Secret Window (2004, David Koepp)

Our first-ever Criterion Channel pick, to see if this movie is as silly as I remember it (yup). “The only thing that matters is the ending,” says Johnny Depp (Yoga Hosers), justifying our little project, a welcome rejoinder to Bill Pullman last year. Maria Bello (A History of Violence) arrives at Depp’s trashed place and the camera isn’t sure what to do while she looks around. Depp is lurking in a pilgrim hat doing his Southern John Turturro impression, having scratched “shooter” into all the walls. She tries to escape but has fatally forgotten how cars work. Tim Hutton (The Dark Half) shows up too late and they both get shovel-murdered and buried in the cornfield, closing on Depp relishing his homegrown corn, a meta-commentary on this corny movie, which I watched in theaters even though Koepp’s Stir of Echoes wasn’t good.


The Watchers (2024, Ishana Night Shyamalan)

On to HBO, which I probably won’t have for long so let’s max out our enjoyment (heh). Dakota Fanning (Coraline) and Georgina Campbell (Barbarian) are waiting in a roachy house when the real Georgina arrives, turns out their friends are being possessed by shapeshifting humanoid ancient insect creatures. Now the new Dakota arrives, calls herself the daywalker, and discovers she’s part-human, hmmm. “I’m so glad it’s over” says Dakota later to her identical twin, but their CG parrot knows it’s not. I’m on an M. Night kick and was sorely tempted to watch this new one from Lady Raven’s sister, but just saved myself 90 minutes


Godzilla II, King of the Monsters (2019, Michael Dougherty)

Sequel to the Gareth Edwards remake, starts and ends with people shouting names in rainy wreckage. Just as the family unit of Kyle (Day the Earth Stood Still Remake) and Vera (Orphan) and Millie is reunited, Rodan flies Gz into space then drops him like a bomb onto the city, then Mothra intervenes and gets vaporized. Vera sacrifices herself using an electro gizmo to lure King Ghidorah away, then Molten Godzilla rises and explodes KG and the whole city. Rodan arrives late, missed the whole fight. I saw Zhang Ziyi for two seconds! Unfortunately, Dougherty directed the great Trick ‘r Treat.


Godzilla vs. Kong (2021, Adam Wingard)

Godzilla is fighting Mechagodzilla, Kong is awakened with a small nuclear device and a deaf girl with Rebecca Hall tells Kong to help out, so he does. Tables turn on Kong, computer guy Brian Tyree Henry helps out, and our guys fuckin destroy Mecha-G. This must be a different city, since most of the buildings are standing. I’m glad Kyle is still alive, since he was in the Peter Jackson Kong, uniting cinematic universes through his pointless presence. This movie looks more fun than the others – I actually forgot that after not liking Wingard I started liking him again.


Godzilla × Kong: The New Empire (2024, Adam Wingard)

It’s gone fully cartoon, as all manner of CG monkeys and lizards fight in Narnia or somewhere, until Evil Anti-Kong escapes to the beaches of Brazil, followed by Power Glove Kong, Gz, and Ice Gz, who all destroy Rio, then team up to PG-13-slaughter Anti-Kong. The humans in these movies always seemed like time-wasters but now I see that without any grounding presence, all that’s left is loud empty colors. A lasting peace between giant apes and lizards is achieved, and Mothra and Rebecca Hall are still alive, fwiw.


Saw 7 aka Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (2010, Kevin Greutert)

The timer’s countin’ down and a bunch of saps are stuck in killer traps. Sean Patrick’s nipples aren’t strong enough for him to stop Gina Holden (death non-escaper in Final Destination 3) from getting cremated alive. Meanwhile, Mandylor from the last couple movies puts an exploding head trap on Jigsaw’s secret assistant Jill, then gets taken down by Jigsaw’s secret-secret assistant… Cary Elwes, sure, why not.


Jigsaw (2017, Michael & Peter Spierig)

And it’s over to Netflix for the prequel. Their fast-forwarding is slower than HBO’s, but the thumbnails load properly so you get a nice sense of the movie leading up to the last ten minutes. No clear winner. Two dudes are locked in laser collars, but Dr. Logan’s collar is fake, trying to get the corrupt detective (Callum Rennie of Hard Core Logo and Goon 2) to confess his corruption. It seems Jig had let the doctor live, now he’s jigsawing people himself, and his clip-show flashback explanation of this takes up the whole ten minutes. Directed by Australian twins who made an Ethan Hawke time travel movie, and the new writers would also take the next two Saws… one of which is on Hulu, who has the smoothest fast-forwarding of all…


Spiral: From the Book of Saw (2021, Darren Lynn Bousman)

Max Minghella is already in the midst of backstory infodump, telling Chris Rock how he killed
a bunch of dirty cops and wants to apply the ITIL continual improvement process to the city police department, but Chris is more concerned that his dad (chief dirty cop Samuel L. Jackson) is hooked to a blood-removal device, which transforms into a suicide-by-cop machine. Max just takes an elevator out of the abandoned factory surrounded by SWAT and the movie ends, what?


