Who Deserves Hell?

A young woman kicks an old lady out of her home and earns a curse for it in 2009's Drag Me to Hell. This is the horror movie Sam Raimi made with the cache he'd acquired from making Spider-Man movies and it's surprisingly similar to this year's Send Help, the movie he made with the cache he'd gotten from making Doctor Strange 2. I liked Send Help but I think Drag Me to Hell is stronger, particularly considering how relevant the plot is at the moment when it seems I'm constantly seeing headlines about some elderly person being kicked out of the home they'd lived in for fifty years due to the unprecedentedly cold and cutthroat practices of landlords.

The great thing, though, is that Christine (Alison Lohman) is not a cutthroat. She works at a bank where she's in charge of loans. She's angling for a promotion to assistent manager, much like the character in Send Help, but Christine's a much more mild mannered character. She's told that to get the big job she's going to have to show she can make the tough decisions. After a guy who's barely worked at the bank a few days shows he's clearly the top candidate for the job, Christine holds her nose and denies a loan to the old lady. Unfortunately for her, this old lady can call down the wrath of a lamia and Christine finds herself tormented by ghosts and demons.

This movie is very reminiscent of the first two Evil Dead movies. Raimi even indulges in similar POV shots of the demoniac entity as it rushes in on Christine's location. And, like in Raimi's classic Evil Dead films, although rules are established for the ghosts and demons, there's the sense that they can break those rules whenever they feel like it.

I really liked this movie because, like Obsession this year, it feels like one that would spark debate after people leave the theatre, like the issues of guilt and responsibility would stay in the mind of the viewer long after the credits roll. It's also a lot of grim fun.

The Sting of Life

It's finally here, the first episode of the new Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episodes hosted by Mike Nelson, with Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy voicing the robots, Crow and Tom Servo. You can purchase the episode, which features a Creature from the Black Lagoon knock-off movie called Sting of Death, on the Rifftrax website. Is it better than Joel Hodgson's attempt to relaunch the series? No, but it's no worse, and it is nice to see it back in the hands of Mike Nelson, who truly was the primary creative force throughout the vast majority of the show's original run, and was the host when the series was finally cancelled, after over a decade, in 1999. I've repeatedly expressed my thoughts regarding the mistakes Hodgson made in reviving the series in 2017. You can read them here, as well as read my thoughts on Mike Nelson's strategy in funding his revival.

While I do think Mike is the most important creative voice on the series, I wish the writer's room had hewed closer to the original series' format. Rifftrax, which Mike launched as a successor series to MST3k decades ago, has managed to sustain itself financially all this time (unlike Hodgson's big budget catastrophe), and is typically written by the same people whom you hear delivering the jokes. Initially only Mike himself and then, eventually, joined by his final MST3k co-stars, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy. MST3k traditionally included virtually everyone who worked on the show which led to the show's reputation for having an extraordinarily broad range of topics for its jokes. In particular, I've suspected Mary Jo Pehl was more responsible for some of the show's better riffs than is generally acknowledged, because her videos with Bridget Jones on the Rifftrax site tend to be even funnier than the boys'.

The subject for riffing in this premiere episode of the new relaunch is Sting of Death, a 1966 movie which swaps out the Black Lagoon Creature for a jellyfish man whose costume is basically a wet suit draped with what, as one of the riffers observes, appear to be Mardi Gras beads. The monster, in Scooby Do fashion, turns out to be a creepy local in a mask. His primary targets are girls who rejected him and guys who talked down to him. The most absurd scene is when a girl is killed in a swimming pool at a party and somehow no-one notices the six foot tall weirdo in the wet suit. Mike wonders if he was hiding in the filter.

As I said, the humour lacks the wonderful breadth of knowledge of all things from sports to science to pop culture that it used to have. Even the nerdy stuff feels stale, as in a musical number Mike and the bots put together about tardigrades. When Star Trek: Discovery had an episode about tardigrades over a decade ago, it already felt like a stale internet meme. You can see Hodgon's wisdom in casting a new, younger cast. Yet you can't argue with the success of Rifftrax. It's not like MST3k was ever especially mainstream, maybe it just needs to settle into being more niche than it ever was before.

One Leg at a Time

Now that I'm in the Atlantic Ocean, I can look back on my days in New York City. I got some really good pants on Saturday. There's a mall by Central Park which, like a lot of malls in California, has adopted the generic name "The Shops." I guess it's like with movies sometimes these days, like the JJ Abrams Star Trek movie just called Star Trek. Studios must imagine the guy who'd heard about Star Trek all his life who then hears about this movie and figures it'd be his "one and done." After that, he doesn't need anymore Star Trek, he's seen all the important stuff. Similarly, a mall called just "The Shops" might cause people to think of that specific mall whenever someone says, "the shops." It's a scheme that falls apart when a bunch of malls adopt that name, though.

Anyway, I got some corduroy trousers at The Shops by Central Park, in the H&M. I'd been travelling with just four outfits but I wanted a warmer alternative to one of my thinner pairs of slacks. All the shops at The Shops looked really expensive and high end but I remembered getting some deals at H&M in Japan. Sure enough, these corduroys were just 34 dollars. They weren't even on sale.

I went to the register and found they had the same self checkout stations they do in Japan. I was just finishing when a woman in her late 50s angrily approached me and started telling me buttons to push. The receipt screen came up and the only options it had were for electronic receipts. "It can't print them?" I said.

"Of course not," she said, "it's a machine." I suppose H&M receipts were traditionally hand written. I said I didn't want a receipt then and she told me to press, "Done." She removed the security seal, which trousers in Japan don't have, and said, "See? It's easy," as though she'd helped me with a task I'd been struggling with.

I had a similar encounter at McDonalds yesterday. The place had two restrooms with coded locks, both gender free restrooms. I waited among a large crowd of people at the counter who seemed all to be complaining about mistakes in their orders. An employee paused in talking to one of them to ask what I wanted and I said I wanted the restroom code, which she told me was 2026.

I turned, but before I could try the restroom on the left, and an older woman intercepted me, saying, "Not that one," and she proceeded to show me how to input the code on the door on the right. Somehow she couldn't punch the numbers in correctly, maybe she had arthritis, but it seemed important to her to show me how to get into this specific restroom so she kept at it. She asked me for the code again and I repeated 2026. She finally got it open and explained the other restroom was for employees. It wasn't labelled as such and I'm inclined to think she was remembering the days when the restrooms were labelled "Women" and "Men".

It's a good thing I wear chelsea boots or a passerby might angrily try to tell me how to tie my shoes.

Leaving the Bronx

It's my last day in New York, and I spent the night in the Bronx, so last night I googled "Horror movies set in the Bronx" and 1968's Rosemary's Baby came up. It happens to be on Criterion this month and I haven't seen it in at least a decade so I went with that. Unfortunately, this hotel's wifi is easily the worst I've experienced in the US or Japan and seems to simply not work except a few, secret, select hours a day. Even now as I write this it's not working so I imagine I'll post this at a Starbucks or something later (it's a McDonalds, it turns out). Last night, the wifi shut off in the middle of Rosemary's Baby. At least I know how it ends.

Roman Polanski used to have such great economy as a storyteller. Particularly with Rosemary's Baby and Repulsion, two movies from the point of view of a woman. Both of them seem to immediately attach themselves to the viewer's mind at the natural pace of thought and perception. Knowing he experienced life under a Nazi regime as a child, it's easy to see how he could conjure a world in which everyone you trust could suddenly turn out to have sinister motives aimed at you at the most intimate levels. Given levels of anti-Semitism in the US to-day, I wonder how far away we are from something like what happened in Germany in the mid-20th century. I didn't mention October 7th, either a few days ago or the day of the original massacre, though I think about it often. I found it horrific specifically because it was an attack on a music festival, an event where people attending have such implicit faith and trust in civilised behaviour that they can abandon themselves to experiencing artistic expression. I suppose Jihadists must be offended by anyone experiencing ecstasy outside the confines of religion because it seems concerts and music festivals are often targeted.

Another difference between New York and the west coast I noticed, there are a lot more Jews in traditional attire here. In fact, I wasn't the only one wearing a fedora. There are young Jewish men all over the city wearing black fedoras and I was asked by them no less than 15 or so times, "Are you Jewish by any chance?" The Sleepy Hollow Hotel, where I stayed a couple nights, is a prominent kosher and Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish-friendly establishment and event place.

I wonder why the Jewish population in California isn't so visible. I'm reminded of the scene in Polanski's Chinatown when Jack Nicholson's character pretends to be trying to get his father checked into a nursing home and the attendant tells him the place doesn't accept Jews. I suppose the stereotype of Jews with money must make them natural boogiemen when socialist or communist interests are prominent, or at least, the ignorant version of those interests, as in the case of the National Socialist Party.

