Notes, thoughts, reviews, and spoilers of films, with a focus on arthouse, cult, and rarities. The notes aren't good, the thoughts aren't deep, the reviews aren't insightful.
Oh no! Stephen King's Cat's Eye! It's a cat-themed Creepshow. It opens with some shots of cats running around, and then one being chased across town by a filthy, bloody St. Bernard. The cat is a pretty good actor. The music is going nuts, trying to really get us more excited about a cat chase than it possibly deserves. Kitty hitches a ride on the back of a delivery truck and gets…
It's Ti West, so no surprise that it's immediately stylized with a strong late-70s/early-80s environment and credit sequence. The color is nicely muted and appropriately beige. Samantha, our poor college kid, rents an entire New England century home from a very trusting lady to get away from her obnoxiously sex-crazed roommate. She doesn't actually have any money for rent, so…
Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert, known for such films as… err… Highlander ) sword fights with a flipping businessman ninja in the car park under a modern-day NYC wrestling match, chops off his head, and absorbs his electric charge like Kirby. Then he flashes back to the bonnie, bonnie hills of Loch Lomond (actually Eilean Donan), where he was once a great warrior of the highlands until a guy…
Beautifully framed, high-contrast black-and-white misty seascapes and a bunch of tight zooms on a grizzly, crazy-faced, pirate-talking Willem Dafoe? Need I go any further? You know this is peak cinema. It's the late 1800s. Dafoe and sparkly-vampire Robert Pattinson are dropped off on a salty New England rock to work a laborious and unthankful 4-week shift at the live-in off-shore lighthouse.…
A young, hip, working class slacker wakes up on the floor of his mostly-empty new low-rent L.A. apartment and meets the young, hip, working class slacker neighbor. There are some crazy math scribbles on the wall, and encounter some interdimensional rainbow warping in his hallway. His ashtray levitates, and they run away. L.A. burns in the background, not because it's post-apocalyptic, but…
Fast-paced, schizophrenic, low-brow, trying-to-hard high school movie satire shot like a less cool Scott Pilgrim . It misuses the term "hipsters" at least twice in the opening. The comedy, as much as it is so, is based on frequent vulgar statements and a montage of 80s high school cliches pretending to be 90s high school cliches. Sometimes a mummy briefly interrupts the frantic stream of pop…
An awful film transition fades in to an extremely awkward narrator delivering a terrible introduction right to the camera, and then it cuts to a still frame of a gold-painted naked woman for the credits, followed by a severely underexposed scene of a car driving through the desert. The people in the car say some real dumb bullshit, and are among the worst actors I've ever encountered. The…
Jean-Pierre Léaud, star of The 400 Blows and Masculin Féminin , plays Henri, a boring, lonely French man living in the U.K. who gets unceremoniously fired from his job of 15 years with zero notice. He coolly and calmly heads home to his boring flat to off himself. After hanging fails and carbon monoxide poisoning fails, he realizes this is a job for professionals. A cabby guides him to the local…
A bunch of excessively millenial L.A. millenials break up and get fired and vocally fry at each other. The main girl plays piano badly, and then has terrifying visions of a smokey, dead Leland Palmer. She books a probably-haunted house online to get away from all the millenialness, and heads out to the dusty California hills. We meet the T-1000, who gives a literal anti-millenial monologue to the…
A bunch of awkward hipsters in The Life Aquatic clothing are in a Karl Marx book club on the beach. Karl Marx is comparing capitalism to vampirism. The hipsters struggle with the concept of metaphors, and it makes them upset. Oddly behaved young people in fancy out-of-time-but-vaguely-turn-of-century speak strangely to each other and collect buckets full of snails. The local, an 1800s-chic manic…
Temperamental Alfred Hitchcock-y string instruments waiver and warble over the credits and images of fetuses, then it jumps abruptly into the low-budget, flatly-lit set which then zooms out with a slide whistle to show that it's intentionally flatly lit because it's a TV-show-within-a-movie. It's a TV gameshow about guessing whether some guy is going to spy on the naked blind girl…
Early 90s overly-computerized techno-space-sci-fi starring Dylan McDermott, dad in American Horror Story: Season 1 . The opening is an outdoor desert shot with a deep, dark red filter over the whole thing, a calm, twangy southwestern guitar, and a post-apocalyptic gas-masked wanderer. Cool framing, cool shots, cool environment, cool costumes… it starts off much better than the IMDB reviews suggest…
Opening credits are an extremely dated 3D CGI tour through the human circulatory system, with all the quality of a Def Leppard music video. A doctor drills into a corpse and giggles madly, rips off its arms, and uses them to sexually harass a secretary, then slits another coworker's throat. No backstory needed, Dr. Giggles is a doctor, he giggles, and he has gone mad. Rock'n'roll…
Haunting, droning synths and violins slowly guide our high-flying drone cameras to a nice little stone palace, where a hipster millenial lady is living in a tent and capturing photos of the front door with a DSLR on a time-lapse timer. The shots are carefully framed and symmetrical. She calls her husband, Ted, a doctor at an insane asylum with low-volume echoing shrieks in the background. The…
The start of what is considered the cousin film trilogy to Slumber Party Massacre , despite sharing no story nor actors nor directors nor writers nor producers. But they both have young women in their underwear getting killed, so it's something. This one clearly had a much larger budget, and is a real slasher flick instead of some half-assed semi-comedy. It opens with Phantasm music and…
It's best to just rip off the band-aid, so double-featured this with the abysmal second act . The opening credits is a slideshow of basic photographs of young people, which unfortunately makes it the best opening credits in the trilogy. We open to kids playing beach volleyball, bad first-person camera work, bad framing, and an awful sound mix. A long-haired loner kid in all-black long…
The second in the series , this one opens with much less-blatant sexual exploitation and a clip show of what we missed in the last film, followed by a nearly full-length karaoke music video to help us connect with the main girl, Courtney, who is in an all-girl garage glam-pop band. Their garage band has much better production value than the film itself, which is itself slightly out-of-focus when…
The name strongly implies this will be a hyper-sexualized, sexist smut horror, and the topless woman in the first shot agrees. The radio is chattering in the background about an escaped serial killer, and mom and dad have to leave for the weekend right now and don't you dare throw any wild, alcohol-fueled parties while they're gone, young lady! The cute girl in scene two abruptly has a…
A Stephen King classic that I've never seen before, with very famous cover art. "A Stephen King classic" is almost universally synonymous with "complete and utter garbage." Let's see! It opens with a suspiciously long statement insisting that the monkeys we are about to see are happy, healthy, and unabused. "NO MONKEY WAS HARMED IN ANY WAY," it says, dismissing the reputational harm…
James Spader (i.e. Robert California) and Deborah Kara Unger (of.. uh… Highlander III: The Sorcerer ) are kinky poly Hollywood swingers. James crashes his car, killing a stranger, and the stranger's wife flashes a boob at him. This kicks of the kink to end all kinks, and it is shocking that David Cronenberg ever got funded again after making this. Spader bumps into widowed wife Holly Hunter…
Illegal brain chips make people into psychopaths, someone dresses up in a Babadook-style children's horror fantasy fairytale outfit and hunts psychopaths. A guy and his best friend are friends because they're psychopaths, but one of them discovers he is only an artificial psychopath, and has a crisis of faith. Surprisingly serious for a Miike film, it's not just a silly, raucous…
A Mad Detective reboot with the same Mad Detective doing the same Mad Detective schtick, except this time he sees almost-dead people's ghosts instead of fully alive people's alter egos. From the co-director/writer of Mad Detective , with Johnnie To dropped. Much less crime drama and more action thriller than the original. Much more colorful, many more rain jackets. Mostly I just…
This detective really is mad, a refreshing change from "mad" detectives that are merely quirky or emotionally haunted. He throws himself down some stairs in a suitcase and then Van Goghs himself to set the stage. That's not to say that this mad detective isn't also emotionally haunted. He talks to his wife, who isn't actually there, and everybody presumes is dead. They presume that…
Two hours of obnoxious theater kids talking to each other in thick millenial accents, but somehow not as bad as it sounds. Like if Napoleon Dynamite was about over-educated 30-something English lit majors from Toronto. Mara is married to a nice guy who she doesn't care about, and has a small child who she doesn't care about, and spends her days elusively critiquing poems written by…
You know, for kids! I'll make the controversial statement: perhaps the best of the Coen Brothers' early works, and one of the best in their catalogue. There are few comedies with such an impeccable combination of story and pacing. It's simple, pure joy from start to finish. Tim Robbins is absolutely flawlessly cast. I maybe should go hunt down more of his films, because he tends to…
Ryūhei Sasaki loses his nice white collar, middle-class management job. Rather than tell his wife and kids, he spends his days eating at homeless shelters and begging unsuccessfully for similar jobs with the sea of other unemployed businessmen. He re-befriends one of his old classmates who is going through the exact same situation. It's a psychologcícal story of familial lies of omission.…
Before Midsommar , Florence Pugh tried something closer to A Midsommar Night's Dream . A period piece based on a Russian novel inspired by a Shakespearean character. Everybody is supposed to sound like they're from north England, so basically Scottish, which they mostly do. Except for Pugh, who somehow sounds like an American with a fake Scottish accent despite actually being British.…
A very strange little narration about a black cat who asks a scarecrow what the most precious thing in the world is, and then sets it on fire. The cat, portrayed as a bundle of waddling scarecrow clothes in a hat, goes to visit the three wise creatures: a candy-dispensing robot with discharged batteries, a depressed woman eating noodles-of-forgetfulness, and a backwards-filmed magician demon…
Solid forgotten 90s thriller, but a bit of a letdown when it chooses the most obvious potential ending. Pretty sure one of the Hellraisers copied this. Or Midnight Meat Train , what was that about again? A Harry Potter-looking young Tim Robbins and crew are doped up on bad joints in the jungle of 'Nam when things start blowing up and the camera starts shaking and people start screaming.…
Serial Experiments: Lain meets Fight Club . A little boring in the first half, a little sloppy in the second. A bubbly young J-Pop idol quits her up-and-coming teeny-bopper trio to take a background role in a Law & Order TV drama. Her little fan base, led by a guy who is drawn to look extra creepy at all times, makes a blog on the nascent internet pretending to be her. Her internet doppelganger…
Takashi Miike wonders if he can remake Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels in Kabukichō, Japan. And yes, yes he can! You've got the Yakuza boss, the rival Chinese gang, the Yakuza double-crosser, the Yakuza mole, the Yakuza indentured servant, the girlfriend of the Yakuza drug runner, a corrupt cop, and a terminally ill boxer running around in a frantic comedy of errors as a hastily planned…
A partially-coherent parade of simple-minded, farcical slapstick comedy routines, loosely following Do-re-mi, a former cabaret clown cum military tuba player, as he tries to hunt down Shu-Shu, the girl he met once under a bridge. She lives next door, with a roommate, and they all interact frequently without realizing who each other are. Every translation has a different variation on their names……
Brandon Cronenberg, intent on proving that he's not exclusively bound to follow in his father's body horror footsteps, casts Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Goth to act out a bunch of his sexual fetishes on screen. Oh, and body horror. Skarsgård, a failed novelist, is on a tropical holiday with his rich sugar-mamma wife in the far away, made up, poverty-stricken land of Li Tolqa. They stay…
Korean Memento, more or less. Oh Dae-su, our loud-mouthed drunken lead, is mysteriously kidnapped off of a rainy street and locked in a hotel room for 15 years with nary a word of explanation before being unceremoniously dumped back on the street. He arms himself with a whacking hammer and goes on an exciting manga-inspired comedy-action mission of discovery and revenge. With nothing more than…
The president's airplane is hijacked so he pops out of an escape pod into Manhattan, a now 80s retro future apocalyptic prison island. The prison gangs take him hostage and refuse to negotiate with government chumps. The government chumps select the obvious plan B: call in the one-eyed, hoarse-voiced, growling prisoner Snake Plissken, a former military prisoner who you might know from his…
A first-person narration tells us about how she wished she was witchy when she watched witch movies. It is an autobiographical audio book about the director's descent into pregnancy-triggered madness, set to a horror movie clip show interspersed with the director talking into the camera. Her tale of postpartum woes escalates, and she introduces some doctors and other moms to talk about their…
Watched on an airplane, notes from phone. The director of Bardo directs Leonardo DiCaprio in a slow Dead Man revenge story with a bit of Takeshi Miike inspiration. Leo, an Old West fur trader out hunting animals for their skins and hiding from native americans on a warpath, is significantly perforated by a bear. He ends up mostly-paralyzed while the world around him gets dangerous. His half-native…
