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The Pink Flamingo Cinema’s EVEN DEATH MAY DIE

Fantastically paced for the full two hours that it is, Samurai Reincarnation looks incredible in its new restoration and plays incredibly for an audience. A lot of genuine laughs at the more direct pulp moments like the nudity but also genuinely enrapturing portions where Fukasaku’s command of the mis-en-scene results in scenes that have the perfect amount of depth and detail for their purposes.

The Expendables 2 is better than the first due it it leaning further in to the obsequiousness to the tenets and stars of ‘80s and ‘90s action schlock, but it’s altogether not all that much of an improvement. Van Damme is definitely a more fun and engaging villain than Eric Roberts or Stone Cold Steve Austin were, and he and Scott Adkins are given a lot to do physically which enhances their presence in the makeup of the film greatly, but again the action is so diminished by the artificiality of the film making that the results are mixed at best. There’s definitely more of a flow in between the bigger sequences here where the plot structure holds one’s attention in place for longer periods and some of those bigger sequences are shot with some deftness. Unfortunately the bulk of the boil down to long framed shoot outs where leads fire guns off screen with insert shots of people being struck by their bullets or close up fights that are so overly cut that there’s no discernible force or momentum communicated by the photography. The scope is definitely what you’re here for, but again it’s a mostly hollow allotment.

I when The Expendables came out and people hailed it as a return to form for waning action cinema, a throw back to the heyday of ‘80s shoot em up fare with as many of those ‘80s stars as could be recruited, only for John Wick to come out in 2014 and take over the whole genre so totally that audiences basically forgot about the mode of action these films were going for. The thing is, they were right to do so. For a film so situated around being an explosive throwback action spectacle the digital blood sprays, jittery camera, washed out concrete colour palette and turn all of the frankly well design set pieces into visual mush, not helped at all by a soundscape that is so overly replete with gunshots and explosions and knife foley it’s basically impossible to tell what sounds are correlated to which on screen movements. The thing is, the way it’s all built, using as many pastiches as possible, turning up the stupid factor with complete childlike earnestness, and having every actor turn in the most direct performance possible, puts in it a light where you can’t help but get invested despite its innateness. Stallone dressed like an early 2000s gay porn star having an existential dialogue with Mickey Rourke looking like a corpse someone found in the bathroom of the Whiskey-a-go-go and the film treating this encounter as if it has endless gravitas and import is downright charming.

For what’s supposed to be a pulp dinosaur action oriented B movie the first dinosaurs don’t make their appearance until just past the twenty minute mark, and the action doesn’t inject itself in to the workings of the film until nearly the end of the first half hour. What makes up that first portion and a near indigestible chunk of the rest of 65 is familial drama between Adam Driver’s lead and Ariana Greenblatt’s mute sidekick acting as an emotional stand in for his long lost daughter. That relationship is situated as the driving force for Drive and Greenblatt’s characters to find a way off the dinosaur planet, but surely the dinosaur planet would be enough of a reason for them to find a way off the dinosaur planet. The dinosaurs are decently designed and rendered, very closely along the lines of the Walking with Dinosaurs purely digital smooth movement style which works for how quickly the film moves between locations but doesn’t give the creatures enough force to really seem present and threatening. There’s all the simple humour and simpler tension that one would expect from a Jurassic Park knock off without any of the finesse needed to make that approach viable here, with the bland composition and stolid writing weighing down what is already airy. Nearly without merit.

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.

