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 Pinocchio (2022, del Toro & Gustafson)

After Don’t Look Now and The Church, I’m on edge when there’s an artist on scaffolding in a movie. Pinocchio (the puppet) is a real horror, created in a drunken rage. Fascists insist that P go to school, but carnie Christoph Waltz wants to kidnap him into the circus instead.

When you are being puppeted by a monkey:

The technical “perfection” doesn’t work in the movie’s favor – it doesn’t look handmade, but composited. Feels like the voices are on one plane, visuals on another, and they are not in unison. At least Waltz (who cannot pronounce Italian names) is having a flamboyantly good time. And have I mentioned it’s a musical for children?

Have I mentioned Pinocchio is Jesus Christ:

When you meet Dragon Cate Blanchett in the afterlife:

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Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964, Larry Roemer)

I had never seen this before, at least not in living memory. Mildly distressing to discover it has better songs, better voice acting, and better stop-motion than the Guillermo. Nobody ever talks about the team’s follow-up, a James Cagney Smokey the Bear movie.

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 Underground (1995, Emir Kusturica)

Blackie and his bestie, the thinner-mustached Marko are communists in 1941. The nearby zoo is bombed, panicking Marko’s brother, the stuttering zookeeper Ivan, and nazis overtake the town. Enter Natalija, Blackie’s girl, an actress also beloved by Marko and Nazi Franz. Marko hides Blackie and his fellow revolutionaries in a basement and when the war ends he decides not to tell them, so he keeps Natalija above ground and the undergrounders keep manufacturing weapons for him to sell. When a monkey blows a hole in the wall during Blackie’s son’s wedding they escape, come across the set of the film reenacting Blackie’s war heroism, and he starts killing German actors. Thirty years later as Yugoslavia is violently dissolving, Ivan finds his lost monkey then everybody dies tragically.

Young Ivan and flock:

Marko and Nat preparing to take drastic measures:

Inserting Blackie into documentary footage from the era was well-done. I think the internet is saying the movie is pro-genocide, but I don’t follow why. Even if so, this is counterbalanced by the movie’s major macaw presence. Won the top prize at Cannes versus Dead Man, City of Lost Children, Shanghai Triad, Hou, Oliveira, Terence Davies, and a pissed-off Theodoros Angelopoulos. Blackie appeared with a couple of James Bonds and played Santa Claus in the nutty-looking anthology Goodbye 20th Century. Marko was in Ozon’s Criminal Lovers, and Franz was in Ozon’s Frantz. Natalija came to Hollywood and ended up hundredth-billed in Maid in Manhattan, playing a maid, that’s embarrassing.

Old Blackie:

Old Ivan finds Old Marko:

by ·Comments Off on A Gentle Woman (1969, Robert Bresson)

As mentioned in the Loznitsa movie, I attempted to repeat White Nights Fest here, only to realize the Loznitsa was far from a straight adaptation. But once again, Bresson can be counted on for Dostoevsky fidelity. After reading the short story I rewatched the Piotr Dumala short, which makes more sense now as an adaptation, though he added the nudity and insects. In fact there’s more sex in all the movie versions than in the book, unless it’s implicit there and I missed it. No insects in the Bresson though, just monkeys, both alive and skeletal.

Our lead pawnbroker had been a bank manager in his dark past (a soldier in the book). Bresson’s film contains much media outside the main story – she listens to LPs of tinkly instrumental music, they go to the cinema to watch a Piccoli/Deneuve film, and to the theater for a Hamlet swordfight (practice for Lancelot). Bresson solves the problem of the entire book being an internal monologue by the pawnbroker after his wife has died, simply by having him speak aloud to the maid. The actors perhaps more actory than in his previous films – deadwife Dominique Sanda would go on to a long career, eventually appearing with Piccoli herself (and if not Deneuve then Nico and Bulle Ogier and Léa Seydoux and Isabelle Huppert ain’t bad).

by ·Comments Off on Game of Death I & II (1973-1981)

Game of Death (1978, Robert Clouse)

Time for the post-Bruce-Lee movies in the Bruce Lee box set. Bruce had filmed about ten minutes of fights for this one, then he inconveniently died. The American studio knew Bruce was profitable, and that’s all they knew, so they cobbled together a new movie, blatantly using stand-ins and cutting reaction shots from other movies. Once they simply pasted a still photo of Bruce’s face over another guy. It’s full of callbacks to the previous movies (thanks to a films-with-the-film subplot), but anyone who enjoyed those is gonna be sad about this one. Even doc footage from Bruce’s actual funeral is used, when lead character “Billy Lo” is supposed to be faking his own death. And this is all in service of a third-rate crime thriller. 1 star for the music, 1 for Sammo Hung, zero for the rest.