Pearl (2022, Ti West)

Mia Goth repression prequel to X, which wasn’t great, and reviews of this and MaXXXine didn’t convince me that it’s a trilogy worth the time. Bouncy haired girl Mitsi is over at Pearl’s place, admits to getting the dancing role that Pearl wanted, but they’re cool, still friends, oh no Pearl is chasing her with an axe. Some pretty good split-screen body-choppin’ shots.


Madame Web (2024, S.J. Clarkson)

Okay, just for the heck of it, the year’s most mocked superhero movie. Dakota Johnson has slow-mo future-sight spidey-sense among a meteor shower of CG metal scraps in a sparks factory. Oh boy, Tahar Rahim plays an evil spider-assassin, until a giant letter P falls on him. She astral-projects to save her useless friends, then they have to save her from drowning, and Adam Scott shows up during hospital recovery. The friends are terrible: Reality Sweeney, Isabela Romulus, and Ghostbuster Celeste, and it ends by teasing a sequel where all of them become heroes. Half of the writers also wrote Morbius, haha.

Looks and sounds like shit right from the start, with spectacularly out-of-sync sound recording. Manos: The Last House on the Left Hands of Fate, about a misanthrope making snuff films, made by a (presumed) misanthrope and looking like an actual snuff film. “This isn’t my cup of tea. I’m not interested in art.”

Dirtbag Bill, about to drill-kill:

Terry, who looks like Dirtbag Bill Hader, gets out of jail for drug dealing and says he’ll show ’em all. Filmmaker Bill isn’t getting much play from his softcore lesbian dramas and blackface whipping scenes. They kidnap some people and murder them on camera, then a voiceover tells us they were all apprehended, ok. An incoherent, possibly evil movie. The cinematographer later shot Avengers: Infinity War, which makes sense.

Despite this movie’s rocky/aborted release it definitely predates the Misfits song:

One of those movies I watched in grungy lo-fi copies enough times that I thought it would feel weird to see in HD, but Ichi is going to be kinda grungy no matter how much resolution you throw at it. It’s also a movie with two prolific actors who I see every year and call “that guy from Ichi The Killer” (most recently when BOTH appeared in Kubi). Lumped in with the Asian horror crowd when it came out, but its over-the-top death and torture scenes are mixed in with the perverse Ichi story, a yakuza war, fucked up music by Boredoms and much crazed humor.

Besides Ichi and Kakihara, we got Shinya Tsukamoto as Ichi’s handler/manipulator – everyone calls him an old fart then he’s revealed to be massively muscled, killing head enforcer Shun Sugata (Tokyo Gore Police chief). Sabu of Shinjuku Triad Society is an ex-cop turned bodyguard for Kaki’s gang to pay the bills, and Suzuki Matsuo (Shin Kamen Rider) plays their identical twin colleages. The rival who Kaki repeatedly tortures is Kitano regular Susumu Terajima.

Ichi’s traumatic backstory is only partly true, Kaki’s attacks on his rivals are based on misinformation and bad guesses, Ichi panics and kills the girls he likes and the boy trying to befriend him. Everyone’s a real mess – but at least Kaki gets what he wanted (to be killed).

Same idea as Serpent’s Path – this time Sho Aikawa’s daughter is the victim, and he dispatches some guy he assumes to be the killer within ten minutes of movie time. Now what?

A guy who looks suspiciously like Creepy but is another actor – somebody Sho presumably killed horribly in Dead or Alive, and the star of Kitano’s Getting Any? – offers the directionless Sho a job at his “import/export” company. The business of this company involves Sho stamping an endless pile of documents in a shabby office while the other guys have some kinda shakedown/blackmail/hitman thing going on. These guys appear small-time, so the boss gets involved, and the boss’s boss, and they want to recruit Sho and put down the others, but they don’t go down so easy. Similar look and tone to the other movie, but goes in a more traditionally yakuza direction.

In here somewhere is Chief Ren Osugi of Nightmare Detective… Ren’s Sonatine and Fireworks costar Susumu Terajima… Kill Bill boss Shun Sugata… but I didn’t catch character names, so I’ll sort it out during the next Kitano or Miike binge.

Kurosawa is a White Dog fan:

Great writeup by John Lehtonen. A small piece:

Eyes of the Spider is a film of emptiness, its protagonist hollowed at the outset. Empty time and empty people, and what is projected onto and, eventually, out of this emptiness. Tonally and generically dynamic, it moves its cipher hero (and Aikawa’s iconographic image) through a variety of generic scenarios and roles: the husband, the salaryman, the yakuza.

I had watched either Serpent’s Path or Eyes of the Spider (I forget which one) in the pre-blog era on VCD so after enjoying Chime (and before this year’s Serpent’s Path remake) it’s time to re/watch these in HD. They both hinge on a kid’s abduction/murder, and each main character’s plot spirals out of control, in very different ways.

