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Probably one of the top 5 slashers ever made. Props to Sheila Goldberg for serving as “dialogue writer”(?) and landing a bit role as a nurse who we know from a gratuitous nametag closeup is named “Sheila Goldberg.”

This review may contain spoilers.

On the one hand I appreciate the emotionally mature handling of relationships, but on the other hand I kind of feel like if the question of the story is “Will she leave her husband for her old flame” then at some point it needed to seem like she might. Still, beautiful cinematography and great performances, especially Greta Lee.

Found a used Blu-Ray of this at Night Owl Video, a sick new store in Brooklyn. Of course this isn’t on par with the best work of either producer Dario Argento or co-writer Lucio Fulci, but it’s a real good time, and given that it came out in 1997 its very existence is practically a miracle. Feels like a dry run for Argento’s own Parisian period piece the following year, his Phantom of the Opera, but I recall that being much worse.

Finally have more of a reference for this movie than the Mr. Show “Great Philouza” sketch. More of a conventional musical biopic than I was expecting—not a “mediocrity” but ironically close given the subject matter

The last time I watched this was actually over a year ago but I didn’t log it then because I still wasn’t sure what to say about it. As you can see below, that has changed.

I do think that Martin Scorsese is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, and he’s made some of my personal favorite films. But GoodFellas, which many seem to consider his magnum opus and which set the template for several of his subsequent movies, has always left me somewhat cold. As with many mob/antihero stories, I’ve also been put off by the current apparent film bro consensus that anyone who sees the film as glamorizing crime is a scold who’s missing the point. Certainly Scorsese is more clear-eyed than many other filmmakers about the uglier aspects of the mafia, but his hyperactive style works overtime to render the story thrilling and alluring. As I said in my review of Auto Focus, filmmaking choices can de-glamorize even the most seemingly enviable experiences, and that is definitely not what Scorsese is doing here. At the same time, if I can’t accept the movie as a clear morality tale, I also can’t quite see it as just a vicarious indulgence in bad behavior either. I do find most film directors to be idiot savants with no worthwhile insights into anything other than their chosen craft, but Scorsese is one of the rare exceptions from which the profession draws its reputation as visionaries. He seems to be a genuinely thoughtful and intelligent person, and highly personal films of his like The Last Temptation of Christ demonstrate an imioned moral sensibility. Surely he had to be saying something more here than “Damn it feels good to be a gangster,” or even “Being a gangster would be cool, but also bad.”

I still don’t fully know the answers to these questions, but I do think I now understand the movie as a reflection of real-life events outside Italian-American organized crime. Just as Francis Ford Coppola intended The Godfather to be a story about capitalism, GoodFellas must have been inspired specifically by the deregulated Wall Street mania of the 1980s.

This occurred to me as I was reading a age on that era in Steve Fraser’s Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life. According to Fraser, the ‘80s saw the rise of corporate raiders who would stage dramatic hostile takeovers of existing firms, then ruthlessly downsize staff and cash out with money borrowed in the firm’s name. It’s a strategy reminiscent of today’s private equity (or DOGE’s treatment of the federal government) and, of course, the “bust out” that Henry Hill’s gang performs on the restaurant they take over. Just as Scorsese’s hot-headed, foul-mouthed vulgarians formed a marked contrast to the more genteel mafiosos of Coppola’s Godfather films, finance’s new generation saw itself as a rebellion against, in Fraser’s words, “Ivy League patricians turned out in rimless glasses and the omnipresent breast-pocket hanky.”

And despite the often dire effects all this often had on American industry outside the financial sector itself, the resulting stock market boom earned corporate titans fawning depictions in pop culture (Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Trump: The Art of the Deal) as well as ostentatious wealth and arrogance. Fraser recounts Sun Belt Savings and Loan’s “Fast Eddie” McBinney throwing a party at which he served lion meat and dressed as Henry VIII. (“The Street” was largely a boys’ club defined by aggressive machismo—another parallel to GoodFellas, at least according to New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, who notoriously argued that “Women are not capable of understanding GoodFellas” because the film is ultimately about male camaraderie.) Scorsese, already a prominent cultural figure and, of course, a consummate New Yorker, would have had a front row seat to the whole circus.