After filming a scene, Billy is calmly threatened by a white suited gangster who wants protection money. He works for an evil bald guy who’s somehow involved in both a record pressing plant (which threatens Billy’s girlfriend’s music career) and a championship fight in Macao (their star fighter is Carl: Robert Wall from Enter the Dragon, who died last week). The gangster protection money plot had already been used in Way of the Dragon (and the Chang Cheh movie I just watched), but so what, it’s a plot, and movies need those.

Billy’s in hiding, letting the gangsters think he’s dead, which gives all the non-Bruce actors an excuse to wear heavy disguises. Carl cheats and beats Sammo Hung in the ring, but Sammo puts on a good showcase, then Billy slaughters Carl in the lockers. The girlfriend (Colleen Camp) inevitably gets kidnapped, and a stuntman wearing Bruce’s yellow tracksuit and a dark helmet fights some motorcycle dudes in a warehouse. Finally, the one true Bruce fights some dudes (including the absurdly tall Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), and it’s glorious for a few minutes. He never even touches the old bald gangster (Dean Jagger, the sheriff of Forty Guns), who falls off a roof while running away, the credits rolling before he even hit the ground.

Movie magic via still photo:

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Game of Death II (1981, Ng See-yuen)

The only sense that this is a sequel is it’s playing the stand-in game with old Bruce footage (the film stock still doesn’t match). Bruce is hilariously dubbed by some cowboy-ass American. He chills with an ass-kicking abbot then gets an incriminating film from some girl. At a friend’s funeral, he’s shot and falls to his death while chasing a helicopter that was stealing his friend’s casket(!), and now Bruce’s sad brother Bobby takes over as the lead, like Bruce took over from James Tien in The Big Boss – but not exactly like that, since Tong Lung is playing both brothers here. Now with an hour to go, the movie doesn’t have to pretend to star Bruce Lee anymore, and can cut loose. The dubbing is atrocious, but the Chinese/Koreans in charge of this movie have got more respect for Bruce’s legacy and more filmmaking and fighting talent than the doofus Americans in part one.

Lewis trying to be intense despite the cute monkey:

Bobby gets intel from a white monk that the evil Lewis and his scarfaced brother, masters of the Palace of Death, are responsible, so he heads on down. Lewis can’t be that evil – he keeps pet peacocks and monkeys. The Whatever Brothers (I didn’t catch their names) challenge Bobby, and he proves his mettle, then a sudden blonde girl gets suddenly naked, tries to kill him, then a guy in a lion suit joins in! Movie is already kinda nutty, and that’s before Bobby descends to the subterranean MST3K sci-fi lair with spacesuited harpoon-armed flunkies and electrified floors. Lewis is found dead, the scarface guy is suspected so Bobby beats his ass, but Bruce’s “dead” friend, who was stealing his own coffin to avoid discovery, is behind the whole thing. Friend/enemy Chin Ku is Jeong-lee Hwang of Drunken Master, the abbot was in Temple of Doom and Sammo’s Enter the Fat Dragon.

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Bruce Lee: The Man and the Legend (1973, Shih Wu)

Polishing off the Criterion box set with a return to the shameless, shoddy quality of Game of Death 1, this time in documentary form. Opens with ten minutes of news film from Bruce’s funeral, which doesn’t sound like such a long time but really felt like it, making me realize I am not cut out to watch Loznitsa’s State Funeral. Then a chronological run through his life and career, with lots of slow zooms into photographs, and a narrator who sounds like he’s from some MST3K short, like How to Go on a Date. Why is the dialogue in the movie Bruce was in as a child covered up with horn music? Why does the English narrator sometimes talk over people speaking English, telling us the same story at a slightly different pace? When Bruce defeats Bob Baker in Fist of Fury, “Baker studied for seven years under Bruce, but he is still no match for his teacher,” the narrator confusing an actor’s skill with a scripted scenario. It closes with then-unreleased Game of Death footage – in fact, Enter The Dragon wasn’t even out yet – in Hong Kong, this quickie doc beat it into theaters by a week. Shih Wu was an assistant director on A Better Tomorrow III, which I’ll probably end up watching eventually.

by ·Comments Off on The White Meadows (2009, Mohammad Rasoulof)

I got Naked Island flashbacks, people transporting water to different islands. Rahmat is a tear collector, witnessing dramas on each island he visits. He gains a stowaway named Nassim who tries to steal from him, they meet a blind man scavenging dead birds, a woman is sent screaming into the burning sea… death at every stop of the boat. Besides the tear bottle there’s a bag where people discard their sorrows, and a series of jars where they whisper their secrets. A rogue painter is tortured and forced to declare that the sea is blue, then sent away with the tear collector so his nonconformist views won’t spread. Another girl is sent away for being too beautiful.

I watched an old DVD of a then-recent film, for some reason transferred from a used print. I had to rewind when I saw lightning during a conversation about how it never rains – just a jagged film scratch. In the end, Rahmat bathes the feet of a government man who only asks “if everyone’s well.”

