Category Archives: Film

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

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

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The third new Marvel movie of the year. You can really tell that writer’s strike slowed things down for a minute.

The first thing I will say is that 2025 demonstrates that the claims about superhero fatigue aren’t correct. What people are tired of[1] is not superheroes, it’s having to keep track of nearly infinite interweaving threads to understand what’s going on in the next movie. So this summer where you have Superman that is the first movie of a new DCU continuity with no history to care about, and now Fantastic Four set on an alternate world by themselves without any of the stuff we’ve been aware of for the past 17 years[2]… this is a thing that people want.

Anyway. It was honestly pretty great?

First of all, this is the most believable Reed Richards I’ve seen in a very long time. He’s the same character I’ve lauded from Ultimate Fantastic Four who was always going to be evil, yet they found a way for him to be believably not evil. (As opposed to the generic comics answer of “he’s not a bad guy because he’s a good guy.”) And Pedro Pascal can apparently continue to play genre characters until the cows come home.

As for the rest of what’s going on… the world feels lived in. I would happily watch a series of shorts based on the several years they’ve been around, fighting their Red Ghosts and their Mole Men and their Wizards and oh please oh please oh please their Paste Pot Petes. I’m not sure in a world with just one superhero group I can believe they would be considered the world’s guardians, but I’m willing to let it slide.

Sue was amazing, Johnny was just a smidge underdeveloped (but that’s what sequels are for), and Ben’s essential sadness was nailed without anyone ever saying “Gee, look how sad (or worse, angry) Ben is!” I cannot imagine what someone coming to these characters for the first time would have thought, but I think it would work?

Oh, and the look of the movie was extremely stylish. Retrofuturism they say, ie what people in the past thought the future would look like. I’d still be fine if it looked that way right now, instead of the way it does look. Which is basically the same, only more drab in most places. So that part was also pretty great.

Lastly, the plot. You know what? The plot wasn’t the point. Introducing the characters was the point, and with that understanding of what’s going on, I really think they picked the right plot. Not an origin story, not a generic “here’s someone they’ve fought before.” Instead, a really big fight with really big characters, who I hope return some years from now in a sequel.

Third time in a row this year that I’m excited to see the next movie. Sometime in the midst of the quantumania of madness era, these started feeling like chores, and I didn’t even notice until now, when they do not.

[1] And here, die-hard fan though I am, I will include myself at least a little bit.
[2] god help us

Jurassic World: Rebirth

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Probably at some previous point, I understood that Jurassic World referred not just to the park, but to the fact of the dinosaurs having gotten loose and now they live here too, like it was the Jurassic all over again[1]. Anyway, they made a trilogy on that theme, and now that Chris Pratt has made enough money, they decided it was time for more Marvel alums to get in on that sweet, sweet dinosaur cash.

Here, therefore, are the things you should know about Jurassic World: Rebirth.

  1. There’s nothing “rebirth” about it. It’s still the same dinosaurs from the same consistent series of movies at the same consistent starting point as it was for every prior sequel. Furthermore, it doesn’t even feel like it’s meant to be a franchisal rebirth. This told a complete story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and no real hooks for sequels starring the same characters.
  2. It’s a little bit of a rip-off of a loving homage to several movies. I can see Jurassic Park 3 in there (with the sailboat family shoehorned into an otherwise straightforward snatch and grab plot), a decent chunk of Aliens (if Newt’s family had survived along with her, and to be fair that may cancel out JP3), and a whole lot of those old GI Joe 5-episode miniserieses they’d put out every year where the Joes and the Cobras are chasing parts of, for example, a weather control machine.
  3. There was no compelling reason to make this movie. Other than “give me some cash”, it doesn’t have a story that needed to be told. That sounds worse than it actually is, the story was fine, extraneous things can often be fine. But it was extraneous more than it was fine, you know?
  4. With that caveat: it was also fun. Possibly because I cannot accept what the writers posited the world to be like 30 years after the rise and fall of InGen, the dinosaur-cloning company. Those character inhabiting that world are all, “meh, I’ve seen dinosaurs, and mostly they’re boring murder machines, so who cares if they go extinct again, or that they ever existed in the first place?” Whereas I will probably never lose my childlike wonder for them, and they keep on looking pretty great in these movies. Thanks Steven Spielberg.
  5. The less said about the pointless “what if we make mutant dinosaurs?” subplot, the better, Pretend it never happened, and you have a better movie. Because wow, it adds nothing and is probably the thing that most made me consider whether the movie was necessary, a la point 3. If you have a subplot that would have been your main plot except you flubbed it entirely? That’s a bad sign.
  6. …but it was still fun, and I do not regret having seen it. The movie was not ruined for me, I just selectively edit a handful of the dinosaur characters to be something just as useful for the service needed in the plot during those scenes, but not pointless and dumb at the same time.
  7. I do a little bit regret not seeing Superman instead. But only a little bit.

[1] But mainly the Cretaceous, not I suppose that this is important to their larger point.

Boys from County Hell

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Imagine a small town. The kind everyone of a certain age who lives there wants to escape from, and within a rounding error of nobody ever actually does. Imagine the young men and women of that certain age, yearning for freedom. Imagine they’re in Ireland, and their town’s claim to fame is Bram Stoker tourism.

Now imagine there’s a cairn in the middle of a field, and legend says someone, or something, is buried under it. Something you wouldn’t want to run into at night, if you take my meaning. Also, the land is being sold for development, and one of our Boys from County Hell sees helping on the construction of that development as his ticket out, even if it means knocking over a few old stones, you know?

Once all the setup was finished and the main action commenced, I simply could not stop feeling the influence of Shaun of the Dead. Yes, vampires instead of zombies, but between the exotic UK accents and the slapstick absurdity and the occasional gore… yeah, there’s no way it wasn’t an inspiration. I daresay this is… well, it’s not a successor at all. I liked it, but come on. Shaun is just one of the best. And I don’t think they were going for homage. But I daresay the movies are having the same conversation with the audience, and this one is worthy of being in that conversation.

The Power (2021)

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A bad sign: I watched a movie, and then completely forgot to review it. Like, completely. I’m not sure that’s ever happened before, with the caveat that, arguably, I’d have no way to know?

The Power[1] (which I watched probably in late May; early June at the absolute latest) is most superficially about rolling blackouts in London in  the early 1970s, which I think were a real thing but do not have sufficient interest to research. So there’s this nurse fresh out of nurse school who is assigned to an infant ward at night, because the power will be out and they cannot be moved or something. For some reason, the details are hazy. So anyway, creepy hospital at night with no power, clearly this is my jam,

Then, weird things start happening. But are the things real? Are they possession? Prankster coworkers? A ghost? The strength of the movie, on paper at least, is in the second act’s tension when you cannot be sure what’s really happening. In practice… it never quite gelled for me. And it definitely didn’t stick with me afterwards!

To save you the trouble, yes there’s eventually clarity on what is going on, and why.

[1] I hate when this happens, but there are actually two movies with that name that came out in 2021. This is the one with the nurse, not the one with the gangster.

Fountain of Youth (2025)

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Archaeologist Harrison Purdue[1] had two children, neither of whom became archaeologists. Natalie Portman is an art museum curator, and John Krasinski is a… fortune hunter, maybe? Adventure seeker? Art thief? Anyway, he’s extremely dismissive of his sister for being boring instead of whatever he is, but nonetheless, he needs her help to fulfill a dying billionaire’s well-funded wish to, um, not die, by finding the Fountain of Youth.

On paper, it seems like it should have everything needed to be pulpy fun. Mysteries to solve, ancient conspiracies to unravel, lots of interested parties getting in each others’ ways. Even without the nod to the name, it should be a clear contender to usher in a new archaeology-adjacent franchise, in the wake of Indiana Jones winding down. But it just…. doesn’t work.

All of the individual pieces I mentioned above work and are fine. Maybe they even come together well enough? It’s hard for me to say with any certainty, probably because I was distracted by the acting. I’ve never seen Krasinski worse, and I usually consider him to be pretty solid; hell, he’s why I wanted to watch the movie. And he’s directed himself to good effect before, so I don’t think I can blame it on lack of direction either. But his character was bombastic and generally unlikeable, which is not the place you want to be, for this kind of movie. Worse, he constantly declaimed things, in a way no real person would ever do, like what you might expect to see in a high school production of Macbeth, but not in something people would pay to watch.

Portman was fine, and believe me, I know she’s worked through bad direction in the past. I’m pretty confident she could have been better, though, based on experiences with her elsewhere. But also, her character choices were just… implausible. If you think I’m talking about the kid, I am mostly talking about the kid, yes.

Thus, I turn to Guy Ritchie. I understand he has a good reputation, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything he’s made. …a brief pause ensues… Upon research, I’ve seen his Sherlock Holmes flicks, the ones with Robert Downey Jr, and nothing else. I deemed them pretty good, so, yeah. No idea at all what went wrong here, but the mustard, she has not been cut.

[1] Get it?

Communion (1976)

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Horror movies in the ’70s sure had a lot of names. IMDb says the original title was Communion, the title card called it Holy Terror[1], but the search terms and the podcast called it Alice, Sweet Alice. Which is not without its charms, to be sure, although the girl being like 12 or something makes it iffier.

So, there’s this girl Alice, and she’s not not a psychopath. Withdrawn because she’s unhappy with her parents’ divorce is a way to look at it, but most withdrawn kids don’t dress in feature-concealing transparent plastic masks and terrorize basically everyone around them, but especially their kid sisters portrayed by babby Brooke Shieldses. It doesn’t help matters that, rightly or wrongly, Alice perceives that everyone likes her sister in equal measure to how much they apparently dislike her.

Naturally, therefore, babby Brooke Shields winds up dead. And suddenly the movie becomes a giallo, in which the cops and Alice’s absentee father try to solve the mystery of who killed Alice’s sister, and why it was Alice. It was interesting, because I’ve never seen a US ripoff giallo, at least not since I knew enough to recognize one. Also, it was pretty good, and frequently pretty disturbing!

[1] My personal favorite

Violation (2020)

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It is difficult to talk about, and in fact difficult to want to talk about, Violation. This is not only, and perhaps not primarily, due to the subject matter. It is not only because I don’t want to accidentally reveal virtually any spoilers, although that may be the primary reason. It’s not only because I’m still not entirely certain what happened, although I’m not.

See, the movie is presented completely out of order of events. There are two sisters, one in the final death throes of her marriage, one moved to off the grid and learning how to be a survivalist. Over the course of events, which were legitimately difficult for me to piece together not because they were out of order so much as because they were fragmented so badly that it was difficult to tell where any given moment might fit even in retrospect, and not only that, whether any given moment had actually happened; over the course of those events, I was saying, a violation of trust occurs, with the result being the slowest burning, most intimately shot revenge story I’ve ever seen. I mean intimate in almost every sense of that word, but I will focus on the facts of how small the cast is and of how nearly every scene is shot in close frame, suffocatingly close. It’s almost impossible to separate the act of viewing the events from the events themselves. I’m used to a comfortable distance, as an audience member, and it was absolutely impossible to achieve that distance.

I am impressed by this movie, and I should probably watch it again, only I find that I don’t want to. It’s just too raw.