And if Wall Street shared the GoodFellas gangsters’ sense of cocksure greed, it also suffered just as dramatic of a downfall. The boom nearly went bust in 1987, saved only by a Federal Reserve bailout. The subsequent savings and loan crisis disgraced some of the industry’s political patrons and led to actual prison sentences for leaders like Michael Milken. In this atmosphere, pop culture’s view of the Street soured. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities were both released in 1987—just as GoodFellas was in development.

I don’t know that GoodFellas’ creators or its contemporary audiences were consciously thinking of its story as a metaphor for the preceding decade on the stock market, but I do know that this context was on their minds. In a 1990 New York Times article, co-screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi justifies one character’s decision to become an informant by saying, “These guys are yuppie hoods. They have all the moral fortitude of a cheap-jack stockbroker trying to hustle.” The article’s author Susan Linfield elaborates that “Henry’s story plays, at times, like an almost madcap satire of capitalist accumulation.” Elsewhere in the article, Scorsese himself says, “The film is about money… The violence is not the main thing—it’s just a way to consolidate power to get the money.”

And if GoodFellas didn’t include overt nods to the financial industry, its successors would be less coy. Scorsese’s 1995 spiritual sequel Casino made the “money” theme even more prominent (Susan Strange’s 1986 book Casino Capitalism had already claimed casinos as a metaphor for finance) and incorporated political oversight in the form of Tommy Smothers’ corrupt state senator. From this perspective, 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street isn’t a variation on the GoodFellas formula so much as a relative literalization of subject matter which had previously only been subtextual.

Still, while all of this deepens the film on an intellectual level, it doesn’t entirely answer the question of how it is meant to be read. Is it a hedonistic fantasy, a condemnatory cautionary tale, or aiming for some compound of both? I now think the movie may indeed be a fantasy—but not in the obvious way. Scorsese doesn’t really envy the characters’ money or their women or even their power. He envies their stupidity, because it frees them from the Catholic guilt and moral anguish at the center of other Scorsese films like Mean Streets and The Last Temptation of Christ. That’s why, unlike so many other gangster storytellers, he doesn’t need his protagonists to be criminal masterminds or even to adhere to a code of loyalty to each other. For him, their very appeal is that they are incapable of comprehending their own damnation. The absence of the moral sensibility I find so irable in some of Scorsese’s other films may be exactly what makes this story so attractive to him—and, presumably, to many others.

Anyway I’m getting married in February and our venue somehow has the bar from this movie. Even though it’s not my favorite movie that’s still pretty cool.

I like to believe that Dario Argento put mincing gay stereotypes in his early movies because he was sincerely trying to be inclusive and he just thought gay people are actually like that

Surprisingly I have never seen any of the Final Destination movies prior to this. The premise just never really appealed to me. Gotta it this was a pretty good time, though. At my screening Tony Todd got a round of applause at his entrance, exit and “In memory of” credit.

This Shock Theater selection started by introducing such an extensive hospital ensemble, complete with various interpersonal dramas, that I was beginning to wonder if there would be any thriller/suspense elements at all. Eventually a murder does happen though, and the movie stays pretty engaging thanks to a decent script and good cast. Especially loved Thomas E. Jackson as the crusty police sergeant who goes around saying stuff like “Do me a favor: Go down to the morgue, tell ‘em I said you’re ready” and “You’re as unbalanced as the budget!” It’s subject to the limitations of its time, the ending is kind of a letdown and it doesn’t seem to be available in a decent transfer, but still, not bad for a Shock B-teamer.

Lucio Fulci would take a lot of ideas from this and Inferno but Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971) proves that this is NOT what inspired him to stage incredibly unconvincing bat attacks

“Che schifo” indeed

Not necessarily one of the best ‘70s Italian horror movies but maybe one of the scariest. Noticed a major Night of the Living Dead influence this time around.

This review may contain spoilers.

