The Thing (2011)
★★★½
Third time through this and I still find it interesting either as a prequel or a remake. I like it quite a bit, but mainly because it is just so similar to The Thing (1982), which will always be one of my favorite films. Is it lazy to basically remake it? It is a clever idea? Or, considering the nature of The Thing (itself) and the situation, was there really no other option as this is just how a The Thing scenario is going to play out? One thing that comes to mind is that it is definitely a prequel in the sense of “If you are only going to watch one of them, watch The Thing (1982). If you are going to watch both of them, make sure you watch 1982 before watching 2011!”.
So, besides all that, it’s very familiar feeling and I like the main character, and it’s fun enough that maybe on its own it would rate a 4-star, but the characters just aren’t the great classic characters that populate The Thing (1982), it isn’t very suspenseful (unlike The Thing 1982 which was quite suspenseful), and while some of the effects are good, they are CGI so clearly it’s going to pale in comparison than those brilliant and disturbing practical effects of The Thing (1982).
Candyman (2021)
★★★
I only just saw the original for the first time last year, so didn’t feel the need to a sequel. But I actually liked this more than I would have expected, except it kinda lost me at the last part, when some other sub-plot took over.
I quite enjoyed Tony Todd’s creepy Candyman character of Candyman (1992), I think that in Candyman (2021), the Candyman seemed more a phantom than a character, so that detracted from the story for me and maybe I would have liked it better if it had been a new story, not a Candyman redux. But I thought it was pretty engaging.
Blood Sabbath
(★★½)
Our guy, a Vietnam vet, wandering alone, cross country with a guitar, very 1970 style. Probably not thinking that anything odd is in his future, especially witches and murder!
What he mainly seems to encounter are extremely forward, free spirited ladies who he seems to find are more an annoyance than anything else. After fleeing like a lunatic from, of all people, Uschi Digard (and friends), he winds up as the obsession of the local witch queen (yes, Dyanne Thorne) who seems to command everyone around and is intent on possessing this fellow.
The lack of blood and the fact that the gaggle of young ladies under the witch queen’s control seem to spend most of their time without any clothes on, this would be much more accurately titled “Nude Sabbath”.
Featuring, as well as you can see through the haze of a worn out VHS (which is how this appears), quite bad acting and cheap production values (mainly shot outdoors), but it’s likeable enough and definitely should have a release better than than this shoddy looking DVD release…
The Shape of Water
(★★★★½)
This fabulous movie is a great romance, but also a great thriller as well.
The story of Elisa, who is mute due to something terrible done to her throat in her youth, but who otherwise seems to have a pleasantly peaceful and solitary, if a bit lonely, life living above a cool old movie theater in a grand old apartment with a nice big bathtub and a quirky and charming, in a way, artist neighbor, Giles.
She is also a janitor at a strange, and seemingly highly secure, government facility, the purpose of which isn’t exactly clear. But they do seem to store specimens there. When the noxious and evil security man, Colonel Strickland, shows up with an extra strange specimen, who he dragged out of a river in South America and seemingly tortured all the way here, Elisa sees something in the creature that no one else does.
But when the political machinations of the US Army and the Soviet Union seem to spell doom for this fascinating being, Elisa turns to the only friends she has, Giles and her co-worker Zelda, for help.
A great movie, beautiful to look at, involving, nerve-wracking (as Strickland is just absolutely terrible and driven to stay that way), but also exciting, charming, a bit fantastical, and fun!
Blacker Than the Night
(★★½)
Pro tip: If you have a bunch of snotty and entitled roommates and you inherit a grand old house from your aunt… Don’t move your roommates into the house with you.
Especially if: the made fun of the house, are rude to the housekeeper, if owning the house requires you to care for your aunt’s cat (and the roommates hate cats), and if they are just all around ungrateful…
Otherwise, as Ofelia finds out, her friends Aurora, Marta, and Pilar are bad roommates for the cat and, once the cat ends up dead, the deceased aunt has some issues with that.
Not particularly interesting or entertaining, but it was alright.
Rawhead Rex
(★★★)
A pub called The Tall Man with a creepy tall man sign. A strangely demonic stained glass window with burning red eyes in the old church. An ancient stone pillar sticking up out of a field.
Signs of the kind of spot in the Irish countryside where you should think “hmm, maybe I shouldn’t mess around here?” Especially that stone pillar…
But no, the farmer wants that pillar out of his way… So, even as weird steam starts coming out of the ground as he tries to pry the damn thing up, he just doesn’t stop…
A pretty entertaining tale of an ancient evil unleashed in a little village, featuring: priests gone bad, dismemberment, mind control, burning red eyes, and the demon (or is it a god) Rawhead Rex, which, while it is one of the better monster names out there, the appearance of it leaves much to be desired, especially since they have no qualms showing him clearly, and often.
