Craig Sanders (of Sanders Camper and RV) is back with another self-financed opus, nominally directed by DTV auteur Omi Capek (Vampire Abortion, Vampire Abortion 2: Corona Baby), but as usual it’s Sanders’ vision on display. We last saw Sanders as the MMA-themed superhero Secret Sentinel in the film of the same name, but with F1dget, Sanders dips his toe into horror with this tale of a cursed fidget spinner.
The Sanders clan is blessed with good fortune and a thriving RV dealership, but youngest son Seth (Seth Sanders) is having trouble. He gets a B on a test and, worse yet, says that recreational vehicles are “cringe.” A fidget spinner appears to help him focus, but its cursed nature soon emerges: when Seth is told to put it away, his symptoms becomes worse, and he can’t recover until he follows the spinner’s unspoken suggestions, emphasized by close-ups and eerie music. When a neighborhood bully tries to take it, he ends up with a broken wrist. A sympathetic but misguided therapist (Clint Howard) explains that sometimes children just need to be listened to, but that kind of talk leads to a fidget spinner buried in his skull like a ninja star. Once the bully also turns up dead and the fidget spinner transforms into a rotary saw blade and flies around the house, Phantasm-style, the Sanders family needs a hero. So of course they leave their house to rough it in one of Sanders’ luxurious custom campers. There, in a tearful scene, Craig Sanders confesses that he has been living a double life as a superhero—yes, this is a Secret Sentinel stealth sequel—and promises to un-haunt their home and help Seth reach his full potential.
The last act is a full-on Home Alone homage as multiple fidget spinners get underfoot, attempt to gouge out Sanders’ eyes, and whatever else CGI and/or stagehands throwing them from off-camera can inflict upon the Secret Sentinel. Refreshingly, we never learn what the “curse” is or why they’ve gone bad. My guess is that Sanders was too late to unload a load of fidget spinners he bought before the fad crashed, as there a lot of them in these sequences, and he sure has a grudge against them. But these aren’t Gremlins or Critters or even Small Soldiers—they’re just little plastic doodads with ball bearings in them, and despite Capek’s best attempts to imbue them with personality, Sanders’ “fight scenes” end up looking like Puck Night at an NHL game.
The effects are lousy and the acting is indifferent. Without a character to play, older daughter Kaci (Kaci Sanders) barely makes an impression. At least newcomer Alyssa Gutierrez-Sanders as the kids’ mother provides two good reasons to watch. If you missed out on the Kickstarter campaign or didn’t get the DVD as a giveaway at a Sanders Camper and RV event, look for it on Tubi . . . if you can sit still for it!
It’s nearly halfway through January, so I guess I should put together my thoughts on the films I saw in 2023. Usually I limit myself to films I actually watched during the calendar year, but most years I put this list together much sooner, and it’s not like I’m going to be audited or anything. This year’s list is even more genre-heavy than usual, reflecting both my preferences and the movies I got around to seeing. As always, however, there are films I would have liked to consider that got away from me (I’m hoping to catch up with Poor Things soon). Ah, well. Even out of what I did see, putting together a list and ranking my choices poses a challenge. I know, I always say ratings and rankings are bullshit, and then I go ahead and try to do it anyway. My Letterboxd diary lists everything I watched for the first time last year, and if you care to investigate you may notice that my star ratings don’t always match this list. So take everything with a grain of salt.
Worst Movie: I usually put miscellaneous categories after the main list, but we’re here to celebrate the good films of last year, so let’s get this out of the way: Cocaine Bear (dir. Elizabeth Banks) promised a trashy, gleefully offensive good time, but it was only intermittently shocking, with the bear attacks (fueled by bags of coke dropped into its forest by bungling smugglers) stranded in a limp crime plot. The attempts to pull our heartstrings with a pair of cute/precocious kids lost in the woods just made it more insulting. There is enough big-name talent involved in this (RIP, Ray Liotta) that you’d think they would aim higher than an original you’d see on SyFy or Tubi.
Biggest Disappointment: I didn’t expect The Super Mario Bros. Movie (dir. Michael Jelenic and Aaron Horvath) to be a masterpiece, but I had higher hopes than this. Nintendo has been gun-shy about allowing adaptations of its IP since Jankel and Morton turned 1993’s Super Mario Bros. into a cyberpunk flop almost entirely divorced from the game, but this animated film veers too far in the opposite direction, with every potentially interesting choice sanded down in the name of brand management. The result is weirdly airless and a little mean, with Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt*) ushered through the beats of a hero’s journey that takes him from a put-upon plumber to savior of the Mushroom Kingdom. Poor Luigi (Charlie Day**) hardly has anything to do, just like younger siblings handed the Player 2 controller everywhere. It’s low-hanging fruit to compare a CGI animated movie to video game cut scenes, but sequences of Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy***) coaching Mario through an obstacle course and our heroes building karts for the inevitable chase make the comparison hard to avoid. Wreck-It Ralph hit these marks with a lot more grace and heart.
* ?
** Okay, this kind of works.
*** Yes, all the major characters are voiced by celebrities. At least Jack Black is having fun.
On to the ranked list:
10. One thousand years ago, the warrior Gloreth defeated a great beast, and ever since, the realm has maintained walls and an order of knights armed with high-tech weapons in case it returns. There’s a lot to like about Nimona (dir. Troy Quane and Nick Bruno): a setting that combines the contemporary and medieval in a way we don’t see on film very often, a queer perspective still rare in animation, and a strong sense of design. Add to that a compelling central character, a knight (Riz Ahmed) disgraced by a crime he wasn’t responsible for, and it starts strong. What I didn’t like very much was the title character, a bratty pink-haired girl (voiced by Chloë Grace Moretz) who attaches herself to the knight in hopes of joining his (imagined) villainy. I lived through the ‘90s, I don’t need any more edgy mascot characters with attitude. Fortunately, there is more to Nimona than the punk exterior—much more. She is a shapeshifter, a dangerous ally to have in a realm built on a foundation of paranoid fear of monsters. There is another side to the story of Gloreth and the beast, and it’s in the second half of the film, as the truth comes to light, that Nimona soars.
9. Like a lot of moviegoers, I did see both halves of the “Barbenheimer” event that gripped cinemas last summer, although I didn’t see them on the same day. Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig) is superficially similar to The Lego Movie: it establishes the world of a beloved toy brand on its own visual and metaphysical terms, then burrows into its underlying psychology. It even features Will Ferrell as a corporate CEO, but Ferrell’s presence is a bit of misdirection, as the struggle Barbie (Margot Robbie) faces isn’t about asserting herself in the face of an overbearing father/boss figure, at least not directly. In Barbie’s world, serious political thought and nightly dance parties coexist easily, since in her multitude she is both President and DJ in addition to all the other careers she’s had over the years (multiple actresses play these different versions, all of them “Barbie,” but Robbie is the Barbie, as it were). Ken (Ryan Gosling) hangs on her every word and gesture, just hoping for a little bit of attention. Without Barbie around, it’s like he hardly exists. The plot gets rolling when Barbie starts to have disturbing, uncharacteristic thoughts—What is death? Why am I unhappy sometimes?—that shake the foundations of her perfect existence, setting her and Ken on a journey to the real world, where girl power isn’t taken for granted. Barbie comments on patriarchy, womanhood, and role models, and it sometimes threatens to buckle under the weight of so much meaning, but Robbie’s and Gosling’s performances are alternately hilarious and touching, and Robbie understands the assignment of playing a doll—essentially a cartoon character—who gradually learns what it means to be human. Think of it as Pleasantville in reverse.
8. Many science fiction films ask, “What if your entire life was a lie?” In They Cloned Tyrone (dir. Juel Taylor), small-time hood Fontaine (John Boyega) is ambushed and killed by a rival drug dealer, only to wake up in his own bed the next morning. Far from being a nightmare, his murder happened in front of other people who are surprised to see him up and about. Their investigation leads to a far-reaching conspiracy involving clones (duh), mind-controlling chemicals, and underground bunkers. On the one hand, this seems to remix beats and themes from Jordan Peele’s films (especially Get Out and Us), but without all the subtlety and ambiguity that make Peele’s movies so unsettling. On the other hand, Peele doesn’t have a trademark on black horror, and subtlety isn’t everything. Tyrone clearly has deep roots in the kind of conspiracy theorizing featured in blaxploitation movies like Three the Hard Way and parodied in Undercover Brother, and it leavens the action and weirdness with humor. Jamie Foxx as a vain, over-the-hill pimp and Teyonah Parris as one of his girls who wants more from life get most of the funny lines (as well as being active characters who keep the plot moving forward), but Boyega as a man of few words undergoing an existential crisis is the emotional center.
7. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (dir. James Gunn) brings the spacefaring subseries of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to a close, at least for now. While unable to totally escape the orbit of the larger MCU plot (particularly the replacement of Peter Quill’s lover Gamora with an angrier version of her from a different timeline who wants nothing to do with him), this installment provides as much information as is necessary for the trilogy to stand on its own. It mostly focuses on Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and finally explores his tragic history as a lab animal “uplifted” by the would-be godlike High Evolutionary before his escape. There’s a lot going on in this film as it ties up as many loose ends as it can, but it demonstrates again Gunn’s love for the weird byways in comics lore and shows why this oddball franchise has been such a good fit for him.
6. The Dungeons & Dragons game has never been one story, but rather a premise. Places, characters, and other conventions have been part of the official materials to the point that there is a recognizable D&D world distinct from other fantasy settings, but unless you’ve played it, you might only have a vague idea of tenth-level wizards and dark elves. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (dir. John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein) brings the game to life better than any previous adaptation, deploying character types, monsters, and magic that will be familiar to fans but in a story that won’t leave non-players feeling left out. Chris Pine plays a disillusioned bard whose turn to thievery to provide a better life for his family resulted in tragedy. After finally escaping from prison with a taciturn barbarian warrior (Michelle Rodriguez), he regroups with his old comrades only to find one of them was behind the betrayal that landed him there in the first place. This is a fun, high-spirited adventure with real emotional stakes and (of course) a bigger threat to the world than is immediately apparent, giving the ragtag found family of thieves and outcasts a chance to become heroes.
5. Many of Hayao Miyazaki’s films involve work: even in the magical bathhouse of Spirited Away, those towels aren’t going to fold themselves. In The Boy and the Heron, the grief-stricken boy Mahito spends part of his sojourn in the other world catching and cleaning fish alongside a butch sailor (who, like many of the people he encounters, corresponds to someone from his regular life, but transformed). It’s not hard to read these interludes as metaphors for redemption, with the main characters finding space to work out their issues, but since I started working at a coffee shop this winter, I was struck by the literal truth of it as well. When you start a new job, you go to a strange place full of unfamiliar people and spend hours performing tasks whose meaning may only gradually become clear. Time passes slowly or quickly but with little relation to the outside world. And eventually you feel at home there and become part of the scenery for someone else. Given that Miyazaki doesn’t seem likely to ever retire, despite announcing that this would be his last movie, I think this is a feeling he knows well.
4. Where 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse introduced Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) and several spider-themed heroes from parallel dimensions, the follow-up Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (dir. Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, and Kemp Powers) raises the stakes by introducing an organization of hundreds of such characters, and the real reason Miles hasn’t been invited to join them before. The eclectic, constantly-shifting animation style that made the first film so refreshing is, if anything, even more pronounced in this: as Miles and best friend Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) spend time traveling between several different worlds, each one is rendered in a distinct visual style. The best part about this is that the trippy cosmic material is balanced by the emotional realities of the characters, their situations, and their motivations. It’s also, indirectly, an argument against the kind of schematic plot beats that make so many superhero movies tiresome, building to a daring cliffhanger ending.
3. In Suzume (dir. Makoto Shinkai), a schoolgirl follows a handsome wanderer to an abandoned town. When her curiosity leads her to open a door that releases a storm-like “dragon” and a mischievous cat spirit, she becomes entangled in his mission to keep the doors to the spirit realm closed. He also gets turned into a chair, which makes her help all the more crucial. Suzume is, obviously, a rather odd movie, but the magical realist plot turns are balanced by down-to-earth moments in which Suzume navigates her way across Japan by rail and ferry, finding friends and other helpful people along the way. The dragon stands in for the natural disasters that have struck Japan in recent years, but concentrating on one girl’s experiences, good and bad, keeps it from being too general.