Hopefully I'll have wifi to-morrow. I'm leaving for England on the Queen Mary 2. I'd planned on going to Europe and was idly thinking, "I sure wish there were some other affordable option aside from air travel." I've been on a lot of long flights this year. So I asked Google's AI if there was any way to go by sea and it mentioned the Queen Mary 2. Of course, it was much too expensive for me but then I noticed the price went down a few days later. Apparently these things work in the opposite way of airline and hotel reservations, the price actually goes down the later you make them. I waited 'til the price got down to just over 500 dollars. They force you to pay for at least two people, though, so the actual price I paid was just over 1000 dollars for a week's journey. Since it includes food, if I calculate the cost of a flight plus hotels for a week, that's still either cheaper or, at the most, just a little more expensive and I figure it'll give me more time to get work done. It's kind of a nuisance switching hotels all the time, chasing the best prices, though in just the two weeks I've been in the twin city area I feel like I've gotten a much more concrete impression of the physical space of New York and New Jersey.

I have to pay 30 dollars a day for wifi on the ship, which seems to be one of the hidden fees. I may see if it's possible to get it for only part of the voyage.

Sonnet 2013

A stamping crown of rusty nails approves
In office stations made to clear the green
Beneath the street, a steep decline improves
Surpassing soot is nothing truly clean
Potato changes hands to greasy bolts
As pigeon ships descend above the spike
Their tough and grumpy captain slowly molts
Collected birds prepare a feathered strike
In Union Square, the squirrels prepare cake
They crush their acorns 'neath the bench's foot
It's more than dizzy ravens like to take
The surplus in the taxi cab is put
A truly greenish crown ennobles dames
The tired moved and made substantial gains

The Dream Demon in the S&M Club

Freddy Krueger returned in 1985's A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, a film once derided for its homoerotic subtext but is now lauded for it. Directed by Jack Sholder and written by David Chaskin with no involvement from franchise creator Wes Craven, aside from a few suggestions, the filmmaking feels cheaper and more TV sized but Robert Englund in the role of Freddy still makes an effectively threatening impression.

The homoerotic elements revolve around the film's main character, a guy named Jesse played by Mark Patton, who was a closeted homosexual at the time. Apparently he complained that the movie kind of outed him for years but has since kind of embraced it, even writing a sequel to the film from the point of view of his character. No-one ever suggests Jesse is gay in the film, the interpretation mainly comes from his physical interactions with a guy on his high school football team and with the coach, whom Jesse encounters at an S&M club.

Jesse's love interest, Lisa (Kim Myers), does feel more like a best friend than lover. She also looks identical to a young Meryl Streep, which is apparently why she was cast.

Freddy's scheme this time is to take possession of Jesse's body so he can massacre people in the real world. This, too, could be taken as an allegory for Jesse struggling with repressed urges.

It's more interesting to think of this movie as unintentionally homoerotic than as intentionally so. My own opinion is that the movie was probably intentionally homophobic. When Chaskin says in interviews that he wanted to address the homophobia he was perceiving in young men, I suspect the thinking was more like, "Guys are creeped out by gay shit, this will make the movie creepier." But the film does function well as a story about someone who can never face his own subconscious so the film's unhappy ending works better on a thematic level--because the movie ends with Jesse not acknowledging his own homosexuality. The consequences are brutal but, hey, it's a horror movie.

In the Hollow

If you've been following my instagram, you'll know I've been in Sleepy Hollow lately. Yes, it's a real town, exactly where Washington Irving described it as being in his 1820 story, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", near Tarrytown, or Tarry Town, as he wrote it. But it only took the name "Sleepy Hollow" in 1996. According to Wikipedia, it was called "Slapershaven" by the 17th century Dutch settlers, meaning "Sleepers' Harbour". Irving wrote the story under a pseudonym he often used to write about the old Dutch communities in New England, Dietrich Knickerbocker. "Rip Van Winkle" is also a story from Knickerbocker. Incidentally, the undergarment supposedly gets its name from Irving's pseudonym.

You can find souvenirs and buildings and institutions with the name of Sleepy Hollow, or references to it, all throughout Tarrytown, and it's no surprise since, prior to 1996, many areas in the vicinity may have justifiably considered itself to be part of the historical village. For my first two nights in the area, I stayed at the Sleepy Hollow Hotel, actually pretty far south of Sleepy Hollow.

Yeah, the Halloween decor was surprisingly lacklustre but I couldn't complain. I'd gotten my room for 150 dollars a night, and it was a really nice room, especially after I'd been staying in a hostel in New Jersey for a week.

Don't get me wrong, it was a nice hostel where I met a lot of nice people, many of them New Yorkers rather than travellers, refugees of the outrageous rent prices oppressing the nation. I ended up paying just over 200 dollars for five days, cheap for the New York area, and close to the same price I was paying my mother to stay at her place in San Diego. One of the people at the hostel told me it was illegal for New Yorkers to stay in the cheaper hostels and hotels located within the city limits, lest it interfere with the city's lucrative tourist trade.

After the initial two days, rates at the Sleepy Hollow Hotel skyrocketed, which seemed only natural given October must certainly be their busiest season, and on the day I checked out the lobby was packed with tourists though it had been fairly empty on the day I'd checked in. I moved to an Extended Stay Hotel about fifty minutes walk away from the Sleepy Hollow Hotel in Elmsford and a 1.5 hour walk from Sleepy Hollow itself.

It's beautiful country and many trees have already turned yellow and red. Broadway, a street running through Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, has Sleepy Hollow themed shops beginning a mile or so south of the Sleepy Hollow sign. There were also many charming local decorations, including a series of scarecrows made by local kids.

I spoke to the proprietress of a cool shop on Broadway and Wildey St called The Legend Shop. The shop sold Halloween decorations and Sleepy Hollow souvenirs as well as vintage records. The soundtrack to the Tim Burton movie was playing when I stopped by. She recommended I visit the cemetery later in the day and also said there was a place that had the costumes from the Burton movie.

Across the street from her shop is a beautiful old library where I stopped in to see what Washington Irving books they had. They had plenty of books called The Legend of Sleepy Hollow but only one tattered paperback copy of The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon. But they did have this beautiful door:

Beeker Street is the main drag of Sleepy Hollow and I was surprised by the profusion of Mexican restaurants. There was one with a Coco theme, based on the Disney movie, which is based on Dia de Los Muertos, a Catholic holiday that shares some DNA with Halloween.

I ended up buying some souvenirs near the Philipsburg Manor; just a scarf, some tea, and a book for my nephew. If you'd like to see more of my photos of Sleepy Hollow, check out my instagram.

Bargain Velvet

The immortal damned show off all their pores in the butt ugly cinematography of 2026's Vampires of the Velvet Lounge. A cast of over fifty year-old guys who used to be in bigger movies and over forty year-old women who used to be in bigger movies help serve up this pastiche of thirty year-old goth movies like Underworld and Repo: The Genetic Opera with a heavy, awkward dose of Sin City.

In one of the movie's awkwardly juxtaposed plots, Dichen Lachman plays Cora, a vampire hunter whose narration she speaks in low gravelly tones, something she clearly has no practice doing because her voice constantly cracks up and down the audible register. She occasionally speaks world-weary, badass lines directly from Sin City. Her assistant, Alex, is played by Rosa Salazar, whom I didn't realise was the girl from Alita: Battle Angel because she doesn't have the huge cgi eyes in this one. Also because she's somehow 41 already. She spends almost the entire movie wearing just a bulky, sparkly t-shirt and enormous black panties, showing this film's attempt to make everything as ugly as possible extends beyond the hair, makeup, and cinematography to include costume design as well.

Mena Suvari, best known as the naked blonde with rose petals from American Beauty, plays the lead, none other than Elizabeth Bathory, who's a vampire in this. It may have been a creative choice to make the woman famously obsessed with youth be the most visibly aged but the makeup and cinematography might have shown her a little more courtesy.

The youngest member of the cast is 32 year old India Eisley who is kind of entertaining and pretty as a vampire afflicted by suicidal ennui but the cinematography even makes her skin look like the surface of the moon.

There's also one guy under 50, 47 year-old Tyrese Gibson who plays one of a trio of guys who used to do higher profile films, the other two being Stephen Dorff and Lochlyn Munro. They're introduced in the most oddly artificial scene in the movie, in a conference room that clearly looks like it was digitally inserted behind them. In fact, I'm pretty sure the three of them were not in the same room for the scene, though we do see them together at a club later on. Tom Berenger and Mark Boone Junior also have small, pointless roles.

The vampires are running an online dating scam in which they lure victims to an absinthe bar. Elizabeth makes a couple of comments about AI to demonstrate this film is bringing this old b movie genre into the 2020s, which would've been nice if the level of insight made me feel like writer/director Adam Sherman had ever spent more than three seconds contemplating the topic.