Poison for the Fairies
(★★★)
After a murderous start, we hop to a school where the new girl, Flavia, meets up with Veronica, whose parents are dead and who says she has a spider at home, also named Flavia?
Flavia is from a skeptic family, educated folks who pride themselves on their modern rejection of old beliefs and who don’t believe in religion or spirits or anything. Veronica, however, lives with her grandmother and has a stuffed owl that tells her things at night and, in fact, says that she is actually an old witch!
Well, they kind of befriend each other and it’s all fun and games. Until Flavia asks Veronica if she can cast a spell so that she doesn’t have to take piano lessons anymore…
From that point, things starts getting south. Turns out that witches and fairies don’t get along and Veronica sets them off on a path top make poison for the fairies. She is rather intimidating and plotting and and Flavia doesn’t know what to do but gets dragged along for the ride.
It wasn’t super engaging, but I did appreciate how they basically never show the faces of adults, leaving it feel like it is really just about the kids. And I did love the ending.
Intruder
(★★★)
Well this was pretty entertaining… And relatable! A grocery store slasher!
Turns out that the Walnut Lake Market is closing, which comes as a surprise to the staff, who are told by the owners to stay late and mark everything half off! But right at closing, one of the cashiers ex-fella’s shows up and starts a scene and a fight and then runs off into the store!
So as they work the night away, cleaning up and marking down, people start dying left and right, always (somehow…) unbeknownst to everyone else in the store! But this mysterious killer didn’t show up with special weaponry, he just uses what is at hand… And there is all sorts of neat stuff in grocery stores: knives, saw, balers, etc…
It is broken-hearted revenge? Someone who is opposed to creating a food desert? Mystery abounds! As do cheap, but effective and interesting, gory kills!
Some pretty silly characters, some odd camera angles, and lots of exciting late-80’s grocery action (for those of us “who were there” to fondly remember the old days), makes for an acceptably fun watch. And the cast includes some surprises… Sam and Ted Raimi are both here, and look out for cameos from Bruce Campbell, Lawrence Bender, and Scott Spiegel (the director).
The Beyond
(★★½)
The story of a woman who inherits an old hotel which was, unfortunately, built over one of the seven gateways to hell!
However, the trouble starts 50 years earlier when a painter who lived there was hauled away, murdered by a mob, and walled off in the basement… Supposedly for his sorcerous ways.
Now that the lady is trying to get the hotel reopened, there are many opportunities for the evil from the gateway to cause much classic Italian gore scenes as all sorts of people involved die from mysterious ways and suffer lots of acid burning, face mangling, eyes popping, etc.
Also featured are assistance from a mysterious blind woman, a doctor who, even after he learns that bullets to the head seem to be the only way to hurt the zombies, keeps wasting ammo on their chests, and a mysterious copy of that great Hyperborean bestseller, Eibon.
But my favorite parts were the first seven minutes and then the last scene. In between those was some meh stuff and some good stuff, mainly crazy sudden weather and an interesting score that seemed pretty incongruous at time.
Also, lots of zombies toward the end, and I still don’t find zombies compelling (well, except for in Burial Ground! Those zombies are great!), and these were lamer than most.
Heretic
(★★★★)
The one true religion… Is that people can be really terrible.
This is just a great film. The lead in is engaging and does a great job showing the clear differences in the women’s personalities and giving us a good feeling for their mission. Then Mr Reed’s charming demeanor and delightful home.
Hugh Grant, who I generally don’t like in anything, is great here! And his charming house is quite delightful. Even if he is an arrogant, pushy, braggart. His obsession with controlling people and trying to show off how smart he is by endlessly rambling on about with his wisdom and bs are pitiful, but realistic (we’ve all known dudes like that, haven’t we?), and rather engaging.
But the best part of the movie is Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, watching their different world views and attitudes swirl around each other as they try to navigate dealing with this egoist who is clearly used to charming people into bad situations.
I also really liked the scale model of the house.
ah, Doom Asylum.
(★★)
Such a promising title! After a terrible (in many ways) traffic accident leaves a lawyer just steps from death and his girlfriend dead, he hides himself away in an abandoned asylum.
This slasher/comedy (well, comedy but not humorous at all) is pretty lame and the title should have been used for a much better movie. There’s very little story here… Not even enough to fill it’s 78 minute runtime so lots of time is made up of showing old movies which our antagonist is supposedly watching.