2. God bless Wes Anderson. In the face of criticism that his work is too stagey and artificial, he doubles down and just keeps pursuing his own distinctive muse. Asteroid City is a frame within a frame: what at first appears to be a black and white television documentary gives way to staged scenes from the life of a playwright, with the central story—the dramatization of his play—designed and lit with the bright colors of a vintage postcard or schoolbook from the 1950s. The fragmentation of the story across these different layers—superficially about a diverse group stranded in a desert town after a UFO landing, but thematically about grief in all its forms—can be distancing, but Anderson has never been afraid to find the perfect settings for his jewels, whether those consist of close-ups, quietly devastating lines of dialogue, or carefully-composed scenes in their entirety. At this point, anyone lining up for an Anderson film knows what they’re in for. In the same year, he refined his hybrid staging even further with four adaptations of short stories by Roald Dahl for Netflix, with actors reading the narrative and switching to dialogue or action as Dahl’s text dictates, within sets combining moveable flats and real locations. My favorite of these was The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, the longest and most involved of the four and also the first one that was released.
1. It could be said that aspiring teen stuntwoman Ria (Priya Kansara) lives in her own world, and neither setbacks at school nor discouragement from her parents shakes her faith in herself. But when her older sister, art school dropout Lena (Ritu Arya), becomes engaged to a seemingly perfect guy, Ria believes that Lena’s been brainwashed into giving up her dreams and selling out, and she takes it upon herself to stop her. Ria’s campaign against the marriage leads to an escalating series of tactics, from attempts at persuasion to digging up dirt on Lena’s fiancé and planting evidence. She may have crossed the line, but what if she’s right? Polite Society (dir. Nida Manzoor) is a hoot, an energetic martial arts comedy (and, with They Cloned Tyrone, the second movie on this list to namecheck Nancy Drew) and a rousing affirmation of sisterhood set in the distinctive milieu of the Pakistani British community.
0. Oh shit, the hits keep on coming. The other half of the “Barbenheimer” duo, Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan) is arguably more straightforward than any of Nolan’s recent films, but even so it features multiple timelines and shifts of perspective that threaten to drop the floor from beneath the audience. The race to build the atomic bomb is interlaced with a security hearing a decade after Hiroshima, by which time physicist and project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) had become a scold of the international community, lionized but racked with guilt. The result is a portrait of a complex, conflicted man who was skilled at political operation, but ultimately not as skilled as he imagined.
-1. See what I did there? Godzilla Minus One (dir. Takashi Yamazaki) was my favorite movie of the year, and one of the best films of the entire Godzilla series. The title sets it up as a quasi-prequel, not quite in continuity with the 1954 original but in dialogue with it. As the story begins, Shikishima (Ryunosoke Kamiki), a Kamikaze pilot, lands on an island base for (unneeded) repairs to his aircraft. That night, the local sea monster attacks and Shikishima jumps into his grounded plane but is unable to pull the trigger of his forward guns. He survives but everyone else on the island is killed. Thus Shikishima is haunted by his two failures to act, and when he returns to a defeated, ruined Tokyo, he is shunned as a deserter. Even when he gets a job on a minesweeping boat and enters a tentative relationship with a young single mother (Minami Hamabe), he cannot escape the feeling that he is cursed, haunted by the ghosts of those soldiers he let down. Inevitably, the sea monster he spared returns, bigger, more powerful, and threatening the mainland. Of course, it is Godzilla, but to Shikishima it is destiny itself, come to collect on his earlier lapses of duty, with interest.
In the most harrowing sequence, he watches Godzilla destroy the new buildings in the Ginza district of Tokyo, undoing the progress achieved since the war’s end, and helpless to rescue the one person who has become most precious to him. Godzilla has always had greater resonance for Japanese audiences and creators than he has for Americans, and this film is more politically potent than many installments of the series, but in the moment in which Shikishima watches everything swept away—horrible enough, but made moreso by the knowledge that he could have prevented it—Godzilla Minus One strikes me as a movie about climate change and the numerous disasters that have hammered Japan because of it as much as a statement about war (although of course it is that, too). Godzilla Minus One is an epic, in its own way like Oppenheimer focused on the question, “What can one man do? What does he owe the world, and what himself?” The comparison of the two films, centered on the same time period, the same pivotal moment, reveals differences in both national outlook and artistic temperament. Both films are riveting, grandiose cinematic spectacles and neither presents easy answers.
Thanks for reading! Let me know if I missed any of your favorites from last year, and have a great 2024!
During the Golden Age of Hollywood, Lon Chaney, Jr. was one of our finest players of big galoots. His meaty, jowly features made him a natural for louts, pugnacious but loyal best friends, or the occasional tragic figure like the Wolf Man. Chaney was, by all accounts, not very pleasant to be around in real life, and he didn’t usually get to play the leading man, but his tormented qualities make him perfect for the six films of the Inner Sanctum Mysteries with which I began my October. Spun off from Simon & Schuster’s branded line of suspense novels and the more famous radio show, each film tells a self-contained story. In each one, Chaney plays a professional man—a doctor, lawyer, an artist—whose success (and alliance with a series of beautiful female leads) can’t protect him from the strange crisis that afflicts him. Most of these films are murder mysteries with a seemingly paranormal twist—someone close to the hero dies through mysterious means, and suspicion falls on him—but the real theme is the unknown dangers that lurk in the subconscious mind. “Yes, even you, without knowing, can commit murder,” intones the disembodied head that introduces each installment. Aping the format of the radio show, the first few films feature extensive scenes of Chaney whispering to himself in voice-over as he tries to understand the predicament he’s in and find a way out. The ultimate materialism of the resolution doesn’t feel like a cop-out, however, as there’s a good bit of spooky atmosphere accompanying the film noir hand-wringing, and even the weakest of them build to an exciting ending.
Having bought the Inner Sanctum Mysteries Blu-ray set just before the beginning of the month, for the first part of my marathon I continued watching older B movies. Another film collection, themed around severed heads and mad science, helped me continue the pattern. To avoid choice paralysis, it’s often easier to binge a series or work my way through a collection like that (it helped that most of those older movies are little more than an hour long). But I also caught up on some recent horror movies that I hadn’t seen yet. The unfortunate closure of the downtown Regal theater means that there wasn’t an October at the Oldtown retro horror series to guide my viewing choices, and with an overall busy month, I guess this is what my list looks like when I’m left to my own devices. As you can see, I didn’t even make it to thirty-one movies for the first time in several years.
One finds spooky inspiration in unexpected places: I attended a marching band competition and saw Blue Valley North’s halftime show based on The Shining. Yes, the whole show.
1. Calling Dr. Death (Reginald Le Borg, 1943) is
2. Weird Woman (Reginald Le Borg, 1944) is (Based on Fritz Lieber’s novel Conjure Wife, this was my favorite of the Inner Sanctum Mysteries.)
3. Dead Man’s Eyes (Reginald Le Borg, 1944) is
4. The Frozen Ghost (Harold Young, 1945) is
5. Strange Confession (John Hoffman, 1945) is
6. Pillow of Death (Wallace Fox, 1945) is (This one is pretty bizarre, but its twists are perhaps best appreciated after seeing the previous films in the Inner Sanctum series.)
7. The Head aka Die Nackte und der Satan (Victor Trivas, 1959) btwd
8. Indestructible Man (Jack Pollexfen, 1956) btwd (another Lon sighting!)
9. A Haunting in Venice (Kenneth Branagh, 2023) *
10. The Amazing Transparent Man (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1960) btwd
11. The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925) * (Lon, Sr.)
12. The Manster (George P. Breakston and Kenneth G. Crane, 1959) btwd (It’s always fun to discover another movie that was excerpted in It Came From Hollywood. Now I’m imagining an alternate 1980s in which David Cronenberg made a big-budget remake of this instead of The Fly.)
13. Renfield (Chris McKay, 2023)
14. Cocaine Bear (Elizabeth Banks, 2023)
15. Ruby (Curtis Harrington, 1977)
16. A*P*E (Paul Leder, 1976)
17. Phantom of the Paradise (Brian De Palma, 1974) *
18. Smile (Parker Finn, 2022)
19. Beast from Haunted Cave (Monte Hellman, 1959)
20. M3GAN (Gerard Johnstone, 2023)
21. Space Monster Wangmagwi (Kwon Hyeok-Jin, 1967 but feels ten years behind; a long-lost kaiju movie from South Korea)
22. Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1988) r
* theatrical/public viewing
r rewatch
is an Inner Sanctum Mystery
btwd from the Brains That Wouldn’t Die collection
With the exception of Beetlejuice, all of these films were first-time viewings.
Best movie: The shock of Lon Chaney, Sr.’s unmasking has been dulled by repeated exposure over the years, but being the most recognizable image from a film full of grandiose spectacle and a literal cast of thousands hasn’t hurt The Phantom of the Opera in the least. I had the opportunity to see this silent masterpiece with the live accompaniment of theater organist Clark Wilson on Wichita’s own Wurlitzer at Century II Exhibition Hall. I also enjoyed the rock-themed update Phantom of the Paradise (which combines the core idea of a disfigured musician hiding in a theater with elements of Faust), which had been on my list to see for a long time and lived up to my expectations for it.
Worst movie: The German-made mad science film The Head isn’t terrible—it gets a lot of mileage from expressionistic shadows and Horst Frank’s comically heavy eyebrows—but it doesn’t bring much new to the subgenre of Donovan’s Brain-inspired tales and is paced at a deadly crawl. After proving that his serum can keep a dog’s head alive after being severed from its body, Dr. Abel (Michel Simon) finds himself put in the same position by the unscrupulous Dr. Ood (Frank) after a bungled heart surgery. As a disembodied head, Abel can only sit in his tank, begging for death, while Ood takes over his lab and performs a body-switching operation on the beautiful but hunchbacked Irene (Karin Kernke). Since this is stylistically similar to the German krimi films of the period, it spends as much time at a nightclub as in the lab, but its leaden pace ultimately weighs it down.
Scariest movie: I don’t think I watched anything that is going to keep me up at night, but of this year’s crop, Smile was the creepiest. Rose (Sosie Bacon), a doctor at an emergency psychiatric hospital, witnesses the violent suicide of a young woman who dies with a disturbing smile on her face. After that, Rose feels haunted by an evil presence, including visions of people she knows smiling in the same sinister way. (This is also the goriest movie I saw this month, so there is no separate write-up for that category.) As her life falls apart, and with her colleagues and loved ones convinced that she’s losing her mind, Rose discovers evidence that she’s been targeted by a body-hopping demon that drives its victims first to madness, then to suicide, fueled by memories of Rose’s mother taking her own life. Yes, like so many contemporary films exploring the trauma of modern living, this is a movie about grief. (Even the campy robot doll movie M3GAN begins with the abrupt death of a young girl’s parents, and much of that film’s drama hinges on the question of how she will move on and who—or what—she will become attached to in her parents’ absence.) Smile manages to balance its downer subject matter with some honest scares, and while some viewers were apparently disappointed by its resolution, I found it a good balance of therapeutic exploration and reminders that, hey, this is actually supposed to be a horror movie. There are no promises of a happy ending.
Funniest movie:Renfield, like the earlier vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows, gets a lot of mileage out of the comparison between thralldom and codependent relationships. Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), the pathetic, bug-eating servant of Count Dracula (Nicolas Cage), knows that he has sold his soul to his demanding, (literally) monstrous boss, but his only consolation is visiting a self-help group for people in abusive relationships and tracking down the members’ abusers to feed Dracula’s appetite. A chance encounter with the Lobo crime family and the lone honest police officer (Awkwafina) trying to take them down shows him that he can be so much more, perhaps even a hero, and the self-help group gives him the vocabulary to stand up for himself and reclaim his power from Dracula. The combination of action and over-the-top violence (with cartoonish splashes of CGI blood that make Blade: Trinity look restrained) with a comedic tone and touches of fantasy reminded me most of last year’s Violent Night, in which David Harbour played a hard-boiled Santa Claus defending a family against a gang of criminals. I did get a lot of laughs out of this one, and since this was a Universal production it featured a number of shots establishing that it’s a direct sequel to Tod Browning’s 1931 classic. One doesn’t cast Nicolas Cage in a movie like this without expecting him to chew the scenery, but he shows restraint and establishes a continuity with Bela Lugosi’s performance. Oddly enough, this is a more direct continuation of Universal’s classic monster series than most of the attempts to reestablish a shared “Dark Universe” in recent years.
