Agent Lee Harker (a Draculized Harper Lee, played by The Girl Whom It Follows) has a hunch that gets her partner killed, and instead of getting mad at her the FBI declares her to be psychic and puts her on the decades-long case of a phantom serial killer who convinces dads to murder-suicide their families. She eventually discovers tall pale T. Rex-fan Nicolas Cage, who smashes his own face while revealing that his accomplice was Agent Harker’s mom (Alicia Witt, Crispin Glover’s Hotel Room partner). Mainly I want to know why the agency’s forensics dept. confidently says that the killer (Cage) never entered the homes, when the long late explanation of mom’s participation shows the killer (Witt) entering all the homes. Directed by the grandson of Scarface’s boss, whose next movie might be an adaptation of the cover story of King’s Skeleton Crew and whose previous movies I can’t decide whether to watch or to 1/10th-watch.

This just in: Robert Rubsam in Mubi.

Surveillance (2008, Jennifer Lynch)

The attraction here was Bill Pullman standing on a (lost) highway in a Lynch joint, but now that I’ve seen Boxing Helena I’m being more selective about my Lynches. On fast-forward the movie looks like 100% conversations in rooms and cars. Something has gone down in one of those cars as Julia Ormond (Inland Empire) dumps a body, then a rough-looking Pullman is explaining the murders we missed to cop hostage Kent Harper, we see them in slow-mo flashback with Bill in a gruesome mask. “You probably read the end of a book first, don’t ya? That is no way to live” – Bill is casting aspersions on the entire Last Ten Minutes project here! His girl Julia arrives and gets very turned on by murdering the remaining hostages. I think the twist is that FBI Agent Ormond was a serial conspirator all along. David Lynch sings over the closing credits.


Chained (2012, Jennifer Lynch)

Another serial killer/hostage story with another past-his-prime actor, yay. Vincent D’Onofrio is hiding Angie in the crawlspace, her would-be rescuer is a vampire-looking boy in the garage. I think he’s Evan Bird of Maps to the Stars – these two turn the tables on Vincent and bury him down there. Evan was presumed dead, looks up his dad Jake Weber, but dad apparently did something dark relating to the kid’s disappearance so he has to die, then I guess the vampire boy goes home to the late serial killer’s house. No David song over the credits, just footsteps of the boy walking through the house. Between these Jennifer made an Indian snake-woman movie, and she has a couple of new things out, but let’s just act like she doesn’t.


Saw VI (2009, Kevin Greutert)

Where we left off in volume 15, “bland-looking Costas Mandylor” was the only known survivor of whatever traps Dead Jigsaw is still laying. Big climax here with too many people and a minute left on the countdown clock. Amanda and Deathbed Tobin Bell both get flashback cameos, giving new context for stuff from part 3 which I haven’t considered since 2007. Peter Outerbridge is our man here, being taught a lesson in front of his wife and some business client he was cruel to. Jigsaw appears on VHS to explain how the client’s survivors can melt Peter with acid, which they promptly do. Costas barely, bloodily escapes from his head-smooshing trap. And I’m afraid Jigsaw’s voiceover was telling us the meaning of all this, but the mixing was bad and it got lost under the music. It’s hard to understand the titles, but next comes Saw 7: 3D: The Final Chapter, then Jigsaw, then Saw X (pronounced “socks”) which is part nine but numeral ten, what am I missing?


Pulse (2006, Jim Sonzero)

They remade Pulse, which seems like the worst idea, but I’ve always wondered… co-adapted by Wes Craven and a writer on Greta. This is “free with ads” so it ain’t really free. Kristen V-Mars Bell has reached the server room, but reality around her is melting and she’s violently assaulted by the editor and the vfx, but before she can be drag-me-to-hell’d, Ian intervenes and uploads a killer virus to crash the system, but the ghosts reboot and the couple flees into an ugly 2006 apocalypse, when everyone was using CG but before it was good. Computer ghosts can break car windows and get punched in the face, ok. After this Sonzero crawled off to video games, but Craven must not have held Kristen Bell responsible since he cast her in Scream 4.