Gotta give this a thumbs up overall for the fun and ambition of it but for me it fell a little short of being fully satisfying in of either genre thrills or social commentary. As with Black Panther, Ryan Coogler creates a left revolutionary villain who comes off as seductively appealing but is ultimately repudiated by the heroes because…? (Sammie turning down the vampires is particularly baffling since rejecting traditional morality seems to be his character’s whole thing.) Like with many glamorized gangster movies, this raises the question of where Coogler’s sympathies really lie: Is he including a conventional ending to get away with the more transgressive middle, or is he making the villains as appealing as possible in order to make their condemnation that much more conclusive? Or, to look at it a different way, is he being shrewdly provocative or just hedging his bets? If the story structure forces unflattering comparisons to From Dusk Till Dawn, the ideas bring to mind George Romero, another filmmaker who symbolized revolution with monsters but who was eventually happy to just let his zombies become the good guys.

Shock Theater selection often confused (including by me) with the 1928 Paul Leni silent film of the same name. This Last Warning follows a pair of wisecracking private detectives who enact some classic Depression-era class resentment while working for some “goofy society people” who are receiving threatening letters. Fine for what it is, I guess, but I’m kind of glad I accidentally sought out the much spookier Leni film first.

I must thank “The Horror Guys” and their “The Horror Guys Guide to Universal Studios Shock! Theater” for informing me that some of the rarer Shock Theater selections can be found on the Russian social media network OK.ru (as can many other hard-to-find films, it seems). Unfortunately this of Reported Missing was pretty terrible quality, which occasionally made it hard to distinguish between the various suited white guys in the cast. Also a timer popped up onscreen a few times near the end, maybe because whoever was dubbing the recording wanted to know when the damn thing would be over. Zero horror elements, as expected, though the plot does involve a few plane crashes that kill tens of people, which kind of conflicts with the light, quippy tone. The identity of the killer is unbelievably easy to predict but the airborne climactic sequence was a little exciting despite the cheesy special effects.

Themes of trauma; minimalist, recursive narrative; bleak suburban setting—Monkey Boy was ahead of its time. Put Bill Skarsgård in the monkey suit and this would have slayed Alamo Drafthouses in 2019.

Rewatched in Italian. There isn’t much dialogue but I did recognize a swear word (“cazzo”) from having read a book by Italian comics artist Zerocalcare. You don’t get that from Duolingo!

Certainly one of the most sensuous movies I’ve ever seen. Unlike the directors’ previous film, Amer, this at least gives the appearance of potentially having a coherent narrative throughline, though if so I didn’t grasp it. A movie guaranteed to make every viewer feel like Homer Simpson at The Stockholm Affair.

Tutto Quel Jazz. Adattamento. Decostruendo Harry. Un Gatto nel Cervello… no wait

Pee-wee Herman is one of those kid culture things I didn’t grow up with and which will therefore be kind of inscrutable to me forever. Pretty fun though. A very queer movie, especially the scenes with Mickey.

Getting interested in watching Andor and it seemed silly to watch that without having seen this supposed point of comparison. Harrowing! Interesting that the film uses voiceover narration from multiple different characters, though we’re mostly seeing the perspective of Philippe; wish the movie had done more with that, or rather would be interested in seeing movies that do more with that. Some parts of the score are extremely similar to parts of John Carpenter’s score for Halloween.

A little spacey for me but I loved the corporate exec whack-a-mole game

Well-made but ultimately doesn’t say anything all that interesting. One of the most clumsily confusing endings I’ve ever seen. Great score by Scott Walker, I wish the whole thing were that exciting.

Sorry to say I was more affected by Christian Ryan’s review of this than by the film itself. Was not expecting some creature FX at the end.

On paper this should be a home run but the relatively restrained style makes it lesser Bava for me. The story has kind of a pleasingly “adult Goosebumps” form, though. I wonder to what extent this was developed with the English-language audience in mind, since “Baron Blood” doesn’t have a correspondingly alliterative Italian translation (they call him “il barone sanguinario”) and the Italian title, “Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga” (“Horrors of Nuremberg Castle”) isn’t nearly as good.

