Tag Archives: Plex

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

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?

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

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!

How to Train Your Dragon (2010)

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Fifteen years later, and also a remake, and I’m only just now seeing the original How to Train Your Dragon. In fact, it’s because of the remake. There are new toys, and my kids like dragons, so they have the new toys, which begged the question, shouldn’t they know what’s the deal with these toys? And Bob’s your uncle.

The plot twist [that I’ve already revealed] being, shouldn’t I know what’s the deal with these toys? Which brings me to a fun fact, in which I can objectively prove that previews are getting worse. I did not learn until 2025 that the dragons were nominally the bad guys of the movie. I always took it straightforwardly that the loser kid who never fit in found a way to be awesome via dragon training, not that he was supposed to be dragon killing this whole time! And I mean, it’s not really a spoiler for the movie, since you learn it during the opening scene narration. But I thought it was a clever subversion of the original previews’ expectations, and now the current previews are all, we cannot subvert anything, as our audience is dumber than ever. Or something like that. My point is, fuck[1] screw previews.

Anyway.

So there’s this Viking kid who is scrawny and engineering-minded, instead of being large and strong and (let’s say) single-minded. Which means he doesn’t fit in. Oh, sure, he still wants to kill dragons, same as everybody else, he just wants to use tools instead of muscles to do it. What a maroon! But once he actually manages to use said tools to get a dragon in a position where he can kill it, he… comes up with a new plan.

This is a kid movie, so the result of the new plan is that he ends up fitting in after all, and everyone learns a valuable lesson about accepting people for who they are. And, okay, as a parent, that’s a good lesson. Also, as a parent, I recognize that sometimes it’s a lesson parents need to learn as much as kids do. But the real point is, the actual plot underlying these lessons is at least halfway decent as well. Plus, riding around on a dragon is cool. I would not, I think, affirmatively recommend this movie to anyone unless you really like dragons and can live with kid movies, but I would not disrecommend the movie to anyone, if they were about to be in front of it. Because, you know, it’s fun!

[1] Family movie, I should watch my language.

Jigoku (1960)

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This week’s approximately 4 year-old-podcast movie was Japanese and 1960s, I am pretty sure? The latter is the slight uncertainty. Anyway, Jigoku is… not precisely weird, so much as foreign. So the first thing that happens[1] is a bright young college kid who is marrying the professor’s daughter and in all ways has the perfect future ahead of him, is a passenger in the car of his friend who is basically a total dick at every moment from his first scene to his last, our hero[2] I was saying is in the car with his friend Dickchan when the friend does a hit and run on a Yakuza guy.

Shiro is horrified and guilty and decides to go the the police, only on the way tragedy strikes in the form of a second car wreck for no apparent reason, and now he’s lost pretty much all of his bright future. So he goes home because his mom is sick and on the way out the door, only to discover a nest of small-town vipers, plus the Yakuza dude’s mom and girlfriend want revenge, and about two-thirds of the way through the movie, it goes full Hamlet and basically everyone you’ve seen since the first reel is now in hell and being punished, Japan-style.

So I said foreign earlier, and none of the above is what I mean. What I could not wrap my head around is why Shiro felt so guilty over all the terrible things that happened, basically none of which he had any control over or culpability in, to my Western sensibilities. And then on top of that, was he being punished in hell because of his guilty conscience, or did the movie agree with him that he was in fact terrible and deserving of all the things being promised to him by the omnipresent king of hell narrator guy? (And then there’s the girl in purgatory for the sin(?) of predeceasing her parents. I mean, yes, that’s a horrifying thing for a parent to imagine, but that should not be how the afterlife works.)

These ontological disconnects aside, I think I liked it. The tragic collapse-of-everything setpiece was engrossing, and the 65 years ago practical effects depicting the eight (or possibly sixteen) Japanese hells was a pretty solid dive into a genre with which I have very little experience, until it’s 40 years later and dominated by angry long-haired ghost girls.

I almost signed up for the 7 day free trial of Criterion for this one. They’re going to snag me, someday. I can see it coming, like a slow motion steamroller shot from 3-5 different camera angles.

[1] Not exactly a spoiler, as it’s all pretty much from the first five minutes, but if you want to check out a Criterion channel early Japanese horror flick unspoiled, hit the eject button now, as I don’t plan to be shy with laying things out.
[2] named Shiro, ha

Kanashimi no Beradonna

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I’m again a long time between episodes of my nominally weekly horror podcast, partly due to difficulty finding a copy of the current movie that I could watch, but I think mostly due to being sick for the greater part of a month and falling behind on podcasts in general. I know one of the categories was revenge, but I don’t remember if that was the style or the monster, and I cannot remember what the other category was at all. (One supposes if I could, I’d also know which was which.) But I think revenge must be the monster die. Style could be a lot of things, but this is a 1973 anime named Belladonna of Sadness, so one supposes the style was Asian, or animated films, or not very plausibly 1970s. Just because of the glut of revenge movies from that decade, I mean.

Of course, I could be wrong about any of these facts, aside from what the movie was I mean. I’d check, but I’ve written way too much for that to make sense at this point.

There was a movie, I was saying. If I’m being real, I have no way to usefully talk about this movie without massive spoilers. Here’s what I can say before I reach that line: Belladonna of Sadness is a wildly stylized and yet minimally animated[1] movie about a medieval European, probably French, village in which a very much in love couple gets married, like you do, but then nothing whatsoever goes well for them for the remainder of the flick.

Okay, I’m not going to explain the plot point by point, because for one thing I don’t think I could anyway, but either way, definitely spoilers from here on in. Cut below the footnote.

[1] In the sense that there isn’t a lot of animation. There’s a lot of art, which the camera pans across, and sometimes small pieces of the art move in small ways. And sometimes it goes crazy. But mostly: very minimalist, from an animated perspective.

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Körkarlen

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And then there are some nights when you sit down to watch a silent Swedish film that is spiritually ripping off A Christmas Carol, but if the Ghost of Christmas Future is the only one who showed up to berate Scrooge, and if Tiny Tim were a consumptive self-deluded Salvation Army worker.

It’s New Year’s Eve, and Sister Edit is dying, while David Holm is getting drunk in a cemetery. What do these scenes and people have in common? This informs the entire plot of The Phantom Carriage, except for the part about the carriage itself, which we are notified in Act I is driven around all year helping Death to reap souls, by whoever died closest to midnight the previous year. (If nobody dies on New Year’s Eve, I think the previous person keeps the job? This doesn’t seem a likely scenario, however.)

At first, as per my cheeky but fair summary above, I did not consider this to be a horror movie. Just because there’s a horse ghost and a guy in a hood with a sickle, it was still mostly a drama about bad decisions. But somewhere in the second half, it goes dark, and it goes hard, and I gotta say, in the end I was impressed. Between the depth of darkness and the (for 1921) technical prowess of the special effects, I can understand how this has turned into a classic’s classic. (You know, people in the industry love it, people outside the industry never heard of it. Like the anecdote about how only 300 people heard The Velvet Underground’s first album, but every one of those people went on to form a successful band.)

Mama (2013)

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If I remember correctly, the random elements of this week’s movie[1] were “witch” and “Latin-American”. Mama is definitely a Latin-American movie, sort of. It was produced by Guillermo del Toro on the strength of a two minute film by a guy from let’s say Colombia, about two young girls who, upon realizing that Mama is back, quickly plan their escape. It is easily findable on YouTube and well worth the watch. That said, it’s not immediately apparent to me that anyone from that short is attached to this movie, and, well, del Toro or not, that’s problematic? Also, not a witch to be found, although there’s certainly a witchy vibe.

Anyway.

After the 2008 housing market crash, this investment firm guy kills his business partners, and then kills his (ex?) wife, and then takes his daughters (ages 3 and 1) on the run. All three completely disappear, but the dude’s brother never gives up looking for the girls, and they are found 5 years later, living ferally in a cabin in the woods near where the father had a spin out in the ice car accident.[2]

So the brother and his thoroughly not into kids rock band girlfriend win custody over the protests of the dead mom’s sister, and work to rehabilitate them from feral to, you know, whatever 6 and 8 year old girls are on any given day of the week. And I know what you’re thinking: this could be any family drama. What you don’t know is that someone or something, which they call “Mama”, was in the woods with them this whole time. And just because they left the woods, that doesn’t mean she’s done with them yet. …or with anyone who stands in her way. Spooky!!

I did not hate the way this ended, and I expected to. Which is not low praise.

[1] Reference: the week in question is 4/12/2021
[2] To be clear, the car is found the same day as the girls; it’s not like people knew about this in advance but never glanced around.