Child’s Play (2019, Lars Klevberg)

While the Chucky sequels hadn’t even run out of steam they rebooted the original with Aubrey Plaza for some reason. Chucky is ugly now, and has the power to control all toys so he sends an army of quadcopter drones and teddy ruxpins after a toy store full of kids and parents. Or is it not a toy store – there’s a refrigerator section, and the kids fight back with a hedge trimmer. Aubrey is being held hostage so Andy lets his badly dubbed friends escape and goes on the attack, whacking Chucky with a RoboCop toy then stabbing him through the heart. Chuck is then shot by Brian Tyree Henry (where’d he come from) and decapitated by Plaza. I didn’t get to hear Mark Hamill say “give me the power I beg of you!!” Andy was already a veteran of Annabelle and Lights Out and went on to The Fabelmans, not a bad career. The director made another bad movie the same year, and the writer is already hard at work on next year’s bad movies.


Renfield (2023, Chris McKay)

This year’s first Dracula movie reportedly had a fun Nic Cage performance and nothing else to recommend it. Oh no the music’s too loud again, and I came just in time to see Nick Hoult kill rival Jean-Ralphio then confront a wooden Awkwafina. Cage has no lines here, explodes into a CG batstorm, then during the big showdown we get flashbacks to Ren’s group therapy sessions. Then Nick and Hoult triumph and chop up Drac. Good tumblr joke, but then they repeat it, and the movie peters out. This is my tenth Nick Hoult movie and I have never once recognized him. McKay made The Tomorrow War, the writers are from Walking Dead and Rick and Morty.


Alone in the Dark (2005, Uwe Boll)

I once thought it would be funny to watch some movies by Boll, with his reputation of being the worst to ever do it, but I checked out House of the Dead and it did me damage. Now every Shocktober I see his follow-up’s title pop up, so let’s consider its ending then put Boll’s name behind us forever. Christian Slater and gang are held at gunpoint by doomed Prof. Matthew Walker then they escape into a hell of CG beasts which is honestly no worse-looking than Pulse. Stephen Dorff has to sacrifice himself to blow up the beasties while Slater and Tara Reid escape to… the front yard of a nice large house, which they wander through, finding only a dead nun. All these movies just wish they were Resident Evil.


C.H.U.D. (1984, Douglas Cheek)

Ever since the early video store days I’ve known I need to see this one – the trouble is that everyone says it’s bad. The chuds are gross mutants with flashlight eyes, but trapped Kim Greist (Brazil) has got a sword and starts choppin. Chris Curry (Starship Troopers) is radioing Daniel Stern (Home Alone), and I dunno which guy is John Heard, maybe the hero threatening this goverment flunky who’s risking/losing his life to cover up the waste disposal/mutant development project. Feels like if Larry Cohen’s idiot brother did an urban Swamp Thing reboot.


All today’s movies found on amazon prime, which is a wasteland: searched titles appear multiple times, as free-to-watch, pay-to-watch, and unavailable, just like Amazon’s main store and its utter catalog confusion. Canceling plans to watch the endings of The Howling parts 2-6, because that’s an entire hour I can spend on a Tod Browning movie. I also made a Disney Plus list with both Haunted Mansions, both Hocus Pocuses, recent Marvel crap, Wrinkle in Time, Black Hole, Black Cauldron, etc, but gotta remember to stick to the mission and not watch bad movies for the sake of watching bad movies.

I paused this halfway since Katy wanted to watch To the Ends of the Earth, which features a lead actor from Sono’s Tokyo Tribe – kinda thinking I should’ve rewatched Tribe instead of this. As Sono’s movies get wackier, I lose more interest… I hated Noriko’s Dinner Table, but it at least felt like he was aiming for something more than prefab cult movies for festival midnight sections and Alamo Drafthouses. Anyway, most of us are here for Nicolas Cage, and he’s good – the production design > acting > editing > writing. It’s written by an American cartoon voice actor and an actor from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night – Sono’s tendency to slow down and repeat everything does the weak script no favors.