Wow. First of all, with the exception of a self-harm trigger warning, this is the kind of movie you should ideally go into cold, especially if you’re a fan of Troma or SOV horror. But at the risk of giving too much away, this begins as a tonally familiar no-budget punk/stoner horror comedy and then, half an hour in, starts alternating between that and a bleak behind-the-scenes drama about the making of the film itself. (Imagine Irma Vep if it had included scenes from the new “Les Vampires” and been produced by Lloyd Kaufman.) What’s really impressive is that the movie capably handles both sides of the coin: The film-within-a-film has a restless visual sense of humor reminiscent of Hundreds of Beavers, and while the low production values hang a little more awkwardly on the drama sections, the darkest moments still manage to be genuinely upsetting. Thanks to Screen Slate for recommending this (a year ago).

The first giallo and therefore pretty mild in genre —less of a whodunit angle than usual, no color, little sleaze, I didn’t spot any J&B scotch. What’s funny is that the thing that cements this movie’s giallo status is its heroine’s fixation on giallo novels and how those books inform her experience of the story. I think we generally assume that self-aware meta comedy comes after a subgenre’s cultural peak (e.g. Scream) but here we have it at the very outset. Reminds me of Ichabod Crane’s addiction to folk ghost stories and Cotton Mather demonology in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” an affectionate satire written at the very beginning of horror’s existence as its own literary genre.

Really does capture a feeling of impending doom, though I guess real life helped augment that

I can’t fully dismiss a movie this confounding but I can’t say I enjoyed it much either. Funny that Matthew McConaughey is playing a deranged redneck but his screen persona is pretty much the same as it always is. Hysterical screaming Leatherface was fun. Why do so many websites insist on calling this “The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre”?

Finally got ahold of this Vietnam protest documentary partially created by Martin Scorsese and Harvey Keitel. This paper gives useful background on the film and suggests that it remains hard to find today mainly because Scorsese is uncomfortable with controversy over its authorship (as it was a collective work but he was the closest thing it had to a “director”) and maybe with being perceived as a “political” filmmaker: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/fil.2010.22.2.133 (You need a JSTOR but I guess you can get a personal one that lets you read 100 free articles a month.)

This doesn’t have much of a narrative arc but definitely feels like it captures its moment. I did not realize going in that there would be a scene on the ground at the Hard Hat Riot. Funny that Scorsese was already doing montages set to ‘60s blues rock, and it’s cathartic to watch him and Keitel arguing in a room full of other ornery leftists at the end.

Find a location near you for Saturday’s “Hands Off” protests: https://www.mobilize.us/handsoff

Another Italian film with more naturalistic dialogue (I assume), which makes it harder for me to understand. But it helps that the story is so action-driven. Everyone is always going somewhere, doing something, getting or losing something.

Capital’s hold on labor is helped along by our denial or ignorance of our bodies’ irreversible deterioration over the course of our lives. It is easier to endure a lifetime of grinding, physically depreciative labor if you believe that at the end of it you can simply step away and become a silver fox windsurfer from an AARP ad—or, as in this film, that you can get your elbow and knee blown apart at close range and still go back to defeating literal ninjas in hand-to-hand combat. Of course, the fact that this movie even has an extensive rehabilitation sequence makes it more realistic than many modern films and TV shows in which major characters are basically unaffected by any injury less severe than decapitation.

Taking this opportunity to say that as much as I love Dario Argento, I do think Mario Bava is the greatest Italian horror filmmaker of all time. He just has so many game-changing, genre-defining or -creating classics. Even a movie like this, not necessarily one of his absolute best-known efforts, is so immaculately atmospheric and feels like an influence on everything from Toby Dammit to 2000s J-horror to that one X-Files episode where Mulder and Scully get stuck in a room on Christmas Eve.

This and The Room should switch titles

The first of my many viewings of this movie that was not followed by nightmares once I went to bed. I guess I’m fully desensitized! Still very scary, though. The 5-star rating does not mean that this is a flawless film; I’ve always felt that the first half’s focus on the evil of the hotel is more frightening and compelling than the second half’s focus on Jack Nicholson being crazy. But when a movie’s strengths are this uniquely potent, it seems silly to penalize it for run-of-the-mill limitations.

More contextualization of my grandfather’s service in Italy in WWII, although these characters never make it to the mainland and their time in Sicily is a relatively brief portion of the film. Funny to see Mark Hamill in a WWII movie from the same year as Empire Strikes Back. Luke Skywalker had it better than this, but then again he never got to say the phrase “playing with my pecker.”