Starting Patty Mullin, in a much less interesting role than in Frankenhooker (along with the most fabulously lame boyfriend ever) and a bunch of other lame characters.
Anyway, these pals joyride out to the abandoned asylum, well, abandoned aside from some pretty noisy band who are playing there for no clear reason, and oh yeah, rumors of a madman who kills people with surgical tools.
All in all, it’s boring and badly acted and has very little substance.
Sinister Funeral
(★★★)
This was quite pleasant. Well, aside from the actual story of a young orphan girl stuck in the care of a murderous stepmother who wants the girl out of the way.
Taking place predominately at a hacienda where it’s just the two of them and the girl tries to do the right thing, but the stepmother is really aiming for doing the wrong thing, and the girl doesn’t seem to have any reliable help with her situation.
The score is quite great, strange, quiet, tense. And some great scenery!
Oddity
(★★★★)
Third time through this but, this time, we went out and saw this as part of the Catamount Horror series. It was quite fun to see it in a theater!
The tale of a woman mysteriously murdered in the rural home that she is renovating with her husband. But, see, her husband works nights at the mental hospital so she was all alone when one of his patients, known as a crazy mother-murderer, knocks on her door with a warning.
Well, she doesn’t heed the warning and ends up dead. Soon the husband brings his new girlfriend to live in the house, and she is also alone at night… Which gets a bit creepy when his late wife’s twin sister shows up with a gift. A rather odd one.
Dug into the Vinegar Syndrome “Brett Piper Sci-Fi 2-fer” and watched Battle for the Lost Planet.
(★★½)
When a thief ends up stealing a spacecraft to get away from the security guards who have him trapped, he ends up being seemingly the only witness to an alien fleet wiping out life on Earth! His disabled ship turns out to be on a five year orbit that will return him to earth, but who knows what he’ll find?!
Of course, this is possibly the lowest budget sci-fi movie I’ve seen. The effects are, well… Let’s say that at times his spaceship looks more like a Playmobile jet plane than a movie prop, the cities that are being attacked by the aliens remind me the of the Troma Team cityscape, the “alien” makeup effects don’t even fully cover their faces, and everything else just looks pretty bad!
But it’s got post-apocalypse gangs, stop-motion monsters, a silly boss car, some terribly inaccurate subtitles (especially considering that the movie is in English and I assume that the subtitles are new as of this release), bad harmonica playing, and, most of all, an endlessly irritating lead character.
But it’s still kind of charming.
Then… Mutant War
(★★½)
I had to immediately follow up Battle for the Lost Planet with its sequel and, while it is still just as low budget as the first one, it also seems better in every way!
Okay, the stop-motion monsters are just as bad as in the first one, but in this, our lead guy is now the old wasteland pro, instead of the new guy like in the last movie. He’s more bearable, the music is better, the effects (while still just as cheap) look better, a better boss car, the story seems more interesting, and it has better harmonica playing throughout!
However, it ended up losing my interest towards the end so I didn’t end up rating it any higher than the first.
The Hyperborean
(★★★★)
This was pretty great!
Pretentious hipster son Aldous, wanna be cowboy son Rex and his influencer girlfriend Lovie, artist daughter Diana and her mediocre husband Ian, and of course, the cupper/butler Fontano, are all gathering at the weekend retreat of the father, Hollis, the wealthy whiskey scion as he has a big announcement to make.
This evening leads to his death (not a spoiler as he is dead when the movie starts). Lots of flashing back to the weekend and the completely unconcealed disdain that everyone has for everyone else.
See Hollis has a stash of not yet bottled 170 year old whiskey that he dug out of an old shipwreck in the arctic and wants to market. Maybe this whiskey doesn’t taste very good, and maybe the whiskey hides another ancient secret and this evening turns out like no one had expected. But it turns out that way in a very fun fashion!
And I enjoyed The Hyperborean so much that I followed it up with Hellmouth.
(★★½)
This one? Yeah, not so much. I liked it quite a bit right off the bat, with its quirky noirish nature and starkly black and white visuals.
But as it went on, it started to drag. The visuals got cornier and less interesting and the story got more twisted around and started to lose my interest.
Then I continued my Nick Cage party with The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
(★★★½)
A combination of Cage making fun of his career, and his reputation, while also celebrating himself for the same.
As an on/off Nick Cage fan since Raising Arizona, it was a pretty entertaining watch. Especially the first half… Much of the second half felt like a traditional “Guns and Chases” action movie, which I wasn’t too interested in.
It also was a nice angle to have his invisible friend Nicky (the early 80’s era Nick) along for the ride.