by ·Comments Off on Weapons (2025, Zach Cregger)

I noticed the parasite stuff on the classroom board long before it came up again via zombie-fungus-ant TV show, argh. The most mystifying was Handsome Family’s “Don’t Be Scared” (the “wake up, Paul” song) playing on the car radio to a cop named Paul. My conspiracy theory is that everything after Paul’s night at the bar with the teacher is his dream, that he fantasizes finding the missing kids (with help from his crack-addict tormentor) and almost saving them before getting paralyzed by a witch and then killed by his ex-girlfriend.

Pulp Fictioned-out story that keeps rewinding and changing perspective. Is it ironic that Brolin writes WITCH on the teacher’s car and the the villain turns out to be an actual witch? Effective blend of fairy-tale horror (pied piper children-napping by evil mind-control witches) with suburban dread/investigation drama. As for investigation, the cops are portrayed as even more ineffective than usual – the one we follow fucks up his home life, falls off the wagon, keeps getting stabbed by a crackhead, brutalizes civilians while disabling his car camera, then gets conquered by the witch, and killed with his own gun. As for the rest of the force, supposedly working hard on the case, nobody thought to check what direction the kids were running and then walk in that direction until the lines intersect – a parent figures this out a month too late.

Movies gain an automatic extra star when seen on the big screen. Packed weeknight crowd tittered at the suspense scenes, but their biggest reaction was upon seeing Justin Long The Mac Guy for some reason. Good movie but Parker isn’t wrong.

by ·Comments Off on In the Lost Lands (2025, Paul W.S. Anderson)

Look like somebody wanted to remake Resident Evil 6 – this looks more similar to RE6 than any other movie looks to RE6, even other Resident Evil movies, and Milla is even named Alice again. There’s some Monster Hunter thrown in (they are in the wasteland hunting monsters) and some post-apocalyptic Mad Maxisms. I haven’t been going out to the movie theater this year, missing important big-screen pictures like Nickel Boys and The Brutalist and Mickey 17, but prioritized this because I thought it would be… not great exactly, but fun/cool, and I nailed it.

Deep Lore sourced from an early George RR Martin story, Milla plays a cursed(?) magic mind-control witch, hunting a mighty werewolf alongside softie tough-guy Dave Bautista who thinks he’s hiding his werewolf identity from her, at the behest of Queen Amara Okereke (British theater actress), pursued by fanatical church assassin Arly Jover (Blade). Some good train action, including an escape from dangling railcars that doesn’t hold up great against the last Mission Impossible, some good fire, and too many CG snakes. The queen’s rival for control of the people “the patriarch” is Fraser James of Shopping, Anderson’s longest-running actor. Bautista’s girlfriend is Deirdre Mullins of Mandrake, her equally doomed business partner is the Polish Sebastian Stan. I said if this turned out to be good then I’ve gotta watch Pompeii, and I guess I’ve gotta.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 29: SHOCKtober 2024 part two

Is this our first SHOCKtober to feature two separate Last Ten Minutes roundups?
I’m not gonna look through the archives to find out!

Late Night With The Devil (2023, Cairnes Bros)

This got decent reviews, I avoided because of its AI scandal. A talk-show guest is getting carol-anne’d into the video realm, her priest and mom suffer grievous neck injuries and someone I’m going to assume was the show’s Andy Richter gets melted by the split-headed beastie, then the show resets and host Jack is back on set disoriented, experiencing time as clip-show. I guess demons Lawnmower-Manned the airwaves. An owl-headed ceremony leads him to a reunion with his dying wife, then wow it ends on “Keep It Warm” by Flo & Eddie. The host was David Dastmalchian, a regular of Batman and Antman movies.

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Smile (2022, Parker Finn)

With part two in theaters it’s time to admit I’m never gonna watch this. I don’t exactly know what it’s about but I bet someone smiles at the end. Sosie (of a Manson movie) is having the childhood trauma talk with her alive-again mom, who then becomes an overly tall hair-monster with a spooky Lawnmower Man voice. She sets the beast on fakey-fire, then goes home and explains her trauma to her man Kyle (one of the Red State kids, with a Downhill Racer poster). But she was dreaming that part, and now the hair-monster takes both their heads apart, and this must have cured her trauma because she smiles.

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Maxxxine (2024, Ti West)

Shootout at the Hollywood sign – this must be Bobby Cannavale dying in her arms, and another cop has been stabbed in the eye by her dying serial killer father, bringing postscript fame to her acting career, and the story fizzles out on her next movie set with Liz Debicki. On one hand I was right when I decided Ti West was bad 14 years ago, on the other, I don’t learn from my mistakes and watched two more of his features plus two anthology segments and the tail ends of four others. Why can’t I just leave Ti West alone?

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Civil War (2024, Alex Garland)

Ballistic and vehicular mayhem, the press is on the scene, and Dunst seems to know something the soldiers don’t, so her team wanders straight into the White House. The soldiers in the ensuing shootout are awfully accommodating to the photographers, then Dunst gets shot rescuing her reckless comrade. In the end they’re just like me, wanting to get real close to an action movie and take screenshots. Nick Offerman would be a pretty good pick for President irl.