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope:

In a bold move that is quite the opposite of what we see from too many concerned filmmakers on the left, Rasoulof joined his increased anger and frustration not with greater literalism or artlessness, but with a shift into the allegorical, mythic register. While the bitterness and protest underlying The White Meadows are crystal clear, the film explores the state of Ahmadinejad’s Iran through a series of absurdist horror vignettes, staged against an unforgiving Lake Orumieh, and witnessed by a man condemned to merely observe and chronicle, but helpless to intervene … Rasoulof weaves this tale of interlocking allegories through visual as well as dramaturgical means. This is a strikingly beautiful film, simultaneously lush and austere, characterized by expansive, elemental landscapes and seascapes. Within these broad fields, human forms are enveloped, knocked hither and thither, struggling to maintain balance and dignity.

by ·Comments Off on Four Shorts watched early 2020

What Did Jack Do? (2017, David Lynch)

Jack is a monkey with a human mouth composited onto his face, so he can be interrogated by detective David Lynch. “They say real love is a banana.” Willow’s review is the one to read: “This is a joke, but Lynch is also being completely sincere.”

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The Capsule (2012, Athina Rachel Tsangari)

Women slither in from all over, have other women inside them via unrealistic compositing effects… there is slow-mo, nudity, colored tongues, and “Horse With No Name” a cappella. Wait, there’s more: goats on leashes, egg-absorbing bellybuttons, painted mustaches, a confession line, heads that turn all the way around.

Reminds of the Lucrecia Martel fashion short and other high-gloss ads made by deeply weird directors. Then towards the end, talk of clones and life-cycles and vampires summons Never Let Me Go and the Lucile Hadzihalilovic films. I liked it more than Chevalier!

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Goldman v Silverman (2020, Safdies)

Adam Sandler is a gold-painted human statue with a kazoo, then Benny Safdie arrives as a silver-painted human statue with a kazoo, insults Goldman then sets up across the street until Goldman comes at him with a can of spraypaint. The ending is played for pathos, Silverman sad and alone with messed up clothes, but, man he started it. Really the point of this movie is that the Safdies filmed Adam Sandler in Times Square and nobody realized it.

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The Fall (2019, Jonathan Glazer)

Another short with masks. This time everyone’s wearing ’em, and a mob shakes a dude down from a tree then drops him down an extremely deep hole. At some point he catches himself and starts to painstakingly climb back up. Pretty much pure nightmare fuel, no other reason for this to exist than to deeply upset everyone who watches.

by ·Comments Off on The Man Who Laughs (1928, Paul Leni)

Opens in flashback with our laughing boy’s rebel father being executed by the king, with the weirdly powerful court jester Barkilphedro (literary-horror regular Brandon Hurst) in attendance. The kid’s face was carved by the “Comprachico” clan headed by Dr. Hardquanonne (George Siegmann of the 1921 Three Musketeers, dead of anemia before this movie’s release). As they’re sailing away, banned from England for various crimes and/or xenophobia, the boy runs off, rescues a blind infant from the arms of her frozen mother, and stumbles into door of Ursus The Philosopher (Cesare Gravina, would appear in The Wedding March the same year and retire a few months later).

Years later, he is Laughing Man Conrad Veidt (practically a silent horror superstar, having starred in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Hands of Orlac), on sideshow tours with the beautiful blind Dea (Phantom of the Opera star Mary Philbin) and their father-figure Ursus (this must’ve proven more lucrative than philosophy). But when they run into Hardquanonne, he uses the laughing man’s existence to blackmail a duchess who lives on the land that Conrad rightfully owns. I would’ve thought if you’re a rebel who is personally murdered by the king, your property is forfeited, but I guess not!

The plot gets silly here – Conrad gets an invitation from hot young party girl Duchess Josiana (Olga Baclanova, wicked star of Freaks), hopes she’ll be in love with him, because that would prove he’s worthy to marry his true love Dea, but as Josiana gets him alone, she receives a note from the queen saying she must marry the Laughing Man in order to keep her land and title, and Josiana reacts by laughing hysterically then hugging her monkey. Conrad is arrested, then instated in the House of Lords the next day – meanwhile his circus family is banished. I can’t tell if the royals are toying with Conrad or if they’re just dense, because everyone throws a fit that he won’t stop smiling, so he flees the castle and makes it to the boat to join Dea and Ursus.

Based on a Victor Hugo novel, remade by Sergio Corbucci in the 1960’s, and again this decade with Depardieu as Ursus. Leni was apparently a talent, followed this with The Last Warning then died of an infected tooth. Conrad, who spoke no english at the time of filming, is terrific. Watched in the dying days of SHOCKtober in honor of this year’s Golden Lion winner at Venice.