Creepy Teruyuki Kagawa kidnaps gangster Yûrei Yanagi (Boiling Point) with the help of Creepy’s math professor friend Sho(w) Aikawa. But the gangster says another guy did the crime, and they have to keep kidnapping gangsters. The second guy (the husband in Door) fingers a third guy (a minor player in early Miike films), who takes them to the room where they’ve made torture videos for profit (these rooms were common in late 90s/early 00s horror).

Sho and Creepy:

Why is Professor Sho capably handling all the details and abductions here, what’s his deal? And why is he privately coaching the abductees on what to say? I guess he’s just trying to help kill as many members of this organization as possible – including Creepy, who it’s revealed used to work in their organization and therefore thought his own family would be exempt from the business. Darkest subject matter given a matter-of-fact tone with an absurd edge.

Michael Sicinski:

Formally, we can already see Kurosawa’s primary style taking shape; the clinical viewpoint and tendency toward long shots emphasize both an objective, godlike perspective as well as a sense that the film frame is a container, trapping its characters in culture and history. If the overt narrative of Serpent’s Path is somewhat vague, Kurosawa fills in all the crevices with a pervasive dread. Considering Kurosawa’s earliest work was purely genre based, here we see him breaking away from those strictures in a fairly dramatic fashion.

A bloodier, sleazier and more despairing predecessor to Made in Hong Kong, positing that the world is a violent shithole. I’d be completely in favor of this sleazy punk nightmare if someone would please censor the animal torture scenes for me… they’re sticking pins into mice right in the first scene… not sure if throwing the cat out the window Grand Budapest-style was faked. First movie watched in 2024, bad omens for the year to come.

Three boys are experimenting with antisocial behavior by setting off a homemade bomb in a movie theater. They’re followed by witness Wan-chu, malcontent younger sister of a detective (Five Fingers of Death star Lo Lieh), who blackmails them into committing ever-greater crimes. And she is not fucking around, starts by hijacking a bus full of passengers. She steals a lot of money orders from a foreigner, setting off a whole secondary gangster plot (the guy’s exposition buddy tells us they’re “in a deadly business”). Inevitably, Detective Brother gets involved in the gangster case until disciplined by his boss, the most dubbed white guy of all time. The girl dies in the same way as her cat, while all the boys get shot in a climactic cop-gangster shootout, only one surviving, wounded and poisoned and insane.

Mouseover to waste this foreigner:
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“Intelligence can be dangerous” – is this a quote from the movie, or something I wrote while watching it? A plague is going around, both within and without the movie, so I watched at home and took cryptic notes.

Benedetta’s dad pays for both his daughter and a beaten incest girl named Bartolomea to enter a convent under abbess Charlotte Rampling. Bene dreams that a cartoon superhero Jesus saves her from violent rapists then attacks her, also sees dodgy CG snakes and other miracles on the regular. The higher-ups decide she’s faking but keep that to themselves and make Bene the new abbess. She invites Bartolo to her bed, but sexual pleasure is not allowed in historical times, so both nuns must be tortured, per church leader Lambert Wilson.

The plague takes Rampling, and suicide takes her daughter/spy Louise Chevillotte (Synonyms and the last couple Garrels). Bene (Sibyl star Virginie Efira) lives out the rest of her days at the convent in a postscript title, and I already can’t remember if Daphne Patakia (the mimic of Nimic) lives or what. Fun movie with witty writing, but it’s still a nun drama, one of my least favorite genres.

No Sudden Move has lost its status as the year’s most grotesque use of a wide-angle lens, courtesy of some Abu Ghraib flashbacks that turn Oscar Isaac and Willem Dafoe into carnival-mirror dwarfs. Isaac served time for torturing the enemy while his superiors stayed free and rich, and a fellow torturer’s son Tye Sheridan tries to rope Isaac into a revenge plot, but Isaac wants to stay cool and quietly win card games using Tiffany Haddish’s money. Nice to see a movie where cooler heads prevail, the kid is set straight and Isaac gets the girl… oh no, that’s not what happens, two people die and Isaac goes back to jail. I can’t decide how I feel about it – the tone felt off, or maybe I just felt weird being at the Grand all by myself, anxiously trying not to expect First Reformed 2.

Fake documentary following the exploits of an area serial killer after the discovery of a room full of videotapes documenting his crimes. Much of this movie is footage “from” those tapes – not just VHS quality, but with an effect like the tapes or camera suffered magnetic damage, the picture bending in waves.

It’s a bummer of a movie that makes you feel bad for watching it. The guy’s first known crime is the abduction/rape/murder of an 8-year-old, the central case is a girl he keeps for a decade and subjects to Martyrs-level torment, and the interviewees are a parade of FBI guys impressed by the killer’s craftiness, which includes railroading a cop to a state execution for the killer’s crimes. So the killer is portrayed as an evil genius still at large at the end, but Se7en or Memories of Murder this ain’t. Let’s stay away from the real sordid feel-bad movies this week and look for more horror-comedies.