Monthly Archives: September 2025

Raw (2016)

This week’s movie from Summer 2021 of the podcast was honestly kind of a spoiler as the scare and I forget what as the style, because man I’m bad at this. The downside of talking about Raw is that I’m going to have to jump into those spoilers, because it’s that kind of movie. But not yet!

So there’s this vegetarian chick from a vegetarian veterinarian family, and it’s almost time to go to vet school! But also, vet school is really weird. Source: the movie, but it apparently involves getting hazed by upperclassmen and even professors? Like, the whole incoming class gets Carried, and hell, probably with actual pig blood, why not? They sure have access to some! Plus weird all night mandatory raves and closet makeouts. It’s honestly a lot more like a mixed-gender fraternity than a professional medical school for animals. Er, about animals.

But the thing is, one of the hazings is to eat a pickled rabbit kidney. And kind of like being introduced to the new religious viewpoints (or political viewpoints, or sexual awakenings) that college brings to many people, it just stands to reason that if you give a confirmed lifelong vegetarian a hunk of meat, they’re gonna go all out with it, you know?

Spoilers below.

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Village of the Damned (1960)

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I haven’t even gotten to the end of the previous episode yet, to find out how we got to this movie, although I plan to provide an update in the footnote[1]. But it turns out even though I knew like 35-45% of the story, I had never actually seen Village of the Damned. And to be fair, I probably would have told you I knew more like 75% of the story, before I saw it.

It shares an astounding amount of DNA with WandaVision. See, there’s this village that’s cut off from the outside world, and before you know it, some magical children are the most important thing happening. If you leave out the witch and the android, it’s practically identical? Okay, but seriously, there’s this village where everyone falls asleep, including people who get too close. After they just as mysteriously wake up, bam, wait a couple months and it turns out all the ladies in town are pregnant. Even the ones whose husbands had been at sea for a year, or who were quite adamant about being virgins.

Then, all the kids are creepy blond/es with glowing eyes who grow up too fast and know too much, and have other probably not magical after all properties that it would be a spoiler to mention, and basically it’s a race to analyze whether this is about the recent Nazi menace, or Cold War paranoia, or fear of the incoming generation, or what other underlying existential terror the writers and directors were grappling with.

The glowing eyed menacing stare part is pretty great, until you realize any time it’s happening, it’s a freeze frame. Even with that, though, I liked it. You can tell why it’s a seminal classic of the “evil children” horror subgenre.

[1] It turns out to have been style British, and scare Altered. I understand why they tried to stay away from werewolves, but at the same time, I’m not convinced the children nor the village were altered in any meaningful way. Oh well. Still a pretty great movie!

Caveat (2020)

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I saw one of those too clever mystery movies that is amazing if you let it wash you along, but as soon as you start to think about it, everything kind of falls apart. So there’s this scruffy, apparently partially amnesiac drifter who gets hired by his former landlord to watch the landlord’s niece for a few days out in the backwoods. See, the niece is mentally imbalanced, and the uncle is just, ugh, I can’t cope, but I’ll pay you to cope! There’s just this one little Caveat…

Okay, maybe two. The house is on an island, only reachable by boat, and the uncle intends to leave with the boat for the aforementioned few days, but mainly it’s that the drifter has to be locked into a harness with a long chain to allow him to wander some of but not all of the house, as the niece doesn’t want him to be able to get into her room, for example.

It’s a pretty interesting premise, on the face of it. What happened here? Why is the uncle being so weird? But if you think for too long, you’ll start asking other questions, like, why would anyone ever agree to this job? Why is there a lockable harness chained into the basement cement that can reach most of the house but not all of it? If the niece is unstable, why let her have a crossbow? Why is the spoiler in the basement untouched by the passage of time? And so on.

It’s not that it’s a bad movie, it’s just that maybe don’t trust it to have good answers to any of these questions, and enjoy the atmosphere instead. Because there’s definitely atmosphere out the wazoo. Not the least of which is the gratuitous screaming foxes.

Amazing Tales: A Game for Children Who Love Adventures Revised Edition

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Fastest I’ve read a book in about forever, but also it’s short. Honestly, I was surprised by quite how fast I managed it all the same, since Amazing Tales is a role-playing game sourcebook. See, I had this idea to play D&D with the kids, and then Mary had the idea that maybe we start with something a little lower key and kid-focused, and this is what she found.

