My Friendly Neighborhood

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If you ever found the puppets on Sesame Street a little creepy[1], have I got a horror game for you! My Friendly Neighborhood tells the story of a kid TV show from an alternate, slightly darker turn of the millennium America. Somehow, their unnamed Vietnam went even worse than ours did, and kids / parents just kind of stopped watching children’s programming, or maybe I’m wrong about that cause and the true cause is public television was never invented, so ratings were the sole driver of a show’s survival. Either way, after a pretty successful 15 or so year run, the show was canceled in the early ’80s, and now, ten or twelve years later, it’s suddenly broadcasting again, overwhelming the signal of intended shows.

So you, a broadcasting engineer named Gordon[2] are sent to the old abandoned studios to shut down the signal and restore everything to normal. Only, when you get there, everything is weird and creepy and oh, right, dangerous, because I left out something important. Apparently another facet of this alternate America is that the puppets are and always were alive. And sometime between the show’s cancellation and now, they’ve gone kind of crazy. And not the normal kind of crazy where they’re just trying to kill you for interfering with their nefarious plans, although, okay, yes also that, but the creepy kind of crazy where you start to listen to what they’re saying and it sounds like what the puppets in H.P. Lovecraft’s Sesame Street would say, and also they’re not so much trying to kill you as they are incidentally killing you while enthusiastically hugging you.

Needless to say, this is all pretty great, and were I of an age where I had countless hours to fill and not enough entertainment to fill them with, I would happily play this again with cheats enabled and on a higher difficulty level, just to see what all else I could unlock that I didn’t find the first time around.

Fantastic atmosphere, occasionally legitimately scary, yet with a surprising amount of heart. Easily recommendable.

[1] I never did, and the game still works
[2] ie the main adult character on Sesame Street for a good long time, and boy howdy am I certain that was on purpose

La polizia brancola nel buio

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Gialli!

The Police Are Blundering in the Dark was the absolutely perfect title of one of the movies in a box set categorized for forgotten giallos, which you may note was not indicated to be forgotten gems or anything, just, forgotten. But that’s okay, when you’re in the right company and already like the genre and especially, my lord, that title.

A bunch of fashion models have been disappearing over the last few months, including one nice lady who clearly should have worn a bra if she was going to be running away that much, and a second nice lady who had abysmal taste in boyfriends. But now that she’s dead, the boyfriend has decided he cares enough about her to at least find out what happened, even if he couldn’t be bothered to show up the night before and help fix her car, since he was cheating on her at the time.

He quickly finds himself at the center of an inexplicable and poorly explained family drama involving a local erotic photographer, his unhappy wife, their niece, and the local doctor who likes to hang around and prescribe drugs for the wheelchair-bound photographer, who to be fair is in poor health. Also, the photographer can take pictures of thoughts. For some reason.

Who among them is the killer, though? Or could it be the newly hired stone-faced butler and nymphomaniac maid who are objectively pulling some kind of con? Or the mentally simple son of the innkeeper and his estranged wife? Or for that matter someone I’ve forgotten? But I don’t think I have. Like the police, you’ll blunder in the dark wondering what is going on, why so many plot points have been dropped, and how the mystery got solved other than timing and dumb luck.

The thing is, this makes it sound like I didn’t like the movie, when, oh no, it was hilarious and inexplicable in exactly the ways bad exploitation movies should be. Great with friends and drinks, and probably still pretty great just by yourself.

Olympus Has Fallen

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Here are a series of weird things about my experience of watching Olympus Has Fallen that have nothing to do with the actual movie.

  1. I thought I had already seen it. I did the thing I do now and then where I decide, I’ve seen enough Shudder movies in a row, what’s on my Netflix queue? And the oldest thing on that queue was London Has Fallen, which is what I thought I would be watching, until I realized, huh, never saw the first one.
  2. But so then I found it was on NBC/USA, but not on Peacock, which is stupid. Which made me nervous that it would be edited, but nope, not edited, tons of adult language and violence. And yet, with commercial breaks edited in. Does that mean if you’re watching cable on the actual USA channel, they just air it uncut now?
  3. When I say commercial breaks edited in, I mean there are fadeouts / fadeins that clearly were not part of the movie in the theater. Which stood out to me because they did not line up with the streaming commercial breaks in any way. How is it possible that we’ve reached a place where commercials are worse than they were in my youth? How is this possible?

