by ·Comments Off on Spetters (1980, Paul Verhoeven)

Follow-up to Soldier of Orange features another bunch of young male friends. These guys ride bikes together and have literal dick-measuring contests, and most of them will meet bad ends. Rutger’s getting too old to play a teenager so he’s the local motorbike champion they idolize. Still too plotty and obvious, but the great 4th Man was up next and Paul’s next couple of decades would be very good.

Rien with his girl in the good early days:

The girl on the poster is future 4th Man star Renée Soutendijk, running a food truck with her gay brother. When she sets up at a bike race, all three of the young dudes fall for her, and though she would appear to be out of their league, she sees them as a possible way out of the food truck life, dating each guy at different points.

Do not get caught ripping off a food truck:

Rien starts winning races and getting paid, then crashes on the highway because dudes in cars can’t stop littering, ending up in a wheelchair. Rien considers Jesus but settles on suicide (again on the highway). Mechanic Eef has been earning cash for his trip to America by mugging gay guys at the mall, until they catch and gang-rape him. Hans is not the greatest racer, gets mocked by Rutger on TV, but apparently still earns enough to buy a local bar after it gets trashed by bikers. This seems at least more stable than the food truck, so the girl stays with Hans and her brother moves on. Multiple Blondie songs on the soundtrack is the movie’s real highlight – also a good fake-sex-noises scene early on.

Eef considers a flasher’s offer:

Rutger can’t stop winning:

by ·Comments Off on Return to Silent Hill (2026, Christophe Gans)

Opening scene is so lousy, but the colors are bright, I remember liking the first movie (and that’s all I remember about it) and there’s promise of a Pyramid Head monster (which is also what I’ve been calling the pileated woodpeckers buzzing around the cabin), so, keeping an open mind.

Ivor Novello (Benediction) meets the lovely Mary (a horror regular, of various Saws and Purges). Flash-forward, she is dead because he’s such a bad driver (this is his defining character trait), but still sends him a letter to return to their home, which is an increasingly dodgy-digi-fx place. I think he has Trauma, and his personal Silent Hill is inside the mind – an ash-covered town, the local duplex playing Jacob’s Ladder and The Tenant. It’s one of those Shutter Island (or Jacob’s Ladder) stories where an empty man gradually figures out who he is/was.

Love at the bottom of the sea:

Some people attempted to write a normal movie review, focusing on what is actually in the movie, most of which sucks, while people with internet madness are predictably calling it a perfect film from a master stylist, or the most affecting onscreen portrait of grief ever filmed. Me, I am postponing plans to rewatch part one this SHOCKtober.

Me, going out to tape Smashing Pumpkins at the Metro:

Metro security, spotting my gear:

by ·Comments Off on Manslaughter (1922, Cecil De Mille)

I realized just before hitting play that I meant to grab Manhandled (1924), not Manslaughter (1922), for the series I’m watching. But I haven’t ever named or mentioned this series and I’m accountable to no one, and I’ve got Manslaughter on DVD with an Alloy Orchestra soundtrack, so we’re making a substitution. Ultimately the movie is a boring morality story, but I enjoyed playing the keyboard-and-percussion score nice and loud.

Early on the movie lets us know that the cute girl is gonna be punished by society for driving her car too fast (55mph!), with ominous capitalization in the intertitles. When Joy races a traffic cop she’d previously bribed I immediately recognized the music – this is the part I used in my trailer for Variete. She does a fun little stunt that kills the pursuing motorcycle cop.

Second-billed is the upright district attorney (who does some manhandling after all), and while Joy is in jail learning how to be a good generous person (?) the DA quits his job to become a drunk, until her jail-earned Goodness puts the DA back on the righteous track.

I’m always saying this:

I like that the lawyer’s name is Dan O’Bannon. DeMille must not have been impressed with Joy – she is 13th-billed in the following year’s Ten Commandments. Dead cop Jack Mower would play a cop in House of Wax decades later. Manhandled maid Lois Wilson starred in The Covered Wagon, and the maid’s sick kid Mickey Moore went on to assistant-direct Elvis movies.

I’m always saying this:

by ·Comments Off on Miroirs No. 3 (2025, Christian Petzold)

Paula Beer is in a car crash, losing her family, in front of the house of a family who lost their daughter/sister, so she naturally falls in with them.

If I was properly caught up with my Petzolds I’ve have seen the mom in Yella and The State I Am In.

