdly because they’re setting up a sub-trilogy, so the kid and his dad (Aaron T-J of one of the bad Godzilla movies) and other weirdos will return, but the kid’s mom (Bikeriders wife Jodie Comer), an elite zombie defender with terminal brain cancer, will not.

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 28 Days Later (2002, Danny Boyle)

I was gonna say “the movie looks artfully shot, too bad my copy is smeary low-res for some reason” – but no, it turns out they shot it on mini-DV. I don’t need to rewatch part two before the third movie, but don’t remember this one at all. Coma victim Cillian awakens into the post-apocalypse, after the extremely infectious rage virus is released from a lab by idiot activists and England is destroyed by Crazies®. He’s rescued by Naomie Harris, and they find a girl whose dad is Brendan Gleeson, and they go on adventures together, getting a flat tire in a rat tunnel, having a Grandaddy-soundtracked grocery shopping spree. Fun’s over after Gleeson gets infected by a crow and the others find a mad group of rapist soldiers. Cillian (a bike messenger who just woke from a coma) turns elite commando and wipes out the squad to save the women. Nayman and Lewis.

by ·Comments Off on Education (2020, Steve McQueen)

Kingsley loves outer space, wants to be an astronaut but can’t read, gets in trouble in school and is busted down to a kindergarten-level special school. A bit upsetting that the night after watching Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii I’m subjected to a fake schoolteacher singing “House of the Rising Sun” in its entirety. Nice little story with crazy end credits music. Naomi Ackie plays an activist exposing the new school for being completely useless, and it ends (ironically I assume) with them putting their hope in an up-and-coming politician named Margaret Thatcher.

Sicinski called this and Wheatle the weakest episodes: “Still, even understood as fundamentally educational efforts, these films are much more adept than the work of Loach and [Paul] Laverty when it comes to articulating the complexities of systematic oppression.”

by ·Comments Off on Downhill (1927, Alfred Hitchcock)

Movie about Ivor’s life repeatedly falling apart even though he’s rich, white, and handsome. First his college buddy, a trend-following buffoon with a pretty sister, knocks up local girl Mabel. She pins it on the rich boy so his family will pay her off, even though scholarship kid Tim was the culprit, and Ivor is expelled on moral grounds and kicked out of his home.

Subtle, Mabel:

But Ivor inherits some money, somehow? He marries a fancy actress, who spends all their cash, cheats on him, then kicks him out of the apartment. He spends some time pathetically mooching off pathetic older women then runs off to France. Fortunately back home, Tim is dying and deathbed-confessing to clear Ivor’s name, so his family takes him back when he returns home half-starved.

Hitch pulls off some really great framing and closeups, but the movie felt like a chore, a couple steps down from The Lodger, so I opted to cut my losses and skip the couple hours of blu extras for now.