Sofia in Ghostland:

The Cult of the Mushroom Cloud:

Escape from New York meets that Rutger Hauer movie Wedlock where the convicts wear exploding collars. This time there are multiple little bombs in his jumpsuit, so Cage can lose an arm or a testicle and survive to the next scene. He’s a bad dude (frequent slow-mo flashbacks to a bank robbery where his partner went all Michael Madsen on the customers), as is Governor Bill Moseley who hires him to retrieve escaped daughter Sofia Boutella (Atomic Blonde and Climax). The Ghostland isn’t such a bad place, compared to anywhere else in this movie, it’s just everyone there has mass delusions. The baddie with a nuclear-melted face turns out to be Cage’s psychotic criminal partner, and Cage turns his half-arm into a weapon – what horror movie fan could’ve seen either of those developments coming?? MVP the Ratman.

Discovering Sofia:

Psycho Nick Cassavetes beneath my favorite banner:

Ratman at left:

Happy SHOCKtober 2021! Reliably a few weeks behind on the blog, but I’m actually catching up, and I helpfully started watching horror movies in September so I’d be able to post them in October. I realized pretty early that this is the movie where the crazy-eyed Nic Cage meme comes from. Cage gives a massive performance, more goofy than you can imagine, speaking the whole time in a Posh Bill & Ted accent, and it seems for a long time like some poor fool director’s movie was ruined because he couldn’t keep a handle on Cage – but it turns out his being uncontrollably weird is a vital part of the plot.

Cage brings home a drunk hot girl, but they get chased out of his apartment by a bat on a string, then he spends half the movie tormenting his secretary (Maria Conchita Alonso, between The Running Man and Predator 2) looking for a missing contract. The bat and the contract, along with the 80’s beats and the accent make the movie hard to take seriously, but Cage is just so enjoyable. He believes that Jennifer Beals has turned him into a vampire (she hasn’t) and that he can’t see his reflection (we can) so he needs to feed, buying some cheap plastic fangs and murdering girls at dance clubs. He grabs and eats a pigeon, brutally breaks up with his imaginary girlfriend, and finally gets staked at home by the secretary’s brother. From the writer of After Hours!

Nic Cage’s pig gets violently kidnapped and he recruits his truffle buyer Amir (Alex Wolff, the Rodrick-looking guy in Hereditary) on a search-and-rescue quest through nearby Portland. I knew so little about this movie going in because I didn’t want to discover whatever people are saying you should watch the movie without knowing. I assume it’s not the subterranean restaurateur fight club, but the fact that Cage plays a retired superchef who uses his eatery connections and cooking skills to track down the culprit, a sort of Ratatouille take on the John Wick template. But hot damn, there’s also a subterranean restaurateur fight club.

Cage is a local legend, a food philosopher-king, who just wants to be left alone with his pig friend in a shack in the woods. Amir’s dad Adam Arkin turns out to be a rival mushroom buyer and the pig thief, and the internet believes this to be stunt casting since Arkin once played an “off the grid, genius gourmet chef” on Northern Exposure. Sarnoski’s first feature, has too much handheld camerawork but not terrible. And the story comes together a little too neatly, that Cage gets answers by recreating a life-pivotal meal he once made for his helper’s pignapping father. These are small complaints about a delightful movie. I would’ve loved to show it to Katy, if not for the subterranean restaurateur fight club.

Lavinia is introduced by the lake, doing a wiccan ritual to cure her mom of cancer and get herself out of this town, when a wandering hydrologist interrupts – it’s convenient that a hydrologist is on-site exactly when an alien color-force lands via meteor and gets into the locals via the well water. Lavinia’s cancerous mom is Joely Richardson (of a movie-royalty family, previously of Drowning by Numbers and the Ken Russell Lady Chatterley), her dad is Nic Cage (toned down from Mandy, and better), doing his damnedest to inform America that alpacas are the animal of the future (they are!).

Lavinia and little brother Jack-Jack:

Cage vs. The Color (Purple):

Soon the mutations begin. Mom reabsorbs Jack, stoner brother Benny and his buddy Tommy Chong see otherworldy visions, the alpacas fuse into a many-headed blob, and Cage takes care of business with a shotgun. I think Lavinia helps bring about the apocalypse! Stanley is beloved for some 1990’s cult films… good music by the composer from Hereditary… shot by a music video vet (Grinderman’s “Heathen Child”). The first major Lovecraft feature since Beyond Re-Animator and Dagon in the early 2000’s (RIP Stuart Gordon).