I was at this show, or at least one of its tapings. Good special but you can’t see me in it

Got to see this for the first time in a theater. Glad the Nitehawk programmer warned us up top that this “just looks like that.” Decent amount of audience chuckles when nothing in particular was happening but also a big, deserved laugh when the villain told her henchman/master “Stop him, Zora!” and Zora seemed to just let out an irritated sigh and disappeared.

I can’t believe this came out the same year as Re-Animator; were Richard Liberty and Jeffrey Combs separated at birth? “Frankenstein” is also such a classic Romero character, kind of a villain but also kind of right about a lot of stuff. I love these movies.

A bunch of Europeans tried to show up Roger Corman by making their own Poe anthology and it kind of rules that the result mostly sucks, except for the Fellini segment of course. Took me a while to figure out why the Roger Vadim segment is so boring to me but I think it’s the lighting—everything just looks like flat daylight, including interiors and nighttime. Can’t be stressed enough how important interesting lighting is to horror!

Found this DVD for a couple bucks at Redscroll Records while back in my hometown for the holidays (which is also where I got my discs for Ghost Son, Pelts and A Blade in the Dark). The film mostly consists of watching the late Maila “Vampira” Nurmi talk, so you can’t fault it for first-hand access to its subject. And that’s not nothing, especially when your subject has this much personality; at one point Nurmi describes her boyfriend being intimidated by the Vampira persona by saying “And then my boyfriend wouldn’t have sex with me and I tried to rape the doorknob.” But there isn’t much in the way of actual filmmaking going on here, despite the interspersed interview snippets with horror convention regulars like Forrest Ackerman and Sid Haig. Cassandra “Elvira” Peterson shows up as well, which is kind of like getting Nas and Jay-Z on the same track back in the day. VAMP Productions has a very impressive stop-motion title card at the beginning.

What a confounding movie. Given that this was one of Full Moon’s earliest productions (it almost played in theaters!) and kicked off their flagship franchise, I guess I assumed it would be relatively normal. But if anything this is one of the most nonsensical films of theirs I’ve seen, piling on impenetrable backstories and lore for no apparent reason besides filling time between Dave Allen’s stop-motion shots. Very funny to see American Graffiti’s Paul Le Mat doing the traditional prestige horror spiel in this movie’s Video Zone featurette: “This story, there’s some intelligence behind it, there’s some mystery behind it that’s revealed that I think is interesting, and there’s some characters that are more than just one-dimensional. And I think that the violence, which is my least favorite part, but which is necessary, I think that will be frightening because it comes out of this madness of the character who is telling the puppets what to do.” For sure dude!

I saw this in theaters when it first came out and owned it on VHS. I feel like it wasn’t that well-received originally but I think it’s been somewhat reappraised in recent years and I’m glad to see that (for me) it holds up! Not quite as Tales From the Crypt-core as Death Becomes Her but not too far off.

Rewatched with the Italian audio (a lot of which I understood!) on the imported DVD I bought years ago before this was available in America. Somehow forgot that star Kelly Curtis is Jamie Lee Curtis’s sister. Still don’t love this but Michele Soavi movies from this era have such a tactile visual texture—I don’t know how he does it! Checked to see if this was shot by the same cinematographer as Cemetery Man (or any of Soavi’s other movies) but nope, totally different guy, though this one also worked on Dario Argento’s Trauma.

Watched for the sake of uncredited co-director Mario Bava. Feels wrong to give this a bad rating but boy was I bored. Used a streaming service called “Flixhouse,” which apparently places its ad breaks totally haphazardly. Tubi would never do that to me. If you’re going to bother, watch in widescreen on YouTube, or just go with the MST3K version.

Not a stone cold masterpiece like 4: In Space but still a fun, goofy horror comedy for the people. The church service scene is incredible even if it has almost nothing to do with the Leprechaun. Does feature an unfortunate comic relief trans character; there’s nothing “positive” about transphobia, Postmaster P. Between this and Bloody Murder 2, director Rob Spera has earned more of my attention.