Babybel:

by ·Comments Off on Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025, Cattet & Forzani)

If I’m following the story (lol), Young Mr. Diman (Yannick “brother of Jeremie” Renier) played Superspy John in a movie series, got recast after his movie vs. diamond Serpentik failed. Now older Connery-looking Mr. Diman (Fabio Testi of a Zulawski movie) is getting kicked out of his hotel after trying to pay with fake diamonds, and thinks Older Serpentik (Maria de Medeiros) might be living next door.

But really it’s just a fragmented romp of distilled genre pleasure. Maybe half dreamed/imagined (there’s a character who hypnotizes victims into believing they’re in a film). A surprisingly high number of Hellraiser-reminiscent scenes, what with the fishhook-haired woman raking people’s faces off, all the skin-cutting in closeup (sometimes with hooks), and fragments of victims’ exploded faces on the ground. Sicinski liked it.

by ·Comments Off on The Woman in the Yard (2025, Jaume Collet-Serra)

Something is up with mirrors, and mom realizes the woman in the yard is her own confused, chicken-murdering self, or rather her suicidal ideation incarnate, and that she’s trapped in the mirror world, like if Us was 100x less interesting and featured Nosferatuan shadow-snatching. Yard Woman never seems to do anything, but all the pets are dead and everyone’s hurt and she’s spreading family discord, letting the days go by. Her first words are “how did I get here?” Mom saves the day by time-tunnelling into the gun locker(?). Cameo appearances: before dad’s fatal car crash they park outside a movie theater showing The Mirror Has Two Faces… and was that a Uneeda Biscuit canister in their shed?

by ·Comments Off on Bringing Out The Dead (1999, Martin Scorsese)

Not sure if it was worth two whole hours just to see Ving Rhames revive I.B. Bangin’ (played by Paul Simon’s son, who exec-produced Pavements), but the movie also has other pleasures.

Mary Beth Hurt is the nurse who debriefs the patients, asking why they deserve help.
Hospital security guard Griss, who wears sunglasses and third-persons himself, has been in everything from Sankofa to the worst(?) Terminator sequel. The Wire‘s Kima and Omar get a minute of screen time each before they’re killed.

Cage and Arquette are both sleepwalking addicts, wearily observing the chaos of the city, until he takes decisive action by mercy-killing her life-supported dad. Cage’s haunting by a girl he couldn’t save is achieved by some Scorpion King-caliber CG face replacement. The dealer who gets fence-impaled was a Sunshine spaceman and the manic suicidal neighbor who Tom Sizemore maybe murders is pop star/NFL owner Marc Anthony.

by ·Comments Off on Night Moves (1975, Arthur Penn)

Watched this in mid-Feb, not intending it as a Gene Hackman memorial screening, but here we are. Great detective plot, Gene a two-bit private eye who finds the missing girl a half hour into the movie then sticks around as new smuggling/murder plots continue to unfold, until the girl (Melanie Griffith a decade pre-Body Double) is dead, movie stunt coordinator Ed Binns (Sixth Angry Man) is dead after two crashes and trying to murder Gene, giggling stuntman Marv dead underwater, mechanic James Woods floating in the dolphin pool, stepdad John Crawford (DEI-enforcing mayor of The Enforcer) guilty possibly dead, and tough Florida girl Jennifer Warren, whom Gene and I were both really getting to like, head smashed by a plane. Side plot of Gene discovering his own wife’s affair (via an Eric Rohmer movie date) then trying to repair his marriage, which doesn’t go too well, as he keeps returning to this case. Matt Singer gets it, and Filipe points out that “everything plot related happens offscreen.”

by ·Comments Off on Boy (1969, Nagisa Oshima)

Boy lives with an adoptive family of scam artists, the parents both Oshima regulars (she’s the criminal’s wife in Violence at Noon, he’s an officer in Death by Hanging). They earn money by having the kid and mom Curly-Sue passing cars then shaking down the drivers. This life doesn’t bring Boy happiness so he’s hoarding his allowance to afford a train ticket out of town, but the others catch up, and carry on until one of their crashes proves fatal and a suspicious driver reports them. Kind of a true-crime story, adapted from news stories, and predicting a bunch of Kore-eda films. The Boy is really good but his lines are so post-dubbed that it sounds like he’s a talking doll having his string pulled.

Boy didn’t act again, but grew up to be Morrissey: