Last Movie Watched Thread

Terrifier 2 - It was okay. Cheesy and more gory/gruesome than scary, but that's to be expected from this series. Actually chuckled a couple of times at Art's pantomimes. I heard a lot about this before it came out originally that it had a better story than the earlier films (Art appeared in one film prior to Terrifier 1), but it's still barely there. There's some very vague connections to the main character's father having seen Art in his mind before he died years earlier, and his daughter being destined to defeat him through her dad preparing her, but it was still pretty vague. 

Amused that the third film came out this weekend and did way better than Joker 2. Extra amused that the guy who plays Art has also played the Joker in some fan films in the past, and he notes that he was cast as Art and as the Joker in the same week in 2015.

Salem's Lot (Unnecessary 2024 remake) - By making this a 2-hour movie instead of a two-part miniseries, everything in this entire adaptation felt rushed. It was just decidedly mediocre. Not even an equivalent of the scariest scene of all time of the kid floating outside the window, tapping, in the first-half finale of the original.

When Evil Lurks - This movie was far more effective in instilling a sense of dread through almost the entire thing. Set in Argentina, two brothers in a poor farming community discover that their neighbor's son is "rotten", potentially infected by evil that, if not disposed of properly, will unleash hell upon the area. When the authority who was SUPPOSED to handle this is found dead, the brothers and their friend try to take on the task themselves. It does not go well. Really great film.

Salem's Lot (Original) - Watched this one today again since they're both on Max. As I remembered, this one was much better. Scary despite very little blood and gore. Ralphie Glick floating outside (and inside) the window TWICE was still eerier than anything in the entire remake. (Biggest sin of the remake was using Ralphie as a "sacrifice to consecrate the mansion" for Barlow to live in, so he was just outright murdered, and so his older brother - the kid who plays Homelander's son in The Boys - was the only one floating outside a window and was far less creepy.)

The only thing I can say for the remake is the final in the drive-in theater was a decent idea. But still...it didn't need to be made.

I agree, at least if my interpretation is correct. That being: this looked cool as hell, but motherfucker, for what?

Halloween (2018) - Sequel/retcon of the series where Michael Myers has been institutionalized for 40 years, and Laurie has a daughter and granddaughter, but she's been prepping her entire life for Michael to escape so she can kill him. Not bad, not great.

I liked the SPOILER ALERT fake house/ trap that Laurie built, and the fake out with her daughter to catch Michael and "kill" him for good. I'm sure it didn't stick though, I haven't looked at what sequels might have been made since this. 

Talk to Me (2022)
I'd heard this was good but tempered my expectations and was pleasantly surprised. This was a really creepy, contained horror movie. It has a pretty straight forward premise. Some teens are in possession of a mysterious ceramic hand that when you hold it and say "Talk to me" you can see and talk to a ghost. When you say "I let you in" the ghost can possess you but not for more than 90 seconds or bad shit happens. Guys, not to spoil anything, but bad shit happens. It's got a good creepy vibe without an over reliance on jump scares. It has the standard Elevated Horror™ trope where it's really about trauma and drug abuse, but also it doesn't fully wallow in it. And, outside of some lax hospital protocols, characters behave believably. Oh, and it has a satisfying ending that completes the story*. I highly recommend this if it sounds like your vibe (maybe more It Follows than Hereditary). I was genuinely creeped out for a while afterwards while walking though my dark house.




* This movie did pretty well and I saw rumors of a sequel, hopefully that never goes anywhere. No reason for a sequel. There wasn't anything left to say, unless you want to do dumb shit like try and spoil the mystery of the hand by trying to explain shit. 

Alien: Romulus (2024)

Despite promising to rage-quit the series after the absolute clusterfuck of Covenant, here I am again. This is probably the best Alien movie since Cubed but that's not exactly saying much. This feels more like a recreation than a movie in its own right - all the familiar beats are here, including lines, references, chestbursters etc and it's all done... fine, I guess, but there's not a lot of reason for this film to actually exist. We get a little glimpse into the world of Alien, with indentured humans working for the Company, but it doesn't ever amount to more than scene-setting. Ash - pardon me, Rook - is around via some shonky CGI bollocks that doesn't really work. The chestburster scene in this is less effectively realised than the one from 1979, which is an achievement of sorts. The cast are all pretty decent - and mostly just pretty - but David Jonsson deserves some amount of praise for the way he plays Andy, it's easily the stand-out performance. There's odd moments that work very well, like the "swimming through the acid" sequence near the end but mostly this is an entirely faithful recreation of something that already exists, but with a prettier cast and little else of note. Decent, then, but incredibly unremarkable.

Blood Red Sky (2021) - Hey, a surprisingly good horror flick that I hadn't heard of before. A woman suffering from a (not very) mysterious illness is attempting to travel with her son from Germany to New York for a cure, when the plane is hijacked over the Atlantic Ocean. Quite a few surprises and some really great performances.

Phew, it's been a bit.

Pillow Talk (mid-century screwball comedies The Apartment and Monkey Business, noms.): Never seen a Doris Day/Rock Hudson romcom before, so we took the opportunity to fill in that gap. Talk about an un-remake-able premise: Day and Hudson are two strangers (in two different apartment buildings? was that a thing?) sharing a party line. She gets fed up with him monopolizing the line talking to all his various sexual conquests, he thinks she's a kill-joy shrew; hijinks and elaborate deceptions involving fictious Texas oilmen ensue. Mostly just made me want to watch Down with Love again, which has all the charm and fun atomic-era production design without the atomic-era gender politics baggage. Like, there's a solid 15-minute scene where Day's character is relentlessly sexually harassed and it's supposed to be funny but just feels queasy today.

Hocus Pocus (Goonies-ish kids movies Finding 'Ohana and Nightbooks, noms.): Another beloved 80s/90s kid cultural touchstone that the both of us had somehow missed. Kind of a mess, no? At times it feels like a teen sex comedy that was re-written for a younger audience. E.g., the constant jokes about how much of a virgin the main character is, but those sorts of jokes would only land if the character was some sort of boastful wannabe playboy type who needed to be taken down a peg, but he isn't and doesn't, so mostly it just comes across as the movie bullying its own protagonist for no reason. And then there's whatever's going on with that extended Garry and Penny Marshall cameo (you know, for kids!), where he pervs on the witches for a bit while she watches TV. It was fine. The scenery chewing witches--particularly SJP's relentlessly horny imbecile--were fun, and I can see how it filled a niche for millennial tweens in want of something spooky-not-scary to watch at Halloween time. From my perspective as a nostalgia-less non-tween it is...fine.

The Third Man (Hitchcockian thrillers Dial M for Murder and Notorious, noms.): Occasionally, you'll watch a movie and realize "oh, this is a movie" with like, cinematography and shit. Loved this. Prototypical noir--Dutch angles, twisty plot, femme fatale, in-over-his-head alcoholic protagonist, too-charming villain--but with some wry humor and even a little warmth cutting through all the bleakness. Looks incredible, particularly that last scene in the sewer tunnels where everyone is bathed in shadow and the edges of the black bricks are picked out by the harsh white light...again, it's just such a movie. I was a surprised at how effective the understated, all-zither score (oh, so that's where that song is from!) was as well.

Practical Magic: Sister and brother-in-law were visiting, and SIL requested we watch something "from the 90s." This popped up on the Max home screen and seemed vaguely Halloween-ish, so on it went. Well...huh. Maybe it's so bad it's good? There's potentially a decent black comedy somewhere in there--accidental murder! evil abusive zombie ex-boyfriend!--but it's buried beneath an avalanche of mawkish romcom pap, including a truly inane Alan Silvestri score. But the tonal whiplash is itself pretty entertaining. So...I don't know. Sure, so bad it's good. If you're in the mood for it.

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret: This time the MIL was visiting, and C put this on in the face of my and MIL's dogged refusal to tell her what we were in the mood for. I'm glad she did! My only knowledge of the book growing up was that it was a) not really written for me and b) vaguely period-related, so I didn't know what to expect, but the movie is a delight. It's funny, and surprisingly frank, and the tween actors were all competent and not at all insufferable (aside from the ones playing characters who are supposed to be insufferable). Rachel McAdams is underrated.

Nightbooks ("weekend immediately preceding Halloween" movies E.T. and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, noms.): Finally back on the regular movie night schedule after two successive weekends of family visits. "Disposable" would uncharitable. It's fun, but it's pretty clearly A Kids Movie for Kids, in a way that Are You There God? surprisingly wasn't. I, again, didn't hate the child actors, which is always a bonus, and Krysten Ritter's "Wicked Witch by Lisa Frank" costumes were a hoot. Decently spooky-not-scary movie for gen alpha tweens.
 

Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

Intrigued by the plaudits of  Ben Grimm and Floyd Diabolical Barber, I sought this out. I started it. Stopped it. Restarted from the beginning. Stopped it. Finally finished it. The first two-thirds is an excellent build up. It's after the title card at 1 hour and some minutes that the freak flags fly bolder and Warner Brothers, Hanna-Barbera, Jay Ward Productions' references start spilling out the screen every second. Those folks must've been very,  very cold. Seems like @notadoctor would know of these people, but I wonder a lot of nonsense. Speaking of nonsense, it's ludicrous that this group got done what they wanted to do with only $150K. Amazing work, folks.

Best surprise was the pole-dancing scene. A jarring hit of sexual sensuality late in the film before moving on to more and increasingly bizarre graphic cartoon deaths. 

C and the kid were out of town for a memorial service this weekend, so, like any lonely bachelor with suddenly way too much time on his hands I marathoned the first five Mission Impossible movies. I think I saw Mission Impossible 2 in theaters when I would've been, like, 12, but remembered very little of it. Otherwise, hadn't seen any of them. These are all functionally the same movie, so I'll just go ahead and rank them with minimal commentary:

5. Mission Impossible 2: not a good movie, but still so delightfully dumb (wall-to-wall kick flips! the longest, saddest-looking motorcycle race!) that I considered ranking it higher. Nah. No. It's bad.

4. Mission Impossible 5 (Rogue Nation): veers a little too close to James Bond territory with the emergence of an evil, all-knowing global Syndicate. Not too many memorable action scenes or stunts. 

3. Mission Impossible 3: again, not too many memorable stunts but features the best villain so far (RIP PSH), so I think that edges it ahead of 5.

2. Mission Impossible 1: interesting in how it's almost more of a taut 90s political thriller than a go-go gadget spy caper. Like, it feels closer to The Fugitive than James Bond, even though there are still plenty of gadgets and ludicrous face masks (glad that become a series staple). The Langley infiltration scene still can't be topped.

1. Mission Impossible 4 (Ghost Protocol): Favorite so far. Best stunts (Burj Khalifa climb), best team and team dynamic.

Mission Impossible 1 is the only one that really seems like it's connected to the series. Not because of the cast members - though that doesn't hurt, despite pissing them away for no good reason other than Tom Cruise's ego - but exactly because it's a taut thriller rather than just the "bigger stunts, more stuff!" maximalist approach that all the subsequent movies take. The TV series was never really indebted to the likes of James Bond but a taut thriller that often consisted of good actors in small rooms having urgent conversations? That it could do. It required smart writing, which is what the films broadly lack. There was good action too, by 60s TV standards, but that wasn't what the whole show was, whereas it pretty much is what the movies are and nothing else. That's why I often refer to the MI movies as Generic Action: The Movie, because though the action is undeniably good there's really very little to distinguish them from one another. 5 is especially guilty of that - a plot that could literally be written on the back of a fag packet - but it's certainly not the only one. As liebkartoffel points out, they're all functionally the same move (excluding 1, maybe) and that's a shame because the first movie really suggests there's space for a thriller-type series that is neither a straightforward Bond surrogate nor what Bourne would go on to be. Alas. 

How To Blow Up a Pipeline (2022)

Well made micro-budget indie mostly shot around, coincidentally, the ghost town where Ms. Goblin and I went for an early date. It's on tribal land that they allow outsiders to visit and it wasn't lost on me that the Pueblo said "by all means shoot your anarchist movie here". A group of environmentalists that I'm legally required to describe as "ragtag" builds bombs and blows up 2 sections of a pipeline in West Texas. Effective twist ending.


Woman at War (2018)

Gorgeously shot, technically clever Icelandic feature about a middle-aged monkeywrencher taking on a real-life mining company, Rio Tinto, the outfit that's trying to fuck over Oak Flat, AZ. For such a despairing topic, the film's surprisingly engages in Scandinavian dry whimsy--the supposedly non-diagetic soundtrack is depicted literally with the band and singers onscreen. Lovely Iceland landscapes and great music make this well worth watching.

Ugh, the Resolution Copper Mine saga. Good for anyone fighting that monstrous mining company.

Just saw Piece by Piece, the Pharrell Williams high-concept Lego musical biopic and it was pretty great! Colorful, fun, silly-but-serious, and a killer soundtrack. Pharrell also displays a remarkable self-awareness for a biopic subject (who also produced this).