The mirror image of Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, that film more aesthetically interesting and this one probably more factually accurate. But when the time comes, they’re both smart enough to put on “God Save the Queen” and basically let it speak for itself.

There used to be a lot of Gothic stories about mad aristocrats sacrificing the people in their communities, young women especially, in a futile quest for eternal life. Good thing that doesn’t happen anymore. Been mentioning this movie to my fiancée and got used to calling it “Cream of the Deem”

Or, in English, “They’re Only Ghosts.” A supernatural farce starring and directed by Christian De Sica, icon of the “cinepanettone” genre. I’m realizing that as an Italian language novice I’ve been somewhat spoiled by the carefully enunciated and crisply recorded dubbed dialogue of older Italian movies. The fast-paced, colloquial sync sound of this film was more challenging, though I picked up enough to recognize this as a shameless imitation of Ghostbusters (or “Acchiappafantasmi,” as it’s known in Italy).

De Sica is of course the son of neorealist director Vittorio De Sica. The protagonists’ deceased patrician father here is named “Vittorio Di Paola” and is introduced with a closeup of the words “Vittorio Di” on his grave to really underline the homage. The younger De Sica also plays Vittorio as a ghost. It’s kind of a touching tribute, or probably would be if I could understand more of the dialogue. There is also a scene in which a man rotates in midair while spraying projectile diarrhea out of his ass.

Continuing my annual tradition of watching a COVID movie on the anniversary of the US lockdowns. I that when this first came out I got the impression that it was a heist movie, and it does sort of become that eventually. But at heart it’s a wry domestic dramedy two-hander about Hathaway and Ejiofor’s upscale boho couple. Funny that when stripped of their usual production resources, Hollywood A-listers fall back on the substance of indie mumblecore even more than the style.

I’m currently reading Katharine Coldiron’s book Junk Film: Why Bad Movies Matter, in which Coldiron says that “the secret of bad movies that are good to watch [is]… as a record of an attempt at making a movie.” This is certainly a bad movie, mainly due to the overwritten and/or under-revised script by Steven Knight. (Knight has worked on tons of stuff and while I haven’t seen most of it, Locked Down was about on par with what I would have expected from the mind behind Serenity (2019) and the Guy Pearce Christmas Carol miniseries.) But the manically confused dialogue, the claustrophobic staging and the parade of familiar faces glimpsed only via Zoom calls (Ben Stiller, Ben Kingsley, Dulé Hill, etc.) do somewhat capture the reality of what pandemic life was like.

This review may contain spoilers.

Shock Theater; not to be confused with The Great Impersonation (1942). Not horror but does involve sinister goings-on in a rundown old manor and references to a ghost that haunts a “Black Bog,” so it’s hardly the least horrific of the Shock Theater selections. Interestingly amoral, as the protagonist is a real bastard who steals another man’s identity to help international arms dealers instigate WWI—at least until the predictable closing twist which renders everything else retroactively duller. A sub-twist reveals that an old woman has been hiding her deranged, supposedly dead son in the woods, foreshadowing Pamela Voorhees’s actions decades later.

I assume the Ti West trilogy would have been named differently if it weren’t for this

The Shock Theater package was a selection of 52 horror or horror-ish Universal Studios films released for television syndication in October of 1957. The sudden availability of these movies, which included many of the famous "Universal monsters" pictures, led to the creation of the horror host TV format and almost single-handedly launched modern horror fandom. While the Universal monsters films remain famous, many of the other selections are now difficult to find. This list features all of the Shock Theater movies in chronological order according to their original theatrical release. Films released on the same day have been ordered alphabetically. A pressbook for the package can be found here. An additional 20 films were released under the title "Son of Shock" in 1958.

(Note: Many Shock Theater lists include Paul Leni’s 1929 silent production The Last Warning, but the pressbook makes clear that Shock’s Last Warning was actually a different film from 1938.)

• Dracula
• Frankenstein
• Murders in the Rue Morgue
• The Mummy
• Secret of the Blue Room
• The Invisible Man
• The Black Cat
• Secret of the Chateau
• The Mystery of Edwin Drood
• Werewolf of London

...plus 42 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

In alphabetical order.

• Berman's March
• Challengers
• Failed State
• Hundreds of Beavers
• I Saw the TV Glow
• Last Year at Marienbad
• Mad Max 2
• Metropolitan
• Problemista
• Tokyo Godfathers

All the movies I’ve shown in my Hoff’s Horrorfest comedy show/horror movie screening series.

• Demons

  October 2014

• Prince of Darkness

  November 2014

• Black Christmas

  December 2014

• Necronomicon

  January 2015

• Psycho II

  February 2015

• Poltergeist

  March 2015

• Maniac Cop 2

  April 2015

• Stage Fright

  May 2015

• Friday the 13th Part III

  June 2015

• Uncle Sam

  July 2015

...plus 51 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The Child
• Creepshow
• Ghostwatch
• The Nightmare Before Christmas
• Sleepy Hollow
• Murder Party
• Trick 'r Treat
• HalloweeNight
• V/H/S
• Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween

Movies which posit the Salem witch trials or similar colonial-era activities (in America) as having been directed at a genuine Satanic/supernatural force. Some spoilers. Suggestions welcome!

• I Married a Witch
• Bell, Book and Candle
• The City of the Dead
• The Haunted Palace
• City of the Living Dead
• Burned at the Stake
• Superstition
• The Devonsville Terror
• The Midnight Hour
• Elvira: Mistress of the Dark

...plus 16 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

In alphabetical order. Good year, had to leave a lot of great stuff off of this!

• 9/11
• Demons at the Door
• Despiser
• Ghostwatch
• Salt of the Earth
• Skinamarink
• the Girls
• Terror Toons
• Thelma & Louise
• The Trial

Upon hearing that Netflix is closing down their disc mailer service, I decided to put together a sampling of films offered by that service that do not seem to currently be available to stream anywhere (apart from unauthorized YouTube rips and such). Just a few obscure cult flicks, you know, probably nothing you ever heard of, but might be worth checking out while you can! I realize mourning old Netflix is like mourning Blockbuster—they were both corporate behemoths with their own problems—but in of people’s access to a broad selection of cinema history, this does kind of suck.

• All That Heaven Allows
• Dawn of the Dead
• Wild at Heart
• Rebecca
• Kundun
• Full Frontal
• Cocoon
• Rififi
• Crash
• All That Jazz

...plus 19 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Destination Nightmare
• Dementia
• Nightfall
• Cage in Box Elder
• XCU: Extreme Close Up
• This Revolution
• Edgar Allan Poe's Darkness
• Monkey Boy
• Overground, an urban picture
• Burial Boys

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• 42 Up
• Anomalisa
• Barbarian
• The Devils
• The Hidden
• The Lair of the White Worm
• Mad God
• Nope
• On the age of a Few People Through a Relatively Short Period of Time
• The Red Shoes

• Battleship Potemkin
• Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan

Films mentioned in the book Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

• All the President's Men
• Joe
• Yankee Doodle Dandy
• Gone with the Wind
• Roots
• Civilisation
• How Should We Then Live?
• Last Tango in Paris
• The Godfather
• The Godfather Part II

...plus 58 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Feature films set in, filmed in or otherwise connected to the town of Wallingford, Connecticut. Details in notes. Let me know if I’m missing anything!

Not on Letterboxd but filmed in Wallingford, according to IMDb:

The Wiggles: Wiggledancing! Live in the U.S.A. (2006)
Constance (2018)
If by 40 (2018)

• Riding in Cars with Boys

  Based on Beverly Donofrio’s memoir about growing up in Wallingford. My review

• The Quiet

  Takes place in nearby Meriden, Wallingford briefly mentioned in dialogue. My review

• College Road Trip

  Filmed partly on the campus of Wallingford prep school Choate Rosemary Hall, standing in for Northwestern University. My review

• The Other Side of the Tracks

  Indie ghost movie filmed partly at Wallingford’s Trackside pizzeria. Wallingford mayor Bill Dickinson appears as a bartender. My review

• Burial Boys

  Low-budget dark comedy filmed at a variety of locations in and around Wallingford. My review

• The Preppie Connection

  Based on a real-life drug trafficking scandal at Choate, fictionalized here as “Sage Hall.” My review

