by ·Comments Off on White of the Eye (1987, Donald Cammell)

Good bright color and 1980s slow motion, bad Pink Floyd music. Women be shoppin’, then be gettin’ murdered at their homes in Tucson. Was it possible for artists working in the 1980s to not produce an “80s movie?” Certainly not in this case, and the music is largely to blame. Cammell pulls off some great angles and edits, like a glitchy Nic Roeg movie, and overall I felt bad not liking it after reading this.

David Keith is an audiophile home stereo installer, who drives an ugly green van while listening to opera. The cops start questioning him about being nearby the recent savage serial killings, leading his wife (Bronx blonde Cathy Moriarty) to ask questions, leading to marital discord. Her husband is very upset about being considered a possible murderer, although he is the murderer, and now he sets out trying to murder her and their daughter. If you’ve seen a 1980s movie, you know this will all lead to machine guns and explosions, somehow. The husband is the Firestarter dad, while the murder investigator is from Christine. I checked to see if I could find enough Stephen King movie veterans to form a pattern but just ended up with The Keep, Matinee, Witch Hunt, and Return of the Killer Tomatoes.

by ·Comments Off on This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967, José Mojica Marins)

Coffin Joe is still a real asshole to everyone he meets – an atheist and completely insufferable about it. In the last movie, after killing a bunch of people, he ended up blind, insane, and dead. This one simply opens among a mad montage of grave-clawing hands and squigglevision credits with [townspeople] “he’s still alive!” [doctor] “he’ll see again!” [judge] “exonerated for murder!”, and then we get on with it.

The townspeople gather to shout about their women who’ve gone missing, figuring the culprit must be Coffin Joe, then Joe comes out to yell at them, saying what, because I’m different?! I’m just as guilty as each of you, and I vow to go out and find this kidnapper! Then he goes straight home to his room full of kidnapped women and gives them another speech about how superior he is – belligerent speeches are his love language. Then he covers the women in giant spiders while they sleep.

Note the parrot behind Henchman Bruno:

Based on his actions, this does not appear to be a true statement:

It’s a little funny to cast yourself ranting about your superior mind, taking on an entire town full of the dumbest people alive. He shows interest in the colonel’s daughter, and when her brother tries to pay him off, Joe takes the money and crushes the brother’s head, framing some bald guy for the crime. His entire scheme involves setting traps for the women until he finds the most superior among them, then impregnating her to begin a new master race, so women are dying every few scenes, including, finally, his would-be bride, precipitating Joe’s downfall.

The backrooms:

Joe has a prolonged hell-nightmare in color, then goes into town and gets captured by his enemies, but they are extremely dumb and slow. He wanders into a storm daring God to strike him down, and when God does, Joe says ahh that proves nothing. A surviving girl from the snake incident (I believe that was after the spiders) rats on him, so a torch mob chases Joe into a skeleton swamp. Supposedly he accepts religion in the moments before drowning in the swamp, but he’s filmed from behind, we don’t see his mouth moving, so I don’t buy it. Coffin Joe would return in Embodiment of Evil… forty years later.

by ·Comments Off on The Black Phone (2021, Scott Derrickson)

Set in 1978 Denver, this is one of those movies where the bulk of the effort was put not into scares or the story making sense, but in lovingly recreating 1978 Denver. Young “Albert” Finney is a bullied baseballer schoolkid with a typically drunk/abusive dad (Jeremy Davies of Spanking the Monkey), when all the kids in town start getting abducted by Ethan Hawke, who then grabs Finney. Now the kid has to escape from the basement before he gets murdered.

Best part of the movie is Grabber’s mask, which has a different expression every time we see it. Worst part is the titular phone, through which the kid’s dead classmates call and offer clues that help him escape, while the police are being as useless as they were in Weapons. Why did Grabber even install that ghost phone down there? Glad to see Ziggy as Grabber’s brother, a conspiracy nut who lives above the child-dungeon and gets killed for discovering it (?). I was only half paying attention, playing with my new glasses. Derrickson initiated the direct-to-DVD era of the Hellraiser franchise, and this is at least his second Ethan Hawke missing-children serial-killer movie after Sinister.

by ·Comments Off on Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026, Jane Schoenbrun)

Self-analyzing cinema, Scream without the thrills. Kids in the Hall sense of humor with stunt-cast harbinger Kevin McDonald. “There is a hole at the bottom of the lake where the movies come from.” Sleepaway Camp and Friday the 13th both exist within this movie, they’re both mentioned, but they’re also ripped off (Friday sequel titles, Sleepaway closing shot) by the fake Miasma franchise. The middle quarter of this is just Camp Miasma Part 1, featuring a long-take massacre to Counting Crows’ A Long December, which has never felt longer: digital kills combined with film texture and VHS love (return of the Videodrome flesh slot from TV Glow). I liked it, of course – the fantasy of going inside your favorite horror franchise to make out with Gillian Anderson.

by ·Comments Off on New York Ripper (1982, Lucio Fulci)

A guy’s dog finds a severed hand by the river, the guy says “ow my balls” and jaunty TV theme music starts. Fulci in TV detective show mode, it almost looks like a proper movie but all the dialogue and human behavior is wacked out in a slightly Italian way.

