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 Junk World (2025, Takahide Hori)

I didn’t need the little robot guy from another movie to get an origin story, but “weirdo pervert stop-motion” is one of my favorite genres, so this was great. Starts with a military unit making their way out of enemy territory, then alternates between rewinding to the same actions from a different character perspective (they took to heart the criticisms that nobody understood what happened in the first movie) and crazily escalating the action/stakes. Kickass protector robot gets injured, rebuilds itself as cuddly robot, time travels to distant past, inspires teddybear-cat creatures to create a complex civilization, then sends daughter of the teddycat leader back to the past to protect the military guys inside a red ducky powersuit.

Ducky streetfighters a Freddy-chested supermutant:

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 33: SHOCKtober Revisits Part 3

Shocker (1989, Wes Craven)

Lawnmower Man-esque story of an electrocuted guy (Mitch “Skinner” Pileggi) who becomes electricity. Our hero (Michael “Tanner” Murphy) jumps inside the television to chase the guy through a montage of TV shows, like a crappy Sherlock Jr. Tanner harnesses the power of the TV Remote Control to gain the upper hand. Someone’s head goes through a TV set (two years after Dream Warriors) while I’m watching this wearing my Videodrome shirt.

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Deadly Friend (1986, Wes Craven)

First I had to rewind far enough to see Momma From The Train’s head get exploded by a basketball, presumably the main thing people remember from this movie. D.F. (OG-Buffy Kristy Swanson) dives out a second-story window to kill Tom (of biker flick Savage Dawn), then she attempts suicide-by-cop, melts into her true robot form and kills Paul (of Little House on the Prairie) offscreen. Murder-bots turning on their owners is a timely topic since I also rewatched M3GAN tonight – after that movie’s expertly uncanny droid, this one’s robot is just a girl wearing too much eyeshadow. It’s always remarkable how bad the ADR was in 1980s movies, like nobody knew what “sounding natural” felt like, or could replicate it using any existing recording equipment.

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976-Evil (1988, Robert Englund)

No recollection what this is about, maybe a blend between Pillow Talk and Unfriended? Mrs. Wilmouth is being devoured by her cats, then Big Hair Angela is molested by Mrs. W’s goblin child. The goblin is called Hoax – his cousin Spike (the only actor who’d return in the sequel) distracts the kid then tosses him into hell, which is in the backyard. I kinda like that every single line reading is awkward, makes the movie less generically bad and more specifically bad.

devil in a sweatervest:

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Fright Night (1985, Tom Holland)

Piecing together what’s happening based on having watched the remake five years back… the vamp Chris “Jack” Skellington is too dentally distorted to recognize, old Roddy McDowall is fighting him back but the nerdy boy Herman’s Head Charlie gets bitten after a really nice bat transformation, while in the basement his girl Amy has already turned vampish. Smashing the windows to let the sunlight in is also how they won in From Dusk Till Dawn, the green-burning vampire skeleton pretty sweet. Coda: everything’s back to normal, Roddy on TV, the kid making out with his girl, and vamps living next door awaiting the sequel. Hoax from 976-EVIL is in this, but either he’s dead by now or I can’t recognize him without the demon makeup. Holland is best known as codirector of The Timekeepers of Eternity.

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Prom Night (1980, Paul Lynch)

There are a lotta kids at this prom and I don’t care to figure out who they all are. Thugs beat up the prom king and steal his crown, then the movie gets its Carrie blood-bucket moment when the masked killer rolls the false king’s severed head out on stage. Hero vs. Villain fight ensues, awkward choreography but a nice disco song. The queen was Jamie Lee Curtis??

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The Kindred (1987, Obrow & Carpenter)

Hat Guy has arrived to collect his killer mutant baby or whatever, says the mutant beastie is John’s brother, but there’s no convincing John, who electrocutes the thing until it explodes and takes Hat Guy with it. Rubber baby beasties attack until Brad (The Hills Have Eyes 2) blows up the whole damn house. Fortunately his dead girlfriend Sharon (of Crawlspace) is somehow alive in the crawlspace. Very gloopy gloppy movie. Nobody seems to like it, but I remember it being good, oh yeah, I was eleven. The directors had made two others together, and separately Obrow did a Dean Koontz adaptation with multiple Twin Peaks actors and Carpenter did a Luke Wilson/Ken Marino ghost movie.

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Fiend Without a Face (1958, Arthur Crabtree)

“They’re becoming visible!” Stop-motion spine/brain creatures climbing trees, cool, apparently caused by “the atomic plant,” so Jeff is going to go blow it up. “Perhaps I can control them” says the professor moments before he’s killed by brains, which make funny sputtering ketchup bottle sfx when they’re shot. Post-explosion, the brains immediately melt – this is one of the goopiest 1950s movies, the Kindred of its time.