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Men (2022, Alex Garland)

Suitably creepy and cool-looking as Jessie Buckley is chased by a little car with a maniacal driver, then encounters a nude forest god which gives anal birth to a screaming pregnant man-baby which gives alien-egg birth to… I’m guessing Rory Kinnear from Peterloo, who gives spinal birth to a bloody mutant Rory, who gives oral birth to, finally, a different guy (Paapa Essiedu). I looked up the word “portentious” to make sure that’s what this is, and, yup. Definitely a more suitable Annihilation follow-up than Civil War was, though in between he made the computer conspiracy series Devs.

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Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022, Halina Reijn)

I can’t believe these fuckin streamers. They’re computer programs, supposedly learning about you and recommending stuff to your tastes, but when I hit play on this it showed a promo for Maxxxine, the movie I just watched twenty minutes ago. It couldn’t be too hard to improve on this system. Anyway, Borat’s daughter and Amandla “The Hate U Give” Stenberg are still alive in a house full of their dead friends, having hushed talks in poor lighting. It’s nice of Bakalova to give us latecomers a tour of all the deaths we missed, then they play with their phones for a long while. The director’s Nicole Kidman age-gap follow-up is getting better reviews than this did.

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Paranormal Activity 3 (2011, Joost & Schulman)

Also, it’s unpleasant enough to type in the search field using the Roku’s NES-style direction pad, is it too much to ask for the rows of letters to wrap around, so I never have to hit left-arrow six times in a row? First-person-cam dad can’t find his family, but finds occult artwork in the dining room and a coven in the garage (the witches from part 5?). His wife knocks him down with gallows-swing-attack, and one of his daughters is a beastie, then a psychic witch snaps him in half. Not as jump-cutty as part two at least. The directors made the Catfish doc.

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Paranormal Activity 4 (2012, Joost & Schulman)

This one’s well-lit and in color. Wow, did anyone realize all these movies have the same girl in them? I figured each movie was about a different family. This one’s got static cameras in each room, and the jumpcuts are back. Mom gets psychically hurled into the ceiling then Johnny Exposition arrives with internet research on covens, but a longhair girl JCVDs his neck. The surviving girl seems decently famous, starring with Vince Vaughn in Freaky, but she doesn’t survive for long, the coven having grown to a mob of hundreds of suburban women. Instead of fun songs over the closing credits (Civil War had “Dream Baby Dream”) these just have a low rumble.

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Cell (2016, Tod Williams)

Prime movies have ads now? Fuck that, guess we’re skipping Paranormal Activity 6 and Five Nights at Freddy’s, but we gotta check out the ad-free Cell to complete our series of Lawnmower Man references. John Cusack is telling his kid the story of Orpheus and saying goodbye to his team before driving away in an ice cream truck and discovering that the transmission tower is surrounded by a very-CG mob of zombified cellphone addicts. He fires all his shotgun shells into one teenager and locates his own cell-poisoned kid within the mob, then blows the truck and tower and everything sky high – or does he??!? I was sorely tempted to read this book at one time, but went with The Ruins instead, damn. Movie looks like shit – this was Williams’s follow-up to Paranormal Activity 2 (a coincidence, I swear).

by ·Comments Off on Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922/1968, Benjamin Christensen)

Is it artistically kosher to re-release a silent film replacing the intertitles with narration and scoring the scenes with weirdo jazz? Why yes, it should be done all the time. There are still plenty of dialogue titles in the reenactment scenes, Burroughs only acts as historian narrator, but it’s still a half hour shorter than the original so his buddy Balch (of Towers Open Fire fame) cut plenty. Good movie in any form, and maybe the only early 1920s film with an ass-kissing parade. The narrator assures us that according to modern psychology none of these women were witches; they all had hysteria.

I watched this between Cuckoo and The First Omen – Satan is having plenty of children:

Been caught cookie-stabbing:

by ·Comments Off on Some Pre-1908 Cinema

Films Chronophotographiques (1889-1904, Étienne-Jules Marey)

I, who am easily amused, spent a Saturday night watching 1890s motion tests while listening to the new Maya Shenfeld album. After dropping cats from a height to see how they land, it focused on naked musclemen walking and jumping and doing olympic sports, which was less of interest. I felt like rewatching Nope, Katy brought up All Light, Everywhere. The editor saved the best for last (birds).

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The Little Match Seller (1902, James Williamson)

Like how adding film grain helps digital compositing look more natural, falling snow makes the dreamy matchlight photo effects hold together. The actor’s gesture – hands reaching out to the phantom roast turkey to hands over face crying – is really good. Even shorter than other versions I’ve seen.

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The Big Swallow (1901, James Williamson)

Early meta-film, guy with appallingly large collar gets agitated and swallows the camera and crew, beautifully done.

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Something Good: Negro Kiss (1898, William Nicholas Selig)

Something good: the woman has crazy shoulders on her dress, resists his advances for a few seconds then gets into it.

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The Merry Frolics of Satan (1906, Georges Méliès)

Alternating between sepia-toned and hand-tinted, a proto-Monty Python comedy – this is a movie that opens with an ass-kicking machine. Trick props and sets, a phantom carriage, everything transforming then demons coming out of nowhere. I put on Stereolab’s “Soop Groove #1” into “Metronomic Underground”, opened my eyes wide, and lost my mind completely. No idea what Satan is up to here, then it ends abruptly.

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The Mysterious Retort (1906, Georges Méliès)

Quite short, and I was still recovering from the satanic spell cast by the previous movie, I have no recollection of this. A lab experiment gone wrong?

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The Witch (1906, Georges Méliès)

I don’t like to say “that artist crazy, he on drugs,” I like to respect the creative process, but Georges Melies crazy, he on drugs. Lovely coloring, I dunno what to say about story – I looked up from typing that last sentence and everyone had turned into frogs or snakes.

by ·Comments Off on Warlock (1989, Steve Miner)

Some of my memorial screenings are more respectful than others… RIP Julian Sands, who was a better actor than allowed by this movie. The Salem witch hunters got this one right, hoping to hang Sands then burn him over a basket of cats, but he escapes to the present day with Richard E. Grant close behind. No doubt due to the Earth’s rotation, the time travel magic also lands them in Malibu. It’s all very Highlander.

We could’ve just rewatched A Room With a View:

Warlock Sands has to collect leaves from Satan’s book, killing and cursing people along the way. He kills a guy who also got killed in Steve Miner’s Friday the 13th Part 3, and curses his wife Lori “Footloose” Singer to age rapidly via ever-whiter wigs, then drinks the boiled fat of an unbaptized boy to gain flying powers. Grant teams up with Singer and a Mennonite to perform an ancient ritual… just kidding, they chuck a weathervane through his body then smash his hand with a hammer. But Sands escapes to the godless city of Boston and assembles the book using crappy fx, then Lori makes him melt and humanity is saved until the sequel, which I’m in no hurry to watch. David Twohy wrote this and made Timescape before hitting the big time with The Fugitive. Sands returned in part 2, from the director of Hellraiser 3, then Ashley Laurence stars in Warlock 3, along with a new Warlock who was (coincidence, I’m sure) also in a Highlander.

by ·Comments Off on After Blue (2021, Bertrand Mandico)

Toxic Roxy is young and blonde, frees buried criminal Kate Bush, who murders all Roxy’s friends then escapes, leaving the whole community angry at Roxy and her hairdresser mom. This all takes place on another planet, populated entirely by women who shun electronics and chemistry, after the earth became uninhabitable… well, only shunning these things to a point, since they have guns and androids (both named after fashion brands). While waiting for Kate, Roxy and her mom (Elina Löwensohn of course) bond with Kate’s fancy rich neighbor Sternberg, with her male android Olgar 2 and weirdo bounty-hunter bots Keifer and Climax.

Extremely horny sci-fi, Roxy masturbating at every opportunity, with dreamy visuals. We got zombie horses, geode-faced creatures, energy weapons, a pubic third eye, hats and fur coats everywhere, and everything is slimy or dripping and cross-faded onto everything else. I felt bad about not liking The Northman last night, then today I double-featured this with Mad God at the Plaza, and now I am feeling much better.

by ·Comments Off on The Spine of Night (2021, Gelatt & King)

Watched on the exercise bike after Duel. Ultraviolent mythological epic, recalling Metalocalypse but with more rotoscoping. Swamp Witch and Ancient Guardian and Local Lord and Chief Librarian all struggle to obtain or protect or misuse a magic blue leaf that gives healing or destructive powers. I’m all in favor of this sort of thing.

by ·Comments Off on The Tragedy of Macbeth (1971, Roman Polanski)

Thought I’d pair this with the Coen version, not realizing the latter wouldn’t come out till early next year. A terrific looking movie, reportedly in part due to newly-designed anamorphic lenses – almost technically impeccable, a few dubbing issues. I like the idea of turning parts of the monologues into voiceover, although it means the actors have to silently react to their overheard thoughts, which is harder to pull off than speaking the lines. It gets gruesome between Macduff’s slaughtered kids, the king’s guards being dismembered, and a man taking a crossbow bolt to the forehead – also some clumsy clanking armor battles (these are all compliments). The only time I felt the 1970’s was in the “dagger I see before me” scene.

Polanski’s first film after his wife was murdered – he’d been prepping What? but thought it’d appear crass(er), and Hugh Hefner(!) was looking to add respectability by getting into the Shakespeare business and losing a bunch of money. Opens with the witches on a beach… the second prophecy scene is zany, and culminates in a good mirror scene.

In the chronology of filmed Macbeths, Werner Schroeter’s obscure hourlong TV version came out the same year, a TV miniseries the year before, but there hadn’t been a major film since Throne of Blood. The next would probably be in ’79, the TV movie with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench. Never heard of a single person in the cast, besides MacB (Frenzy star Jon Finch). Lady M Francesca Annis would star in back-to-back sci-fi epics Krull and Dune. Macduff would become a Gilliam regular, and Banquo was in Dennis Potter’s Cream in My Coffee.

Macduff would like some revenge please: