Category Archives: Film

Noroi

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Podcast movie! The scare was demons, and the style was found footage, and the movie was Noroi: The Curse.

Found footage can be silly. Why are these people recording everything? Why, having seen the things they are recording, do they not make different choices instead of just continuing to record? How did they get so good at filming things? This latter clearly doesn’t always apply. Sometimes, they lean into the “bad camera operator” angle. Sometimes, and thankfully this is one of those, they lean into the professional angle. Sometimes, both.[1]

So anyway, there’s this documentary filmmaker in Japan, and he catches wind of some strange goings on at a local apartment complex. I forget the instigating incident. But something weird happens with a little boy staring out of a window, and some inexplicable sounds on his footage, and he starts pulling on threads. A psychic girl here, a tinfoil clad conspiracy theorist there, dead pigeons everywhere you look, and before you know it there’s a mysterious name, a drowned village, and everyone involved in the documentary are dropping like flies.

Ah, you are saying, why didn’t he just quit? I don’t disagree, but I never felt like he made an inexplicable choice until the last ten minutes of the film, so, not too bad as such things go. Anyway, I’m surprised I missed this one. It was 2005, right around the time the whole J-horror thing got so big that their movies were being remade in Hollywood constantly for a year or two. And yet, not a clue it existed[2]. Which is a pity, as it hangs together very well and is pretty scary. Recommended.

[1] I’m looking at you, Blair Witch Project.
[2] haha oops. 2005 is when the documentary was made. This came out in 2017. No wonder I never heard of it, it’s new!

Wake Up Dead Man

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Did you know they made a third Knives Out movie? Of course you did, it was like two months ago and you’ve already seen it. …and now I have too!

Wake Up Dead Man is a locked room mystery in which a fire and brimstone priest with a small but dedicated congregation is murdered, apparently by the new assistant priest (who has some specific Catholic title, and I will not be able to help you more than that) with a motive of “stop ruining the church”. But once Benoit Blanc gets involved, well, you know there’s going to be more to it than that.

The movie did a thing I’ve never seen before. Well, first it did something I’ve seen lots of times, which is dole out information in a way that recontextualizes what you thought you knew. And it does this several times. I could tell I was in for a treat when I had the idea it was basically all over but the “gather everyone in a room and tell them what really happened” scene, only to realize there was more than an hour left. Which brings me to what it did that I had never seen. The consulting detective, having been called in to solve the case, actually shows up in the middle of things and well before the events of the case are even over.[1]

Anyway, it’s a mystery, so I don’t really want to go crazy with detail, but I felt that the subject matter was treated with surprising kindness, even though it was ripe for lampooning or even axe-grinding. The typically star-studded cast was as good as you expect them to be, I could not stop chuckling, and every time I thought I had a handle on what was going on and felt very clever, I was 25-50% right at best, but never in a way that felt cheap or like I was actually writing the smarter story in my head. Good stuff.

[1] I know. Christie had Poirot onsite for murders all the time. The difference is, he just happened to be there when the events were set into motion. This was a different thing where you would expect the police and famous detective to only show up once the crime is over, but in fact the crime still had days left to go. Look, it’s unusual, okay!

Don’t Fuck in the Woods 2

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I know what you’re thinking. Who gave those people more money?

I’ll do you one better. This was enough more money to improve everything about the premise. Better filmstock, better camera work, an actual plot, longer sex scenes of sufficiently improved quality that I think this has to fall into a heretofore unexplored genre, erotic horror[1]. It’s even feature length, albeit only like 75 minutes not counting the credits and slightly less damning blooper reel. (I’m pretty sure this one didn’t have an intimacy coordinator either, though.)

Don’t Fuck in the Woods 2 picks up the very next day. Apparently, the woods in which the original fuckery occured butt up against a summer camp, which is just opening for the season. And you know what that means: horned up counselors who are at least a couple of days away from having any serious responsibilities. (Also, a folksy nurse trying to be an adult to the teens and a handyman with a dark and mysterious past, because why not?)

So before you can say “fuck me in the, heehee, woods“, you’ve got a blood-soaked final girl warning all of them about what is about to happen, nobody listening, and a swarm of penis-shaped slugs penetrating anything that moves. Anybody can die at any moment, and since I know you’re going to ask: yes, they left things wide open for number three.

If there’s anything disappointing about this franchise, it’s that the premise is not quite as straightforward as it could be. There are at least a few people who not only don’t fuck in the woods, but even one or two who never actually try to. And yet, this does not grant them any form of immunity to the coming bloodbath. So I guess you might as well just do it, right?

[1] Erotic thrillers? The ’90s are littered with them. Softcore porn pretending to be light horror? Sure, Misty Mundae will always be the queen of that barely explored subgenre from the Oughts. But actually a horror movie with enough sex scenes to be erotic yet not so many or so explicit to move into being porn instead? I’ve never seen it happen until today.

Don’t Fuck in the Woods

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The last time I saw a movie that was this refreshingly straightforward about how things would go, it was Stay out of the Fucking Attic.

So the deal is, some young adult types (the couple who arrived early only to mysteriously vanish, the sister of the girl in that couple and her girlfriend, a preppy couple, a stoner, and a video store chick) go camping in the woods. In many cases, these people engage in some form of sex, in direct contravention of the film’s title.

Don’t Fuck in the Woods is director Shawn Burkett’s distillation of every ’80s slasher movie in a rural setting. Skip all the backstory about the tortured summer camp cook or twin survivor of a boating accident or rabid grizzly bear and just go straight to a creature who hunts by sex pheromone or something, and don’t even explain that part, just film some people fucking so later you can film them being eviscerated. There’s no foreplay here, just a lean hour[1] of badly filmed sex and violence.

But you know what? Expectations were solidly met.

[1] It says 73 minutes, but don’t be fooled. That’s three minutes of showing the cast at their nudest and most bloody under the name cards of the actors, followed by a ten minute blooper reel in which they make it abundantly clear that this is not the kind of production that hires an intimacy coordinator.

Kandisha (2020)

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Based on a very narrow sample size of this movie from five years ago, I have to say that I am shocked by how casually racist French kids are with each other. This has nothing to do with the plot of the movie, nor particularly with the character development for that matter. It was just an adjustment I had to make. (Really, it’s probably like how mean girls in like Heathers or Mean Girls call each other bitch, and mean to be endearing. Of course, that doesn’t really sell itself as a solution either, if you give it more than a second’s thought.)

Again, not the point of the movie. So there are these French girls who I think all live in the same apartment building? They for sure go to the same school, or maybe more like used to go to and are now too old for that, but maybe not. Either way, not much schooling happening. And they’re surrounded by their boyfriends and baby daddies and exes and brothers and so on, and they are also spray paint taggers for some reason, with a secret gang tag all their own and everything. It’s very bonding.

Having established all that, two inciting incidents occur in close proximity. In the first, the white girl finds the name Kandisha tagged [by people not them] under some wallpaper, and the Muslim girl recognizes her as a Moroccan legendary figure who takes revenge on behalf of wronged women. Then they jokingly try to summon her, with no results. In the second incident, later that same night, the white girl is brutally attacked and attempted-raped by an ex-. Later still that same night while showering off the blood and detritus of the evening’s events, she tries to summon Kandisha again, with rather stronger results.

The catch is: you can’t really control a vengeance demon, and without almost any pause at all, the innocent[1] men in their lives are dropping like flies. If only there were some way to call her off altogether! Welp, good luck with that.

[1] At the least, more innocent.

The Housemaid (2025)

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Date night coin toss between this one and Primate, but Mary had read the book and wanted to see the movie, so The Housemaid it was. All I really knew about this movie going in is that it’s a thriller and that Sydney Sweeney, who is broadly considered the hot girl these days, gets naked in it.[1] I’ll try not to go much further myself, insofar as it had a nice, twisty plot the way thrillers ought to have.

So Sydney Sweeney is interviewing for a live-in housemaid job at one of those rich people houses in wealthy suburb NYC, the ones where all the rich families know each other and all their maids and nannies know each other, and where the wives don’t have jobs but also still need help because of all the parenting-adjacent and/or charity-adjacent tasks they perform, so they can be seen by each other to be doing these tasks while not actually getting their hands dirty with any actual charity work or parenting. And because of dark secrets of her own, she really needs the job but also knows she isn’t going to get the job, right up until she does.

And when I say I wish I’d known less, a lot of what I mean is that I wish I’d been able to tell which things seemed suspicious / concerning on their own merits, and not because I already knew something was going to be off-kilter. Like the door with a lock on the outside and scratches on the inside from ten minutes in but also that room is where she now lives? 100% sus if you know the genre, maybe plausibly explained in the moment if you do not know what genre you’re watching though? No way to tell really, since I did know.

Anyway. The point is, she’s a maid, and her lady of the house employer might actually be secret twins, one of whom hates her, so different are her behaviors between one scene and the next. But it’s okay, because the husband guy is not only hot as all get out, he’s also extremely empathetic, and anyway nobody else much likes Amanda Seyfried (the wife) either, and I’m sure this will all turn out fine for everyone involved.

Fun, sporadically steamy, ride.

[1] Does that make it an erotic thriller? I think like two more sex scenes and probably yes, or maybe I more accurately mean two more minutes’ worth of sex scenes. But nah, the threshold, whatever it most accurately is, was not crossed.

How to Train Your Dragon (2025)

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So, remember when that one movie about training dragons came out? And then 15 years later, they did a live action remake?

Look, I don’t want to say this How to Train Your Dragon is a shot for shot remake of the animated feature, just with human actors in place of the animated voice actors. For one thing, the new one is longer.

But… yeah, the truth is, it’s the same movie. And I already reviewed it once, so.

Son (2021)

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My giant list of Shudder movies to watch has gotten to where the new movies were coming out in 2021. Nice.

That said, man I’ve made a hash of this review. The problem is, I watched the movie over a week ago, then kind of forgot I had watched it, then watched another movie, then let more days pass because that review is going to be pretty easy, then glanced at my Shudder queue and realized my mistake.

So there’s this pregnant lady on the run, played by Laurie Strode’s granddaughter, and after she resentfully gives birth to the child during the prologue, we jump forward multiple years to her moderately free-wheeling single motherhood. That is, until she finds a horde of creepy people in her Son‘s bedroom, Rosemary’s Baby-style, and then he gets very sick. Downside is, there’s no evidence of the people and basically nobody believes her, except for this one Good Cop trope guy who keeps showing up whenever she has yet another evidence-free freakout, and before long, you can feel the chemistry between them starting to build.

That is, until her son finds a more successful cure than the doctors had as yet provided for his affliction, at the expense of the neighbor babysitter, and now they are forced to go on the run from both the law and her past, still unbelieved. But also, we slowly begin to realize… what if it really is all in her head? If that’s the case, just who is it leaving a string of bodies across flyover America? It’s like if You Might Be the Killer weren’t a comedy. I’m not saying I did not have a number of pretty shrewd guesses as to what was going on, but I am saying it was a fantastic slow burn of a movie that kept me guessing right up until the final scene, and you cannot ask for much more than that.

Vicious Fun

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A difference between the movies of the 1980s and the movies of the 2020s is that, for the most part, we have a more enlightened view of the way people ought to behave. For example, if you were a judgmental nerd with a crazy hot roommate in 1983, the arc of your story would be to win the roommate as a prize for your many inappropriate behaviours, such as berating her for wanting to watch Falcon Crest with her friends, or tailing her (admittedly scuzzball) date to a Chinese restaurant on the edge of town and inserting yourself into his life.

Whereas in the 2020s when you are that same loser character in 1983 under the same circumstances, and you take all of the same actions… you know, ultimately what I did not like about this movie is that he was still the protagonist at all. So be prepared for that, even if his end state isn’t quite as thoroughly rewarded as it once would have been.

The plot twist is that, after getting way too sorry for himself drunk and passing out in a supply closet of said Chinese restaurant, he wakes up to a small motivational self-help group in the main room of the now closed location. Before very long at all, he deduces that they’re not alcoholics so much as they are serial killers, and he’d better hope he can blend in if he wants to survive the night, much less get back to winning the heart of his roommate.

The other thing that would have made me like the movie more [aside from the aforementioned more sympathetic protagonist] is if I had not just seen the same overall plot play out across season one of the Dexter revival. Which is in no way their fault, since the movie predates the TV season by five years. Anyway, Vicious Fun was maybe sufficiently vicious, but definitely not sufficiently fun. I wanted more comedy out of my horror comedy than I actually received. Alas.

Videodrome

Horror podcast time. The scare was society, and the style was sexy / erotic. So naturally, they landed on David Cronenberg. I… if I’m being honest, I ought to rewatch the last 20 minutes of Videodrome, because everything happened so fast after he was given the gun that I don’t think I actually know what transpired. But also, I kind of don’t want to watch it again? So…

The Onion once wrote a man on the street interview piece during the 2000 election in which one of the interviewees indicated that Bush vs Gore was choice he made every weekend on Cinemax. That guy would have felt very comfortable watching Toronto’s CivicTV, the channel you take to bed with you. Channel 83 is programmed by a shockingly young James Woods, who is always on the hunt for the newest way to keep his audience satisfied. (Mostly with, you guessed it, either bush or gore.)

In addition to scouring the earth for the latest and lowest brow, he also advocates for his programming on local talk shows, explaining that he is not causing society to worsen, but rather giving people an outlet for their pre-existing base desires so they don’t enact them in reality. Which is honestly not far afield of the discussions that were happening a few years earlier in Eyes of Laura Mars, nor for that matter discussions that continue to happen today. At least, he briefly advocates that position before pivoting to hitting on fellow panelist and radio call-in show host Blondie[1]. Before you know it, he’s showing her the pirate broadcast out of Pittsburgh that he recently acquired, of people being plotlessly tortured and killed, but, you know, fake. Really. Definitely not a broadcast of actual harm and murders. Who could do something like that?

Anyway, she’s so into it that she wants to be a contestant[2], and heads off to Pennsylvania in search of Romero or whoever is putting the thing out into the world. When she never returns, James Woods goes down a rabbit hole trying to find out who is responsible for Videodrome (the name of the pirate broadcast his hacker intercepted, you see), what its purpose is, where Blondie ended up, really all of that. And suddenly shit gets weird. I’m talking pulsing videocassettes, involuntary body mods, and a climax so hallucinatory that I legitimately have no idea what happened.

No, that’s not true. Cronenberg is what happened.

[1] The band, not the comic strip
[2] It is unclear to me where the idea that this was open casting came from