Oh, yeah, and the effects suck. Its copious computer effects look like a SyFy original movie from 2003.

Eva Marie Saint

Eva Marie Saint has died at the age of 102. I had no idea she'd been around for over a century. It's nice to see she wasn't kicked out of her home in Los Angeles before she died. Unlike some actresses of her age, maybe she still had a good income because her last major film role was in 2014's Winter's Tale and she played Martha Kent in Superman Returns in 2005. But of course, she's best known for being in two of the greatest movies of all time, North by Northwest and On the Waterfront.

I'll admit, I'm not a big Eva Marie Saint fan. I love both of those movies, particularly North by Northwest, but comparing her performances in the two films really highlights how On the Waterfront's director, Elia Kazan, deserved his reputation for getting great performances out of actors. Plus, she was partnered with Marlon Brando in that movie, and I think his performance was so startlingly natural it likely provoked natural responses from her. It's no wonder she won an Oscar for On the Waterfront. So it's puzzling that she's so rigid in North by Northwest. It may have been due to that film's director, Alfred Hitchcock's, infamous coldness with his actors, and her performance isn't so different from Kim Novak's in Vertigo the year previous. But as with Novak, the impression of a repressed and emotionally unavailable woman kind of works when analysing the film.

Busy Space Nine

I'm still working my way through a rewatch of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and recently I got to the late third season two parter, "Improbable Cause"/"The Die Is Cast", which aired in April, 1995. This is one I used to rewatch a lot when I was in high school. When we were studying Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in one English class, I told the teacher that this set of episodes referenced the play, and it does, at the beginning, when Bashir and Garek are talking about it over lunch. She let me show that scene, but then I told her the whole episode contained references to the play, so she showed the whole first of the two episodes to the class. I tend to cringe looking back on that because the rest of the two parter really has very little to do with Julius Caesar, apart from a quote of the famous "fault is not in our stars" line at the very end of part two. But, when I think about it, she didn't have to listen to one of her students and play a whole episode of Star Trek she'd never seen before. She probably just saw a chance to grade papers or something while the show babysat the class. That's how in classes of all manner of subjects we so often ended up watching Back to the Future.

This is the two part episode where Garek teams up with Odo and they encounter Garek's former boss, Enabran Tain. This two parter kind of ruins Garek for the rest of the series because, before this, although we had a relatively good idea that he'd worked for Cardassian intelligence at some point in his past, he was still an enigma, and that added something to every scene he was in. It seemed like there was a lot less reason for him to turn up after this. But I still like his chemistry with Odo, especially since this episode is mainly Odo being the hardass instead of the emotional puddle, I mean figuratively.

As a teenager, my friends and I liked the big space battle, and used to compare it to the high water mark at that time, the space battle in Return of the Jedi. Of course, there have been space battles in movies since that have at least exceeded those in number of ships a thousand fold, a thousand times over. CGI got good at rendering spaceships a lot earlier than it managed to perfect anything else. The Return of the Jedi battle sequence, with its remarkable practical effects, still looks great, though, but this episode's looks stiff and slow. It still works as a story point, at least, and it effectively establishes how dangerous the Dominion is when they're able to fend off the combined Cardassian and Romulan fleets.

Travel Too Cheap

Rutger Hauer terrorises a young man through various improbable and cruel ways in 1986's The Hitcher. This movie may have been supernatural on accident, or it may have been on purpose, I'm not sure, but I certainly like it.

Jim (C. Thomas Howell) has taken a job driving a car from Chicago to San Diego, not unlike Kowalski in Vanishing Point was delivering a car to San Francisco. But instead of becoming a symbol for doomed freedom, Jim becomes the victim of a man called John Ryder, played by an imperturbable, perpetually amused Rutger Hauer. Jim picks up John as a hitchhiker. When John tries to kill Jim, Jim outsmarts him and manages to drive off. Unfortunately, John somehow has the means to follow and torment Jim wherever he goes. Cars and helicopters are destroyed in fiery explosions, John somehow wipes out entire gas stations and police stations.

When Jim stumbles into a diner with only one waitress in attendance, the only evidence Jim gets that John has caught up to him is a severed human finger in his French fries. How did John get the finger in there? Why did he do it? From a filmmaking perspective, you can say, "Well, because it's creepy." This might bother me in a lot of films but not here. The filmmakers do seem to lean into it consciously, at least in one scene where John somehow has all the bullets for Jim's gun in his pocket. Is John some kind of manifestation of a part of Jim's personality? The film never explains but maintains a nicely nightmarish quality throughout.

The waitress is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh and she's good as always. She's set up as a love interest for Jim but I think this must be the only movie in the '80s in which she didn't get naked.

Rutger Hauer is fantastic and as horrible as he gets it's hard not to get caught up in his sadistic charisma.

The Hitcher is available on Criterion this month as part of a Highway Horror collection which somehow does not include Lost Highway.

Pianos at Night

A college student's ambition to be a great pianist are piqued with a little help from demoniac forces in 2020's Nocturne. Sydney Sweeney stars as a pale ascetic. No-one batted an eye at that back in 2020, and she does a fine job. A lot of people compared this movie to The Black Swan--the Natalie Portman ballerina movie, not the Tyrone Power pirate movie--but there's more of a gossipy tone to this movie. It's not bad, though, and writer/director Zu Quirke delivers a solid little horror soap opera.

Juliet (Sweeney) is the sister of Vivian (Madison Iseman). They're both talented pianists at an elite boarding school but Vivian has been accepted to Julliard while Juliet hasn't. Juliet may have been jealous but it's hard to say how much jealousy comes naturally from her and how much of it is provoked by circumstances, which I thought was a nice point of ambiguity.

There's also recently been a suicide, the school's star pianist, and this leaves a slot open for someone else to perform at an important school concert, and it turns out to be Vivian. Meanwhile, Juliet finds a notebook that belonged to the deceased star pianist and it's filled with strange, demoniac images and symbols. There's the notebook, there's the occasional cruel words from Vivian or their mutual friends, there's the fact that Juliet has sacrificed having a personal life since childhood just to be the best. It's hard to say for sure what pushes Juliet into darker territory in her desire to be the best.

I think this movie would count as Dark Academia if all the characters were attractive boys wearing tweed. Sweeney's believable as someone with a hidden tenacious streak who's not as introspective as she ought to be.

Nocturne is available on Amazon Prime.

Sonnet 2012

For puddles drained, forgotten days recede
As gentle hills of sand dissolve, they slept
A dose of twenty grains, do not exceed
There's secret math in rotten lockers kept
A row of blondes beholds the podgy wight
He disappears across the nightly track
And so the ladies board the pumpkin train
The sky above becomes a jelly black
Their station's gone and now they're left alone
They peer about the strange and empty lot
The chill ignores their coats and hits the bone
A distant howl provokes a gloomy thought
The hungry shapes are swirling round them fast
From here, some cruel and bitter spells are cast

Corpses Seldom Love Wisely

October seems like no time to stop watching Tales from the Crypt. "Three's a Crowd" and "The Thing from the Grave" are two episodes from May, 1990. "Three's a Crowd" presents a love triangle story in which a married couple, Richard and Della, are invited to stay at the cabin of their wealthy friend, Alan. Richard is played by Gavan O'Herlihy, whom most people of my generation will remember best as Airk from Willow. He spends most of the episode in a piping hot rage, convinced that Della is cheating on him with Alan. Both Della and Alan are constantly shocked by Richard's unstable behaviour, yet the two of them do act suspiciously secretive and chummy. When the twist ending comes, we're supposed to think, "My God, Richard's made a terrible mistake!" but I think most people will actually be thinking, "Why on earth did Alan and Della think it was a good idea to plot anything, however benign, behind Richard's back?"

"The Thing from the Grave" features another love triangle but one with more star power. Miguel Ferrer plays the jealous boyfriend of a supermodel played by Teri Hatcher. She falls for her photographer, Devlin (Kyle Secor). This one more sensibly ends with zombies, courtesy of a cursed amulet. Ferrer's good as the angry, entitled boyfriend. I also like the Cryptkeeper's intro for this episode in which we seem to catch him reading a porno magazine of human corpses.

The World is Elm Street

Halloween month has begun so I watched the original 1984 Nightmare on Elm Street last night. The only thing I remembered from the previous time I watched it was that on that occasion I also didn't remember anything about it from the time before that. Watching the movie last night, I didn't even remember stuff from the Red Letter Media review of it I'd watched a couple weeks earlier. I guess this is just a movie that doesn't stick, at least for me.

Heather Langenkamp, the lead, the film's heroine, always seems like her nose and upper lip are numb but she gives a convincing enough, sincere performance. The piece of trivia everyone knows is this was Johnny Depp's first movie, playing Langenkamp's boyfriend. It was weird watching this after watching the Ebenezer trailer.

I see a lot of people saying it looks like an old Tim Burton movie, back when Burton had a noticeably consistent aesthetic. It's directed by Ti West, the director of the X/Pearl movies. It seems he may have learned something from the fact that Pearl received far more praise than the other two movies in that series and decided he has more of a knack for slightly fantastical, Victorian or Edwardian period films. I hope, for his sake, Pearl wasn't mostly Mia Goth's labour of love, as it was reported to be. Maybe she should be a director.

You don't really see any of the familiar zaniness in Depp's Nightmare on Elm Street performance. He was playing the cool teenage boyfriend, that was the job. The arc of his career kind of reminds me of Al Pacino or Jack Nicholson, both of whom have always had a distinctive affect but at some point in their career lapsed into almost exclusively playing broad, exaggerated versions of their former personae. In Nicholson's case, the switchover can be pinpointed to his performance as the Joker.

Freddy Kruger is surprisingly restrained in the first movie, too. He hadn't become the cartoon character yet. At the point he appeared, there was already a series of popular slasher monsters of the '70s and '80s, there was already Leatherface and Michael Myers. You can see why the makers of Nightmare figured Freddy needed a hook, which turned out to be his razor fingered glove and fedora. I wonder why no-one calls me Freddy Kruger when they see me wearing my fedora. I suppose I ought to get a stripey red shirt. People have started in on the Indiana Jones cracks here in New York and New Jersey now, too. It's really strange. Yesterday a fat guy in a Captain America t-shirt yelled "Dr. Jones!" at me. Talk about glass houses.

Two are One

A pair of sisters who often speak in unison struggle in a world inhospitable to their strangeness in 2026's Bucking Fastard. Werner Herzog directs this film loosely based on a real life pair of twin sisters. The film is dedicated to the late David Lynch and in many ways it's reminiscent of My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, the project on which Herzog and Lynch collaborated. Segments of the film that focus on the salacious, real world story are paired with other scenes in which the main character(s) dreamily contemplate the beauty and strangeness of reality. It's an aesthetic attitude that not many people have an appetite for--most critics don't quite know how to appreciate beauty, so many of the reviews for both films have failed to find much of value in them. This fittingly parallels the lives of the sisters in the film, whose difficulties stem from a world that cannot empathise with their priorities. For me, this film was incredible; it is an effective, melancholy meditation on lives cursed with being out of step with society, lives that few are willing to see humanity in.

The first part of the film focuses on the most salacious true story attached to the pair, their obsession with a man who'd been their sexual partner, but who had eventually gotten a restraining order put out on them after their failure to cope with his marriage to another woman had caused them to harass him. We see them throwing garbage bags onto the windscreen of his car and setting fire to his mailbox.

In real life, the pair of sisters were twins--you can see footage of them in TV documentaries from the '80s. Herzog sets the film in the modern day, complete with internet and touch screens, factors that play important roles in the film's story. The sisters are also not twins, as they directly state in the movie, despite the Wikipedia entry erroneously referring to them as twins. They're played by real life sisters Kate and Rooney Mara. Herzog also moves the location from Yorkshire, England, to County Kildare, Ireland.

The Mara sisters give an incredible performance that must have been very difficult to achieve. Their speaking most of the time in unison seems different from how the real life sisters spoke in unison. In the brief bits of footage I could find of them on YouTube, the real life pair watch each other a lot and look for confirmation and cues. When they speak in unison, it comes off as a kind of litany, like the things they say together are lines in a play they constantly repeat. The characters played by the Mara sisters, Jean and Joan Holbrooke, seem often as though they have a single brain operating two bodies. The Mara sisters basically give two complete performances of the same character, standing next to each other, but sometimes they switch to finishing each other's sentences instead of speaking simultaneously.

They're fascinating, the viewer is compelled to wonder how their minds function. A character played by Domhnall Gleeson tries to help them. They have trouble opening a sardine can because it's not something they can do together and he slowly coaxes one of them into doing it alone. But any time one is distinguished from the other, either visually or through actions, it causes them both profound distress. Setting the story in modern times adds another dimension to the story. An old man whose home they're staying in is shocked to find nude pictures of them on the internet, taken by a voyeur on the roof across the street from their bedroom window. When the old man informs them, they can't believe him because, as they tell him, they don't have internet. He slowly realises that they think if they don't have internet, then pictures of them can't be on the internet.

In both real life and in the film, the sisters must lead a very simple life in order to maintain their synchronicity. Though they're taken as simple-minded, it must actually take a great deal of mental acuity to maintain their mirror act, but even so they likely must keep the parameters narrow. So this fosters a very simple outlook on life which is doubtless why they're given to fervent romantic ideas. This is what makes them classic Herzog protagonists. They'll go to any lengths for their goals because they have thoroughly unshakable convictions. They have to, to maintain their unison.

The final act of the film is the cosiest piece of filmmaking I've seen from Herzog. The sisters move out to the countryside to stay with a widow in her cottage. They spend their time around local caves that command a fantastic view of the surrounding countryside. When a local rich hunter tries to slaughter all the local foxes, the sisters keep one whom they name Cupid. Cupid leads them, and the film, into a symbolic realm in which the influence of David Lynch becomes clearer. It also solidifies the point of the story. The same obsessions that allow them to find incredible beauty in the world also cut them off from it.

Bucking Fastard is playing at the New York Film Festival.

'Till Hit Do They Part

When her mobster husband is killed, a woman tries to rebuild her life in Jonathan Demme's 1988 film Married to the Mob. A less comedic tone would've helped this movie a lot, especially since Michelle Pfeiffer plays the lead role so straight. Matthew Modine gives a distractingly broad performance as her love interest and much of the plot is silly without being amusing.

Pfeiffer plays Angela, who's married to Frankie, a mob enforcer played by Alec Baldwin. The boss, Tony, is played by Dean Stockwell and he's got eyes for Angela, which makes his wife, Connie (Mercedes Ruehl) furious. Virtually everyone in the movie is a known name. In minor roles the cast includes Joan Cusack, Oliver Platt, Chris Isaak, and Nancy Travis.

After Frankie's killed, Angela moves to a grimy apartment on the lower east side of Manhattan, where my current hotel happens to be. I'm already noticing what a difference it makes, watching a movie set in New York and actually having spent time in New York. Somehow actually walking around here makes all the dialogue referring to locations come alive in ways that poring over Google Maps never did.

Matthew Modine plays an FBI agent who has Angela under surveillance. After he accidentally bumps into her in an elevator, they start dating and things get complicated. Pfeiffer plays it totally straight, she really seems like she's falling for him, which is really odd because Modine plays his character like a 24/7 goofball. Instead of focusing so much on their relationship, the last act focuses more on Connie trying to prove Tony's cheating on her and on the FBI trying to nab Tony. There are some interesting moments and I liked the scene where Tony starts to realise what's going on. Demme makes his thoughts visual by having the actors perform them without any preamble. It's a deft bit of filmmaking that shows Demme was a master.

Married to the Mob is available on The Criterion Channel until to-morrow.

The Versatile Word "Cafe"

One of the differences between New York and California I'm noticing is that there are far fewer homeless people on the streets. I did some reading and found that this is despite the fact that New York actually has more homeless people than any other city in the US. However, since there's a legal mandate for shelter, the vast majority of New York's homeless are in shelters.

I also noticed there aren't as many restrooms with coded locks. So far I've only seen one, a McDonalds where I bought a small fries just so I could use the restroom. I then tried to give the fries to a homeless man who rejected them. I had half a sandwich leftover from lunch that was rejected by another homeless man. If they can afford to be so picky, New York must be taking very good care of its homeless indeed.

Yesterday I wanted to go to a cafe to read. I walked past a Starbucks that was packed before seeing a place called Union Square Cafe that was totally empty. I didn't know at the time it was kind of a famous New York restaurant. I was bemused when the hostess told me it would be a five minute wait before a table would be ready when I could plainly see behind her an almost entirely deserted restaurant. It was after 11 in the morning. As I waited outside, people with reservations rapidly started turning up.

All I wanted was some tea but it seemed wrong not to order food somehow. So I ordered a salad and a turkey sandwich. It was good, surprisingly greasy. In California, upscale food is usually dry, but I guess New York's not shy with the oils.

I was at a little table that was too close to other tables. I knocked over a pepper shaker on the next table when I was sitting down. While I was reading and drinking tea, a young woman sat at the table next to me and she was shortly joined by a young man. I listened to their conversation instead of reading. He referred to his male partner so it wasn't a date. He and she both work in publishing. He's from Atlanta and she's from Texas. He gushed about Dolly Parton and told her how much he loved the bayou. "That's the first time I've ever heard anyone say they love the bayou," she said. He said he loved the diversity. I'd bet good money he's never been to a bayou. He seemed compelled the fill up the conversation while she mostly said, "Yes. Oh, yes. Right. Totally." I was disappointed they didn't talk more about books.

East of West

That's the arch and colonnade for the Manhattan Bridge, near my hotel in Chinatown. I've been shifting between different hotels in New York and New Jersey for about a week, to get the best prices. I think they're a bit inflated right now because of the UN meeting, or maybe prices are showing lower next week just because they're lower when you reserve earlier. Anyway, it's my first time on the east coast of the US. I'm mainly here for the New York Film Festival and to visit colleges because I want to go to grad school but I also I just want to be able to say I've been here at least once in my life. For most of my life, if someone had asked me if I wanted to go to New York City, I would've said, "Not especially," despite the innumerable movies I love that were set and/or shot in the city. I'd always admired what I knew about the city's spirit and diversity but I didn't see any reason why I should go to the inconvenience of visiting it. But living in Japan made me realise what a potent symbol the city remains for people around the world, even if they can't articulate why.

I've spent two nights in Brooklyn, four in New Jersey, and one in Manhattan. One thing I've noticed is that people are a lot more polite here than they are in San Diego, at least right now. It feels a little like the San Diego I remember from six years ago. I've gotten no rude comments and the few people who have commented on the odd way I dress have done so in what seems like a more natural, less rehearsed, less condescending fashion.

Mostly I've been in New Jersey, in Ridgefield, the Korea Town, which was fine because I could get cheap, filling meals from the local H Mart as well as bottled green tea, which I seem to have a taste for lately. I rarely drank it in Japan. I assume I should have easy access to such things here in Chinatown, too.

Mostly New Jersey seemed a lot more generically American than New York. The layout of the Target was so precisely identical to the one in Santee it was eerie. One thing I found startling was the amount of roadkill. I saw a dead groundhog, a dead canary, and a dead deer on the same short length of road. It took two days for the deer to be removed. I almost became roadkill myself when Google maps directed me to walk on the side of a busy bridge with no sidewalk. The next day, because I wanted to get from my hotel to the Target, I tried to find an alternate route around that bridge which took me onto an overgrown, abandoned subway track, where I saw this live deer:

I took a couple steps after taking the photo and the animal ran away. I followed the track, which runs under the bridge I was trying to circumvent, trying to find a way I could get out of it on the south side, where the Target was. Eventually I came to this pitch black tunnel carved into the rock.

The deer must have run in there so I assume it comes out the other side but it seemed unwise to risk it without a flashlight. It was wonderfully spooky anyway.

I ended up having to go back the way I came and managed to find a somewhat awkward way to the south side of the old track on the western side of the bridge.

Girls in the Pink and Silver Haze

Two beautiful girls meet in an otherwise vacant luxury hotel, one girl famous, the other not. So begins 2026's Her Private Hell, Nicolas Winding Refn's latest rumination on neon, atmospheric beauty and violence. It's a lovely film, which is plenty for me, but not enough for a number of boneheaded critics who are griping about the film's slow pace. The mysterious city seemingly held in eternal night, shrouded in a sinister mist looks like the city in Blade Runner, depopulated and shot by Mario Bava. Refn's visuals echo not only Ridley Scott and Mario Bava but also Suzuki Seijun, Douglas Sirk, and Jack Cardiff. I found it to be a satisfying buffet.

Sophie Thatcher plays Elle, an actress shooting a Sci-Fi action film, seemingly on soundstages in the same hotel where she's staying. Her new friend, Hunter (Kristine Froseth), is also her co-star. She's eager and star struck by the cool and brusque Elle and their contemplations of each other are accompanied by a lush, dreamy musical score by Pino Donaggio, simultaneously injecting the scenes with real feeling while heightening their artificiality, one of several things that reminded me of Inland Empire. So many of Refn's lingering shots of the girls framed in fashionable splendour seem to be saying, "Isn't it artificial and isn't it marvellous?"

It's not really clear what city it is. It may be Tokyo, where Refn originally wanted to shoot, but of course he wasn't allowed--the film was shot in Copenhagen instead. But sometimes when Elle lapses into reverie, the camera descends to the streets in the mist, where we meet an American GI called K (Charlie Melton) who stalks streets with Japanese civilians and signage, seeking the infamous "Leather Man" who kidnapped his daughter. It has a very post World War II vibe yet two mysterious Japanese seamstresses who worked on Elle's wardrobe in the movie also meet with K. There are indications K is a ghost so these seamstresses may be spirits of some kind.

Elle and Hunter witness the Leather Man murder a woman in a building across the mist from their hotel. Of course, it recalls Hitchcock's Rear Window but maybe more pertinently The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The Leather Man's most significant leather is his black gloves which unmistakably mark him as a giallo nightmare.

In the scenes with K, Refn seems to have reacquired his taste for shooting action scenes. There's a memorable fight between K and a fat yakuza. Throughout the fight, a girl kept in an iron collar by the yakuza watches impassively, chewing bubble gum, reminding me of the secretary in Tokyo Nagaremono. The action is very gendered, with the boys inhabiting a realm of sweat, blood, and fists while the girls exist in a reality of languid gestures and glittering gowns. When K brings out his brass knuckles to threaten the seamstresses, one of them smiles gently and informs him, "That won't work on us."

The film's conclusion was satisfying, at least for me. Your mileage may vary.

Sonnet 2011

The pizza legends lead the group of girls
A daily stop invites the playing gangs
She catches cheese before it hits her curls
And brushes back her long and tangled bangs
Her friends describe arrests from yesterday
She shares a slice and asks for certain names
But all's forgot before a Saturday
A pen of lights enfolds the sleepy dames
"It's only twenty five til nine," she says
"They say there's time for aught to catch a soul."
A passing train with lights recalls a blaze
The pizza crust's too thin to fill a hole
"Now where's my scissor set," she checks her purse
Instead she finds the knife that cut a curse

Death Served with Sprinkles

Kids go crazy for the demoniac taste of ice cream in 2026's Ice Cream Man. It's an Eli Roth movie, maybe the most niche movie he's ever made. You really need to be into dark humour to enjoy this one and, considering nowadays people's idea of "dark" is the Robert Pattinson Batman movie or Dark Academia, it's no wonder this one didn't connect with audiences. You may ask, is this the whole reason the original Hostel movies were popular but this wasn't? The real difference is that Hostel worked as a straightforward horror movie while, for Ice Cream Man, you really need to be in on the joke, which is that straightforward horror movies are also, typically, ridiculous if you think about them. Anyway, I enjoyed Ice Cream Man but I didn't find the humour as sharp as what we see in Thanksgiving.

The film feels like a distant parody of Something Wicked This Way Comes. The movie opens on an idyllic afternoon of junior high school baseball. Our point of view character is the nerdy Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), who fails to catch the fly ball that decides the game. A strange ice cream truck appears, operated by a smiling man in a bow tie (Ari Millen). Jared doesn't imbibe the evil ice cream because he's lactose intolerant. He watches helplessly as most of his classmates are transformed into gleeful murderers the next day. He teams up with Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman), who threw up the ice cream because she's bulimic, and the delinquent Tommy (Shiloh O'Reilly). The three try to survive as mayhem descends on their school.

It felt a little like Roth was trying to school Zach Creegor and show him how you really make a movie about weaponised children. It's like Roth wrote up a list of one hundred ways kids can kill their parents. They range from the relatively plausible to the appreciably bizarre. One man is scalped and fed his own brains in an ice cream cone, one man has popsicle sticks crammed into every orifice. This is all stuff from the real fan of '70s and '80s horror, both relatively mainstream stuff like the Nightmare on Elm Street movies or the more obscure cult classics, like Cannibal Holocaust.

Over the course of the film, Roth develops the relationships between the characters. I particularly enjoyed the progression of Jared's high school student sister, Lizzie (Sarah Abbott), who's forced to reunite with her ex-boyfriend (Dylan Hawco) amid the mayhem.

The movie concludes with a dedication to several people, including "Angelo and David", presumably Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch. Most people associate Roth with Quentin Tarantino but he also worked with Lynch early on. There's a very lucky man.

The Attorney and the Ham

A movie cowboy marries his pretty lawyer in 1951's The Groom Wore Spurs. This isn't a movie that ever made a big splash, either on its initial release or in retrospectives, and there really isn't much remarkable about it except it's always nice to see Ginger Rogers.

She plays the lawyer, AJ Furnival, and she was just about to turn 40, though she seems to be playing someone a bit younger. Her roommate is played by Joan Davis who's introduced showing off a new hair style, saying someone told her it made her look younger, the implicit joke being that she looks obviously older than AJ, though in real life Rogers was a year older than Davis.

The cowboy is named Ben Castle and he's played by Jack Carson, who's amusing enough. My favourite gag in the movie is when AJ, compelled to stay the night at Ben's place, locks her bedroom door. Then thinks about it and unlocks it. Then thinks again and locks it. Then unlocks it. Each time, we see Carson outside comically take a step toward her door, then check himself, the start again, etc. When she does let him in, she remarks the door had been unlocked and he says, "I lost count!"

There are a lot of little moments that gently challenge cultural norms. The very fact that the young woman is a lawyer is a source of constant astonishment. At one point Ben suggest she talk to someone "man to man" before he remembers himself. Sometimes Jack Carson is a little too broad and it's a little silly that the movie cowboy is such a phony that even his voice is entirely different. Though John Wayne infamously didn't live up to his onscreen persona.

The Groom Wore Spurs is available on Amazon Prime.

Through the House of Backrooms: The Next Generation

The owner of a furniture store finds a gateway to another dimension in 2026's Backrooms. Based on a 4chan meme from several years ago, this is a fun, creepy daydream. Sure, it's derivative, but it's derivative in the way of an urban legend, like something that grew up in communal, half-digested impressions of Through the Looking Glass, Being John Malkovich, and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves.

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, the furniture store owner. He may have been influenced by Walter White. Ejiofor comes off as a little too bourgeois to be an average furniture store owner and we learn at one point he had ambitions to be an architect that were derailed by his ex-wife's need for him to be a breadwinner. I wish the film had done a better job making his commercial cheesier in the way of a real world furniture store commercial.

This movie was produced by James Wan and one of my frequent complaints about Wan's films is the noticeably cheap production design. But in this case, the bare, anonymous walls were actually appropriate for the Backrooms dimension. Still, I wish his actual shop had looked more cluttered and lived in, especially since we see that Clark kind of lives there.

It is fun seeing him and, later, his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), running through the halls of the other dimension and seeing weirdly placed furniture and then distorted dream people. It reminded me strongly of dream sequences on Star Trek: The Next Generation, especially "Phantasms", the one where Data eats Counselor Troi like a cake.

Like the corridors of the Enterprise in that episode, it's suggested that the corridors of the Backrooms is really a reflection of Clark's mind.

The film's monster is pretty cool and played by Robert Bobroczkyi, the 7'7" actor from Romania who gives the creature a wonderfully odd shape.

The Wages of Walking

The late Hayden Panettiere's final role was in 2026's Sleepwalker, a dismally written, nihilistic film about a woman being haunted by her dead child and her not dead husband. Her performance in the lead role isn't bad and the first third of the film has a little effective creepiness. But writer/director Brandon Auman doesn't have the chops for sustained quality and the film dissolves into a lazy, mean-spirited soap opera.

We're introduced to Sarah (Panettiere) comforting her distraught eight or nine year old daughter, who has had a terrifying experience sleepwalking. But then we learn it is in fact Sarah who's been sleepwalking and her daughter is dead. She still has a little boy of about the same age and the two of them are staying with Sarah's mother, Gloria (Beverly D'Angelo). Sarah's an artist who's been producing a series of disturbing paintings lately (I actually kind of liked her paintings). Her abusive husband, Michael (Justin Chatwin), is in a coma, but his ghost still stalks her to cause her psychological distress. He was still her husband because, the first time she tried to separate from him, he beat her up in front of their little boy and thereafter refused to give her a divorce.

We see Sarah watching the original Night of the Living Dead and Carnival of Souls and I felt like Auman was pointing to them as influences but Sleepwalker lacks the psychological depth of either. The climax of the film falls totally flat because Auman is counting on the impact of a twist that really adds up to nothing. Most of all, Sarah's sleepwalking actively detracts from her character development somehow. I think Auman wanted her to be like the protagonist of Carnival of Souls, whose supernatural problem ties intimately and effectively with her psychological problem but Sarah just seems like a lady being randomly tortured.

Auman's previous credits, I was surprised to see, mainly involved animation. He was a writer on Star Wars: Resistance. So I guess we can't blame that show's mediocrity entirely on Disney's overbearing committee.

Danger Kids

I have a tendency to overestimate people. I think this was my primary barrier to completely enjoying 2025's Weapons. I did like premise and I thought the performances were good but the screenplay bothered me too much, particularly when it came to how Zach Creegor thinks people think and act. But, again, I overestimate people. It's possible most people are the kind of dim witted assholes we see in this movie.

So the movie starts out and we learn that all but one student in the elementary school classroom of Mrs. Gandry (Julia Garner) got out of bed one night and ran into the darkness, never to be seen again (at least that's what the narration says). I do appreciate the poster calls her "Mrs" instead of pretending people actually say "Miz".

It's weird, right? Naturally angry parents suspect the teacher. I say "angry" because none of them seem distraught. The attitude, particularly shown by Josh Brolin's character, father of a child called Mike, is more of the kind of indignation seen in passengers of an airline told their flight is going to be delayed five hours than the kind of soul wrenching grief of parents whose children have been kidnapped. This may have been social commentary.

Mrs. Gandry, Justine, is just bewildered and wants to get answers but she's also not grief stricken. As a teacher myself, I would be heartbroken and morose and spending every waking moment trying to find the missing kids. Justine goes home to her improbably massive and beautiful home for someone living on an elementary school teacher's salary in 2025 and has some vodka and loosens up. People are leaving threatening calls on her phone and someone writes "witch" on her car.

There are a lot of questions people don't ask that would seem natural to me. The most obvious being, was Justine indoctrinating the students on some kind of wacko ideology? Something that would make the kids all behave in exactly the same strange way. Wouldn't police be asking her questions about her religion and political affiliations? What about the one kid who didn't disappear? They question him and he says he doesn't know anything but the movie spends a very long time addressing whether or not the police spoke to his parents. When it is addressed, the police blatantly ignore a number of red flags. Somehow, also, the school principal (Benedict Wong) has never met the child's parents.

Archer, Brolin's character, does his own investigating and discovers that security cameras show the kids running in the same direction to converge at a significant location. Why didn't the police notice this?

There's a pointless subplot about a beat cop played by Alden Ehrenreich that seems to have been inspired by John C Reilly's character in Magnolia, except a lot less realistic. I was reminded of Robert Zemekis' adaptation of Beowulf when Grendel pauses for dramatic effect outside the mead hall for no apparent reason when Ehrenreich's character pauses outside the tent of a junkie he's chasing so he can slowly and silently unzip the tent instead of, like a normal cop, saying, "Sir, please exit the tent" or something.

This is also a movie where people variously have supernatural strength in some scenes and don't in others, depending on what's convenient for the plot. It is an intriguing setup. Maybe director Zach Creegor is like George Lucas, more of an idea guy, a world builder, but he needs someone else to write his dialogue.

Weapons is available on Amazon Prime.

A Dream is the Girl You Make It

A disturbed young man falls in love with his captive sea monster in 2026's Mermaid. I'm so glad we live in a world where a movie like this can get made. While its tonal experiment doesn't always connect, I really respect it for hitching up its own tightrope and walking it wearing fins.

But, okay, what is love? It seems like moviegoers have been interested in that question this year since Obsession. Mermaid, despite not being nearly as successful, actually has a somewhat similar premise. A young, sexually frustrated young man, possibly an incel, is so desperate to have a relationship with his dream woman, he tries to make it work even when it turns out she may be an inhuman monster. Unlike in Obsession, though, the monstrousness of the title creature is never in doubt. The mermaid is played by the talented Avery Potemri whom imdb doesn't even call an actress but instead a "movement artist who specializes in creature work." In addition to Obsession, I also thought of Chappell Roan's "Casual" music video in which Roan is the young woman who takes a sexy murderous sea monster home. But the relationship depicted in Roan's video is far more consensual.

Comedian Johnny Pemberton plays the male lead, Doug, a perpetually dazed and confused young man with a percocet habit, living alone in the large Florida home he inherited from his father. We meet him just as he's losing his job taking care of a fish tank at a strip club, where the owner, in the process of firing him, takes a moment to tell him that he's creeped out one of the girls with the poems his been writing for her.

When he gets home, a couple gangsters played by Robert Patrick and Tyler Rice beat him up for failing to pay up the 30 grand he owes them and they kill Doug's beloved tank full of fish. As Doug later explains to the mermaid, whom he names Destiny, when he has her in a drugged stupor in his bathtub, he knows a lot about fish but not a lot about women. This is comically plain from the fact that he's speaking English words to a being who clearly doesn't know much beyond the instinctive need to consume animal flesh with her rows of gruesome, razor sharp teeth. But Doug found her when he was in the midst of a suicide attempt and the prospect of having a mermaid lover is seemingly the only thing that pulls him back from the brink. It's as though the protagonist of a Creature from the Black Lagoon movie has convinced himself he's really in Splash. Variety's review contrasts the film to The Shape of Water.

Fascinatingly, a couple of reviews can't help but infer some level of mutual attraction between Doug and Destiny. There is a slight hint near the end that maybe Destiny deliberately refrains from tearing his face off but as far as I can see the attraction's all in Doug's head.

The film is a mixture of horror and comedy. The film's weakest points are when it thinks it's a comedy with horror elements. It works far better as a horror movie with comedy elements. Potemri's makeup and costume are excellent and you can get a good look at them on her instagram.

Mermaid is available on Amazon Prime.

These Old Bones Have Life in Them

Three exiled bones find adventure in a fantastic valley in Jeff Smith's Bone, a comic series that ran from 1991 to 2004. People had been recommending this one to me for decades but it was over the course of this summer that I finally got around to reading it. I'm sure glad I did, it's amazing. And I can see why so many people recommended it to me specifically, though many of those people were in social circles that have evaporated over the years for one reason or another. The only person I'm still in contact with whom I remember recommending it confessed to me that she'd never actually read it herself. It's kind of too bad I have no-one I can tell, "Wow, thanks for the recommendation!" Unless one of you still reads this blog.

Anyway, it's funny how well it aligns with the research paper I'm writing on H. Rider Haggard's She and film adaptations of it. One of the reasons I've pinpointed for the continual failure of the film adaptations to capture the magic of the original novel is none of them understand how important the narrator's--not just ugly--but bizarre physical features are. They provide an important contrast to the titular character's supernatural beauty and this is a dichotomy that recurs in fiction. She directly references Beauty and the Beast and in the 20th century you have Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy movies, virtually every family sitcom with a fat, Falstaffian patriarch paired with a beautiful wife, and Bone.

The three bone characters--Fone Bone, Phoney Bone, and Smiley Bone--are based on characters Jeff Smith created as a child but the influence of Disney characters, particularly Carl Bark's Uncle Scrooge comics, is unmistakable. You could look at the three characters as versions of Mickey, Goofy, and Scrooge. They could also be Blondie, Tuco, and Angel Eyes, I suppose. For most of the comic it seemed like Fone Bone was good, Smiley Bone was neutral, and Phoney Bone was evil.

We learn the three bone cousins were run out of their hometown of Boneville after Phoney's disastrous mayoral campaign. So they wander into "The Valley", a place with more of a high fantasy vibe. The bones themselves fit a more cartoonish aesthetic and comedic sensibility. Fone meets a beautiful, relatively realistically drawn girl named Thorn and develops a crush on her. I doubt I'm the first one to get a Roger and Jessica vibe from the two.

The series has been compared to Lord of the Rings because a mythology about the foundation of the valley and dragons and various other magical creatures gradually takes over. The climax involves an all out war with elaborate battle scenes. Also like Tolkien, Smith contrives many smaller, effectively charming vignettes, woven into the larger tale. There's an adventure in which Fone and Smiley have to take a baby rat creature back to its homeland--rat creatures are basically the Valley's version of the orc. There's a gigantic mountain lion called Roque Ja (or Rock Jaw) they must escape with the help of a dozen baby animals. There's Thorn's recurring dreams and her gradual realisation that she has an unexpectedly grand destiny. Through all this, Smith manages to maintain a fidelity to the two contrasting tones. One of my favourite interplays is between Phoney Bone and the world of the Valley. Phoney is constantly contriving petty, cartoon size schemes in this big beautiful fantasy world. He tricks the people of a town called Barrelhaven into following him by calling himself a dragonslayer, knowing full well that the dragons are absolutely no threat to the villagers. When the team are engaged in a desperate, treacherous journey through "Ghost Circles", Phoney is driven on by dreams of riches in the capital city of Atheia, where he eventually enlists Smiley's aid in stamping currency with his own likeness.

All along, the question of how Fone Bone's attraction to Thorn is going to resolve is a constant source of tension. If there is one flaw in the series, it's that Smith ultimately chooses a resolution that satisfies a certain thematic concept while neglecting the logic of the story itself. But maybe he bit off more than he could chew. In any case, the story as a whole is still lovely.

Sonnet 2010

An olive sea was black across the crust
The River Cheese was one that flowed through Gaul
One time, a treasure brought a sword to rust
Some silent shadows wait along the mall
Acrylic night describes a lonesome scene
The moon's a frozen skull above the blur
A fella's nose is like a friendly bean
And down the alley rings an iron spur
His steed was left beside the rotten inn
Inside you'll find a dozen girls and cats
And six or seven scraggly, drunken men
With cards and bullets hid beneath their hats
Before the stroke of twelve, he steps inside
Now here's a town where many ghosts abide

Killers and Detectives Doing Their Thing, '90s Style

Robert De Niro plays a cop who reluctantly comes out of retirement to track down a copycat killer in 2026's The Whisper Man. I say 2026 but this feels remarkably like an average 1996 movie. Not a great De Niro movie like Heat or Jackie Brown, though The Whisper Man does reunite De Niro with his Jackie Brown co-star Michael Keaton. It's more like Secret Window or any number of mid tier Ashley Judd or Michael Douglas movies from the period. It was a fairly enjoyable throwback, though.

Adam Scott's also in the film, playing De Niro's son named Tom. Tom and his little boy have just moved into a massive, gorgeous house with lots of bookcases that I would very much like to have. Then, one day, Tom's son is kidnapped and it looks like the MO of the so-called "Whisper Man". The trouble is, Tom's father, Peter (De Niro), put the real Whisper Man away decades ago. Michael Keaton plays the original killer and in interrogation scenes between him and De Niro, Keaton really hams it up as the psychotic paedophile. De Niro's performance is far more restrained. I assume it's a choice, or maybe he's just profoundly tired, but he's a long way from Raging Bull. All the rage is with Adam Scott in this one.

Michelle Monaghan plays the younger detective working with De Niro's character and it's all a basic, unremarkable procedural except it feels like something that would've been churned out thirty years ago.

The Whisper Man is available on Netflix.

An Ideal Lady

There are two recent news stories the algorithm has been repeatedly feeding to me lately that have become connected in my mind: the manufactured controversy around Sydney Sweeney's nude Novig ad and the Australian woman who had runner's diarrhea during an athletic competition in China. Mostly because the articles about Sweeney's ad tend to collect quotes from actual female athletes about how they disapprove of the false impression Sweeney supposedly creates of female athletes. Surely footage of a real female athlete soldiering on through physical discomfort and public embarrassment is exactly the counterpoint Sweeney's detractors would want to exhibit. But the psychology behind the clickbait of both stories highlights the current state of Puritanism and how it's being exploited.

The Sydney Sweeney controversy wouldn't make much sense in Brazil or Italy or any number of other Catholic countries in which physical human beauty isn't seen as a problem. But it was only twenty years ago here in the US that advertisements featuring naked women with their bits covered strategically, selling all manner of things, were so ubiquitous as to barely rate notice. Even so, the Puritanism was always a part of American psychology, lying dormant, perhaps. But it could still spring up, as in the 2004 halftime show when Justin Timberlake removed a piece of Janet Jackson's costume onstage, revealing her breast. The term "wardrobe malfunction" was born as commentators and representatives tried to explain something as an accident that was clearly deliberate. Despite the pervasive sexualisation in media, this was somehow a bridge too far, and the psychological mechanisms nested deep in media and gossip went to work rationalising how something could have happened between two popular pop stars in public. To contemplate it as anything other than an accident was too close to the nerve, perhaps. It was like Norman Bates having to become his mother to explain his own murders to himself. The rationalisation must be arrived at, however irrationally.

A lot of writers have been having fun finding different ways to joke about the idea that Sydney Sweeney was sincerely trying to present herself as a professional athlete. The conservative writer Caitlin Flanagan amusingly wrote, "I don’t think there’s a single person who saw Sweeney obscure her large breasts who thought, She must play professional football." Sweeney herself posted a series of links to athletes who have posed nude in rebuttal. Yet Flanagan also points to the hypocrisy of feminism for shaming a woman for using her sexuality while also advocating for the right of a woman to "walk through the Mall of America in a pair of pasties and a G-string." This strawman doesn't last a brief perusal of liberal commentaries, like this one at The Guardian, and yet The Guardian also has this one that concurs with the ad's detractors. Conservatives have identified prudishness as a weakness on the left which they can exploit. It's something else that makes the liberals look like creepy zealots. This is a somewhat awkward position, though, as the comments sections on the conservative articles naturally have a number of conservatives saying they're also uncomfortable with the presentation of woman's bare flesh as something beautiful. Yes, even conservatives can be Puritans.

But who is really to blame for the Joanna Wietrzyk problem, the woman who defaecated while competing--and winning--the Hyrox? The Hyrox, by the way is a relatively new sport competition that involves running and various workout stations. It was during a burpee session, after pausing in her 8km run, that Wietrzyk soiled herself and apparently some of the equipment. Who is to blame? Is it the organisers? A number have people have apparently complained to the officials who say they didn't step in right away because, while the rules forbid leaving snot or spit on the equipment or the floor, no-one thought to include any rules about faeces. This is, of course, bullshit, no pun intended. Watching the video of the woman running and her suit bottom changing colour, it's absurd to imagine oneself in the shoes of an organiser spotting this and rushing into the fray in order to tell Wietrzyk to please stop pooping and seclude herself immediately. For one thing, runners soiling themselves in the midst of a marathon is not an uncommon occurrence, it's called runner's diarrhea. Nor is it unheard of for a runner to complete a race while defaecating. Wietrzyk found herself in the unusual position of being in an arena in which she also had to use communal equipment. To expect Wietrzyk or the officials to make snap policy decisions in the midst of the competition is unrealistic. Yet, the morality must rationalise, the morality must have its comprehensible narrative. And so Wietrzyk had to make a public apology which I frankly consider an embarrassment more genuine than her uncontrollable bowel movement.

"I know my actions had an impact beyond myself, and I am genuinely sorry to everyone who was affected. I am learning from this experience and will carry those lessons with me, including remembering that there is more to life than racing and knowing when it is right to step away. On reflection, I have decided to retroactively withdraw from the race and forfeit the points I earned."

I'm compelled to wonder if the outcome would have been different had the competition occurred in, say, Mexico instead of China. Obviously China was never a Protestant country but it has its own form of Puritanism.

What connects the Sydney Sweeney story and the Joanna Wietrzyk story for me is the evident trouble many people have in being able to simultaneously enjoy a fantasy (or allow others to enjoy a fantasy) while having the maturity to realise that reality isn't always pretty, and that it doesn't have to be. The same attitude that shames Sydney Sweeney shames Joanna Wietrzyk--not for soiling equipment but for being unattractively human in public. So often when people insist on more realism in public what they're really insisting on is their own fantasy, and when people are pushing a fantasy they can't consciously acknowledge as a fantasy, it tends to be uglier than any reality and certainly an intentionally crafted fantasy.

Your Average Ironically Average Title

I kept seeing Bob Odenkirk's face in the thumbnail for 2026's Normal on Amazon Prime and I kept wondering, "Why is it showing me this? Didn't I already see it a couple years ago?" But the movie I was thinking of was Nobody, another action movie starring Bob Odenkirk and written by Derek Kolstad, creator of the John Wick franchise. With Normal, Kolstad tries to channel a little Fargo energy but it ultimately dissolves into action that feels even less substantial than Nobody and the later John Wick movies.

Odenkirk plays Ulysses, who's separated from his wife, Penny, presumably short for Penelope, because, yes, this is an Odyssey reference. He comes to the small town of Normal, Minnesota to be an interim sheriff after the town's previous sheriff mysteriously died ice fishing in his underwear. He meets a series of quirky characters and establishes himself as a friendly, easy going guy who leaves a ticket on a local bartender's car parked in a red zone--a ticket that turns out to merely contain a note; "Park better." The bartender is played by Lena Headey whose role in this film is sadly smaller than her billing suggests.

Then there's a bank robbery perpetrated by a nice young couple Ulysses had met earlier in the film and, one thing leads to another, and he's sided with them in a gun fight against all the deputies and seemingly the entire rest of the town's population. All because there's a vault in the bank containing yakuza gold.

Yes, the yakuza. The film begins with a prologue in Osaka in which a yakuza boss sends a subordinate, played by Peter Shinkoda, who also played the yakuza guy on Daredevil, to run things in Normal, which is apparently a stateside location for the outfit's money laundering. The rest of the movie is a long action sequence.

Kolstad and Odenkirk came up with the concept together. I like the concept but it's a shame Odenkirk didn't write the screenplay because, goddamn, Kolstad cannot write dialogue. Ulysses has a voice over narration in the form of voice mails he leaves for Penny in which he explains that Normal is so boring that he spends a lot of time saying, "Nothing to see here." Someone should have explained to Kolstad that police generally don't have to say that unless there is something to see. But I won't spoil the dumbest moment, which is an extremely awkward exchange of dialogue that ushers Lena Headey out of the movie.

The attempts to inject the story with local colour never feel more than derivative at best. There's a moose wandering around town that mostly just made think, "Oh, they saw Northern Exposure." I like seeing Bob Odenkirk, though.

Whew. I got through the whole review without mentioning Twin Peaks.

Normal is available on Amazon Prime.

Digitally Fortified Magic

In all my analyses and contemplations of popular media, I have to admit the appeal of Sandra Bullock eludes me. But I can't deny the amazing longevity of her career and it's her continued popularity that has made 2026's Practical Magic 2 a sort of success. I mean, the 30 million dollars the movie made in its opening weekend fell short of the low end of expectations and it's not at all clear that the movie will recoup its budget. But for a movie like this, it's doing pretty well.

I find it ironic that this movie eschews practical effects in favour of copious cgi. Tonally, this sequel is so different from its predecessor, it's basically a different genre. While the first film, directed by Griffith Dunne with a screenplay by Robin Swicord, Akiva Goldsman, and Adam Brooks from a book by Alice Hoffman, was essentially magically realism, the sequel, directed by Susanne Bier with a screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, Georgia Pritchett, and Kelly Marcel, based on another Alice Hoffman book, is all out fantasy. You'll notice only Akiva Goldsman carried over from the first film's screenwriters. Goldsman's most prominent recent work has been writing for Star Trek series and this new Practical Magic movie has a very TV sized feel. In addition to all the cgi, most of it was clearly shot on soundstages, a stark departure from the first film's reliance on location. And while the first film focused primarily on magic as a metaphor for relationships, the second film's focus on the family curse is used as a pretext for a fantasy quest to England which makes this film's introduction of sparkly, swirly sorcery remind one vividly of Harry Potter.

So confident were the filmmakers in Sandra Bullock's popular appeal that they wrote her as the drag in this one. After the death of her husband--presumably the first film's love interest, played by Aidan Quinn--she decides to live without magic and even has her daughters' memories wiped. So there are several scenes where she stands in stern disapproval of her sister and aunts insisting on being whimsical and magical.

The daughters have been recast with younger actresses, Maisie Williams and Joey King, so that they can be used to appeal to a younger audience. It's Joey King's character who primarily drives the action, going to England in an attempt to dispel the family curse that causes all men they love to die young. So Bullock and her sister, played by Nicole Kidman, have to follow her to England where they meet a professor played by Lee Pace, who played the elven king in the Hobbit movies. There's intrigue and Kidman, playing an American character, mocks her own inability to do an English accent, a joke that really doesn't land for any of us who remember her playing Virginia Woolf.

There are some good songs in the movie, though I see now almost none of them are included on the film's official soundtrack. I was surprised to hear "Fade Into You" covered by a male singer and it was the second movie I've seen this year to feature an Olivia Rodrigo song, in this case "The Cure", the lyrics of which kind of run counter to the scene for which it's played, in which Joey King's character attempts to acquire a cure for her dying boyfriend. It's a good thing the characters in the movie couldn't actually hear Rodrigo singing, "You will never be the cure." In any case, Rodrigo continues to be the young artist that older people are overjoyed (and more than a little surprised) to be able to enjoy.

So, while it'll never be Harry Potter, this movie may satisfy those looking for some snack sized epic fantasy.

Listen to the Sounds

Things start to get bad, demoniac, even, for a young woman alone with her comatose mother in 2026's Undertone. Whether or not you like this movie depends entirely on what kind of viewer you are. If you're an entirely passive viewer who expects a film to fill in every blank, you may be bored by this film. But if you're an active, observant viewer, who interrogates the shadows and the partially open doors and everything that just might be a clue, this movie's a hell of a ride.

Evy (Nina Kiri) is staying at her mother's house to care for her. In the big two storey place, her mother stays in bed upstairs, seemingly unconscious. Downstairs, in the dining room, Evy co-hosts a podcast with Justin (Adam DiMarco), who broadcasts from another location. The sound design in this movie is crucial to everything that happens. When Evy puts on her noise cancelling headphones, we're aware of the sense it strips her of even as the sounds and narratives it supplies take on eerie connexions to her physical environment. The camera often frames her on one side of the screen and places the darkened hallway behind her or a mirrored cabinet showing a reflection of the distant kitchen. Every shot casually introduces a space from which an unlooked for threat might spring.

On the podcast, Justin introduces Evy to some sound files he received in an anonymous e-mail. They're recordings of a young couple undergoing a sinister, supernatural experience.

A lot of people have compared this movie to Paranormal Activity so it's no surprise that the director has been hired to write and direct the next film in the Paranormal Activity franchise. I suppose if anyone can recapture the magic of the first Paranormal Activity film it's this guy. I suspect that multimillion dollar film will not be quite as good as this 500,000 dollar one, though. But he'll always have Undertone. This lovely little creepy treat.