Dumbest movie I’ll probably watch again: I’ve seen a lot of spoofs of giant monster movies, and even put together a list of my favorites. The 1976 remake of King Kong inspired a rush of knock-offs, including Queen Kong, Yeti: Giant of the Twentieth Century, and Wichita, Kansas’ own King Kung Fu. But somehow I went this long without seeing one of the most infamous, A*P*E. It’s absolutely the most shameless in ripping off the original (as well as Jaws, and even the title suggests another big hit of the 1970s, M*A*S*H). It starts on a ship, the ape having already been captured on an island. Two crew members discuss the expedition backers’ plan to put the creature on display, starting at Disneyland. But “Oh shit,” the ape gets loose and, after destroying the ship and fighting a giant shark, lands in Korea. The setting is the only twist on the formula, however, as there is an American movie star (Joanna Kerns) filming on location to fill the Fay Wray part, and the US military is on hand for the big third-act showdown outside Seoul. (So, yes, somehow I ended up watching two films about giant monsters rampaging across Korea and picking up damsels in distress. Even with Space Monster Wangmagwi’s jarring bursts of scatological comedy, it at least tries to be serious.) A*P*E’s tone is wacky, frequently aspiring to a hip, irreverent college sensibility—the Hollywood actress is filming a rape scene when her screaming gets the ape’s attention, and the put-upon Army commander is a high-strung, ineffective striver—but a lot of it is downright silly, with the ape dancing to music and flipping the bird to the Army after destroying their helicopters. Those juvenile elements are more like the kid-oriented Godzilla films coming out at the same time. To bring things full circle, even Godzilla vs. Megalon cashed in on King Kong mania, recreating that film’s iconic use of the then-new World Trade Center towers on a poster, even though the big G doesn’t go anywhere near New York City in his film.
I hope you had a fun and safe Halloween. Thanks for reading!
Yes, that’s right. Ten years ago this month, I launched Medleyana, and it’s still going—well, maybe not going strong, but it’s going. This year in particular has been pretty fallow, and I couldn’t blame anyone for thinking that I’d abandoned it for good. All I can say is that I’ve been occupied with work and other personal projects that have taken up my time, but now I’m back. The approach of the spooky season in October usually gives me something to write about, so at a minimum you can expect a Halloween wrap-up at the end of the month.
But for now, I feel justified in taking a small victory lap and indulging in something I don’t do very often: repackaging old articles in new lists. I’ve gone through my posts and chosen ten of my favorites, one from each year of Medleyana’s existence (counting a year as beginning in September—you can take the academic out of the academy, but . . . ). Some of these are articles I still post links to when I feel compelled to summarize my viewpoint on a particular subject, and others are deep dives into my own personal interests. If you’ve been following me since the beginning, thank you, and I hope these are pleasant reminders of where we came from. If you’re new to Medleyana, consider this a sampler, all of them examples of what I mean by the blog’s slogan, “In praise of the eclectic.”
When I began Medleyana, I started out by writing connected series and multi-subject articles in which I tried to get out ideas that had long occupied me, but even in the first year I started to get the hang of writing focused essays on single subjects. Since this article on collecting comic books was posted, I’ve become more serious about building and organizing my collection, and I ended up writing about comics a fair amount. But I’m still not planning on funding my retirement with them.
This one combines several themes that I returned to over the years: review, commentary, and a bit of history as I look at an idiosyncratic “funny animal” comic book series.
The history of the pulps, both the magazines and the writers, is another subject I delved into quite a bit, and in this essay I investigated the contents of several horror-focused short story collections by the creator of Conan the Barbarian.
I saw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny earlier this summer, and I enjoyed it. The de-aging technology that made Harrison Ford look younger for a prologue set during World War II has continued to improve, but I couldn’t help wondering: if this technology had been available when they made Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989, would we have had the wonderful prologue with River Phoenix as young Indy?
Written in response to Rogue One, with its CGI-generated Peter Cushing and de-aged Carrie Fisher, this article has only become more relevant since. As of this writing, so-called “AI” threatens to upend every creative industry, and Hollywood writers and actors are striking, in part against the prospect of being replaced or devalued by chatbots and infinitely pliable computer simulations. The increased churn of low-quality streaming content and never-ending franchise service has reached a point of unsustainability, and audiences are already beginning to turn away. I stand by the assertion made in this article that CGI tools can be used responsibly, but they are just that, tools: algorithms don’t have original ideas, they don’t have desires or viewpoints to express, and they aren’t going to live up to producers’ fantasies of steady, guaranteed revenue forever.
My interest in Jack Kirby’s science fiction comic Kamandi is another subject I’ve written about several times, and in 2017, Kirby’s centenary year, I posted issue-by-issue reviews of Kamandi Challenge, a tribute series in which rotating teams of artists and writers took on the character and his world, setting up a cliffhanger at the end of each issue for the next team to unravel. Issue no. 9 was a fascinating standalone story that explored some of Kamandi’s psychology and allowed me to express my thoughts on Jack Kirby’s qualities as a storyteller.
A large number of my posts on Medleyana have been reviews of serials from the silent film era up to the 1950s, when the formula of narrative by weekly installment migrated to television. Although I was mostly interested in exploring the two-fisted adventure aesthetic (shared by the pulp magazines and Golden Age comics) at first, I learned a lot about plotting and setting up story conflicts with stakes, and going through each serial to take screenshots for illustrative purposes ended up being an education in composition and blocking. This review is typical, and if you enjoy it, there’s much more where it came from.
Combining my interests in film, the pulps, and horror, this review gets at some of the challenges we face when we attempt to “separate the art from the artist.”
When I began Medleyana, I thought I would primarily write about music. This article is a bit of a throwback in that it combines a couple of topics and bounces them off each other, but it’s also a good indicator of my increased interest in anime over the last decade as I examine the seminal fan film Daicon IV and its legacy.
From the beginning, I’ve celebrated Halloween on the blog, culminating with a month’s-end list of spooky movies I watched and other activities I participated in. Last year’s wrap-up included meditations on the passage of time, mortality, and the reasons we like to scare ourselves, a theme that Medleyana ended up exploring much more than I expected when I began writing. I had just turned 40 when I started this blog, and now I’m 50. (It’s been a year since my wife was treated for the cancer I mention in this post, and she’s doing well, thanks for asking.) The last decade has been one of exploring interests that had been set aside because of school and work, including many new discoveries that hadn’t even been on my radar before I started writing. (It’s a good thing I had such an open-ended format from the beginning.) If I haven’t accomplished everything I set out to do, I’ve had other opportunities and made new friends that I didn’t expect. The very landscape of the internet has changed since I started—it’s mostly worse—but I’m proud of what I’ve created. It’s been a journey. Thank you for coming along with me.
This is the latest I have ever posted a year-end roundup for this blog, but life happens, so if you’re still interested in seeing such an article, well, better late than never. Some of the same life events (detailed in previous posts) that kept me busy also cut down on the number of films I watched last year (you can see my complete Letterboxd diary here). On the other hand, I did manage to make it to the movie theater a little more consistently than I did in 2020 and 2021, although still not at the rate I used to attend. Between theatrical showings, streaming, and physical media options, I saw nearly forty movies released in 2022, enough to make a personal Best of 2022 list. Several films I wanted to see evaded me, including Flux Gourmet, Violent Night, and Babylon, and I have yet to see some of the biggest films with colons in their titles: Top Gun: Maverick, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Avatar: The Way of Water.
Nevertheless! As always, the following list represents my favorites from among those I watched, and is subject to change (at the encouragement of a friend, I started posting more detailed reactions and star ratings to my Letterboxd account, but some of those movies have already changed in my estimation as they linger with me).
10. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson) was one of three new adaptations of the familiar story of a wooden puppet who comes to life, but the only one I saw (and, from what I hear, the only one worth watching). Although many details are familiar from other retellings, del Toro has once again put his personal stamp on the material, weaving religious and political struggles into the story and explicitly setting it in Mussolini’s Italy during World War II. This film was co-written by Patrick McHale (Over the Garden Wall), whose brand of fantasy turns out to be very compatible with del Toro’s. All of this is brought to life in gorgeous stop-motion animation (it’s been a boom year for the medium, in fact, with anthology film The House, Henry Selick’s Wendell and Wild, and Phil Tippett’s long-in-production Mad God all released in the last year).
9. A world-renowned chef (Ralph Fiennes) summons a group of rich clients, restaurant critics, and foodies to his island restaurant for an exclusive event, only to turn the tables, with each course revealing the grudges he holds against them. Fiennes’ performance as the chef is the best part of the film, gradually revealing the intense pressure under which he works, the toll it’s taken on his health and private life, and the masterful control necessary to bring a meal (or a revenge) together. I enjoyed The Menu (dir. Mark Mylod) while I was watching it, but in retrospect it has a very similar dynamic to Ready or Not, a film I still prefer. The pretensions of haute cuisine are perhaps too easy of a target, but expanding its scope to call out bloodless, unfeeling art of any kind makes it clear that it’s as much a jab at A24-style “elevated horror” as a call to bring out the guillotines. That Anya Taylor-Joy, who is practically the face of “elevated horror” since breaking out with The VVitch, appears as the audience surrogate among the diners and gets to deliver the third-act thesis statement makes the irony all the more . . . delicious.
8. Winsor McCay’s classic newspaper comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland is in the public domain, so it’s fair game for borrowing and adaptation, but it’s a little strange that as far as I can tell, McCay’s name doesn’t even appear in the credits for Slumberland (dir. Francis Lawrence). But whatever, real heads know. The new film reimagines the protagonist as a young girl (Marlow Barkley), orphaned and sent to live with her emotionally closed-off uncle (Chris O’Dowd). Reliving memories of her imaginative father in dreams, she encounters Flip (Jason Momoa), a rogue who is able to move freely within the dream world—Slumberland—living out whatever fantasy suits him for the moment. McCay’s comic strip was famously episodic, with the tow-headed main character waking up at the end of each installment, but the film borrows liberally from films like Time Bandits (a map of Slumberland figures prominently), Inception, and the Disney+ series Loki (Flip is a fugitive dreamer, pursued by “dream police” whose bureaucratic look and ethos draw heavily on ‘70s cop shows, much like Loki’s Time Variance Authority) to provide structure. On top of that, Momoa plays the satyr-like Flip as an aggressive mix of Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow and wrestler “Macho Man” Randy Savage. But somehow all these diverse elements come satisfyingly together; the dream worlds are dazzling and connect in fun ways (and since these are technically other people’s dreams, their relationship to the dreamers’ waking lives come as an amusing reveal near the end), and at its core there is an emotional arc that balances the power of dreaming with the importance of living your life while you’re awake.
7. I posted a longer review of The Bad Guys (dir. Pierre Perifel) on Letterboxd, but to keep it short, this is an example of the family-friendly animated comedy done right. A band of slick animal outlaws, all scary predators like Wolf, Shark, Snake, et cetera, is provided with a second chance, allowing them to find out whether they’re “bad guys” because they’re born that way or because society treats them as such. Drawing on a vocabulary of heist and con films, The Bad Guys delivers the pleasures of tightly-plotted scams and schemes (complete with double- and triple-crosses), witty banter, and characters who aren’t always what they appear.
6. Another film about the pleasures of behaving badly, Do Revenge (dir. Jennifer Kaytin Robinson) calls its shots early on with prominently placed copies of Strangers on a Train and Dangerous Liaisons, and it’s similarly knowing about the media- (and social media-) soaked lives of the privileged young people at its center. After Drea (Camila Mendes) has her life at an exclusive prep school turned upside down by a leaked explicit video, endangering her planned-out life path, a new acquaintance, Eleanor (Maya Hawke), helps her get payback in exchange for help with her own revenge. Of course, things never work out quite the way we expect, even when they appear to go according to plan. Do Revenge is the Gen-Z successor to Heathers, and I mean that as the highest praise.
5. In Turning Red (dir. Domee Shi), thirteen-year-old Meilin (Rosalie Chiang) has everything under control, from school to friendship to her dutiful place in her family, until puberty comes along and wrecks everything: her sudden, unpredictable transformation into a giant red panda is fraught with metaphor (outside of educational films, this is the first Disney release to explicitly mention menstruation), but it’s also a powerful escapist fantasy. When she learns that her transformation is part of her family’s heritage, and that she is expected to follow her mother’s example of locking away her newfound power, she is forced to make a difficult decision. It sounds heavy, but Turning Red balances its exploration of generational trauma, the immigrant experience, and peer pressure with the goofiness of being in middle school and just wanting to see your favorite boy band in concert and writing merman fanfic about the cute boy you have a crush on.
4. Ten years ago, Funny or Die released a fake trailer for a heavy, dramatic biopic of “Weird Al” Yankovic with Aaron Paul as the novelty singer-songwriter. Amazingly, we now have the actual film promised by that trailer in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (dir. Eric Appel), starring Daniel Radcliffe (announcing the project, Yankovic asserted that “I have no doubt whatsoever that this is the role future generations will remember him for”). Detailing Yankovic’s incredible rise to the top of 1980s music stardom, his passionate affair with Madonna, having the tables turned on him when his original song “Eat It” was parodied by Michael Jackson, and his battle against a Colombian drug cartel, Weird is in the same vein as comedy “behind the music” films like This Is Spinal Tap and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, but is even more amazing since, unlike those movies, it all really happened.