The premise: a guy talks in a deranged Donald Duck voice as he kills women all over New York. Fay (who looks somewhat like the Hellbound puzzle girl) is dreaming the killings, which are being committed by her boyfriend (a stone-age warrior in Conquest). Lead cop on the case Jack Hedley (just off a Bond film) had previously called the killer “a very superior mind,” and after blowing the boyfriend’s face off he says: “You know it’s strange, the brain.” This guy can’t keep his own clues straight, and loses his favorite prostitute to the killer along the way.

Me, going out to tape Gun Club at Danceteria:

After The Beyond, Fulci made two NYC movies (this and Manhattan Baby) before Conquest. This one suggests that New Yorkers in 1982 were too busy having weird sex to go out to movies or shows. Almost everything here is offputting, but the staging of some closeups and quick zooms are pure cinema, unfortunately.

by ·Comments Off on While the City Sleeps (1956, Fritz Lang)

Kane Kyne Enterprises runs a sensationalist newspaper/TV empire. As is often the case in crime reporting movies, it’s not enough for these guys to cover the big serial killer story, they have to solve it before the cops do, in order to create new stories to cover. Vincent Price is the spoiled kid who just inherited the company, playing power games by creating an executive director position and watching the company leaders fight for it. In the game: big brit George Sanders, big eyebrows Thomas The Kid Mitchell, and small mustache James Craig (Side Street). Free agent Dana Andrews is a TV newsman trying to get away with his fiancee before getting pulled into all this drama. For once the women are just as important in the story. Rhonda Fleming is Price’s hotwife, sleeping with the small mustache guy, which somehow lands him the big job. Ida Lupino is Sanders’ gal, kissing up to Dana to coerce and/or blackmail him into helping. Sally Forrest (star of a couple Lupino-directed dramas) is Dana’s gal, who he puts in danger by trying to bait the killer. All this leads to more and more inter-office drama, the news people caring less about the actual serial killer, who tries to reassert himself with some serial killings, but gets caught in a futile newspaper exclusive. Last-minute scale-tipping rewards the (relatively) virtuous and interferes with an employee’s honeymoon, as was always happening in 1950s workaholic movies.

by ·Comments Off on Strangler vs. Strangler (1984, Slobodan Sijan)

The credits roll over a long slow zoom into the back of a conductor’s head – someone has been watching Unfaithfully Yours – and later they’ll steal the Psycho music during a shower murder. It’s a cute mass-murder/mass-media comedy from Serbia, the director’s follow-up to How I Was Systematically Destroyed by Idiots. There are elaborate flashbacks, an opera, a music video, and an intertitled talking cat.

No one will be admitted during the thrilling shower scene:

The police inspector, having a bad day:

Strangler One is Pera, a flower salesman tormented by his mother, who falls into mad amnesiac rages when women insult his flowers. Spiro is an indie rocker who claims to be in touch psychically with the strangler, and writes a hit song about it. Women are just around to be strangled, until DJ Sofia bites off a strangler’s ear during the final struggle.

by ·Comments Off on Faces of Death (2026, Daniel Goldhaber)

Watched this meta-remake because I trust the Pipeline guy, and Director Daniel did not let me down even if Writer Daniel (and his Cam co-writer) strayed increasingly into dumb-ass territory. I find his internet thrillers less compelling – let’s blow up some more pipelines.

Barbie Ferreira of Euphoria is a viral-snuff-video survivor who now reviews flagged violent videos all day for shithead boss Josh (of multiple LaKeith Stanfield movies) until she uncovers a serial killer who’s recreating scenes from Faces of Death (1978). Killer Arthur (a power ranger) takes over the second half, killing her roommate (of Cocaine Bear), as Arthur and Barbie turn the tables on each other repeatedly until his inevitable (captured on video) death.

The roommate has two copies of Independence Day on VHS:

and two of The Sixth Sense:

by ·Comments Off on Redux Redux / How to Shoot a Ghost

Redux Redux (2025, Kevin & Matthew McManus)

A great concept turned into an unfortunately bad movie with boring music. I watched on fast-forward.

The Block Island Sound directors cast their sister as a multidimensional force of vengance, hopping parallel universes in search of a world where her murdered daughter is still alive, taking out serial killer Jeremy Holm each time before moving on, until she picks up one of his survivors Stella Marcus and they get to repeatedly save each other.

with Jim Cummings of Snow Hollow as her hookup:

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How to Shoot a Ghost (2025, Charlie Kaufman)

Earned this half-hour movie with the time saved from fast-forwarding Redux. This one has some good words and some good images, making it better than the last Kaufman short I saw (from the same writer). The whole emotional journal of being a ghost in Greece doesn’t come together, but Kaufman and Jessie Buckley deserve a belated victory lap after I’m Thinking of Ending Things.