Category Archives: Film

An Unquiet Grave

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Sometimes a movie is a lot more interesting than it is good.

This is not to say that An Unquiet Grave is bad, precisely. It’s short, especially by modern standards, and it clicks right along at a prodigious speed, but it still, in retrospect, feels a little too long somehow. The character beats and the acting were good, and I liked the plot, but I also think the plot was the problem. There just wasn’t really enough of it to fill 80ish minutes, even if you account for all the long shots of people looking sad.

See, it’s like this. There’s a guy whose wife died, and he has a plan to bring her back, with her twin sister’s help. That right there? It’s the whole movie. There are two actors, a lot of back and forth dialogue, a handful of events, and then the credits roll. I think I liked it, even despite the too long thing, but I also think what I liked about it was the interestingness of the premise and the tiny cast more than, you know, the movie itself. But also, the acting is staying with me. There’s a little bit of special effects, mostly make-up related, but the true horror of the movie is all conveyed in the acting choices, and I’m here for it.

I feel like I may be talking myself into liking it better than it deserves? Because it really isn’t anywhere near great, and I maintain that it’s more interesting than good. I guess I mean the parts that are good may actually be great, but they do not outweigh maintaining such a somber mood for such a long time relative to what actually occurs.

Speaking of interesting: I just learned that the female lead was also one of the writers. This makes me feel better about the brief nudity in the film, which felt otherwise more exploitative than I’m usually comfortable with. Well, wait, let me explain. Exploitative nudity in film is the bread and butter of what I am comfortable with, it’s practically a horror film food group. But this was emotionally exploitative, and while I fully understood the artistic choice behind it, it was uncomfortable all the same. But her also being a writer on the film really does smooth that over a bit, so hooray!

But also, the ending? Like, literally the last second of the movie? That part was brilliant.

The Running Man (2025)

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I remember seeing The Running Man when I was a kid, because of course I did. Sci-fi action movies with Schwarzenegger were a no brainer. I remember, years later, reading The Running Man, by Richard Bachman[1], and recognizing enough of the plot elements (and, okay, the title) to know it was where the movie came from. And I remember being astonished by just how much better the book was than the movie.[2] Ironically, I remember almost nothing about the plot of the movie itself; what I’m envisioning is Arnold running around a laser tag arena in a shiny lycra jumpsuit and then eventually beating up Family Feud’s own Richard Dawson, but surely, surely there was more to it than that. Counterpoint, of course, is how readily I gave up on that movie once I read the book.

Fast forward 30-odd years, and it seems someone who actually liked the book has made a new version of the movie in which things are a little more… serious-minded. The Running Man is the primetime jewel in the Network’s crown of 24×7 reality TV game shows in which downtrodden losers try to earn enough money to escape from the slums, which of course they never will, but in the meantime the Network rakes it in from an enthralled America. (This Bachman guy was prescient, I tell you.)

One such loser, Ben Richards, has been blackballed from pretty much any available job because he keeps trying to help his coworkers instead of letting them fail and die, and there’s no room for woke chumps in the new America. But he has a sick daughter and a wife who’s about one night away from becoming a prostitute to makes ends meet[3], and before you know it he’s signed up for the show. Which is a 30 day game of hide and seek between the Runners and… pretty much everyone else. Anyone who reports a Runner’s location gets a wad of dough, and then the Goons (ie, corporate police) and the Hunters (ie, the recurring characters who America is rooting for, most seasons) swoop down and kill the Runner who got reported.

Hiding from literally everyone, as you may be able to conceive of, is a tricky matter, and doing it for 30 days is nearly impossible, especially under the cameras everywhere panopticon we call modernity. (Plus, you can’t just hide in the deep woods and wait it out, because you have to mail in a 10 minute tape every day or you get disqualified.) Anyway, that’s it. That’s the whole movie. Will he succeed where everyone else has failed?

Okay, that’s not the whole movie. There’s also the thread, woven throughout, in which a mirror is held up to us as an audience and we get to think about just how complicit we may or may not be in the coming dystopia, Tarantino-style.

[1] Or someone else, who can remember
[2] This was in my callow youth when I didn’t know just how readily Hollywood will scrap a book’s plot entirely in favor of their own idea.
[3] As opposed to doing it because it’s her chosen career path, which would be a whole different story.

Eyes of Laura Mars

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Another podcast movie, this time with a scare that is not really technology, but a style that is most definitely New York City. Eyes of Laura Mars is not a giallo. For one thing, it is zero percent Italian. But it’s not not a giallo either, if you take my drift. There is definitely shared and/or stolen DNA.

Laura Mars[1] is a fashion photographer who has entered her “coffee table book of staged murder photos” artistic phase, but since it’s 1978 that’s not entirely a thing yet, and therefore she is drumming up a lot of controversy around how she’s causing people to be desensitized to violence, and okay, sure, there really is nothing new under the sun is there?

Anyhow, the twist is that she suddenly starts observing the murders of people who are professionally close to her, through the eyes of the murderer. Soon the cops are involved, albeit more because of the murders than because of her weird psychic connection to the killer. And before you know it there are more dead half-naked models (among other victims) than you can shake an icepick at. Is the killer her loser ex-husband? Her creepy limo driver? Her gay but the movie never openly admits it agent?

Actually, that was the weirdest thing about the flick. Because as soon as you know Brad Dourif is in the movie, you also know he’s the killer. To be clear, this is not a spoiler, I’m not saying if he actually is or not. I’m just saying that, as a savvy viewer of horror films over the past five decades, there’s no question in your mind about whether he’s the killer, which makes for a very strange viewing experience of what is nominally meant to be a mystery in which nearly any of the still living characters should be a suspect.

Am I making sense here? I’m pretty sure I’m making sense.

In conclusion: it’s not bad! It’s definitely not good, it is I daresay pretty damned silly. But it’s not bad. Well, except for one piece of unnecessary prejudice that would be a pretty big spoiler to reveal, but alas for the way certain mental health issues are treated as low hanging fruit. And, oh, one other thing: this was written by John Carpenter, which is notable in that I’ve never seen him write for a different director or probably a different composer than himself before. Weird.

[1] To the best of my knowledge, not Veronica’s mother

Hereditary

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Because I have not been hiding under a rock, I’ve known about Hereditary since 2018, maybe 2017. But it always seemed a little bit too much, so I held off, and held off, and kept holding off, and finally it took on a life of its own I guess? But, because I sort of have been hiding under a rock, I also managed to avoid virtually all information about the movie, and thus came into it essentially unspoiled, excepting only genre, really.

I would recommend this, as a great deal of the fun was in trying to unravel just what precisely was going on, with really only the title as a potential clue. On the downside, this means I kind of shouldn’t say much. So, the first thing that happens is grandma dies. Then we learn about the difficult dynamics in the family surrounding grandma. Then, one of the more shocking and disturbing <spoilers> I personally have ever seen occurs. Then, shit gets weird.

In addition to being compelling from beginning to end, I need to give a shout out to the sound design people, who did a masterful job. Also, the special effects surrounding zooming in on a miniature and it seamlessly becoming a real life room? Top notch. And, okay, going to put the spoiler behind a cut, because I really need to talk about this and, after all, most people in the world have seen it by now.

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Nochnoy Dozor

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This week’s podcast movie was a) vampires and b) a bitchin’ soundtrack. I think I will agree that Night Watch hits both of these marks, even if the soundtrack isn’t quite what I expected it to be. The movie is based on a series of six books, which I almost want to read. The premise is that there’s been a precarious balance between the forces of good and evil, portrayed as the Night Watch (the good guys who guard against evil) and the Day Watch (bad guys who guard against good). Because maintaining the balance is important, since all out war was going to just destroy everything, as per the prologue to the movie.

So now everyone who isn’t human and eventually discovers this about themselves gets to choose if they will join light or darkness, and the movie is about one such dude, who got caught up in the Night Watch during a sting operation when he hired a witch to make his wife stop cheating on him; he was the bait for the bad guy witch, you see. And now he’s trying to save a kid from a vampire but also save the world from ending because it turns out there’s a prophecy about a cursed virgin, and… you know what, I could go on for another two paragraphs and never once have to make a lick of sense. The point is, it’s a dark fantasy movie in an extremely Russian way, and I think most of what I liked about it is that it’s something that would never have been made in America.

It’s not that it’s exactly good, and me saying it that way should not be construed as it being exactly bad either. But it’s 100% Grade A different, and in these fallen days, that’s not nothing, you know?

The Karate Kid (2010)

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What happened was, I sat down to watch Child’s Play 2. This is because except for the first one and maybe Bride of Chucky[1], I never saw any of the movies in that series, and it seemed like it was time to give it a go. But then, when I pulled up my search bar to find what service it’s showing on, I saw an old search that had revealed a new Karate Kid movie set after Cobra Kai.

Is that compelling? Okay, maybe not, even though I truly loved Cobra Kai. BUT, my son also just started a karate class, because of how he needs something that will calm him and center him and give him a modicum of discipline, and martial arts sounds like the right thing for that. And so this new Karate Kid movie also somehow pulls in Jackie Chan from The Karate Kid remake, and I never saw that one, except now I have I suppose.

That’s it. That’s the whole story.

So anyway, this is a straight remake of the 1984 original, with different characters and setting, but somehow the precise same story beats. A 12 year old black kid and his mom move from Detroit to China, where he has no friends and where being friendly with a girl gets him beat up by some kids who know kung fu. (To be fair, he probably egged it on with some poorly thought out posturing.) He does something dumb to get petty revenge after they continue picking on him, and right when they are about to truly beat him up, the handyman at his apartment jumps in and wins a six on one fight without throwing a single punch.

So then Mr. Han agrees to teach young Dre kung fu[2] so he can enter a tournament and fight against the kids who are being trained at a “No Mercy” dojo(?) during said tournament instead of out in the streets, and that should settle everything. And then there are some montages, some 12 year old flirting, and a kung fu tournament, which was probably but not definitely bigger than All-Valley.

Yep. That’s the Karate Kid alright.

Now I can watch the new movie, in which Mr. Han and Daniel Larusso join forces for some reason to teach a new kid something. Possibly about karate.

[1] Huh. According to here, I’ve seen Seed of Chucky. Boy do I have no memory of that. Best part: still no idea whether I saw Bride.
[2] That’s the biggest problem with the fact of the remake. At no point is anyone a karate kid.

Weapons (2025)

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The guy who made Barbarian[1] just made another movie. In Weapons, a whole classroom of kids just up and run away from home, on the same night, at the same time. As you can imagine, everyone in town finds this event to have been very wtf. If you are anything like them, you are wondering: how did this happen? Why did this happen? If you are anything like humans in general, you are also wondering: who can we blame?

Anyway, that’s it. That’s the movie. If you want to know what happens next, or if you liked Barbarian, then you definitely want to watch this movie. Barbarian is a better horror movie, but Weapons is I think closer to mystery than pure horror in the first place, which makes a difference in comparing them. Either way, they are structured similarly, and I like to think they are set in the same universe of Zach Cregger’s mind, a universe in which I’m excited to see what comes next.

[1] I just saw that again, earlier in the weekend. Man, it is an all time baller.

Tales from the Darkside: The Movie

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It’s been weeks. I don’t even a little bit remember what the podcast random dice were. Probably one of them was anthology, maybe? Regardless, the movie they watched four years ago and therefore I am watching today is the movie version of Tales from the Darkside, a show I never really watched back in the day. I hope it was better than this movie was, though? Someone called it (the movie I mean) a secret version of Creepshow 3, which never got made for whatever reason, but wow are the Creepshows better.