Die Hard With a Vengeance is by far a more inventive and dynamic sequel than Die Hard 2 in that it ditches the single cut off location in favour of turning the entire island of Manhattan in to John McClane’s newest arena. The callbacks to the first film are arguably the weaker portions of the film, with the entire angle of Jeremy Iron’s characters relations to the first group of thieves not amounting to anything outside of forgiving a small contrivance in the plotting that could have been excused as part of the villain’s plan anyway. That plan does oscillate between tonal spectrum’s with some severity, moving betwixt nicely staged action sequences with waves of bullets and cheap death and then having a bunch of scenes with cops desperately trying to clear out schools possibly rigged with explosives which value human life much more dearly. Both work but they do eat in to each other, which is less so the case with Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson’s New York odyssey which eventually merges in to the super structural story. The dynamic between the two is fantastic and McTiernan shoots and styles them both with a regularity that adds a lot of pathos to the fanciful thing’s they’re forced to do. Good balance between a crime caper and an action movie. Cops are still racist no matter what this movie says.

Paul Walker already feels out of place in every role that doesn’t involve him being behind the wheel of an early 2000’s JDM with Nos, so Timeline flinging him back to the 100 years war, a time where they didn’t even have cars let alone Toyota Supras, presents a real problem. The other problems are that the scripting is an overwrought mess, the art design looks incredibly cheap despite the scale, and the pacing of the film throws the flow all over the place in its quest to get to the end. The real problem is that none of this is fun, never becoming haphazard enough to be laughable nor slick enough to be actually gunny, inhabiting a zone just short of sensibility and just past sense. Having Billy Connolly and Gerard Butler on board and having neither of the go full raging Scotsman against evil English gentry is such a wasted opportunity that it hangs over all of their respective scenes and teases the audience with the potentiality that something fun could actually happen which it never does. At least Michael Sheen and Marton Csokas are enjoying themselves in their chain mailed villainy, which does come through the frame at points. Maybe the biggest failing was having Neal McDonough in a heavily forested period piece reminding me of Ravenous, which isn’t this films fault but still does it nothing but disservice in comparison.

The Pink Flamingo Cinema's EVEN DEATH MAY DIE

We told people what The Visitor is at least half a dozen times in print before the film and yet people still turned up and were shocked by the content, which goes to show you that Bruce LaBruce literally stabbing the audience in the eyes with the text is an apt approach to thematic illustration. Great to see this in a cinema again.

Worse than Dangerous Liaisons in all technical and most tonal aspects, yet there’s something about the adolescent urge and carefree youthfulness of Cruel Intentions that ends up making it so much more present and tangible plotting than its inspiration. Ryan Phillippe is kind of terrible in acting any way that isn’t smug and self assured, which makes some of his conquests and later genuine romantic entanglements a little far fetched, but other than that every performance is perfectly in line with the characterisation to the extent where the naivete and arguably even idiocy of the characters is entirely valid with the framework of the story. Sarah Michelle Gellar playing in and against type with all of the finesse and power of the teen scene queen but with not a single shred of doubt ever piercing that veil. It’s interesting exactly how much interest the film manages to generate in its first two acts despite none of the characters undergoing much if any change in that period, owing to its slowly expanding plotting and the memorable performances. Sadly it’s all shot agonisingly flat with nary a shadow in sight in its many over lit and oddly sparsely decorated interiors. Maybe that partially comes down to that eras idea of opulence being more understated, but it doesn’t excuse how empty a lot of the framing is.

No matter how much one may intellectualise a shoot and cry as some greater exercise in humanism that depicts the impacts of war as a unilaterally impacting force upon those involved, there is no excusing of the fact that some people involved are wielding guns and in uniforms and some people aren’t. In the mind of Alex Garland Warfare is a depiction of an engagement during the occupation of Iraq that points out the inequities of the conflict, like the Iraqi army being treated as fodder by the American soldiers, but like nearly every other war films fails to grasp with the reason that the soldiers are there in the first place. No amount of technical accuracy forgives missing out on examining the dynamics of the conflict, and having the film end with loving photography of the technical advisers walking the actors through their paces makes it very clear exactly who the film sympathetic towards. In that technical composition it’s perfectly serviceable yet nothing that hasn’t been seen before in a better film, with its supposed notions of reality beaten out by the totality of a film like Jarhead and its motions at pathos losing out to the more operatic depictions of war in a film like Platoon. You can dress up war crimes with as much “them or me” rhetoric as you like and have your foot soldiers be as sad as they may have been, but in both cases you have to ask what they’re doing there in the first place.

Was iring Arnold’s pure mechanical affect intermingled with human touches in Terminator 2: Judgement Day so I thought I’d rewatch Kindergarten Cop where he does basically the inverse. It’s a testament to his versatility as an actor that he can pull of a role like this in a way that no other action star ever could, making himself come off as genuinely vulnerable against kindergarten class and also grow and change during the course of his relationship with them. A big part of that is Reitman knowing how much set up is needed to make such a development affable tot he audience, giving Arnold a full fifteen minutes or so of badass cop mode before throwing him into the proverbial fire. The romantic angle is a little strained even with the repeated insistence of the film that Arnold is mesmerisingly good looking to any divorcee mother that looks upon his immense mass, but within the tonality of the film it does its part to make the transition of his character function. The humour is light and hearty along with the photography, and the tonal presence of the film manages to be chipper and cheeky whilst also broaching some rough topics in a manner that doesn’t feel entirely like lip service.

I think watching Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed very far away from any viewing of Ginger Snaps was a bad idea because the character of the second is such a direct continuation of the first that it doesn’t spend much time establishing Bridgette’s character aside from the brief prologue before moving almost immediately into development. A little strange considering this film was released a full four years after the first but given how much of a cult audience it attracted it’s understandable that they’d make a sequel assuming that the audience was familiar. Shifting the central metaphor from lycanthropy as burgeoning womanhood to lycanthropy as addiction is an intriguing one even if it is ultimately less developed and less engaging than the former. What sells that aspect of the film is Emily Perkins’s performance, which takes the naivete of her turn in the prior film and inverts it into a weariness and angst which come off as instinctual reactions to her lingering trauma. The film moves around Perkins with touches of flair and style though never quite enough to make the setting any more engaging than as a background for Bridgette’s own journey. All in all a straight downgrade from the first film.

Watched on Sunday May 11, 2025.

Perfectly understand all the criticism of Sinners centring on the Marvel blockbuster type movement and the heavy handedness of the metaphor, yet all that is done to make it more general audience facing and for my money it’s wildly successful. Having the cool guy martial expertise of superhero fight choreography with an impressive amount of gore and a sexual expressiveness that’s downright persistent is a big boon to a project like this Coogler knew where he had to compromise to keep people on the hook and knew where he could push the envelope and be inventive and apart form a few strays like the washed out colours in the club interior at night with the yellowed white balance and the mondo edit with too many flashback callbacks he crafted a fun action romp with a functional thematic metaphor that’s to an extent challenging for it’s audience. Michael B. Jordan puts in his two best performances to date playing both the gruff no nonsense straight action lead type and wry and sly comic action lead type alongside an always in fine form Delroy Lindo, with fantastic ing performances from Wunmi Mosaku who kills in the put upon expository role, debuting Miles Caton who fills his role with a genially genuine fear of the camera that translates to fear of his surroundings, and Jack O’Connell who’s key villain Remmick might go down as one of the better film vampires to date. The vampire designs along with rest of the effects work are expressive without being encumbering, present enough to clearly affect the form of the subject but not so big as to become a note of themselves, and the same can be said of the music that zips in and out of time and place with pronounced notation that at the same time never makes itself the centre of the total composition. All the little problems it has, the pacing in the back half, the perhaps overly lengthy set up, the occasionally tackiness of the visual construction, all pale in the project being as balanced between masters as it is. Coogler has taken the affect of the modern big budget action movie and solved all of the problems they have, replacing the airy violence with impactful motions, the sexlessness with a present and egalitarian sexuality that shoves in as many cunnilingus mentions as it feasibly can, and the washy subtext with engaging and challenging messaging that asks questions about whiteness and culture inside and outside of a personal context. Big and loud but not dumb.

