by ·Comments Off on Dust Devil (1992, Richard Stanley)

Hardware was silly fun, Color Out of Space a real cool time, this movie is the Richard Stanley tiebreaker, and… I can dig it. We got just-okay storytelling, but baller filmmaking – South African post-Twin Peaks cult-killer stuff, with at least three cool birds.

Shelter me from the power of the finger:

Chelsea (one of Deborah Unger’s girls in Lynch’s Hotel Room) is on the run, and connects with roaming psycho Robert John Burke (between Hal Hartley movies). Everything this guy does, he does ominously. Her husband (of Space Mutiny: MST3K season 8) is after Chelsea and cops Joe and Ben (both of Cry Freedom) are after RJB. Eventually everyone will die except Chelsea, but she takes on the serial-psycho spirit and becomes the new RJB. The DP supposedly shot Highlander III: The Sorcerer in 1994, but that must be an AI hallucination – there were only two Highlander movies.

by ·Comments Off on Kinds of Kindness (2024, Yorgos Lanthimos)

1. Plemons is married to Hong, living according to strict instructions from Dafoe, until they have a disagreement and Plemons is cut loose, extremely pathetic on his own. Qualley is part of the organization, also under Dafoe, and Stone appears to be the new Plemons, until Jesse figures out how to get back in his employer’s good graces. The music is all doom-piano or moaning choir. Goes nicely with Yorgos’s project of deconstructing human behavior.

2. Plemons is a cop, Athie his partner, his wife Emma has been missing and arrives home acting strange, so he tells people that she’s not his real wife, then finds ways to prove it (cw: finger trauma). Good commitment to casting quirky people all down the line in these.

3. Plemons and Stone in another Dafoe cult, this time one whose members only use water from a tank that Hong has cried in. Qualley is twins, Alwyn a rapist husband, and in an episode three exclusive, Hunter Schafer of Cuckoo is an attempted resurrectionist.

by ·Comments Off on Holy Smoke (1999, Jane Campion)

A good bird movie, with emus and cockatoos and budgies. Kate Winslet falls in with guru Baba and decides to stay in India, so her parents trick her into returning home and hire cult deprogrammer Harvey Keitel. But he lacks his required assistant and fucks up the assignment – the sight of Kate nude leads to a fully degraded Harvey selling out his whole plan. Keitel in the Emil Jannings tradition, a master of playing an apparent tough guy who becomes a blubbering mess. When his would-be assistant does arrive it’s Pam Grier, who I just saw in Ghosts of Mars.

L-R: Kate, Cockatoo

L-R: Robbie (Chopper), Yvonne (Muriel’s Wedding), Tim (Farscape)

Harvey, tough as nails, uncorruptable:

Ah, well, nevertheless…

by ·Comments Off on The Parallax View (1974, Alan Pakula)

Turns out it’s a 4th of July movie (which I watched on the 6th).

Months after a senator is shot by waiters at a Space Needle party, a reporter at the scene tells colleague Warren Beatty that witnesses are being killed. Warren goes rogue, raises hell with a small-town sheriff’s department and comes away with some papers from an organization that recruits assassins. He goes undercover calling himself Harry Nilsson, gets a crazy guy to fill out the admission forms for him, and convinces the parallax group he’s crazy enough to kill for them. I didn’t follow all the twists when he saved a flight full of people from a bombing, but the company is onto him afterwards, sending his editor a heart attack sandwich then framing Warren for the climactic assassination.

Alan “The Count” Pakula was the 70’s conspiracy thriller guy, making this between Klute and All the President’s Men. The screenwriters also did Three Days of the Condor (sure) and The Money Pit (what) with uncredited work by the late Robert Towne. They got a Taking of Pelham hijacker in this, a Stepford wife, and a Hitchcock actor.

Proof that it’s a 1970s movie:

by ·Comments Off on The Sweet East (2023, Sean Price Williams)

Talia “no relation” Ryder slips away from a school trip to DC and goes on adventures. Friendly professor Simon Rex offers her a place to stay and she wakes up under a swastika comforter. I think they’re watching the DW Griffith Edgar Allen Poe movie? She gets work on a film shoot, and the next guy to help out (Rish Shah) hides her in a barn so his gun-cult brother doesn’t find out. Ensuing gunfight kills film shoot’s star (Coppola’s Elvis), oops. Watched this after reading Pinkerton’s Bombast issue 2, but first I should’ve watched Hotel des invalides, then a Luc Moullet movie or two (maybe Origins of a Meal and Essai d’ouverture).

Charles Bramesco in LWLies:

A vessel for the views and experiences of those around her, she’s defined by her passivity and vacuity in her tendency to repeat the last thing she heard to the next person she meets. She sits and listens until the vibes sour, then simply walks away.

Adam Nayman’s is the only review I’ve seen to mention The Scary of 61st (and I didn’t even realize one of its lead actors had a cameo in this).

Conceptually, The Sweet East is as rigorously digressive as its author’s (best) film criticism, stringing together relevant references to a host of American iconoclasts and styling each of Lillian’s (mis)adventures as exercises in projection wherein her acquaintances — be they crusty vegan “artivists,” sad-sack domestic terrorists, trendy independent filmmakers (Jeremy O. Harris and Ayo Edebiri), It Boy movie stars (Jacob Elordi), or Butthole Surfers (a quick visit by Gibby Haynes) — treat the pretty, vacant interloper as a blank canvas for their artistic ambitions and/or sexual desires (and, given the general influence of Lolita, these things are usually implied to be one and the same).

by ·Comments Off on Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012, John Hyams)

There’s this idea going around on Vulgar Auteurism Twitter that some godforsaken JCVD/Dolph Lundgren action series got revived in the 2010s by the son of the director of Timecop, starring the 12th-billed actor in Expendables 2, as a straight-to-video 3D (?) fifth sequel shot entirely in nondescript strip-mall locations, and it was actually great. Still buzzed off The Doom Generation, I watched it to set the record straight, and it was actually great.

Not a normal DTV sequel – dank Damon Packard vibes, the scenes linger weirdly, the strobe effects more intense. Apparently I was supposed to watch Regeneration first to make any sense out of this. Scott Adkins’ family is killed in first-person oner-cam by culty home invaders. Evil plumber Magnus is freed by Dolph Lundgren in a red Mario hat, prompting a strobey JCVD appearance in a strip club bathroom and a full-house slaughter. Scott Adkins finally comes alive and destroys the plumber, then meets mystery woman Mariah Bonner and another Scott Adkins who works for JCVD, and learns we’re all clones who never had families. Murderous rages are flown into, everyone dies.

Daniel Goldhaber decodes it: “A movie about a man trapped inside of a genre movie, programmed with a stock motivation.” More from Josephine and Josh.

by ·Comments Off on All the Colors of the Dark (1972, Sergio Martino)

Every Shocktober you’ve gotta watch one of those illogical Italian movies with crazy use of zooms and focus and repetitive editing. Londoner “Jane” (Five Dolls star Edwige Fenech) sees murder everywhere since her miscarriage, husband “Richard” (her costar from Martino’s Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh) wants her to take her blue pills and make sweet love to him and not go to therapy. But Jane is being stalked by the blue-eyed man from her murder dreams. After he tries to kill her with an axe, neighbor May takes Jane to a group she says can help: a rapey clown cult of pale-faced people watching a guy with Freddy fingernails do animal sacrifices.

“You’ve crossed the limits of reality.” Everyone starts dying – Richard pitchforks Blue Eyes (Ivan Rassimov of Schock) then shoots his wife’s sister Barbara for trying to seduce him, the cult kills Richard, etc. Even the tidy explanatory ending doesn’t make sense, which is perfect.

by ·Comments Off on The Sacred Spirit (2021, Chema Garcí­a Ibarra)

I didn’t mean to watch another crazy movie involving pedophilia so soon after The Scary of Sixty-First, but that’s what I get for not reading plot descriptions. It’s more of a twist ending in this movie, anyway. Jose Manuel is apparently helping out his sister whose daughter has been abducted, but really J.M. has helped abduct the girl and is now working on her twin sister. This is because he’s joined a minor UFO cult (half of whose members are named Raúl) whose leader asks for spiritual child sacrifices but is actually a child pornographer, illegal organ harvester, and probable murderer.

Made in Spain, played Locarno’s main section with Zeros and Ones and After Blue. It’s a likable, low-key absurdist movie with fun visual design and cool music, and you think you’re following a group of harmless kooks until the ending revelation. I take this as a critique on so-called harmless cults in general, that escape into conspiracy theory leads to ignorance of a darker reality. The Cinema Scope review isn’t online and I’ve misplaced half my issues in the move, damn, but in Cineuropa, Ibarra talks of working with nonprofessionals: “I look for that kind of natural spontaneity: I try to avoid them memorizing the text and have them read it only a few times … Nacho Fernández, the protagonist, is a guy from Alicante who works as a night watchman in a car park.”

by ·Comments Off on The Empty Man (2020, David Prior)

The horror flop-cult-hit of the year lives up to its growing reputation. I’m not convinced all the story threads came together, but loved the plot shifts, false leads, repetitions, and the overall look and movement of the thing.

Paul (Aaron Poole of The Void) falls down a hole in Bhutan and has an encounter with a zen skeleton, then becomes mute until a couple days later when he psychically murders his friends. 20+ years later, James Badge Dale is a Lonely Guy, an ex cop with a dead family. The neighbor’s daughter Amanda tries to cheer him up by saying nothing is real, then she summons urban legend The Empty Man and all her friends are found hanging under a bridge, so dumbass James emptymans himself to solve the mystery.

Amanda, emptymanning her friends:

This seems a straightforward murder-ghost scenario, but James’s investigation uncovers a dangerous doomsday cult that formed around Bhutan Paul, seeking to transfer his consciousness into a new empty vessel. A Cassady/Pattinson type (Robert Aramayo from Nocturnal Animals) helps feed him clues. Great abduction scene, all potential witnesses looking at their phones.

“We can’t indict the cosmos”

“Staged by Prior with an unnerving sense of convergence that recalls the thrillers of his sometime collaborator David Fincher, right down to the participation of a guru-like figure who goes by John Doe.” Adam Nayman conducted an essential interview for Mubi, the most unexpected shoutout being The Hamster Factor.