3. “You’re capable of anything because you’re so bad at everything,” says a dimension-hopping version of Evelyn’s (Michelle Yeoh) husband, explaining why her every failure and missed opportunity makes her the perfect candidate to save the many branching realities that make up the multiverse. Taught to access versions of herself that made different choices and borrow their skills (everything from kung fu to playing the piano with her feet), Evelyn confronts the nihilistic Jobu Tupaki, a cautionary example of a jumper who’s seen so much that nothing has any meaning, but her real struggle is to avoid the same fate and make the best of the one life that’s really hers. Everything Everywhere All at Once (dir. “The Daniels,” Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) represents the fullest expression of the fascination with multiverses that has gradually gone mainstream in the last decade or so, but while it speaks the language of science fiction and superhero comics, the emotional stakes set it apart from the usual summer blockbuster (note the title: there’s not a colon anywhere to be found). It speaks to the pervasive sense of having taken a wrong turn somewhere, and that acute nostalgia for things that never were that comes from imagining things would be so much better in some other timeline. Ultimately, connection to the multiverse doesn’t mean much if you can’t connect to yourself and the people around you.
2. Earlier this year, X homaged and updated The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for a cinephile generation hungry to see itself in the spotlight: Mia Goth plays an aspiring porn actress, who along with her crew, runs afoul of a murderous old woman (also played by Goth). X was cool, but the prequel Pearl, also released this year (and, like X, directed by Ti West), is on another level entirely: Goth returns to reveal the old woman’s youth in World War I-era Texas, struggling to contain her sociopathic impulses and desire for fame and recognition against the strictness of her German immigrant family, her absent husband fighting the war, and the fears of contamination brought on by the 1918 influenza epidemic (filmmakers have tried with various levels of success to deal with Covid as a plot point, but this is the best I have seen, “pandemic cinema” that succeeds by analogy rather than hitting the subject head-on). Where X borrowed the grimy vocabulary of TCSM and Psycho and calls attention to its cleverness through a nerdy film director character, Pearl mimics Hollywood’s Golden Age through a surging, romantic score and visual references to The Wizard of Oz and the silent films Pearl hopes to star in, and the result is magical. Magical, and terrifying.
1. I’ve enjoyed all of writer-director Jordan Peele’s films so far, but I suspect Nope is the one I’ll revisit the most for its ominous Western/monster movie vibe. Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer play sibling heirs to a ranch that supplies horses to movie and television productions, left to run things on their own after their father’s death. A series of weird events around the isolated ranch and centered on a former child actor’s (Steven Yeun) nearby tourist trap leads the siblings to suspect UFO activity. I don’t want to spoil anything else, but Nope is scary, funny, and awe-inspiring; Peele knows his Fortean lore, the plotting is tight and fast-paced, and the meditations on spectacle and the treatment of animals in show business don’t feel like an afterthought or a heavy-handed message. I’m also fascinated by the observation that Nope is in part an homage to Steven Spielberg’s career, with numerous references in the visuals and names of characters, and that it’s ultimately a study of the “Spielberg face,” the trademark expressive close-up used to project a sense of awe and wonder in so many of the director’s films.
Honorable Mention: Over the years a number of self-distributed films have made their way to YouTube, sometimes for a limited time and sometimes for good. This year, the most interesting YouTube-distributed film I saw was Ambient Trip Commander, a one-man animated production drawn, animated, and scored by Danny Wolfers, who performs under the name Legowelt. The story is simple but not straightforward: an aimless young woman spends her days working in a synthesizer shop until a mysterious summons draws her to a distant town, home to both a Paleolithic cave and a mountain castle. A sinister pink being stalks her as she makes her way to her destination. With a handmade look and a cool electronic soundtrack, Ambient Trip Commander is mostly about vibes, a meditation on expanding consciousness and a love letter to retro synths and computers. It successfully captures the dreamlike feeling of being alone, traveling across an empty landscape at night: it’s both cozy and a little spooky.
Thanks for reading and following, and have a great 2023!
The other night, I was watching the thirty-first and final movie of my month-long Spooktober marathon; I was eating popcorn, as one does, when I felt a harder crunch than usual and realized that one of my teeth had cracked. It was the second time this had happened, so I recognized the sensation immediately. It was one of my back molars, one of the wisdom teeth I was so proud of having held on to; I’d even had a filling on this one just a couple of weeks ago (the other tooth that cracked, now gone, was another of these wisdom teeth). However, I wasn’t mad or distraught; it didn’t even hurt, at least not yet. I fished the wayward chip of tooth out of my mouth, sighed, and shrugged. I’m almost fifty, and after a certain point your body falling apart is just something you accept.
It’s also pretty minor in the scheme of things: most people don’t even have those back teeth, and aside from the inconvenience and expense of dealing with it, I’ll survive. Last month, my wife had surgery to remove her kidney along with a large tumor that had grown on it. Its presence was a shock, discovered at the end of summer, so we didn’t have a lot of time to process it before it was happening. She came out the other side okay, and has been recovering. Compared to what she went through, I’m getting off easy. Still, it was only about halfway through my October marathon, wading through Japanese body horror and American slasher gore, when I thought, “Hey, I wonder if there’s any connection between my current obsession with bloody abdominal wounds and the surgical ordeal I nursed my wife through last month?” Compartmentalization is a hell of a thing.
It is, I suppose, one of the reasons the made-up terrors of the movies don’t work on me like they once did. As I wrote last year, on the heels of broken bones and other mundane disasters, the world has a way of taking its toll even without black-gloved giallo killers or supernatural demons. There is a beach that makes us grow old, and its name is planet Earth; the shore we walk is the one between the unknowable prenatal past and the all-too-certain future: a fragile sandbar bounded on both sides by deep waters. When I was younger, I didn’t like looking too closely at suggestions of mortality. Now, it is simply a fact of life, and while individual films or books might thrill me with suspense or depress me with dark commentary on human nature, shock me with depictions of sudden violence or sicken me with visceral carnage, they are more likely to be momentary escapes from the worries of real life than the source of nightmares.
One theory I’ve encountered to explain the appeal of scary stories is that by experiencing frights vicariously, we gain a sense of control. There are, of course, different kinds of horror, which I’ll go into in more detail below as I expand on my list of movies I viewed this month, but it’s certainly true that the majority of movies and stories take for granted that you’ll exit the theater or close the book none the worse for wear, able to say that you made it through. Take that, Boogeyman! At the worst, maybe you’ll have a bad dream or you’ll jump the next time you hear a creaky door when you’re alone in the house at night, but perhaps you’ll be mentally fortified when something scary actually does happen in real life. I don’t entirely abide by this self-help view of art, but the theory that experiencing art allows us to mentally practice hypothetical situations ahead of time isn’t one I can completely deny, either.
But enough doom and gloom. For the first time in years, I am actually posting this on Halloween instead of the day after, so an evening of trick-or-treating (or, in my case, being on the other end of that transaction) is still ahead of us. The final weekend of October included a Halloween house party, the first we’ve held in ages, and yesterday we carved our Jack o’ lanterns. Even spending time on other seasonal activities, I was able to watch thirty-one horror and fantasy movies this month, and for the first time they were all first-time watches for me. (I saw a few films at the theater, but I skipped out on the retro screenings at the drive-in, cutting down on films I might have seen before.) I was also more consistent in watching only horror or Halloween-specific fare this month than most years, give or take a robotic geisha or children’s magic school. So, as always, here’s the complete list, with a few highlights singled out after:
1. My Best Friend’s Exorcism (Damon Thomas, 2022)
2. The Munsters (Rob Zombie, 2022)
3. DeadTectives (Tony West, 2018)
4. Sister Tempest (Joe Badon, 2020)
5. Attack of the Crab Monsters (Roger Corman, 1957)
6. Tokyo Gore Police (Yoshihiro Nishimura, 2008)
7. Hocus Pocus 2 (Anne Fletcher, 2022)
8. Meatball Machine (Yudai Yamaguchi and Jun’ichi Yamamoto, 2005)
12. Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (Christopher Speeth, 1973)
13. RoboGeisha (Noboru Iguchi, 2009)
14. Suburban Gothic (Richard Bates Jr., 2014)
15. The Disembodied (Walter Grauman, 1957)
16. The Beyond (Lucio Fulci, 1981)
17. Atom Age Vampire (Anton Giulio Majano, 1960)
18. X (Ti West, 2022)
19. The Raven (Roger Corman, 1963)
20. Doll Face (Stuart Paul, 2021)
21. Halloween Kills (David Gordon Green, 2021)
22. Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell aka “the Japanese Evil Dead” (Shinichi Fukazawa, 1995)
23. Blood Tea and Red String (Christiane Cegavske, 2006)
24. Aabra Ka Daabra: The School of Magic aka “the Bollywood Harry Potter” (Dheeraj Kumar, 2004)
25. Tenebre (Dario Argento, 1982)*
26. Opera (Dario Argento, 1987)*
27. Pieces (Juan Piquer Simón, 1982)*
28. Halloween Ends (David Gordon Green, 2022)*
29. Motel Hell (Kevin Connor, 1980)
30. Werewolf by Night (Michael Giacchino, 2022)
31. Wendell & Wild (Henry Selick, 2022)
*seen in theater
Best movie: In the past I might not have sought out a movie with a title like Meatball Machine, promising over-the-top gore, but since I was exploring the genre, I gave it a chance. Yoji (Issey Takahashi), a put-upon factory worker, finally makes time with the shy, pretty coworker he’s been flirting with, at the same time that an invasion of strange alien parasites arrives at his doorstep. The parasites turn their human victims into horrifying cyborg gladiators, single-mindedly battling others of their kind while their human consciousness remains helplessly trapped inside their hijacked bodies. (It’s gradually revealed that the parasite pods house tiny aliens engaging in a cosmic game, controlling their human “mounts”—the “meatball machines” of the title—through bio-mechanical linkages.) It’s a relatively somber film for such an outrageous premise, and the key to its success is balancing the bleakness of its outlook—it’s strongly suggested that the main couple have too many personal issues to overcome for a successful relationship, even before the aliens get involved—with the inventive special effects, action sequences, and heady concepts. This has been an educational month for me, as I realized that Sheborg, an Australian film I talked up a few years ago, owes a great deal to this movie; I suspect that they all trace their lineage back to Tetsuo: The Iron Man, but I haven’t gotten to that one yet. (As far as Meatball Machine goes, I also liked the belated sequel, Kodoku, even as it relies more on the absurd humor and T&A that are an element in many of the Japanese shockers I’ve seen.)
Goriest movie: Speaking of absurd humor, there’s a moment early in Tokyo Gore Police in which Ruka (Eihi Shiina), a leading member of the force, ascends to the top floor of a building by firing a rocket launcher into the ground and riding the recoil into the air. That’s as good an indicator as any that we’re not exactly in for realism (later, a character flies around a room, held aloft by geysers of his own blood, so ditto), but something like a live-action anime. Still, Tokyo Gore Police does what it says on the tin: it is super gory. In the near future, tumors turn criminal “engineers” into bizarre living weapons. The police force is dedicated to hunting down these vicious predators, but there is more to their story than simple mad science run amok. I was pleasantly surprised by the dystopian setting woven around the mayhem, with cutting and hara-kiri being so common that commercial products and PSAs acknowledge them, and of course the privatized, heavily propagandized police aren’t the force for good they claim to be. If this wasn’t influenced by Judge Dredd’s take on the police, it has a lot in common with it. Most of the Japanese “super-powered girl takes on monsters” films I‘ve seen don’t really try that hard to fit the pieces together and are just happy to be exploitation shockers, but on the other hand this still makes me suspect that it’s primarily made for export to the West with all the “Isn’t Japan wacky?” material pushed to the forefront. Tokyo Gore Police is just one of several blood-drenched movies I watched this month, so it was hard to pick just one winner in this category: in addition to the other Japanese splatterpunk I saw, there was The Beyond, X, Halloween Kills and Ends, Motel Hell, and Pieces. Really, they’re all winners.
Worst movie: I dislike going after small projects with hammer and tongs; it feels churlish to single out a backyard production when there are more worthy high-profile targets out there. As far as professionally-made films starring people I’d heard of with actual commercial aspirations, the limp Suburban Gothic was my biggest disappointment this month. But beyond that, what can you really say? Sometimes the scrappy can-do passion project doesn’t turn out. Doll Face was, I believe, a web series or something that got compiled into a feature; it’s no-budget and amateurish and is 75 minutes but only has enough good material for a 20-minute short. A timid young woman, Marmalade (Alix Villaret), inherits her grandmother’s condo, with the catch that it comes with her extensive doll collection, whom she must love as if they were her own children. The dolls are, of course, alive in some fashion, and there’s some business with an evil doll maker cursing his creations and a homeless “master doll repairman,” and the girl also sees a terrible therapist. The dolls start committing suicide in ways that are more hilarious than scary, and the line between human and doll begins to collapse for her. The weirdest detail is that Marmalade’s dialogue (in a thick French accent) is all post-recorded, as she never moves her lips. I thought at first we were hearing her thoughts, like Garfield, but no, she holds conversations that way. Nevertheless, despite her limitations, Villaret is quite charming: a living doll, you might say.