Anyway. There’s this secret service guy not on active duty because of reasons that are explored in the first act, but he happens to be looking out his window when the White House is attacked by terrorists and/or foreign powers. So he runs down the street and crashes the party, John McClane style, and before you know it he’s the only good guy in a completely captured government facility.

Pretty much everything else happens the way you’d expect, it’s an action movie after all. I liked it well enough to be a movie, but I am skeptical that there’s enough here to support a trilogy, you know? We’ll see, someday!

Skull: The Mask

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With a sample size of two[1], I can say reliably that modern South American audiences and filmmakers are mostly afraid of demons, with an undercurrent of being afraid of corrupt police. Skull: The Mask is about waking up some demon dude who wants to either help the intestines of the earth move (because that would be bad) or stop them from moving (because when they’re moving that’s a good thing), I am really unclear as to which.

After a throwaway gorefest scene with Nazis, we fast forward to modern times, where the top stories are Bolivian children gone missing[2] and a murder spree that started at the home of an archaeological professor and her way too young girlfriend, both of which cases are being investigated by the same lady cop who was recently cleared of murder charges in some as far as I know unrelated case, but man is the press well-informed on these matters, giving out specific details of the murders and showing graphic footage, and I really do have to wonder if it’s done that way down there, or if local audiences would be rolling their eyes a bit.

But so anyway, there’s this mask which is kind of a six horned skull that wraps around your face and now you’re possessed with the demon, and if you guessed that this has some tie-in with the Nazi shit and the archaeologist and the earth’s intestines, then I’d say you’ve been paying attention. There’s plenty of gore, plenty of weird dream sequence stop motion animation, and a respectable number of breasts, all gratuitous as though the dream of the ’80s is alive in São Paulo.

My intent here was not to give everything away, but I’m torn right now between feeling like I should say more, feeling like I’ve already said too much, and feeling like honestly I’m not sure I’d know how to spoil the plot fully even if that were my intent. In any event, this was an experience and a half, and I’d say check it out.

[1] The other is an unreviewed Joe Bob showing of a movie whose title I’m blanking on, I think Argentinian, and with some serious darkness to it. Like whoa. If I remember the name of it. I’ll mention it.[3]
[2] Maybe something to add to the things South Americans are afraid of?
[3] When Evil Lurks, about which I should add that another fear, if perhaps not of the public but for sure of the writer, is custody battles / divorce.

Incident at Raven’s Gate

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Now, here’s a movie where even talking about the random rolls used to get to it would be a spoiler. Well, okay. the style die was “Australasian”, it’s only the monster die that would be a spoiler. Still, though, it would be, and Incident at Raven’s Gate was good enough that I don’t want to spoil it, so.

The movie starts with a burned out shell of a house being investigated, and then dumps back to five days earlier, where we meet the players: a super uptight sheep farmer (maybe?), his bored younger plant-growing wife, his fuck-up younger brother on parole, some annoying twerp barflies, the hot lady bartender, and the local cop who is obsessed with her. Add the drought-stricken central Australian landscape as a pressure cooker, and a mysterious outside force to push the button I guess?, and then watch the players progress from point A to the burned out farmhouse point B, with occasional flashforward interludes to the investigators.

There are twists and turns, some predictable, some not, but it’s mostly a study of characters in crisis, and I very much dug it.

Psycho Goreman

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You learn basically everything you need to know about Psycho Goreman[1] in the opening text crawl, when we learn that he comes from the planet Gigax. These are people who are definitely in a joking mood, and want you to be in on it. …for certain values of “you”.

There are these two siblings, and the younger sister is abusive to the nebbish older brother. (10 and 7, maybe?) For example, in their regular game of crazy ball[2], if he wins he gets something pretty regular, I forget what because it was reasonable, while if she wins, he has to dig a hole and then bury himself in it. And of course he never wins.

Anyway, in the course of digging the hole, they uncover the hidden burial site of an immortal dark power bent on galactic domination, and wacky hijinx ensue. It’s astonishing how close this comes to being a family-friendly movie[3]. You would have to change almost none of the plot, but man would you have to change a lot of the special effects.

My point is, you shouldn’t watch it with your kids. Even if it does have a little bit of a lesson right at the end. You should watch it if you like gross-out horror comedy or were ever kind of a dweeb, and if you’re not allergic to children in movies.

[1] PG for short, but since the movie is unrated, I guess they did not compromise on their artistic vision.
[2] Dodgeball but with a Calvinball-influenced ruleset
[3] There’s even a musical interlude in the middle, almost more of a music video, entitled Frig You. Which is a perfect encapsulation of how it’s almost family-friendly.

How to Train Your Dragon (2010)

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Fifteen years later, and also a remake, and I’m only just now seeing the original How to Train Your Dragon. In fact, it’s because of the remake. There are new toys, and my kids like dragons, so they have the new toys, which begged the question, shouldn’t they know what’s the deal with these toys? And Bob’s your uncle.

The plot twist [that I’ve already revealed] being, shouldn’t I know what’s the deal with these toys? Which brings me to a fun fact, in which I can objectively prove that previews are getting worse. I did not learn until 2025 that the dragons were nominally the bad guys of the movie. I always took it straightforwardly that the loser kid who never fit in found a way to be awesome via dragon training, not that he was supposed to be dragon killing this whole time! And I mean, it’s not really a spoiler for the movie, since you learn it during the opening scene narration. But I thought it was a clever subversion of the original previews’ expectations, and now the current previews are all, we cannot subvert anything, as our audience is dumber than ever. Or something like that. My point is, fuck[1] screw previews.

Anyway.

So there’s this Viking kid who is scrawny and engineering-minded, instead of being large and strong and (let’s say) single-minded. Which means he doesn’t fit in. Oh, sure, he still wants to kill dragons, same as everybody else, he just wants to use tools instead of muscles to do it. What a maroon! But once he actually manages to use said tools to get a dragon in a position where he can kill it, he… comes up with a new plan.

This is a kid movie, so the result of the new plan is that he ends up fitting in after all, and everyone learns a valuable lesson about accepting people for who they are. And, okay, as a parent, that’s a good lesson. Also, as a parent, I recognize that sometimes it’s a lesson parents need to learn as much as kids do. But the real point is, the actual plot underlying these lessons is at least halfway decent as well. Plus, riding around on a dragon is cool. I would not, I think, affirmatively recommend this movie to anyone unless you really like dragons and can live with kid movies, but I would not disrecommend the movie to anyone, if they were about to be in front of it. Because, you know, it’s fun!

[1] Family movie, I should watch my language.

Godmonster of Indian Flats

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There were actually several episodes in a row of my horror podcast that covered movies I had already seen, which was a nice change of pace. But then they got (via the scare being “animal” and the theme being “Western”) to a movie nobody has ever seen before, Godmonster of Indian Flats. This is one of those movies that has two plots that have nothing to do with each other, and the payoff is in seeing how everything comes together in a thunderous crescendo.[1]

In the first story, some kid is awkwardly introduced to a town near Reno called “The Comstock”, a goldmine boom and then bust and then historically recreated town that might even be real for all I know, so he can get beat up and then rescued by a scientist and then exposed to some weird mutant sheep embryo, so we can follow the sci-fi horror portion of the movie. The second, and far weightier by volume, story is about a conspicuously black dude who represents a mining magnate who wants to buy up parts of the town and reopen the mines, in direct opposition to the “this place is a historical recreation now” ethos the mayor(?) is espousing.

The first story proceeds with lots of science talk mostly and very little plot or character advancement of any kind. The second story is an increasingly (but subtly) racist game of cat and mouse between the buyer and the town, where nothing is as it seems if you’re the buyer character, but also everything is exactly as it seems if you’re the person watching the movie. (Which, by the way, you should not be. Big mistake.)

The climax of the second story kicks off the actual start of the first story, but then it quickly fizzles out after a big lassoing demonstration, and now we’re at the thunderous crescendo where everything comes together, and it… well, it’s not fair to say it fizzles out again, because nothing this inexplicable is a fizzle. Basically, the big reveal about what’s really been going on in the first story happens, and then people react to it in ways that first make sense, and then make no sense at all, and then I cannot even figure out what is supposed to be happening, and the whole time the movie’s villain is laughing maniacally and monologuing about how inevitable his (ie, capitalism’s) victory is and always was, and then there’s an explosion, and then the movie ends, bad guys firmly victorious and good guys in total disarray.

I just don’t even know.

Also, if it seems like I basically forgot to talk about the mutant sheep monster that was the whole reason I saw this? If it seems like that to you, reading, imagine how it seemed to me, watching, when the movie also basically forgot this seemingly integral plot element.

[1] I’m actually stealing from my future self here, as it will [I anticipate, at least] be a better metaphor for the thing I’m reading right now.

The Reckoning (2020)

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It’s easy to forget, living in the country that spawned the Salem Witch Trials, that other places were equally terrible to women in (especially but certainly not exclusively) the 17th century. Take England. Imagine you’re a squire, which is apparently a term for a landholder, not just someone who carries things for a knight. People all over are dying of the plague, and for some reason you want back a parcel of land you’re renting out. The only thing standing in the way is the family you’ve rented it to. Now imagine the husband gets the plague and dies, and now it’s only the wife and infant daughter, but the wife has paid for the next six months of rent up front. And yet you still want the land. If only there were some way to… oh, wait, no, she’s probably a witch, right? Problem solved!

The Reckoning is about what happens after Grace stands accused of witchcraft. There’s a witchfinder, and there are implements of torture, and there are public hearings, and there are family schisms, just really all the things you would expect out of obviously false accusations of this type, you know? I at first was afraid we were headed towards Hostel: The History of Europe, but none of the torture scenes (well, after the initial public flogging) are lingering and visceral, they are there solely to make sure you know they happened.

The heart of the movie is the face-off between Grace (the witch [let’s say]) and the witchfinder with whom she shares a past. Each is certain of their facts, and each is certain of the strength of their will. And the drama of that, er, reckoning is enough to carry the movie. Honestly, at almost two hours, the movie overstays its welcome any time it strays from that central conflict and the secondary conflicts surrounding it to explore the stuff in Grace’s head.

Her… visions? delusions? hallucinations? temptations? serve only to confuse the question of whether she might in fact be a witch after all, which I think strongly undercuts the story’s entire purpose. Also, they are aggressively sexualized in a way that simply doesn’t fit the surrounding events. I am never opposed to sexualization and also nudity in the service of the plot, and rarely for that matter does the gratuitous type bother me either. I think what failed here is that it was not meant to be gratuitous, and yet there was no way for me to take the scenes with the gravity they were portrayed without, like I said, completely fracturing the movie’s central thesis.

The fact that I still think it’s a good film, despite that previous paragraph, should be taken as a pretty solid endorsement. I have only one caveat, but it would completely spoil the ending, and so I bite my tongue and still mostly say, yeah, check it out.

A Quiet Place: Day One

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I have long claimed that in virtually all zombie movies[1], the zombie part should be considered a setting, Space movies, Westerns, zombie movies, etc. The zombies are where the movie happens and the circumstances the characters are baselined against, but the movie isn’t about the zombies. It’s about whatever the characters are going through plus whatever metaphor the writers / directors want to shoehorn into those plot events and that setting.

The new A Quiet Place movie from last year seems willing to let those weird quadruped aliens that can hear really well and not see so great, so as long as you’re silent you’re safe from them? I was saying, it seems willing to let their alien invasion become a new such setting. We’ve moved away from the “end of the world through the eyes of this one family” viewpoint of the first two movies, in favor of, superficially, a more global approach. Want to see how hard it is (or, perversely, how easy it is) to be quiet in Manhattan? Let’s show invasion day from right there, and give you an idea of just how much noise 8 million people can make, even and perhaps especially when they’re not supposed to.

But the real movie isn’t about this at all. It’s actually about dying. …okay, yes, tons and tons of people die in this movie. But I mean, it’s about being in hospice, and knowing you’re going to die, soon, and wanting to do that one more thing you have on your bucket list while trying to decide if you’re willing and able to let go, not that you have much choice, and anyway, what about your cat? Who’s going to take care of your cat? This is so much bullshit.

The real movie, I was saying, is about that. The “you’d better be quiet” quadruped aliens are simply the backdrop against which this quotidian internal drama is taking place. As always, the sound design for these movies is superb, and even if there are things that happened that I am categorically unwilling to believe if I stop and let myself wonder about them, the movie works so well on an emotional level[2] that I’m willing to handwave those things and let them lie.

[1] Okay, probably not Return of the Living Dead
[2] Helped along, to be sure, by the acting talent of Lupita Nyong’o and also by the extremely intimate size of the cast