by ·Comments Off on House of Wax (2005, Jaume Collet-Serra)

On one hand, this is a semi-remake about stupid college kids camping out inadvisably close to an evil wax museum and going dead/missing one by one, starring nobody of note, spending too much time trying to make us care about the central sibling relationship. On the other hand, Jaume (in his debut) overachieves, shooting the hell out of it. The twin brother writers envision twin brother killers, who’ve taken the title literally and constructed the entire multi-story house out of wax. The town has been Phantasm’d, every resident killed by the brothers, waxed and posed. I respect how bonkers it all becomes by the end.

Despite Woman in the Yard, Jaume is more hit than miss – I’m considering a Liam Neeson Action Thriller Week to catch up. The DP specialises in stupid nonsense, editor did The Nice Guys, and first victim Wade is 22nd-billed in Terrifier 3.

by ·Comments Off on Gemini (1999, Shinya Tsukamoto)

Yukio (Bird People In China star Masahiro Motoki) is a doctor who detests poor people.

Rin (Ryo of Harmful Insect and Scabbard Samurai) is his wife, has lost her memory.

They sleep like this:

One day, the doctor’s fur-lined bloodshot-eyed doppelganger arrives and kills the doctor’s parents.

Then the doppelganger throws the doctor down a well.

He torments the doctor, reveals the truth about their parents and the wife, all the plotty drama less convincing than the excellent visuals and cool music.

by ·Comments Off on The Monkey (2025, Oz Perkins)

“A bit annoying and overwritten,” was my first thought, before landing on “uniquely idiotic.” But the opening sequence features Adam Scott with a flamethrower, so among all the sorry humor and sub-Final-Destination Rubegoldbergian kills, we get a few undeniable pleasures. Also some nice long cross-fades, and a couple of possible Bruce Campbell references. Skeleton Crew has now birthed two and a third theatrical films (The Mist, The Raft) plus some anthology horror episodes and apparently a Guy Maddin version of Here There Be Tygers?? That’s what the wiki says, though the lboxd description of Maddin’s Tygers sounds as faithful to the King story as The Lawnmower Man.

The Streaming:

Anyway, the monkey… twin boys (nu-Fregley in an animated Diary of a Wimpy Kid) inherit the thing, it kills their babysitter (not that they’re even aware) and their mom and uncle, then 25 years later their aunt, as they grow into twin Divergent Theos who are trying to find the monkey in order to kill each other. This latter part is supposed to be in the present-day, but all the phones still have cords. Also starring Orphan Black as their mom… Young Timothee Wonka as one twin’s kid… Elijah “Wirt” Wood as a guru stepdad… Sarah “daughter of Eugene” Levy as the aunt… and Rohan “no relation to Bruce” Campbell.

Horses:

by ·Comments Off on Sinners (2025, Ryan Coogler)

I’ve gotta stop sitting so close to the screen – between the closeness and the frantic editing, I’m not sure how our small team survived when fifty vampires, who’ve been shown as lightning-quick and super-strong, bust into the house. Bold music throughout, and the music not just incidental but vital to plot and theme. I’d be interested in reading about influences, since it turns From Dusk Till Dawn to Django Unchained. A little too neatly tied together, with the late revelations of the twins’ Chicago adventure (not actually becoming rich gangsters but stealing big from two rival gangs then running away while the gangs blamed each other) and the tolerant local whites’ less-tolerant motivations, and each of the three main dudes meeting a woman at the same time, then those six being the main survivors. Mostly as good as advertised though, taking place in a single day, plus a delicious Buddy Guy postscript.

The near-white girl is Hailee from True Grit, and the other Michael Jordan’s woman played the wife in His House… we saw a preview for the evil white vampire’s next horror movie 28 Years Later… the girl Sammy likes will supposedly star in a Running Man remake… I never recognize Lola “Gemini” Kirke, who doesn’t look enough like her sister… the Chinese woman who must have died in that climactic rampage is in the new Alma & The Wolf… the doorman was in Miracle at St. Anna and plays Raphael in the recent Ninja Turtle things… plus Delroy Lindo on harmonica.

by ·Comments Off on Horrors of Malformed Men (1969, Teruo Ishii)

Wild 1920’s-set mad-scientist movie. The title and concept are more fun than the experience of watching it. I fell asleep with my finger on the screenshot key and had to delete ten thousand files the next day.

Can’t say you weren’t warned, I’m superdeformed (dig it):

Young doctor (lead actor from the also-nutty Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell) escapes from an asylum, seeking a half-remembered island, and finds a doomed circus girl who also half-remembers it. He makes his way to the shore right as his doppelganger dies, so he pretends to be that guy, saying “actually I’m still alive,” then hangs out with his weird family and sleeps with his sister.