So, there are four stories. In the first one, a kid gets kidnapped by a witch and has to Scheherazade his way out of getting cooked for a dinner party, but for some reason using the witch’s own book of scary stories, all of which she should have read before? Did not make a lick of sense. This story, via the book, provides the frame for the other three.

Then in the second one, Christian Slater and Steve Buscemi have a Re-Animator relationship sort of, only it’s a mummy and a sister thing instead of dead bodies and a girlfriend thing. It was fine as far as it went, but the twist at the end did not make the slightest bit of sense to me.

In the third, someone adapted a Stephen King story about a hitman assassinating a cat, which truly did have a Creepshow vibe, but without the comic book stills and the crypt keeper, it felt cheesy instead of delightfully over the top. Which is too bad, as it might otherwise have been the best of the bunch.

Finally, in the actual best of the bunch, James Remar plays a starving artist with a dark secret who unexpectedly finds love and success, except for, you know, “dark secret”. The sad thing was when the witch from the connective story even knew it was the best story they told the whole time. Like, you should not admit which child is your favorite, yo. It’s not kosher!

I’m not mad I saw the movie, exactly, but I’m mad it took me this long to see it, as by rights I should have moved on to better stuff long since.

Halloween Ends

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I saw Halloween Kills four years ago, and when the final entry in the trilogy[1] had not yet been released. It was released the next year, and yet here I am four years later and only finally watching it. Kids, I think, is the only answer worth mentioning.

Unlike Halloween Kills, I am disappointed to report, the next movie is not a direct continuation of its predecessor. Instead, three or four years have passed. Also unlike its predecessors, Halloween Ends is not a Halloween movie. Set in the Halloween universe, I think? But at least two thirds a different kind of movie entirely. I think I liked it for what it was, but it took a while to adjust away my expectations from what it was not.

What it is: a new character that we’ve never seen before experiences an intensely personal accidental tragedy, and then a few years later becomes entangled with Laurie Strode via her granddaughter Allyson. Also, Michael Myers is still unaccounted for, which has short and long term consequences to the plot’s development. And, look, I’m being too coy to call this an actual review, but at the same time, if you can stomach the idea of a movie that is mostly “in the Halloween universe” instead of an actual third movie in a trilogy[1], I’d hate to spoil it for you. Especially when it is a very spoilable movie.

Two things of note though: there’s a Darcy the Mail Girl cameo, and also the series ends on an emotionally satisfying note. By which I mean, it’s up to you how happy or unhappy you are with the ending, but you cannot say they did not provide an ending.

[1] sort of a trilogy

Kolskaya sverhglubokaya

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Back in the late ’90s and then ongoing for the next twenty or so years, off and on when he did not consider himself retired, I spent a lot of time listening to the Art Bell Show. Hell, I still listen to reruns, it’s a great soundtrack for falling asleep. One of the things I remember hearing about, back in those days, was the massively deep hole in Russia from which recording equipment heard screams and moans, like seven miles down, and had they found hell?! Other than the recording itself, which okay was a little disquieting but could have been produced by anyone from anywhere, I do not recall any compelling evidence being provided. But that’s kind of the point of Art Bell. He gives you cool hypotheticals and lets you feel spoopy, as the kids used to say, and then at the end of the episode the world is still pretty regular, no aliens or ghosts or bigfeet or nothin’.

I never did really hear anything else about that Superdeep hole. Until now, sort of?

Set just before the fall of the Soviet Union, a lady scientist with a dark past and a whole bunch of military dudes are sent to a miles-deep research facility in Siberia to figure out why things have gotten weird. It’s almost exclusively from her point of view, which results in really solid tension building as people head off to deal with this or that mysterious occurrence, and you might hear screaming or gunfire, but you don’t know what actually happened, and what they report back isn’t as useful as it could be at explaining things.

I was reminded a lot of that oil rig game I played last year, but with a serial numbers filed off Russian cast of Aliens. Effectively creepy, high stakes, and intense. Can recommend.