Hydrologist, Benny, Tommy:

Hi, mom:

Nick Cage has one last chance to find the enemy who once held Cage captive and messed up his ear (Benir – sounds like “bent ear” – is played by Alexander Karim, actually a Swede). The first problem is that Benir is presumed dead (actually sick, in seclusion), and the second is that Cage has been diagnosed with rapidly-advancing dementia – so both men are dying of health issues aside from the revenge drama.

Cage gets help from his spy buddies Anton Yelchin (between Only Lovers Left Alive and Experimenter) and Irène Jacob (The Double Life of Véronique), and impersonates a doctor (Serban Celea of Retro Puppet Master) to gain access to his nemesis. But this is where the movie finally gets interesting. After the studio recut the movie and released it as Dying of the Light, Schrader recreated his preferred version using unconventional means, with Lynchian overlays, quivering closeups, reversed shots, and scenes rephotographed off a TV. Finally, after the typical spy-movie plot and dialogue, Cage and Benir’s confrontation breaks down into experimental sounds and colors, then cuts to Cage’s tombstone.

A failed recording artist turned minor cult leader ties up Nicolas Cage and kills his wife – bad move. Nic John Wicks the enemy, but with less professional skill and more sheer bloody rage. The cult calls in their supernatural enforcers, the Black Skulls biker gang, but Cage’s Rage is too strong to be stopped. The movie’s story seems like a thin excuse to unleash an intense Cage performance and psychotronic visual effects on the viewer, and this viewer ain’t complaining. Seems like I noticed references to Friday the 13th, Rob Zombie, Evil Dead, Hellraiser – there must be more.

Visually and performatively stylized melodrama, slangy and retro and dreamily lit, like a much better Grease, or a nonmusical West Side Story. Rusty James (Matt Dillon in his third S.E. Hinton movie in a row) mopes around with his tough friend Smokey (Nicolas Cage, his second year in the movies) and his nerdy David Cronenberg-looking friend Steve (Vincent Spano of City of Hope) and Nice Guy Eddie, speaking wistfully about Rusty’s long-missing older brother, local-legend gangster The Motorcycle Boy. Rusty James has a hot girlfriend Patty (Diane Lane) who’s into him, but he cheats and disappears and flakes around. Rusty James is trying to keep alive the gang wars he barely remembers from his brother’s day, and just as he’s losing a fight, The Motorcycle Boy dramatically reappears. This is the earliest I’ve seen Mickey Rourke, four years before Angel Heart, doing his gentle/tough handsome-zen thing – everyone in town agrees he’s crazy, but we don’t see him acting crazy, except maybe when he liberates every animal in the pet store.

It’s clear from the tone of the thing that somebody is doomed – probably Rourke (and yup, sure enough). The cops aren’t happy to see him back, but a heroin-addict substitute teacher starts hanging around, and old rivalries start simmering. It’s kind of a hangout movie where not much happens, but it feels tense most of the time. Dillon’s character is kind of an idiot, and his idol brother’s return blows up his worldview that things were better in the tough old days. In the end Rourke has died, Cage has stolen the girl and said he’d take over the gang if there even was a gang, Rusty James rides his brother’s motorcycle to the ocean, and it sounds like Wall of Voodoo over the credits but I guess it was that guy from The Police.

I keep meaning to watch the four hours of extras on the Criterion disc, but haven’t found the time. The Outsiders was also a Coppola-shot S.E. Hinton-written gang movie made the same year, and I should have double-featured these. The cast in this film is impressive – the brothers’ shitty alcoholic dad is Dennis Hopper, Laurence Fishburne is a gang go-between, Tom Waits a bartender. William Smith, who starred in the real David Cronenberg’s Fast Company, is the mustache cop who uses inappropriate force to kill Rourke after the pet store incident.

Rumble brothers with grudge cop: