Monthly Archives: October 2020

A Night in the Lonesome October revisited

Cool thing about finally reading A Night in the Lonesome October again: I have done this on a month when October ended in a full moon, as the plot demands. Also, and if I’m being real, moreso cool, I did it as a family. I mean, Malcolm wasn’t really old enough to catch the finer points of the adventures of Snuff and his human, Jack, and he doesn’t have the literary context to catch the sundry references on display, but he does like to hear me read.

If this gets to be annual, which I don’t fully expect that it will, I am not going to write a new review each year, in which I decline to discuss the plot any more deeply than I already have. But this time seems relevant nevertheless. And so, a fairly belated Happy Halloween!

From the Dark (2014)

There’s something to be said for a tidy, self-contained monster movie. I mean, look at Alien!

From the Dark is one such entry into that genre, in which a happily bickering Irish couple run into trouble when the driver[1] ignores GPS instructions, resulting in their being stuck in the mud, way off the beaten track[2] and just after sunset, but conveniently near a farmhouse where the old man who owns the place is sitting in the dark in his living room, mumbling incoherently and totally incapable of providing the assistance for which they had gone looking. Things go from bad to worse when they discover something else is out there in the dark with them.

Late October is the perfect time to watch this movie. Not only is it scary movie season anyway, but also the gray dreary outside keeps the house nice and dark any time of day, which fits the extremely minimal lighting aesthetic of the flick. As you can see, I don’t really want to say anything else about the movie itself, as, spoilers, but: it was a good ‘un.

[1] Guess which one was the driver. Go on, have a guess.
[2] Get it?

Party Hard Die Young

There are two kinds of slasher movies. The first kind is a gradually building sequence of events and accompanying tension in which targeted characters first learn that murder is on the menu and then over the remainder of the film try desperately to stay alive long enough to find out who is behind the murders, in the hopes of saving themselves; this of course does not work for virtually any of them, but that’s the tenor of the semi-genre. Examples: Friday the 13th, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (aka part 5), the majority of one-off slasher films.

The other kind is almost always a member of a longer series, and everyone knows who the killer is because he’s[1] an unstoppable supernatural force. The trying to stay alive part is the same, as is the success rate, just without the false hope that figuring out what’s going on would help. Examples: any movie set on Elm Street, the remainder of the F13 franchise.

Party Hard, Die Young is a literal-minded (or, more to the point, -titled) example of the first kind of slasher movie, about a small group of graduating German high school seniors, or whatever they might be called instead in Germany, who were all in the same home room, or however German classes are divided up. Eight or ten of them, anyway? I lost track of that sentence. Let me start over. It’s about a group of German teens off to a summer EDM[2] festival on an island in the Adriatic, to party hard before going off to college, but then most of them die young instead.

Get it?

The description on Shudder and in IMDb makes reference to how slick and stylish and post-Scream it is, and, man, I just can’t tell what they’re talking about. Like, it has a modern feel to it, both the film quality and of course the lighting and soundtrack; it’s definitely not an ’80s slasher movie. That’s fine, but if you say post-Scream to mean everything looks and sounds better, instead of grainy 35mm film stock and spooky sound editing, man did you miss what made Scream ground-breaking.

In summation, this was a pretty good albeit by the numbers slasher mystery, and mainly it made me hungry for someone to make the same movie, but the setting is Burning Man.

[1] Where, I ask you, are the female-led supernatural slasher serieses? Get it together, not-Hollywood!
[2] Electronic Dance Music, boomer

Guns Akimbo

I have heard of Guns Akimbo before, so the Amazon Prime rule does not apply.

So, remember BumFights, where people would pay bums to, y’know, fight each other, and record it on their phones, and then upload those videos and charge people to watch them, and voilà, instant albeit troubling profit[1]? Imagine that world advanced by technology and the decline and fall of civilized society, and you have Skizm, a website where people pay to watch random folk hunt and murder each other.

Now imagine that Harry Potter hadn’t been a wizard, so he ended up as a mobile game software developer with a way too cool girlfriend who came to her senses and dumped him, and now he’s got nothing going for him, so he trolls the Skizm website insulting its viewership one at a time. Until he insults the wrong person, and ends up home-invaded, knocked out, and wakes up with a pair of guns literally bolted to his hands, because he has become the latest contestant, with 24 hours to kill or be killed by his opponent.

Sure, the plot is a little deeper than that, but you know everything you need to know. Either that’s hilarious and you want to watch it, or you’re a better person than I am.

[1] I did a modicum of research and determined that it was too long ago for phone recordings, was released on DVD, and also maybe what I’m remembering was more backlash hype than reality. But that’s not important to the metaphor.

The Love Witch

Movies in the ’60s were weird. Because they had all these eye-popping colors, and would film people in sharp focus while driving and the background looked like completely different film stock, even though I think it was actually real instead of matted, and everyone’s performance was very earnest and serious, like the fate of the world depended on finding a new boyfriend or solving that mysterious murder or discussing whether feminism is worthwhile in the modern world. No naturalism to speak of in really any aspect of a ’60s movie, is I think my point.

The Love Witch was made just a handful of years ago, but you’d believe the filmstock was kept in an airtight container for the past 50+ years, if not for the occasional modern vehicle in street shots, because every other aspect is pitch perfect. Elaine, per her interior monologue, recently lost her husband and became a witch, and now she needs to find love again, which she plans to do by finding a man, giving him everything he could possibly want[1], and also a love potion she mixed up on top of that. That premise established, all that remains is to find out whether she actually knows what she wants, as well as how far she will go to get it. Plus a bunch of random burlesque dancing, naked coven ceremonies, creepy MRA-disguised-as-ultra-feminist warlocks, largely gratuitous tarot, and the most random, tiny renfaire you ever did see.

And a theme song that must be heard to be believed, “Love Is a Magikal Thing”.

[1] Free access to sex and sandwiches? I’m only barely clear on what else she had in mind, if anything.

Humanoids from the Deep

I cannot justify any claim that Monster (Humanoids from the Deep) is a good movie. First of all, were coastal fishing towns in California ever even a thing? I have the sense that every inch of usable beach is for being beachfront for zillionaires, not for fishing boats that compete with each other and sometimes blow up and also there’s a cannery being built that will save the town, unless it will violate a treaty with the local tribe and they decide to sue about it and ruin the town. It’s like, what even was the point of manifest destiny?

None of that has anything to do with any humanoids from the deep, but then again neither does a guy in a tent seducing chicks with a ventriloquist dummy (and the same ventriloquism jokes you hear every time that concept is raised), and yet here we are. My point, if I am somehow failing to make it, is that this movie doesn’t make a lick of sense, and is also generally offensive in that 1980 second card on the late night double feature kind of way.

But that’s okay! It revels in being nonsensical, since really everything that happens is a vehicle for ladies to get naked so they can be chased (and as you can clearly see on the poster, be mated with) by fishmen (not to be confused with the fishermen, although clearly this also happens from time to time; the difference is the fishermen understand consent) who have evolved for… some reason? The scientist who was clearly an inspiration for the scientist lady in Deep Murder explained it at some point, but I didn’t really follow.

Roger Corman was probably not a good man? But he knew how to produce a B-movie, is all I’m really trying to say here. Another thing I suppose I cannot justify is how to square being a modern liberal with loving this kind of trash. Mostly I don’t try, though. It’s just who I am?

Far Cry

You know the rule about movies that you can’t make a good adaptation of a video game? It’s not 100% true, but it sure mostly is. I’m pretty sure I played the video game Far Cry since the inception of this blog, a fact which will be confirmed or denied by the link or lack of link just above, at the reference point.

Anyway, I have come here mostly to say that Far Cry (the film) lives down to those expectations. Its sins include: giving away way too much of the plot way too soon – the game was so great about the slow reveal; cartoonishly evil characters – like, at some point, when you’re a mercenary army and someone outside your hierarchy is disciplining your members by shooting them in the head, and you’re all armed and outnumber that person by 20 to 1, you just take the person out and blame it on the insurgent guy who everyone already knows is running around the island; extraneous and unfunny sidekicks; unnecessary to the plot sex scenes; even worse, unnecessary to the plot sex scenes where you skip the actual sex part of the scene.

There are probably more sins than these, but I was working and not being very distracted by the movie from working (which is both good and disappointing at the same time), so I reckon I had plenty of time to miss some. I didn’t even know they made this movie, to be honest, and finding it on Amazon Prime Video definitely feeds my theory about the contents of that service!