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Alucarda (1977, Juan López Moctezuma)

Bloody naked Justine savagely claws at a religious lady – they’ve come to a truce when the lady’s idiot doctor friend comes in splashing around beakers of holy water, J gets skeletonized and the lady bitten. As a result(?), young supervampire Alucarda speaks the magic words that cause all nuns to burst into flame. There is a lot of screaming! Al has a holy water protection field, and these bozos only had one idea, but fortunately Al is a girl, and these last two movies have demonstrated that girls’ reaction to horror is to scream and be useless to stop it, so Al goes mad from her own fiery destructive wrath and vanishes. Director made the also not-great Mansion of Madness, Al was recently in a netflix movie called Grumpy Christmas.

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Phenomena (1985, Dario Argento)

Uh oh, Jennifer Connelly is stuck in a maggoty flooded dead body dumpster, someone has been watching Poltergeist. The man chained up nearby breaks his own thumb to escape the cuffs (a common tactic lately) and attack Jen’s cackling tormentor, but Jen escapes on her own. It’s not an Italian movie until we encounter a horribly dubbed child, and this one’s got a scary face and a halberd. Jen’s terrified screams summon a swarm of flies that eat the kid’s mutant face off. She tries to escape by boat but is so technically unhandy, the boat explodes leaving her trapped in a ring of fire, then she’s saved by a razor-wielding monkey. Every line and edit and action seems a little odd – I think this is what makes Argento’s movies stand out, and I didn’t understand his vibe when I first watched this on VHS.

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Session 9 (2001, Brad Anderson)

I remember this and The Machinist being a big deal, a hot new Anderson on the scene, but haven’t thought about either one in a long while and never watched his follow-ups. Gordon is lobotomizing guys through their eye sockets while dreaming that an imaginary labcoat guy is responsible. We’re doing the post-Fight Club pre-Shudder Island thing of revisiting all the past kills with the knowledge that our delusional protag was the killer all along. Seems like a just-alright indie movie in retrospect.

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Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988, David DeCoteau)

Think this was more USA Up All Night than Channel 11 Shocktober. Our intrepid heroes (a hotgirl and nerdy Calvin) are searching a foggy warehouse for she-demons, manage to clumsily set Evil Babs With Unidentified Accent on fire after she kills Nude Victim Lisa offscreen. Some more stuff happens, it’s not worth recounting. The lighting and acting are very bad – there’s boobs, but USA wouldn’t have shown them, so why did anyone watch this? We get a demon puppet, at least. Nude Victim was later in Puppet Master 3, Babs is from Slumber Party Massacre, and our heroes were both in Nightmare on Elm Street 4 the same year.

by ·Comments Off on Hardware (1990, Richard Stanley)

This is clever in its visual transitions and I like the early bits of the soundtrack composed of chill slide guitar (and Iggy Pop as a wacky DJ), but ultimately feels like a cool robot design with a movie loosely hung around it.

Dylan McDermott (also of future-robot movie Automata) and his sidekick Shades (of Jarman’s Edward II) bring the scavenged head of a self-healing military attack robot to Dylan’s off-again girlfriend Jill (Phantasm II). She puts on some Ministry before integrating the head into one of her artworks (Spielberg would use the same band to convey dystopian junkyard aesthetics a decade later).

Three guesses which one is Shades:

Unfortunately the robot was built as part of a government program to kill all the humans, and it reactivates to complete its mission. First it lets the girl’s creeper neighbor (Wm Hootkins of Death Machine) make a slow fool of himself before it megakills him. Jill lowers her body heat to undetectable levels by jumping into an open-door fridge for five seconds, then they throw the robot in the shower and it does the whole “I’m melting” bit.

by ·Comments Off on Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004, Mamoru Oshii)

Very CG movie, but that feels appropriate for the content. Some idiot corporation has produced a bulletproof kung-fu sexbot, and the cybercops have to stop the killing while negotiating different levels of reality, like a boring eXistenZ.

by ·Comments Off on The Doll (1919, Ernst Lubitsch)

Closeted heir marries an AI, relevant again 105 years later. He intends to, anyway, but the robot inventor’s assistant (a kid, the funniest character and best actor, who keeps trying to kill himself by drinking paint) busts the doll, and the inventor’s daughter covers by pretending to be the heir’s sex robot until they can repair it. Everything is gleefully artificial – the costumes and sets and acting all preposterous. I didn’t jibe with the organ soundtrack on the blu-ray, so – per the director’s original intent – I put on Nine Inch Nails Hesitation Marks as the soundtrack. I find myself playing Hesitation Marks all the time lately, Lubitsch knows why.

by ·Comments Off on The Wild Robot (2024, Chris Sanders)

Iron Giant and Wall-E-inspired, starts out full of thrilling possibility and ends up more of a talking-animals movie for children. But along the way there’s some wildly great animation. I love their approach to fur, bucking against the “billion individual hairs” approach in vogue since Monsters Inc., and the action scenes are the best.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts Watched Sept 2024

Revenger (1958, Dusan Vukotic)

Scarf Guy catches his wife cheating, goes to the gun store and imagines every possible scenario, none of them especially good, so he buys a butterfly net. That part must’ve made more sense in the original Chekhov story. Getting around to watching more by Vukotic after enjoying Cow on the Moon and Cowboy Jimmy.