Chair goals:

He makes it out to the family island and finds his madman web-handed dad who deforms people, and hopes to one day deform everyone… one at a time I guess, since he doesn’t have a Magneto-scale operation here. Dad reveals various hidden identities and plots and backstories – such as when he locked his wife in a cave, and she fed on the crabs that fed on her dead lover – then a cop who’d been posing as a family servant explains some more.

Dad is a disability-rights advocate:

But it’s true he has issues:

After all this, the young doctor’s sister-lover reaches the correct conclusion: “We will embrace atop the fireworks mortar. We will scatter magnificently across the great sky.”

by ·Comments Off on The Black Room (1935, Roy William Neill)

Baron Boris Karloff is an 1830’s tyrant, and right before the villagers can violently depose him, he suggests (to the surprisingly patient angry mob) trading places with his lovable, crippled twin brother Anton. Everyone (except maybe the brother) is pleased. Before going into exile the outgoing baron shows his brother around the place, takes him into the cursed Black Room, and shoves him down a hole to his death – then pretends to have a crippled arm and a soft, friendly manner in order to retain power and marry the pretty harpist Marian Marsh (the poor girl who turns Peter Lorre’s criminal life around in Sternberg’s Crime & Punishment).

Now all Fake Anton has to do is avoid using his right arm, and never return to the black room, where the ancient prophecy said he’ll die. But signing a marriage document, his would-be father-in-law (Thurston Hall of The Great McGinty and Renoir’s This Land is Mine) spies him in a mirror (in a lovely zoom shot) and has to get murdered, the crime pinned on the harpist’s other suitor Robert Allen (a Westerns regular also in The Awful Truth). Then on the wedding day a suspicious dog chases Karloff straight into the Black Room where he falls on his late brother’s sword.

Probably better than the other Karloff movie I watched this month. Playing identical twins is always a good actor showcase, and I thought the movie would avoid throwing both Karloffs together, but right after they meet they’re in an action scene together, neat. Neill was a directing machine, cranking out 100+ movies until he worked himself to death.

Harpist and dad:

by ·Comments Off on My Twentieth Century (1989, Ildiko Enyedi)

Twin girls in Budapest grow up separately, both end up dating a thin-faced Tesla-type character (Nostalgia star Oleg Yankovskiy). Lots of appealing birth-of-cinema and -electricity stuff.

From my notes:
– She tries to bomb the minister at the cinema
– They go to the zoo and the monkey narrates a flashback
– Stars and electric lightbulbs whisper to each other

Dorota Segda as Dora:

Dorota Segda as Lili:

Oleg:

by ·Comments Off on Black Night (2005, Olivier Smolders)

“There’s a problem with your films. I don’t understand it. It’s not clear at all.”

A Belgian movie, watched for the Shadowplay thing, but I opted to cover Ferat Vampire instead because this one seemed… more difficult. As the red curtains open and the film begins, diorama-like, full of seared memories and dream logic, I tell myself “don’t call it Lynchian, that’s what everyone has said about it,” but Goodreads tell me that Smolders wrote a book about Eraserhead and Vimeo says he made a video called Lynch Empire, so nevermind, it’s Lynchian. This is his only feature to date, in a 35-year career of shorts.

Kids walk towards the camera, a bug is pinned to the wall, twin Poltergeist II preachers are flashback-puppeteers, causing a wolfman to kill the girl to big choral music, like hymns with some Thin Red Line mixed in. The girl lives again, only to be killed with scissors. Then the doctor, who is viewing these memory-plays by peering into our suit-wearing protagonist’s ear, says he’s fantasizing and he never had a sister, let alone a murdered one, and he needs to chill out.

Our man has an a static Crispin Glovery intensity, and a facial birthmark so we can conveniently tell who plays him in flashback, living in a city under near-permanent eclipse (the second time in 24 hours I’ve thought of Dark City). He works as the bug guy in a museum – a zoo worker in a room full of film cans – and we’ve seen multiple sets of identical twins at this point, making this the second movie this year after the Mandico short to be strongly reminiscent of A Zed & Two Noughts.

Enough with all the comparisons to other films – we go into overdrive when a black woman (the museum security guard) appears, sick and naked and pregnant, in his bed. We hear her thoughts, untranslated (at least on my DVD), while he deals with his stress by watching anthropological films of a beardy colonialist white man (his father, and the museum director). She make him promise not to leave, he immediately runs into the hallway while she gets killed by the ghost of his dead sister, then turns into a cocoon that births a white woman who goes to the museum, naked but for a leopard-skin coat, and murders a taxidermist, the sun comes out and everyone gets annoyed, and now the allusions/symbolism are out of my league.

Anyway, the closeup of leaf insects are great. This would seem to be a cult movie in need of a cult. Smolders was reportedly born in Kinshasa, says in the extras that his film’s vision of Africa is “a fantasized territory based on stories written by … large museums which … fanatically classified a universe that they didn’t understand.” He also says that the story’s logic is based on the rule that “what happens to a character is exactly what he most fears, yet desires at the same time.”