The posterThe movie
Weirdest movie: In Sister Tempest, art teacher Anne (Kali Russell), estranged from her younger sister, takes a student, Ginger (Linnea Gregg), under her wing, perhaps to fill the void in her family life. Soon, Ginger becomes angrily possessive, destroying Anne’s remaining relationships and even holding her hostage in her own home. Through fractured chronological storytelling, Anne is also being held by an alien tribunal, presumably after death, who demand that she describe and explain her actions, and the collapse of real life and fantasy is explored from numerous angles. (The constant presence of “Xiolans,” an alien camera crew who document Anne’s life for dissection by the tribunal, is a highlight.) It doesn’t take long to realize that Anne is one of those “unreliable narrators” we’ve heard about. Writer-director Joe Badon is firmly in the DIY indy camp, combining elements of animation, music video, and homemade special effects with a deliberately confounding and contradictory tale. Dream and religious imagery is where it’s at. Sister Tempest has many of the same idiosyncrasies as Badon’s previous film, The God Inside My Ear, and could even be seen as a continuation of it; it’s much more assured, however, even as it takes bigger swings (for one thing, you’ll probably see the ending coming but I still found it effective, a hurdle TGIME didn’t quite overcome).
Most fun: I like all of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films in varying degrees, but The Raven was just flat-out fun. Vincent Price plays Dr. Craven, a sorcerer who has chosen to avoid the internecine struggles of his fellow wizards, sitting at home, mooning over his deceased (or so he thinks!) wife Lenore (Hazel Court). When a raven appears at his window, revealing himself as a fellow wizard (Peter Lorre) and asking for help, claiming to have seen Lenore alive at the castle of Dr. Scarabus, the plot (which, you can tell, has only a nominal relation to Poe’s original poem) gets rolling. I had a big grin when Boris Karloff first appeared as Scarabus, graciously inviting his guests into his castle and shocked—shocked!—that they could believe him capable of any evil deeds. Of course, Karloff could do comedy very well, and it’s just a gas to see him, Price, and Lorre trying to out-ham each other. All that and young Jack Nicholson! (I must confess that I saw Karloff and Nicholson in The Terror when I was in high school and I thought it was the most boring “horror” movie I had ever seen, and since then I’ve kind of scoffed every time I see it in one of those public domain DVD collections, but I should probably check it out again now that I have more appreciation for atmosphere and the “slow burn.”) The final magical duel between Craven and Scarabus is also one for the ages. Finally, the one constant in every phase of Corman’s career is that he absolutely put the most beautiful women he could find in his pictures—did anyone tell Hazel Court this movie was for kids?
Legacies: Many of this year’s new films are parts of long-running franchises: sure, you’ve seen werewolves before, but what about a werewolf who could someday share the screen with Spider-Man? Rob Zombie’s goofy take on The Munsters is true to the TV show, silly sight gags and dad jokes included, and forms a prequel to the series. And I’ll admit to enjoying Hocus Pocus 2 more than I expected to, even acknowledging how unnecessary I thought it was. But the big one is the conclusion of David Gordon Green’s trilogy with Halloween Ends.
I don’t have a huge investment in the Halloween series—aside from the DGG trilogy I’ve only seen the 1978 original and the non-Michael Myers Halloween III. I’m aware of it, of course, and I appreciate the absurdity of needing a timeline map to keep track of how the sequels are (or aren’t) related to one another. Multiverses are all the rage now, though, so perhaps the series was simply ahead of its time. Green’s Halloween, which I saw in the theater in 2018, is a true legacy sequel, building on Halloween (1978) alone and jettisoning everything else (so no, Michael isn’t Laurie’s brother in this version). In Green’s vision, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is an ultimate survivor, training herself for the inevitable moment when Michael returns to finish the job he started forty years earlier, but his real theme (repeatedly and explicitly stated) is how violence, and its attendant grief and anger, can warp a community. I liked the idea of a cohesive trilogy that takes place on one crazy Halloween forty years after the original attacks, so having Halloween Ends swerve into a very different story separated in time from Halloween (2018) and Halloween Kills, and with relatively little screen time for Michael, well, I can see why that left some fans disconcerted.
Having said that, I found the story of Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), a young man marked by a terrible mistake that left a child dead, compelling. After years of being a pariah, Corey finds new power through a chance encounter with Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney), still alive and hiding out in the sewer like an evil spirit. It’s like Christine, but with a nearly-immortal mass murderer instead of a car. Also, the teenagers who push Corey to the edge are all in the marching band, showing that anyone can be a bully; it’s an empowering message, really. The final act and the over-the-top effort to prove that (spoiler!) Michael is really dead this time seem like the collision of real-world thinking with the mythic world of the movies, and I don’t know if it’s going to be as satisfying in the long run as it probably was in the moment. But even a casual fan like me isn’t immune to the weight of forty years of history/histories between Michael and Laurie. RIP, Michael Myers of Earth-G, at least until the next time someone wants to start printing Halloween money.
Well, that’s it for this year. Maybe next year I’ll concentrate on revisiting old favorites or reappraising stuff I need to give another chance. Happy Halloween!
The key word in my reading this year was “pulp”: not to say I didn’t read some “serious” literature, but for the most part I was looking for the quick hit, and that meant tearing through a lot of genre paperbacks—adventure, horror, and mystery—especially once summer started and I found myself doing a lot of waiting for kids at music lessons, doctors’ appointments, and the like. I guess you could say that this year I rediscovered the pleasure of skimming, of not having to read every word as closely as if I were writing a graduate thesis on it. Fiction often takes me longer to read than non-fiction because of the labor of imagining every detail as the author describes it, but, welp, not this year.
If I had a reading “project” this year, it was reading all of the (non-film) Indiana Jones tie-in novels; I had read a couple of them before and had a few more on the shelf, but making the decision to track down the rest (a manageable but not trivial task) was a plunge I hadn’t expected to take at the beginning of the year. Despite my affection for the Indiana Jones movies and pulp adventure in general, I grew up with the snob’s suspicion of such tie-ins, a resistance I’ve gradually broken down in recent years as I explored movie adaptations and mass market fiction in general.
So, how were they? Most of them don’t rise to the heights of the best media tie-ins (Max Allan Collins’s Dick Tracy novelization and Matthew Stover’s adaptation of Revenge of the Sith are probably the best I’ve read), but they are diverting, and the best of them feel like authentic extensions of the character and his world that we know from Harrison Ford’s performance in the film series. They are also a neat-looking collection, with matching trade dress and original painted covers by poster maestro Drew Struzan, and most of them feature Indy confronting a legendary supernatural artifact or phenomenon, as you would expect.
Of the three authors who wrote the original twelve installments, Max McCoy’s were my favorite: they feel the most like they could have been movies in the original series, and strike the right balance of action, mystery, and characterization. The two by Martin Caidin (who, among other works, wrote the book upon which The Six Million Dollar Man was based) feel like they might have originally been written about Doc Savage or some other pulp superman and then rebranded as Indiana Jones novels; they’re entertaining enough, but the plots are bizarre and don’t feel much like the character as depicted anywhere else, like hearing a story about someone you know that makes you wonder if you’re thinking of the same person. Rob MacGregor not only wrote the most books (six), but they have the most complex internal continuity, not to mention a mystical bent that, considering these are prequels set in the early to mid-1930s, makes the character’s skepticism of the supernatural as depicted in Raiders of the Lost Ark a little jarring.
The original twelve books were published in the 1990s, following Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, so there are frequent references to Indy’s strained relationship with his father, and side characters such as Marcus Brody and Sallah make appearances. The thirteenth book, Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead by Steve Perry, was released in 2009 alongside Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and includes that film’s George “Mac” McHale as Indy’s partner in adventure. With another Indiana Jones movie scheduled for 2022, will there be any new tie-in prequels/sidequels? I don’t know, but while researching that question I found that Rob MacGregor wrote another novel, Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings, that was never published, but which he began releasing as audio installments this fall, to be finished in January with a mystery announcement scheduled for February: a new book, or a print publication of this one? Either way, I feel obligated to check it out now.
Another theme emerged in my horror reading: the much-discussed motif of the “final girl,” the (usually virginal) would-be victim who is able to stand up to and escape or dispatch the killer in a slasher film. The concept was codified in Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws, but is now deployed self-consciously (witness The Final Girls, the 2015 movie I watched in October, not to be confused with Final Girl, from the same year, and a bunch of other movies and TV episodes with similar titles). The Final Girl Support Group was the first fiction by Grady Hendrix I’ve read, but the novel, which brings together a group of survivors of killing sprees clearly modeled on classic slasher franchises, is definitely the work of someone familiar with the tropes and clichés of the genre, as well as the commentary and criticism surrounding it. By chance I had read a less self-conscious “final girl” novel, Kimberly Rangel’s The Homecoming, earlier in the fall, with its heroine the only survivor of a Ouija board session gone wrong; when she returns home (and to the scene of the crime) years later, many still suspect her of the murders, but the reader knows that it’s actually the work of a serial killer who was executed at the very moment the Ouija board made contact with the spirit realm (did I mention I was looking for pulp?). Even Stephen Graham Jones’ recent The Only Good Indians riffs on the concept with a “Finals Girl,” so-called because she’s a basketball prodigy, but, well, don’t be surprised by where she ends up at the end of the book. (Jones’s latest novel, My Heart Is a Chainsaw, looks to be similarly self-referential, as it deals with a horror fan who ends up putting her knowledge to practical use, but I suppose it’s as much a matter of writers starting out as fans as it is the ubiquity of metanarrative concepts being popular; in any case, I look forward to reading it.)
January
The Boys of Sheriff Street, Jerome Charyn and Jacques de Loustal: French graphic novel, translated and published by Dover, of all companies
Samurai Executioner Vol. 4: Portrait of Death and Vol. 10: A Couple of Jitte, Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima: excellent manga from the creators of Lone Wolf and Cub, set in the same historical era
Winter’s Tale, Mark Helprin: a masterpiece
February
Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman in Rogue to Riches, David Boswell (reread)
The Living Talmud: The Wisdom of the Fathers and its classical commentaries, selected and translated with an essay by Judah Goldin
Medieval Ghost Stories, Andrew Joynes
March
The Night Ocean, Paul La Farge
Wonder Woman: The Complete Dailies 1944-1945, William Moulton Marston and H. G. Peter
The Which Way Tree, Elizabeth Crook
May
Kanako el Kananam: Aventuroj en la Ĝangalo de Novgvineo, Kenneth G. Linton: As I mentioned last year, I began studying Esperanto in 2020, and this memoir, by an Australian soldier stationed in New Guinea after World War II, is so far the only full-length book I’ve read in the language. It took me a while.
The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, George Saunders, illustrated by Lane Smith: another one of those “postmodern author’s children’s books for adults,” fits on the shelf next to Donald Barthelme’s The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, but not as good
The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux: the book that got me in the pulp mood for the summer
June
Indiana Jones and the Peril at Delphi, Rob MacGregor
Indiana Jones and the Dance of the Giants, Rob MacGregor
Cold Cash, Gaylord Dold
Indiana Jones and the Seven Veils, Rob MacGregor
Indiana Jones and the Genesis Deluge, Rob MacGregor
July
Indiana Jones and the Unicorn’s Legacy, Rob MacGregor
Indiana Jones and the Interior World, Rob MacGregor (reread)
The Homecoming, Kimberly Rangel
August
Avengers: The Complete Celestial Madonna Saga, Steve Englehart, John Buscema, Jorge Santamaría, et al
Faerie Tale, Raymond E. Feist
Indiana Jones and the Sky Pirates, Martin Caidin
Indiana Jones and the White Witch, Martin Caidin
King Kong, Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper, novelization by Delos W. Lovelace
September
Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone, Max McCoy
Dangerous Girls, R. L. Stine
The Yellow Room, Mary Roberts Rinehart: I know, don’t judge by the cover, but I expected more of a Gothic romance than this turned out to be. Wouldn’t you?
Indiana Jones and the Dinosaur Eggs, Max McCoy
Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth, Max McCoy (reread)
October
Indiana Jones and the Secret of the Sphinx, Max McCoy
The Final Girl Support Group, Grady Hendrix
The Death Freak, “John Luckless” who is also known as Clifford Irving and Herbert Burkholz: I found this at Goodwill and immediately had to read it, and I guess in this case the cover turned out to be pretty accurate: an only-in-the-’70s satirical spy thriller, sort of like a James Bond novel if Q were the hero.
Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead, Steve Perry
November
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco (trans. William Weaver)
December
The Best American Noir of the Century, ed. James Ellroy and Otto Penzler: a 700+ page doorstop that I’ve had for a while, but once I started reading it I wished I’d started it sooner
Flying Too High (A Phryne Fisher Mystery), Kerry Greenwood
The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones
That’s it for 2021: I hope to post more consistently in 2022, but whatever happens, have a Happy New Year!
The human body is so fragile: aside from the typical slashings and beheadings that befall horror movie victims, all it takes is an upsetting of our delicate chemical balance to send us spiraling. An overdose of alcohol injected by invading saucer-men or exposure to the radioactive body of an astounding she-monster, and it’s curtains. Even the beach that makes you grow old is but an acceleration of the natural process by which we eventually wither and die (alert readers will notice that I didn’t actually get around to seeing M. Night Shyamalan’s Old this month, but I assume it does what it says on the label—it’s not like Shyamalan is famous for big twists or anything).
Autumn is a natural time to contemplate the fragility of life, of course, surely part of the reason we have such spooky associations with the season to begin with. But this particular October has been a busy one, spent waiting for tow trucks and in doctors’ waiting rooms, so finishing the month with a movie like writer-director Michael Dougherty’s Trick ‘r Treat, so aware of the connections between people and events and the chain reactions that cascade into disaster, seems appropriate. (Everything’s under control here, so don’t be alarmed: I’m developing a theme. I was also at a bunch of high school football games, but that’s less dramatic.)
While I was busy, and for a time thought that this year’s Spooktober crop of films would be the most meager since I began keeping track of them for this blog, I was able to fit in a respectable number of horror and fantasy films representing every decade from the 1930s to the present, all but a few of them first-time viewings. Most of them were on the shorter side, some very short indeed. Did I count a repeat viewing of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown just so I could get to the magic number 31? Mmmaybe, but what’re you gonna do, call the Halloween Police?
At least I resisted the urge to log the Korean Netflix hit Squid Game on my Letterboxd account, but watching that nine-hour series is probably the other reason my movie-watching got off to a slow start (for the record, it’s a horror-adjacent thriller, so if it had been a feature film I would have counted it). Squid Game was my son’s first “adult” media aside from Marvel movies or whatever, and we watched it together; it was fun to see him engage with the series’ twists and turns, so reminiscent (to me) of shows like Lost, as he encountered them for the first time (and to be fair, some of the big twists took me by surprise as well). Other uncounted TV watching included multiple episodes of Treehouse of Horror, the Halloween anthology episodes of The Simpsons that I can put on and rewatch with pleasure any time.
Speaking of television, a recent theme in my viewing has been exploring made-for-TV movies, particularly from the 1970s. I “pregamed” a bit in September with some of these movies, so in addition to the TV movies listed below, I enjoyed Are You in the House Alone? (Walter Grauman, 1978), a film about sexual assault with a more serious tone than its title would suggest; The Night They Took Miss Beautiful (Robert Michael Lewis, 1977), a hostage thriller with an all-star cast; and The Darker Side of Terror (Gus Trikonis, 1979), a thoroughly trashy look at the dangers of leaving your clone alone with your sexually unsatisfied wife. Killdozer (Jerry London, 1974), a famous example of the form based on a story by Theodore Sturgeon, turned out to be kind of dull.
Now for the main event! To curtail the risk of running any longer, here’s the complete list:
1. The Mummy (Karl Freund, 1932)
2. A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985)**
3. Alone in the Dark (Jack Sholder, 1982)**
4. Invasion of the Saucer-Men (Edward L. Cahn, 1957)
5. Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992)
6. Dave Made a Maze (Bill “Not the Calvin and Hobbes guy” Watterson, 2017)
7. Muppets Haunted Mansion (Kirk R. Thatcher, 2021) t
8. Monster Brawl (Jesse Thomas Cook, 2011)
9. The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (Joseph Green, 1962)*
10. The Astounding She-Monster (Ronald V. Ashcroft, 1957)
11. Psycho Goreman (Steven Kostanski, 2020)
12. Incubus (Leslie Stevens, 1966)
13. Frankenstein Island (Jerry Warren, 1981)
14. The Wild World of Batwoman (Jerry Warren, 1966)*
15. Trilogy of Terror (Dan Curtis, 1975) t
16. Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout (Kenneth J. Hall, 1990)
17. Jennifer’s Body (Karyn Kusama, 2009)
18. Shadow in the Cloud (Roseanne Liang, 2020)
19. The Werewolf of Woodstock (John Moffitt, 1975) t
20. Something Evil (Steven Spielberg, 1972) t
21. The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)
22. Army of Darkness (Sam Raimi, 1992)*, **
23. The Funhouse (Tobe Hooper, 1981)**
24. The Horror at 37,000 Feet (David Lowell Rich, 1973) t
25. The Final Girls (Todd Strauss-Schulson, 2015)
26. The Black Cat (Luigi Cozzi, 1989)
27. Instruments of Evil (Huw Evans and Curtis Anderson, 2016)
28. Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)*
29. The Leopard Man (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)
30. It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (Bill Melendez, 1966)* t
31. Trick ‘r Treat (Michael Dougherty, 2007)
* rewatch
** seen at the drive-in
t made for television
Best Movie: At the risk of being basic, the movie that impressed me the most this month is also one of the most revered, Bernard Rose’s Clive Barker adaptation Candyman (from 1992, not to be confused with this year’s reboot/sequel). Virginia Madsen plays an anthropology grad student determined to explain the persistent urban legend of a hook-handed killer haunting the Cabrini-Green housing projects; Tony Todd is the iconic title character. Barker in the early ‘90s was a sophisticated new voice in horror, and Candyman often feels like an arty prestige picture to match his reputation (with a score by Philip Glass that still feels novel, even after Glass has scored many more mainstream films), but the operatic tone just makes the blood and guts more shocking and the commentary on racial violence and gentrification is still relevant.
Worst Movie: I’ve seen enough B-movies from the 1950s to adjust my expectations, but at just over an hour, The Astounding She-Monster is especially flimsy. Gun-toting crooks and the debutante they’ve kidnapped crash the house of a geologist in a remote area; meanwhile, a glowing alien (curvy Shirley Kilpatrick in a skin-tight bodysuit), who is either the survivor of a long-vanished civilization or the emissary of an enlightened council of planets (maybe both—I was a little fuzzy on this point), wanders the woods, killing any human she comes into contact with. It’s not the worst thing ever, and I’m fortunate that I didn’t see anything truly terrible this month, but it’s pretty half-baked and it feels as if there’s a decent crime picture that doesn’t need the sci-fi gloss buried inside it. (It does have a hell of a poster, though.)
Scariest Movie: Now this is a horror movie! In The Funhouse, four teenagers spend the night inside the funhouse at a sleazy traveling carnival, running afoul of the sideshow freak who lives inside it, Phantom of the Opera-style. (That’s the kind of terrible decision you can count on old-school horror movie characters to make, and amusingly it’s just one kid who makes every dumb, short-sighted move in this film, ruining it for everyone. Dammit, Steve!) Tobe Hooper recaptures some of the grotty energy of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with another grotesque family living on the edges of society and the sly suggestion that “normal” families can be pretty messed up, too.
Weirdest Movie: Dave Made a Maze combines two of my favorite themes: a hand-crafted aesthetic and a superficially silly premise played straight. Dave (Nick Thune), a struggling wannabe artist, has put together a cardboard labyrinth in his living room . . . and gotten lost in it. When his fiancée and friends enter the maze to find him, they discover a sprawling, ever-expanding nightmare factory made of old boxes and other refuse, bigger on the inside than it appears from the outside, and from which there is no apparent escape. The metaphor for feeling trapped by a creative project couldn’t be clearer, and Dave Made a Maze works as a clever exploration of Dave’s relationships and unfocused psyche as well as a continually surprising series of handmade action/horror setpieces. Cheer up: at least your unfinished novel didn’t kill anyone (I hope).
Goriest Movie: A runner-up for Weirdest Movie, The Black Cat (from 1989, one of several movies with this title) is nominally an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, but is actually a crypto-sequel to Dominic Argento’s classics Suspiria and Inferno, made at a time when it wasn’t clear if Argento would finish his trilogy about the “Three Mothers.” He eventually did with Mother of Tears, a film that is not well-regarded and which represents a very different era of horror filmmaking; I don’t hate Mother of Tears, but I’m also happy to have Cozzi’s take on the material, in which an actress (Florence Guérin) studying to play the witch Levana, the Mater Lachrymarum, loses her grip on reality and comes to believe that Levana is possessing her and driving her to kill. The witch has a face made of worms and drools green slime on her, Fulci-style, and some of the more outré supernatural kills include making an occult expert’s heart explode in her chest. In one scene, the film-within-a-film’s screenwriter, after being attacked, crashes his car through the front wall of the actress’s house; after crawling out of the car, he reveals the knife plunged into his back. Was that there the whole time he was driving? An utterly deranged movie in the best Italian style.
Funniest Movie: Many of the films I watched this month are at least a bit funny. Psycho Goreman features one of my favorite sources of comedy, characters who exist at the center of their own universe, with scant (if any) regard for the feelings or situations of people around them. One such character is Mimi (Nita-Josee Hanna), a domineering young girl who comes into possession of absolute power over the title character, an ancient world-destroying evil monster imprisoned by the victors in a galactic war (think Power Rangers or Masters of the Universe). Mimi immediately uses the power of Psycho Goreman (a name bestowed by her and her brother) to impress her friends, make boys like her, and get out of doing chores, but of course you can’t keep such a thing secret forever. Psycho Goreman doesn’t quite stick the landing, unable to decide if Mimi should learn a lesson or stay true to her own self-regard, but I found it very amusing overall, and the whole cast is committed to a premise that is part ‘80s throwback (I was reminded a lot of Turbo Kid) and ‘00s indie comedy.
Not That Bad: I’ve written before about director Jerry Warren and my bull-headed attempts to plow through his (mostly crappy) filmography, so I was prepared for the worst with Frankenstein Island. Four hot-air balloonists, attempting a record-breaking flight around the world, are forced down on a remote island inhabited by animal-skin-clad Amazons, shipwrecked sailors, and the widow (big question mark) of the original Dr. Frankenstein. While a genial hostess, Sheila (!) Frankenstein is continuing her late husband’s work, and in fact communicating with him through the magic of science (John Carradine appears as Dr. Frankenstein in these interludes, almost certainly repurposing footage in the vein of Bela Lugosi’s appearance in Plan 9 from Outer Space). The whole thing is ridiculous, but in contrast to most of Warren’s movies it is at least fun to watch and features mostly original footage. It impressed me enough to revisit the only other Warren film I’ve even half-liked, The Wild World of Batwoman, to see if I had imagined enjoying it. That’s two films to receive my highest rating for a Jerry Warren picture, “Not Completely Terrible.”
Dumbest Movie I Will Probably Watch Again: I don’t know if I’ll watch Frankenstein Island again, but other contenders for this honor include Monster Brawl (a face-off between classic monsters—or their non-union equivalents—in the form of a pro wrestling pay-per-view event), Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout (a tribute to an iconic scream queen’s career in the form of a tacky artifact of the video store era), and The Werewolf of Woodstock (which looks cheap even for a TV production but has a surprisingly credible rock soundtrack). After the Woodstock festival is over, a hippie-hating townie gets electrocuted and turns into a werewolf (?!—perhaps his hatred of hippies kept him alive). Cue rampage against cops and hippies alike. Did I mention that the werewolf hates hippies? Plus he gets away in a dune buggy!
Kino en Esperanto: As mentioned at the end of last year, I started studying the constructed language Esperanto during the pandemic. While I have slowed down since earning my atesto (certificate), I knew I wanted to wait to watch Incubus, starring William Shatner and filmed entirely in Esperanto, until I could understand it without relying on subtitles. Ultimately, it probably didn’t matter because as far as I can tell none of the cast are Esperanto speakers: writer-director Leslie Stevens apparently made the decision to film in Esperanto to give it global appeal during an upswing in the language’s popularity, or perhaps as a novelty. Most of the pronunciation isn’t great, although Shatner (pre-Star Trek) comes off the best, actually acting and delivering the unfamiliar words with a cadence that sounds like speech instead of obviously reading syllables off cue cards. (Actually, the title annoys me more than the dialogue: to conform to Esperanto orthography it should be Inkubo.) Apart from the language issues, the film is interesting and atmospheric, however, a sort of allegorical fairy tale reminiscent of The Seventh Seal or Carnival of Souls and filmed in the natural beauty of Big Sur. Shatner plays a wounded soldier, the target of a beautiful succubus (Allyson Ames) who claims the souls of the men she seduces; has she met her match in Shatner?
That brings Spooktober 2021 to a close; thanks for reading and I hope you had a happy Halloween!
Once again, my Halloween-themed blog post is coming out on the day after the holiday, so I hope you have enough leftover candy to snack on while I lay out the State of the ‘Ween for you again. The pandemic didn’t stop trick-or-treaters in my neighborhood: in addition to being on a Saturday with a full moon, we in Kansas were blessed with a perfect not-too-cold evening, a nice change from having snow on the ground earlier in the week. Everyone was doing a good job with social distancing, and to help out I constructed a candy chute out of a ten-foot PVC pipe to deliver candy into trick-or-treaters’ hands. There weren’t as many people out as I would have expected under normal circumstances, but it was a respectable turnout, and combined with the glimpses of other friends’ in-person or online gatherings, I think most people who wanted to were able to find some kind of outlet for their spooky seasonal urges. I won’t pretend that COVID didn’t have an impact, but it was okay.
As far as media consumption this month goes, I decided to take it (relatively) easy. As much as I enjoy indulging in horror movies and ghost stories at this time of year, I don’t like it to feel like homework, and with everything going on in the world and the upcoming election I felt it was just as important to safeguard my mental health and not stress over missing some self-imposed deadline or goal. That gave me more freedom to rewatch familiar classics or follow up on things that might not fit neatly into the Spooktoberween category.
It also meant watching more short films. Before I get on to the main event, I want to highlight a few of the odds and ends I encountered this month. The 1910 Frankenstein produced by Thomas Edison was actually only a little over ten minutes in length, but given the wide variability of film lengths in the silent era, I’m counting it on my main list; I had thought I might revisit other versions of the classic story, but didn’t follow through with it (Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster doesn’t count, as the title creature is a robot only nicknamed “Frankenstein”). For the record, I liked it a lot, and found its suggestion that the monster was only a product of the doctor’s imagination way ahead of its time.
Other shorts included some of The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror” episodes and classic TV specials starring Garfield and Charlie Brown. I also revisited the 1977 special Witch’s Night Out, which I had seen as a very young child but probably not since. Watching it now, I was struck very strongly with the idea that Witch’s Night Out is a good portrayal of what it was like to grow up in a college town during the ‘70s, particularly the notion that an obviously burned-out hippie would make a good babysitter. Other than that, it’s hard to explain. I don’t think my family was too impressed with this one, but it was a blast from the past for me to be sure.
Finally, I had the opportunity (through Gofobo) to view a couple of episodes of 50 States of Fright, a horror anthology program on the short-content (and short-lived) app Quibi. This was after Quibi’s owners had already put the company up for sale, so I’m not sure what the point of the screening was: to drum up interest and spread positive word-of-mouth, perhaps, or maybe to get viewer feedback? I’m not sure. Maybe they were hoping that I would buy Quibi? Anyway, I was thrilled to be able to watch “The Golden Arm,” the only Quibi project that seems to have gotten much attention, even if it’s for how ridiculous it looked. The attempt to make an overt fable into a serious ghost story about a woman (Rachel Brosnahan) so obsessed with gold that she has a prosthetic arm made from the precious metal, even if wearing it kills her, doesn’t quite land, but to be fair it’s not that much sillier than many episodes of Tales From the Crypt or other horror anthology shows. Here’s hoping 50 States of Fright finds a home elsewhere now that Quibi is apparently closing down for good.
This year was a little different, to say the least, so I am making my list a little differently as well. I usually just list every movie I watch during October, whether it’s a rewatch or a first-time viewing, and a good portion of the list is made up of selections from the October at the Oldtown horror series. This year, with indoor theaters mostly closed, the horror series moved to the drive-in, starting in September; I made it to a few, but not all of the shows, but I’m taking their inspiration to count my “Septober” watches from both months. This time I’m leaving out movies that don’t fit the seasonal horror or fantasy mood as well as rewatches of movies I’ve seen before (anyone who wants to see what I left out can consult my Letterboxd Diary). Here’s the official list, all first-time watches (or, in a couple of cases, it’s been so long that they might as well be):
1. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
2. Train to Busan (Yeon Sang-ho, 2016)
3. Creepshow (George A. Romero, 1982)
4. The People Under the Stairs (Wes Craven, 1991)
5. Pledges (DJ Red, 2018)
6. The Jurassic Dead aka Z-Rex (Milko Davis and Thomas Martwick, 2017)
7. Frankenstein (J. Searle Dawley, 1910)
8. Slither (James Gunn, 2006)
9. King Kong (John Guillermin, 1976)
10. They Came From Beyond Space (Freddie Francis, 1967)
11. Tokyo Living Dead Idol (Yuki Kumagai, 2018)
12. Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror (Xavier Burgin, 2019)
13. Ghost Stories (Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson, 2017)
14. The Awful Dr. Orlof (Jess Franco, 1962)
15. Nocturne (Zu Quirke, 2020)
16. Dr. Orloff’s Monster aka The Secret of Dr. Orloff aka The Mistresses of Dr. Jekyll (Jess Franco, 1964)
17. Orloff and the Invisible Man aka Dr. Orloff’s Invisible Monster aka The Amorous Life of the Invisible Man (Pierre Chevalier, 1970)
18. Revenge in the House of Usher aka Neurosis aka Zombie 5 (Jess Franco as “J. P. Johnson,” 1982)
19. Hubie Halloween (Steven Brill, 2020)
20. Vibes (Ken Kwapis, 1988)
21. Prom Night (Paul Lynch, 1980)
22. Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (Bruce Pittman, 1987)
23. Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (Peter R. Simpson and Ron Oliver, 1990)
24. Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil (Clay Borris, 1992)
25. Invitation to Hell (Wes Craven, 1984)
26. Robot Monster (Phil Tucker, 1953)
27. Cat-Women of the Moon (Arthur Hilton, 1953)
28. Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (Robert Gaffney, 1965)
29. Snatchers (Stephen Cedars and Benji Kleiman, 2019)
Best Movie: Director Wes Craven’s output is among the most variable of big-name horror directors (the same year he made the classic A Nightmare on Elm Street he directed the goofy TV movie Invitation to Hell, starring Susan Lucci as the head of a sinister country club). The People Under the Stairs successfully brings together a number of his pet themes, with a young black kid (Brandon Adams) facing off against a deranged couple whose rent-seeking predations have drained the ghetto of money and hope for years (and who bear a not-coincidental resemblance to Ronald and Nancy Reagan). If the porous membrane between dreams and reality doesn’t come in for examination here as it does in some of Craven’s other films, perhaps it’s because the reality of the film is already so bonkers: “Daddy” and “Mommy” live in a fortified house, imprisoning foster children and intruders alike in feral conditions in the basement, while covering their cruelty, criminality, and sexual deviancy with a Father Knows Best veneer. This is an angry film that manages to deliver its message while remaining both scary and fun, and the continuing relevance of its plot means that it’s not surprising Jordan Peele is reportedly producing a remake.
The posterThe reality
Worst Movie: Possibly the worst movie I’ve watched all year, not just this fall, The Jurassic Dead promises hordes of undead dinosaurs, or at least one ferocious zombie tyrannosaur, and gives us instead a nearly incomprehensible plot about a scientist who discovers the secret of re-animation, loses his positions with first the government and then a university, and decides to exact his revenge on the world by releasing a zombie virus at the same time the earth is struck by the asteroid that only he predicted. There’s also a dinosaur in it. The protagonists are a band of mercenaries sent to take out the baddie at his compound and a group of college kids who wind up in the same place after getting lost in the desert. Somehow they have to work together. It’s not boring, I’ll give it that, but other than that it’s awful.
Scariest Movie: “The brain sees what it wants to see” is the tagline (and a key piece of dialogue) in Ghost Stories, in which a professional skeptic and debunker (co-writer/director Andy Nyman) is challenged to examine three seemingly inexplicable cases of the supernatural. As he tracks down the original witnesses and hears their stories, it’s clear that he himself is haunted, but only at the end do the threads come together. Thus Ghost Stories has a favorite form of mine, the anthology of stories-within-a-story, and whether or not you find the ending satisfying, the film has a chilling atmosphere and some hair-raising incidents. Ending a film this bleak with “The Monster Mash” over the end credits feels like a final ironic joke at the audience’s expense.
Least Scary Movie: I didn’t watch a ton of really terrifying films this month, but I’ll highlight Nocturne, part of Amazon’s Welcome to the Blumhouse series, as one that I think was trying to be scary. Nocturne centers on a pair of twin sisters attending a prestigious music prep school: Vivian (Madison Iseman), the prodigy, has been accepted to Juilliard, while Juliet (Sydney Sweeney) remains an underachiever. Until, that is, Juliet recovers a notebook belonging to a former student who had committed suicide, and discovers what seems like a set of occult signs: things start to go well for her, but her successes are accompanied by disturbing visions and fear that she is being taken over by some outside force. The elevator pitch seems to be “Whiplash meets Hereditary,” and I want to be clear that I did enjoy it, but I found its depiction of the high-pressure music world much more compelling than the rote horror elements, which had an ominous, dread-inducing mood, but never really came together and, worse yet, played out almost exactly the way the audience was led to expect.
Funniest Movie:Romancing the Stone and Ghostbusters were two of the biggest hits of the early 1980s, so it’s not surprising that someone thought to combine elements of the two. Vibes isn’t a horror film at all, but rather a supernatural comedy in which Jeff Goldblum and Cyndi Lauper play psychics recruited by sketchy-but-lovable Peter Falk to track down a missing expedition to a lost city in the Andes. The lost city is supposedly full of gold, but it’s actually the home of a powerful artifact full of psychic energy, sought after by other, less scrupulous psychics who hope to use it to conquer the world. Vibes is a lot of fun, but it’s extremely lightweight: there’s never much suspense, even during the big finale, but it’s worth watching for Goldblum and Lauper’s sexy chemistry and for the rest of the cast having a ball. In particular, it makes me wish Lauper had found more vehicles to act in: she nails the kind of streetwise screwball throwback that Madonna was trying to portray in movies at around the same time.
Weirdest Movie:Pledges was a Dollar Tree find, and like many of the movies I find there it’s low-budget and not very high-profile. The premise is one of the oldest in horror: a group of fraternity and sorority pledges go into the woods overnight as part of their initiation, and something bad happens. I was expecting typical teens-in-the-woods slasher hijinks, either from hazing gone wrong or from learning They’re Not Alone, but after an unsurprising setup it goes in much stranger directions, more like The Blair Witch Project or even Annihilation. There’s a hint that the woods are part of an off-limits government site, but whether the occurrences, which include time dilation, weird tumors, and creepy doppelgangers, are part of a mad science experiment, an alien invasion, or something else, is never explained. It’s not a particularly great film, but in a season in which I mostly watched straight-ahead horror, it was one of the oddest.
Most Informative Movie: For the first time, a documentary appears on one of these Halloween lists. Horror Noire investigates cinematic horror by and starring African Americans from the early days (by chance, I had watched Son of Ingagi earlier this summer) up to the current success of Jordan Peele (I’m glad I had already seen Get Out, as Horror Noire’s coverage of it goes into detail explaining why it is so cathartic, including the ending). Black audiences have often been among the biggest fans of horror, even while the film industry was slow to cater to them or even recognize their humanity. On the other hand, the fact that horror is often a low-budget entry point into the film industry has made it more welcoming to minority filmmakers than more high-profile genres, and Horror Noire includes plenty of examples of great, ambitious films from black filmmakers, including some that I intend to add to my watchlist.
Biggest Surprise: A few years ago I read a book that rewired some of my thinking on genre film, Atomic Bomb Cinema by Jerome F. Shapiro. Looking at the range of cautionary films that came out after the detonations that ended World War II and ushered in the Atomic Age, Shapiro is uninterested in purely “political” or “sentimental” films like On the Beach or The Day After, and instead takes notions of the Apocalypse back to their roots in the visionary religious texts of the Torah and the Bible. He points out the way modern apocalyptic films use ancient tropes such as journeys to the heavens, visitation from prophets or historical figures, and communication through dreams; even Godzilla has roots in the fantastic monsters that appear in Japanese fables. I don’t recall if Shapiro discusses Robot Monster in his book, but I didn’t expect it to fit into that context as neatly as it does: I only remembered the easily-mocked Ro-Man costume, a gorilla suit with a space helmet, from It Came From Hollywood and similarly selective looks back at the good-old, bad-old days of cheap B-movies. Make no mistake, Robot Monster is cheap, but it’s much more ambitious than I expected. The heroes, a small family, are the last humans left on earth after Ro-Man, in advance of an invasion of his kind, has wiped out all of humanity with incredible space weapons. Space battles and communication with other planets are part of the story as well, but much of the bigger picture is only alluded to rather than shown, and the scale is very much down-to-earth as the family huddles in a bombed-out house, protected by an electric fence, and Ro-Man sits in a nearby cave, conflicted over whether to carry out his programming or spare Alice, the pretty young daughter of the family. What are these new feelings Ro-Man is experiencing? They are counter to the Program! He is becoming more like a Hu-Man than a Ro-Man! It would be a stretch to call Robot Monster completely successful—as storytelling it is garbled, it attempts a George Pal epic on a Roger Corman budget, and I haven’t even gotten to the bubble machine Ro-Man uses as a computer—but I have to agree with my friend Zack Clopton’s assessment that it has an enjoyable “dream logic,” and there is more in it to chew on than one might expect.
That wraps up Halloween and Septober 2020! How was your Halloween? Did you watch anything exciting or scary this month? Have a great fall, everyone!
This essay contains spoilers for Color Out of Space.
It’s been hard to be an H. P. Lovecraft fan the last few years. I don’t mean because of his often-lugubrious prose style, his penchant for unpronounceable names, or his tendency to describe his horrors as “indescribable” (how convenient!): those traits tend to be the source of affectionate ribbing between fans rather than cause for cancellation, or at least come down to matters of taste. But Lovecraft has come under greater scrutiny in recent years for his racist views; whether you believe, as I do, that he underwent some revision of those views in the last years of his life, broadening his perspective, the fact remains that in his private letters and early writings he gave vent to opinions on race that put him in extreme company, even in the 1920s. Nor is this a case where one can easily separate the art and the artist, for his fiction, even some of the greatest of his stories, clearly come from a personal place in which Lovecraft’s xenophobia and fear of miscegenation form the basis of the fantastic horrors he describes (not to mention the more explicit references to the race and ethnicity of his human characters when they do appear).
These criticisms have been a long time coming, and they hardly blew up overnight: indeed, recognition that the “old man” wrote a few impolitic things has been present at least since his stories began to be collected and reprinted for an audience beyond the pulp magazines in which they first appeared. The world of fantasy and science fiction was, like many fandoms, an insular one, and the most influential voices within it tended to be white and, like me, insulated by privilege from feeling truly hurt by Lovecraft’s words. Robert Bloch, in his 1982 essay “Heritage of Horror” (the introduction to The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, the paperback collection that was an introduction to Lovecraft for many readers, including me), devotes two whole paragraphs to the charge of racism against Lovecraft, ultimately dismissing it as just one more spurious charge laid against the master by uncomprehending outsiders.
Both fiction and scholarship have, to their credit, attempted to grapple with this legacy rather than ignore it in recent years. On the new fiction front, the subversion or reimagining of Lovecraft’s themes, often written by people of color and tackling Lovecraft’s personal biases directly, has breathed life into a subgenre of horror that frequently consisted of stale imitations. Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, for example, is set in the 1950s and centers on a black science fiction fan, captivated by the imagination in pulp stories but acutely aware of the subhuman depictions of black people in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and others. What, he asks, do you do when you love a genre that doesn’t love you back? The hero’s nephew, for one, creates a comic book space opera with a black heroine, based on his mother, and that’s one strategy (witness the success Jordan Peele has had creating horror centered on specifically black experiences: expanding representation means new and better stories for everyone).
There’s also the 2015 decision to change the World Fantasy Award trophy from a bust of Lovecraft to something more abstract. For the record, even as a fan I think that’s the right call: as much as it was meant as an affectionate tribute when it started in 1975, in this day and age it’s a little odd to have a trophy representing “World Fantasy” look like any single person, as if it were all their idea, and I can’t blame the minority and POC writers who felt that they were being asked to place their work under the symbolic authority of a man who when alive would likely not have recognized or welcomed them. Finally, it’s a decision that makes it easier to keep the man himself in perspective, as one of many authors and with human flaws, rather than an Easter Island totem, unanswerable and above criticism.
I can’t say that I was directly thinking about these issues while I watched Color Out of Space, Richard Stanley’s new adaptation of Lovecraft’s short story “The Colour Out of Space.” What most struck me was that the film, in which a strange meteorite contaminates and destroys a small New England farm and the family that lives there, feels up to the minute, urgent even, in ways that are present in the original story and feel completely true to it, even as Stanley prunes and updates the text. But as I let the film sink in over the next few days, it occurred to me that it is next to impossible to talk about Lovecraft now without being aware of the discussion around him, and that for many people Lovecraft’s racism has become the sum total of what they know and think about him, particularly if they haven’t encountered him firsthand (and how many will now avoid him, if they think that every story is but a thinly-veiled racist screed?).
Yet here we are with a largely faithful feature film, and one that not only feels relevant but which features a multiracial cast and does so without a major rearrangement of the text. Lovecraft may be a “problematic fave,” but he continues to hang on in public consciousness because of something at the core of his writing, some essential observation of modern life. “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” Yes, Lovecraft was a pessimist, but there are times when pessimism and realism are one and the same, and reading a bracingly dark vision can be strangely life-affirming. Lovecraft–pedantic, verbose, racist–hangs on because of the clarity of that vision.
In “The Colour Out of Space” (which appeared in Amazing Stories in 1927, one of only a handful of Lovecraft’s stories to appear in a science fiction magazine rather than his usual Weird Tales), an unnamed surveyor visits the ancient wooded valleys around Arkham, Massachusetts (one of Lovecraft’s fictional towns) in advance for a new reservoir that will flood the land. Finding a desolate area called the “blasted heath” by the country folk, the surveyor tracks down a local farmer named Ammi Pierce, who tells him about the “strange days” forty years prior, when the “blasted heath” was the farm of Nahum Gardner and his family. Pierce relates the story of the meteorite that landed on the farm and the glass-like globule or “bubble” at its center: “the colour . . . was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all.” Over the course of the following year, in Pierce’s telling, the vegetation and animals around the farm go through strange metamorphoses, displaying a vague sense of “wrongness” familiar to readers of Lovecraft, but eventually turning the same unidentifiable “colour” and even visibly glowing at night. The people of the farm, Gardner’s family, become watchful and unhealthy, convinced that something is wrong but unable to leave. The farm’s well, in particular, seems to be at the center of their misgivings. Their transformations become more and more horrible, until the night Ammi Pierce and a delegation of lawmen from Arkham witness the transformation that leaves behind the “blasted heath.” The resolution is as uneasy as the ending of a 1950s monster movie: the danger is passed, but only for now, and it leaves behind the uncomfortable awareness of how dangerous the world really is.
“The Colour Out of Space” has been regarded as a cautionary tale about nuclear radiation and fallout: it was written well before the atomic bomb became a reality, but radiation was already a known phenomenon on a smaller scale, and world-destroying bombs and plagues were familiar in the pages of the pulp magazines long before they hit the front pages of newspapers. The intimations that the meteorite and the unearthly “colour” come from somewhere alien, where the forces of nature are different, place this story within the “cosmic horror” subgenre Lovecraft is known for, but it is essentially a story of contamination: the horror is one of environmental pollution, of body and mind being betrayed and corrupted by the elements around one.
In transferring this story to the screen (and for the record, this is not the first movie adaptation–I’ve even written about another loose adaptation, Die, Monster, Die!), Stanley (with co-writer Scarlett Amaris) wisely eliminates the frame story. The surveyor (now a hydrologist, played by Elliot Knight) is the protagonist, directly visiting the Gardner farm and getting involved in the action, and rather than being set years in the past everything has been updated to the present. Instead of being a yeoman farmer, Nathan Gardner (Nicolas Cage) is a businessman who’s made his pile in the city and moved his family back to his father’s farm, living off the land and living the dream. I recognized this person immediately, right down to the alpacas he has added to the farm (“the animal of the future,” a phrase that will come to seem downright ominous). Theresa Gardner (Joely Richardson), a breast cancer survivor, continues to work as a stockbroker, the laptop and headset mic she uses to connect with her clients incongruous with the tiny garret that serves as her office. The family, with its three children–Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur), Benny (Brendan Meyer), and the youngest, Jack (Julian Hilliard)–may have its issues, but it’s basically functional: they can work things out.
Until, that is, the night of the meteorite. It’s not really possible to depict a never-before-seen color, but Stanley does make it look spectacular, ladling on the neon pink and purple, lens flares and other prismatic effects, and accompanying the visual flashes with eerie sounds (comparisons to the palette of Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy are apt). Even the arrival of the meteorite is a big event, causing computers to glitch and affecting each member of the family differently; the staging implies that the stone’s arrival is as much a psychic event as a physical one, and did it really fall from space, or from an opening to another dimension? Once everyone comes outside to look at it, it looks like a pink, pulsating brain. Later on, as the alien color seeps into everything around it and pink-hued flowers sprout around the farm, it’s as if the landscape is being turned into the surface of another planet (and indeed there are suggestions that that’s exactly what is happening). As the meteorite begins to show its malign influence, the transformations the animal life and eventually the family experience recall John Carpenter’s The Thing, or the ooky body horror of Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna.
Unlike some adaptations, Color Out of Space is explicitly set in Lovecraft’s imaginary “witch-haunted” New England: in addition to nearby Arkham, there are references to Innsmouth and Kingsport; the hydrologist, Ward Phillips (one of Lovecraft’s pen names), wears a Miskatonic University tee shirt. Although Lovecraft’s original story predates Cthulhu and his other famous creations, the Necronomicon makes an appearance in the film, but it’s the “Simon” Necronomicon, a mass-produced paperback published in 1977, and it doesn’t provide any answers. The film begins and ends with some of Lovecraft’s own words as voice over delivered by the hydrologist.
By coincidence, less than a week before seeing Color Out of Space I had watched The Last Mimzy for my review of Henry Kuttner’s short fiction: in both films, Joely Richardson plays the mom of a family experiencing an incursion from otherworldly forces. The Last Mimzy is an optimistic film, injecting Kuttner’s story with about 1000% more woo in the form of Deepak Chopra-style speculation about connections between quantum mechanics and meditative states, Tibetan mandalas, and dream visions along with Kuttner’s fourth-dimensional speculations, and it grafts a “children are our future” sense of purpose onto the story. It’s a far cry from the nihilistic horror of Color, and I was tempted to say that the coincidence of Richardson’s casting says something about our national mood then and now. I couldn’t honestly make the comparison, though: The Last Mimzy was released in 2007, post-9/11, in the midst of the Iraq War, and with the culture wars already in full swing. Rainn Wilson’s character in Mimzy, a science teacher, makes the point early on that pollutants, including cultural pollutants (?), can actually change a population’s DNA, corrupting them from the inside. It has a hopeful point of view, to be sure, but the anxiety that the rot is already present is clear.
The same thing is going on in Color Out of Space; the rot is just further along. The color affects each member of the family differently, but the suggestion is that the color is bringing out and corrupting something already inherent in their character. As the mom, Richardson is alternately spacey and shrewish, finally undergoing a sort of inverted pregnancy, drawing her youngest son back into her body. Witchy eldest daughter Lavinia becomes a cosmic priestess of the color, cutting occult sigils into her own flesh. Ezra (Tommy Chong), the squatter who lives off the grid in a shack on the Gardners’ property, becomes a literal burnout; he comes to understand the color and even provides the hydrologist with a vision of the color’s alien home, but that knowledge doesn’t help him escape it.
Nathan Gardner becomes a parody of middle-aged dadhood, berating his family and making tough decisions one moment and settling into his easy chair in the next, watching the static on his TV and surrounding himself with the ghosts of his departed family. (Since this is a Nicolas Cage vehicle, he gets a few good freak-outs, but the build-up is more gradual than in some: unlike in Mom and Dad, he doesn’t seem unhinged from the beginning.) In one scene, Nathan rants about how he followed the rules but everything still went to shit: in context, he’s talking about his crop of tomatoes, tinged with the unpleasant taste of the color, but it’s not hard to hear in it the frustration we’ve all felt, that the game is rigged and that we’re at the mercy of a system we can’t control.
Ultimately, this is environmental horror: the cosmic stuff just gets us in the door, but at its core the fear is real enough. The fact that the mother is a cancer survivor is significant, I think, symbolic of the cancerous growth of the color throughout the Gardners’ farm, but also a reminder that the healthy exterior at the beginning of the film was only an illusion. News clips on television show dead fish and reports about climate change; the hydrologist’s presence on the farm is due to the planned reservoir, a source of manmade devastation. Whatever is in the well at the farm will soon be part of the municipal water supply for a much greater area. Color Out of Space is a vision of an ordinary family destroyed by forces that mankind as a whole has set in motion, and which are as unstoppable as storms, earthquakes, and meteors. “It’s in the water,” the characters tell each other, but there is nothing they can do but drink.
Medleyana 