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The Playful Robot (1956, Dusan Vukotic)

A nutty one with excellent music. Scientist in a sort of Wallace-automated Jetsons laboratory creates a sentient humanoid robot then tells it to clean the lab while he naps. Instead it creates two smaller child robots so it can also nap, but they focus more on messing with each other. Not sure why a flying saucer bird hatches from an egg at the end, but the scientist wakes up and isn’t at all displeased by this messy racket.

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The Struggle (1977, Marcell Jankovics)

Very good and short, feels like Bill Plympton turned classical. A muscley sculptor chisels away at a block while it chisels away at him, until the block has become a muscley human figure and the sculptor is old and busted. I still remember Marcell’s Sisyphus animation 15 years later. Won the (short) palme d’or.

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Eyetoon (1968, Jerry Abrams)

Blobby abstract art flickers, fast-motion driving demo, geometric and psychedelic patterns, sex drugs and rock & roll – for the first half it can’t decide what it wants to be, then it settles on being an avant-porno for the second half.

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Cab Calloway’s Hi-De-Ho (1934, Fred Waller)

Cab, even more of a goofball than expected and making the most of his floppy hair, rehearses with his pajama-wearing band in the sleeper car of a train, then they perform at the Cotton Club. Train Porter Sam buys a radio to keep his Chicago hotwife entertained while he’s away, Cab finds out the hotwife is alone and entertains her in person. Corny and hardly technically perfect, but there aren’t a lotta opportunities to see Cab dancing to his own songs.

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Senor Droopy (1949, Tex Avery)

Wolf the star bullfighter is trouncing the bull, who then turns the tables. Nobody takes Droopy seriously, then the bull disrespects his dream girl and he gets mad. It’s Tex Avery, it’s Droopy, it’s good.

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Chumlum (1964, Ron Rice)

A parade of double-and-more-exposures. Ron got Jack Smith and the Warholites to dress up and act freaky with percussive music by an ex-Velvet. It’s only 20 minutes and at least five of that is a girl swinging in a hammock chair. I’m sure it’s very transgressive but nobody appears to be having much fun except maybe Ron in the editing room.

Chuck Stephens in Cinema Scope:

A hallucinatory micro-epic filmed during lulls in production of Smith’s Normal Love … a movie so sumptuously and serenely psychedelic it appears to have been printed entirely on gauze … a thousand and one Lower East Side nights melting together in a cosmic slop of languid poses and limp half-dances, a smoke-fragile erotica that climaxes and dissolves the moment it hits your eye … it was only in the crazy crucible of Chumlum that Smith’s frittering, flailing “play” out in front of the camera seemed to find a mostly-in-focus chemical twin behind the lens.

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Los Angeles Plays New York (2016, John Wilson)

John Wilson shot and edited a piece for a fashion guy who refuses to pay, so… he sues his friend Clark, standing in for the MIA fashion guy, after filming a fake fashion short with Clark as the supposed client, and they get booked on a boring new Judge Judy-affiliated court show and bring in a hidden camera. John then worries whether this short film violates his agreement with the TV studio and they’ll sue him over it, so he claims it can’t be released… then how am I watching it?

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Mr. Hayashi (1961, Bruce Baillie)

A great idea to make three-minute sun-bathed interview/portraits, there should be a thousand more of these. This one’s with Mr. Hayashi, part-time gardener – that’s about all we learn about him.

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To Parsifal (1963, Bruce Baillie)

Bruce’s Leviathan – he rides a fishing boat and watches water and birds. After the halfway point he moves to land, exploring the railroad and its surrounding vegetation and insect life, all while listening to Wagner.

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Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1963, Bruce Baillie)

Death/applause intro, then a hazy drift of city superimpositions. Long take tailing a motorcycle in San Francisco (not a known habitat of the Dakota Sioux) over the titles with church music. He does play with focus in a purposeful way (the ol’ rack from a distant American flag to nearby barbed wire) but sometimes the picture is so soft and blurry that you wonder if he remembered to focus at all. Parades, war, advertisements filmed off a TV with shaky reception. Repeated applause, motor vehicles, and bananas. Shots from X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes! The city pays little mind as a dead man is removed from the sidewalk to an ambulance, and the sea and the motorcycle roll on.

Horizon at the bottom of frame? That’s interesting: