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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Madonna's body is a dangerous, sexual weapon in 1993's Body of Evidence. An amazing cast headed by Madonna and Willem Dafoe brings this once tawdry tale to life, though now it's strangely innocent and adorable.
Madonna plays Rebecca, a young woman into S&M, whose latest sexual partner was an old man who died of a heart attack while she was straddling him. Since he left everything to her in the will, people think she did it on purpose, that she used her sexy body as nothing less than an instrument of murder.
Enter Willem Dafoe as Frank, her lawyer, who seeks to, you know. Get her off. This is in spite of the fact that he's married to a character played by Julianne Moore who, according to Wikipedia, disliked her nude scene, her first ever, in this movie. I watched it last week and I honestly can't remember her nude scene, if it's any comfort to her. Though maybe that's what she meant when she called it "extraneous". She had plenty of memorable nude scenes in movies after this.
But it's hard to compete with Madonna on that score, though all the sex scenes in this film feel kind of mechanical and starchy. Sure, there's lots of nudity (though no genitalia) and bondage gear and hot wax. But every shot feels like the director of photography said, "Okay, I need you two to stay within exactly this area and try not to move your limbs too much out of the initial pose." I actually found myself looking forward more to the courtroom scenes, which are ridiculous. Joe Mantegna as opposing council somehow brings the thing to trial on the claim that Madonna's sexiness is deadly. Frank Langella shows up to testify against her and the movie also has Anne Archer and Jurgen Prochnow. That's quite a cast for such a lightweight piece of fluff.
Body of Evidence is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a collection of Madonna movies.
A son derails his father's moral reeducation in 2026's The Super Mario Galaxy. Diminished and humiliated in his minuscule prison, Bowser's pride has been broken by the Mario Brothers. To reclaim his sense of self-worth he must again embrace the fires of hell in this almost entirely humourless, accidental noir.
This is a sequel to The Super Mario Brothers Movie, a poorly written film, the best part of which was Jack Black's Bowser, aka King Koopa, whose "Peaches" musical number made everyone root for the big bad turtle, though many are unwilling to admit it. So the filmmakers this time sought to reorient audience sympathy to where it ought to have been all along, with Mario (Chris Pratt). They try to make up for lost time and establish that Mario, too, has a secret love for Peach (Anna Taylor Joy) who, of course, cannot be shown to bear anything as emotionally weak as romantic affection for man or turtle.
Neither can her long lost sister, Rosalina (Brie Larson), who primarily exhibits maternal care as the mother of a group of star creatures. Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie) manages to kidnap her, forcing Peach and her servants, the Mario Brothers, to spring into action.
Bowser, physically reduced after being forced to ingest a poison mushroom, is kept imprisoned in a miniature castle where he paints portraits of Peach and vents his impotent fury. He's seen the error of his ways and selflessly presents himself for punishment when a gigantic queen bee wishes to sentence the brothers to hard labour for their crimes. In the course of serving his sentence, he's transported against his will to his son's spacecraft, where he does all in his power to prevent his son from killing Peach and her allies. But they don't see his good will and interpret his actions as only villainous. Meanwhile, his son reminds him of their bond and shared ambitions.
So, manipulated by the forces around him, Bowser, who was never a clever or imaginative turtle, accepts the hand dealt to him and in a scene that mimics the bridge battle from the original Super Mario Brothers, he is punished for fulfilling his destined role with unimaginable physical pain and permanent, total disfigurement.
I laughed one time during the movie, when Toad told Starfox to "Do a barrel roll," a reference to the old internet meme. I didn't know why I found it so funny decades ago, nor can I explain why I find it so funny now.
Sonnet 2009
A street of spinning knives prepared the plane
On ev'ry block, an eye would watch the ink
A paper plate conveyed a senseless brain
Above the jet, a god creates a brink
Between the sky and space, it choked and stalled
A rusted gear rebounds against its wing
A trail of fuel described its spiralled fall
Remorseless earth collects the broken thing
It happened late, a little after nine
In darkness, figures rose about the bird
Some whispered words renounce the false divine
A metal angel burns beneath the word
As dawn arose, it saw no meagre trace
The man's attempt was gone, and all erased
A group of teenagers find a very useful Aztec whistle that kills you when you blow it in 2026's Whistle. What will those Aztecs think of next. I guess this movie isn't the worst I've ever seen but there's something really lazy about it.
If you've been following my blog this year, you've probably noticed I've been watching a lot of new movies lately. With all the bleak, grim stories in the news about current times and the not too distant future, it's been a comfort to find that there's some really vital filmmaking going on. There are movies like Hokum or Undertone that are amazing and movies that, even if they're not absolutely stunning, are at least trying bold new ideas and going out on a creative limb, movies like Touch Me or Pretty Lethal. So it's a real drag to see something like Whistle that feels so stale and half-assed.
The cast is fine. Among the group of teens, the film focuses on Daphne Keen as Chrys, a shy girl who's just moved to town and is staying with her cousin, Rel (Sky Yang). Rounding out the group of friends who find the whistle are Ellie (Sophie Nelisse), Chrys' love interest, a jock named Dean (Jhaleil Swaby), and his girlfriend, Grace (Ali Skovbye), a prom queen type. Nick Frost has a small role as their teacher.
Aztec death whistles actually exist but no-one knows what they were actually used for. This movie decides that, when you blow one, everyone in earshot is stalked by an apparition of themselves on the moment of their inevitable death. When this apparition grabs you, you die immediately, ahead of your fated time. So when Grace, for example, is killed, it's by an old lady version of herself.
Although Chrys and Ellie and their budding romance is centrally framed, the filmmakers are clearly more interested in Rel. He's obsessed with a comic book character called The Revenger, clearly based on The Crow. When it looks like he's fated just to be randomly killed off by a magic whistle, he struggles to fit this into his conception of a world that turns on justice and retribution. This eventually leads him to a moral quandary that feels like it ought to have been the film's centrepiece.
I don't think male, heterosexual filmmakers can't make stories about lesbians. Mulholland Drive will always be a shining example to the contrary but I think straight guys often get a little too dazzled by the fundamental appeal of pretty young lesbians to give the characters much complexity and that's certainly the case here.
The film has a villain who comes across as both lazy and interesting. He's a youth pastor named Noah (Percy Hynes White) who's a true zealot yet he's also an ornery drug pusher. I'm used to Hollywood movies dunking on Christians but this guy is such an extreme strawman it's kind of impressive.
Nick Frost's role would've also made for a more interesting protagonist. When he realises what the whistle is, he immediately takes it and tries to sell it in an online auction. A whole movie could've been made about his morally dubious character, caught in a supernatural trap.
Whistle is available on Shudder. By the way, if you watch this movie through Amazon Prime, which is where I have my Shudder subscription, make sure to disable the mechanism that forces the player to switch to another video once the credits start to role. This movie has a crucial plot twist after the first few credits, which I wasn't able to see until I disabled that thing.