Watched on an airplane, notes from phone. Katniss Everdeen volunteers as tribute to don a fake russian accent and play out a slow, septuple-crossing KGB spy drama. An American tells her to defect, she says "yeah, alright," and she defects. Her bosses are pretty sure she defected, so they beat her with sticks and liquify her roommate. They let her go, though, and she continues defecting. You can…
Cronenbergian body horror premised on the cultural belief that women "expire" when they get older. Demi Moore, a 70-year-old who looks like a 40-year-old, is an award-winning-actress-cum-jazzercise-instructor fired by her slimy Hollywood boss, Dennis Quaid, for being too old. She signs up for an extremely under-defined medical experiment, and gives violent spinal birth to a younger, hotter clone…
Shot entirely on a slightly distorted wide-angle, which seems to be handheld but on some janky stabilizing rig with weird movements. I don't like the camera, but I do like that it means every scene is a long, continuous shot. Straight-forward ghost story with no real twists, and a few side threads that they don't bother to follow. Successful business woman Lucy Liu and her husband have…
Watched on an airplane, notes from phone. Two villains in one superhero film seems excessive. They're both pretty good, though. The Penguin is top notch, peak villain. Batman making out with a villain who just blew up a building seems wholly inappropes. Batman puts his sexuality before his morality, it would seem. It's peak Burton set design, excellent model zooms, and rockin'…
Watched on an airplane, notes from phone. Opens with sarcastic slapstick bloodbath at a Best Buy knockoff Black Friday fire sale. Dozens die. One year later, it's a Massachusetts Thanksgiving themed slasher. A man in a pilgrim mask axing high school kids who were at last year's sale. Accusations fly, blood flies, kids die. Well done, no complaints.
I saw it on an airplane and the airplane was broken, so it started from the last 10 minutes, for which I wrote: "An endlessly repeated manufactured action drama, the two main characters almost dying dozens of times over a few minutes. Bewildering lack of suspense as it refuses to even take 20 seconds to breathe between alien attacks. Someone has a bloody explosive alien birth. Nobody can act worth…
The opening scene, some kids playing baseball in the Colorado 70s, is underexposed. I'm not sure if that's to fake cloudiness or because it's a flashback, but it just looks improperly shot. Anyhow, it starts with an homage to how great it was to be a kid in the 70s, changes to ominous electronica as a black panel van turns into the idyllic neighborhood road, cuts to credits, and…
Isabella Rossellini teaches us a lot more than we need to know about the absurd and perverted mating habits of animals. A beautiful symphony of leotard and construction paper glued to people and sticks.
Beat Takeshi really hates kids, so he sends them all to an island to brutally murder each other. He isn't sure if they'll do a good job, so he also sends in an older kid with an uzi and infinite ammo. The kids go about their regular day-to-day high school drama, but now armed with a significant quantity of mortally dangerous weaponry and a less than tenuous grasp on the concepts of game…
Hot on the heels of The Howling , Joe Dante is back with a Christmasy black comedy about cute little furbies that reproduce when damp and turn into house-demolishing pests if you feed them at the wrong time, not entirely unlike owning a husky. All of the mogwais eat a post-midnight snack except for squeaky little Gizmo, the good one, who ultimately saves the day after all of the humans and dogs…
Johnny Depp's giant-eyed daughter, Lily-Rose, stars in a Sweeney Todd-esque desaturated world of sadness and despair. Lily-Rose does not come close to her father's acting prowess. Though, to her credit, she was given a really dumb backstory. Nicholas Hoult (jock-to-crippled-weirdo in Skins ) isn't bad. His best friend, Aaron Taylor-Johnson (the guy being stunted for in The Fall Guy…
A low-key Korean vampire tale that spirals insanely into a surrealist Tell-tale Heart. Song Kang-ho (dummy hero of The Host (2006) ), a young Catholic priest, volunteers for some probably-immoral vaccine research trial and is miraculously cured of an incurable disease. Unfortunately, we quickly learn, that's because he was getting blood transfusions from a vampire, and the cure comes with an…
A horny Korean Rashomon filled with M. Nighty twisteroos, taking place in early 20th century Japanese-occupied-Korea. A story in three parts, each part overlapping, and each part retelling the overlap from a different, and more correct, perspective. It centers around a poor Korean girl sent to work as the handmaiden of a rich young Japanese woman with a massive inheritance. But it's all a…