And I have to say, it fits the bill. Honestly, it’s pretty clever. First, you pick a genre, which is to say The Deep Dark Woods (animal/fairy fantasy), Magical Kingdoms Long Ago (generic fantasy), The Pirate Seas (swashbuckling, but also probably fantasy) and Among the Stars (sci-fi, obvs). But also it would be pretty easy to take what you wanted from the former two settings and include them in the latter two settings. Or for that matter to make them space pirates.

Then your kid makes a character, which is to say, something that fits the setting. Is it a pirate captain? A robo-dinosaur with jetpack legs? A fairy who is also a princess? Then they get four skills that they’re good at, like Being Brave, Doing Science, Marksmanship, etc, and one of them they’re best at, second best, third best, and last best, and each skill gets a descending die, from d12 to d6. Then, anytime they want to do something that seems hard, they pick a skill, say what they’re doing, and roll. 3 or higher succeeds! And you either tell them how they succeeded and what next, or how things got worse and now what will they do?

It’s a kid game, obviously nothing irrevocably bad happens, but I suppose it could get hairy now and then, and mostly you’re trying to tell a story with them about how things went great. RPG 101, or so? I suppose someday soon I’ll find out how it goes.

Never Flinch

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Stephen King keeps writing murder mystery novels, possibly because he likes the genre but I think mostly because he likes his mystery solver character Holly Gibney. Never Flinch actually has two such mysteries. In the first one, there’s a serial killer who is targeting random people but naming them as proxies for the jury pool of a man who was innocent, but sent to jail and then murdered there. In the second one, one of those religious nuts that likes to blow up abortion clinics is hunting a lady who is going around the country encouraging people to vote for better state representatives to expand abortion access on a state by state basis.

As I know I’ve said before, King with an axe to grind is simply not as good of an author as King with his imagination flowing freely. I agree with all of his politics, and I nevertheless continue to wish they would not infect his books. It’s just too… apparent. Takes me out of the narrative, it does. And in this case, it’s half the plot. So, y’know. There’s that.

All the same, one of the things at which he excels is weaving disparate pieces of a narrative toward each other like three freight trains that seem to be on different tracks but it turns out they’re all headed for the same place, and if you think only two trains can crash into each other because of the way that train tracks work, well, that’s sort of my point, innit? So that’s the part of the story that was great. (And also, I share his enjoyment of his character.)

The only remaining downside of this book is that, the pieces of the plot woven together, the crescendo reached… the weaving was great, you see, but the crescendo was… fine. It was fine. It was not great. All in all, it was a mid book, which still means I followed it breathlessly and wanted to know how it turned out the whole time, because you see it was a mid book on a Stephen King scale. And I do love me some King. Ask anyone.

But I can also be honest with myself in the aftermath of that aforementioned trainwreck.

À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma

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It started, like it does a lot more than is probably apparent from the individual offerings here at Shards of Delirium[1], with Joe Bob. The first episode of The Last Drive-In this month was a sequel movie about Coffin Joe, a Brazilian villain (or anti-hero, back before that was a thing people said) I had never previously heard of. The two-pronged catch was, a) I have of course never seen the first movie, and b) I could not stay awake past the first 20 minutes of the sequel because of having had three vaccines earlier in the day.

Obviously, I decided to watch the first movie first, which I now have. My conclusion is that the choice to not air At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul was the correct one. Joe is a mortician, and he’s a pretentious self-absorbed dick, but in a way that is initially hilarious. He strikes dramatic poses from on high, he mocks the superstitions of the plebes (including faith), he beats his wife at only period-appropriate levels, that kind of thing. …okay, the last one wasn’t hilarious, but ultimately this is my point. Coffin Joe of this first movie is, as soon as his plan kicks off, supremely unlikeable.

That plan is to have a son. The downside is, his wife is barren. So he gets rid of her, picks a new girl, gets rid of anyone standing in the way of acquiring her, and so on until he gets caught up in some kind of consequence, and I ultimately did not understand why people like him or would watch sequels. Then I did watch the sequel, wherein he’s an anti-hero with likeable qualities instead of just a wife-beating dick, and even though he’s still clearly a villain, he’s a lot more fun, and so ultimately, I would say it’s fine to give This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse a try, even if it has one of the worst endings of any movie I’ve ever seen. (But that was not Joe’s fault[2], and is undone in the third movie [which I have not seen], so yay.)

The sequence in which Joe is walking alone at night on All Hallow’s Eve[3] and runs into or maybe hallucinates the annual procession of the Dead is pretty great, though.

[1] And like is probably eminently apparent from the site in aggregate
[2] Joe the director, not Joe the character, although it turns out they are portrayed by the same human person.
[3] or maybe it was the Day of the Dead, but since it was at night and what I’m about to say happened, I assume it was the night before

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.