• Where'd You Go, Bernadette

  Features a subplot in which the protagonist’s daughter has to decide whether or not to attend Choate. My review

• Record Safari

  Includes a visit to Wallingford record store Redscroll Records. My review

• Giving Up Forever

  Indie production about an incel shooter, filmed in Wallingford but set in the Hamptons. My review

A little off from the calendar schedule but finally tackling this in honor of pd187’s recently deleted (now restored!) Letterboxd . Here’s the original list: https://boxd.it/5ETJc

1. UFOs: It Has Begun

   week 1: june 1-june 7
   first week! watch anything off letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/pd187/list/esoteric-hidden-knowledge-8th-dimensional/

2. The Day Before Disclosure

   week 2: june 8-june 14
   pioneer 10 crosses the orbit of neptune into deep space on june 13, 1983, the first man-made object to leave our solar system*. watch a ufotv dvd, anything on ufotv's roku channel, or search 4maz*n prᏆӎ3 for "ufotv" letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/pd187/list/ufotv/ *(in modern/recorded history)

3. The Mysterious Monsters

   week 3: june 15-june 21

   saturday, june 20 is summer solstice, the sun at its highest point... watch a SUNN CLASSIC! letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/pd187/list/sunn-classics/

4. Mirage Men

   week 4: june 22-june 28
   kenneth arnold's sighting was june 24, 1947. watch a ufology doc from m.k. rhodes list letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/notmortalkombat/list/ufo-is-a-bucket-of-shit/

5. The Sore Losers

   week 5: june 29-july 5
   john keel died july 3rd, 2009 - R.I.P.! watch a movie about mothman or the mib mythos & consider how it relates to yr own experiences with "ultraterrestrials" letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/pd187/list/mib-mythos-lore-they-are-stuck-with-us-we/

6. The Parallax View

   the 4th of july: amerikkka eats its young - watch a movie about an assassination (real or fictional) ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/ATF.html

7. Night of the Demon

   week 6: july 6-july 12
   cryptozoologist loren coleman was born july 12, 1947 (!!!) - watch a cryptid movie! bigfoot museum recs: letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/pd187/list/expedition-bigfoot-in-cherry-log-ga-movie/

8. The Ninth Gate

   week 7: july 13-july19
   eyes wide shut was released july 16, 1999. watch a movie from 1999 & think how it continues to inform esoteric ideas & philosophies letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/pd187/list/1999-the-gnostic-multiplex-the-formulation/

9. The Appointment

   week 8: july 20-july 26
   july 2003: 700 club host & cia asset pat robertson (author of "the new world order") backs war criminal charles taylor in the 2nd liberian civil war. watch a christian scare film! letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/rabbitroom/list/christian-scare-films/

10. The Ninth Configuration

    july 21 1969: "man" lands on the "moon." watch a movie with a critical/unorthodox view of apollo & NASA, i.e. letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/film/space-is-the-place/

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Witches, devils and other spooky seasonal treats from writer/director Paul Schrader

• Cat People
• Witch Hunt
• Affliction
• Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist

The complete list, as far as I’m aware. Let me know if I missed any

• Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives
• Bloody Murder

Goopy horror/disaster/action hybrids about a diverse ensemble besieged by demons. Excluding movies like The Ogre and Demons 6: De Profundis and such that were falsely marketed as Demons sequels, but including movies that FEEL like Demons sequels. Inclusion =/= endorsement

• Demons
• Demons 2
• Night of the Demons
• The Church
• Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight
• From Dusk Till Dawn
• The Convent
• Deathgasm

Movies where H. P. Lovecraft’s forces of cosmic terror are represented visually as purple stuff, or just the color purple itself. Comment if you know of other examples!

• From Beyond
• The Color Out of Space
• Color Out of Space

Ranked from best to worst, from a blog post I did in 2016.

1. Black Christmas

   A.k.a. Silent Night Evil Night

2. Night of the Dark Full Moon
3. Silent Night, Deadly Night
4. Silent Night
5. Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2
6. Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker
7. Silent Night Deadly Night 4: Initiation
8. Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out!
9. Silent Night, Zombie Night
10. Silent Night, Bloody Night: The Homecoming

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.