Also a lot of people seem to think that the guy in the musical sequence was Bootsy Collins but Bootsy is a bass player and not a guitar player. That guy was either supposed to be Eddie Hazel or Bootsy's brother Catfish Collins.

35mm

Incredibly beat up 35mm print of the Ritz that fluctuated being nearly entirely discoloured, scratched to death, and unconscionably choppy, not that it affected the film one bit. Having the audience roar with laughter as they did was a new experience for me, reactions are usually more subdued but no less enraptured, and it does go to prove the film's eternally immaculate existence.

The Pink Flamingo Cinema’s EVEN DEATH MAY DIE

Like almost every other one of Jess Franco’s works Venus in Furs has a plot that is one step away from utter nonsense, but like every other Franco work it’s about the atmosphere which the film has in spades. Aside from the occasional digressions into exposition and the sudden interjection of an ending that has basically nothing to do with anything that’s occurred so far the film wafts in an out of conscious mechanism along with Maria Rohm’s vengeful spirit as she takes S&M revenge. For Franco this lasciviousness is comparatively quite tasteful; sure there’s a lot of nudity and bawdiness, but it’s not as entirely slovenly as he can otherwise be and the film is always directing these moments towards a conclusion rather than just having the nudity hanging there alongside the text. The photography is nicely spatial with a lot of attention paid to the intimate room settings that these extended slow murder sequences take place in, posing the figures with the angularity of rococo paintings and cleverly keeps the foreground and the background of shots minimally composed. Franco’s aim with this was to recreate a musical trance state, and while it’s not quite as hypnagogic as all that there is a certain unconscious magnetism to it.

4K Restoration

While the political metaphor encoming the slow collapse of the Soviet Union that The Fall of Otrar is so clearly trying to embody is twisted to the point of being unrecognisable the film ends up being a palpably personal look in to the grand mechanisms of history. Director Ardak Amirkulov shoots the great beast from inside its intestines, having his various characters play out the political intrigues of the moment as individual movements that when combined form up the lingering atmospheric idea of decay that is otherwise not omnipresent. The well to do of Otrar rest on their decadence as a gauge of their presupposed power and shrug off the threats of the oncoming Mongol Empire in visual and written language that is simultaneously shocking for an audience familiar with the exploits and historical presence of the great Khan himself and at the same time perfectly understandable given the discord and egos that the figures exhibit. Though focusing more on the general organisation of characters instead of their intimate illustrations does result in the first half of the nearly three hour film being staggered and limping in pace it pays off at the end once their respective mettle is tested by Mongol horseman flinging themselves at the gates of the city.

That first half of the film is shot with an internal and even sarcastic cinematic language, contrasting the grand and imposing power and wealth of Otrar’s leadership with a scarce mis en scene and sepia toned photography that calls to mind the wasteland of Konstantin Lopushansky’s Dead Man’s Letters, which was also written by this film’s co-writer Aleksei German. There’s an intimacy here that cuts through the duelling egos and labyrinthine political intrigue the film projects and lets the audience wallow in the ridiculousness of punitive punishments and court drama fought over bare stone walls. The second half is comparatively much more daring and kinetic, featuring some gorgeous action photography that whilst not being able to subsume the production limitations has so much genuine danger that the battle scenes end up as perilous in mood as they are in subtext. There’s some real dangerous stuntwork captured here in fantastically flat and florid camerawork, as in the case of a shot during the initial approach on the walls where a horse bolts and tears through a siege ladder and the man carrying it in an open framed wide shot and the hauntingly deep image of horses barrelling through the open gate of the city in and out of the frigid darkness on either side. Not worth watching unless you’ve got some small background in Soviet cinema of the period, but for those that do it’s a rare treat for something to be as expansive and yet internal as this is.

Louis Theroux: The Settlers is not new information for anyone that’s given Israel the most cursory glance over the sorry near century that it’s existed, but I think this is still an insight in to the situation because of Theroux’s clinical lensing. Having all of the settlers decrepit and ridiculous argumentation surrounding their “divine” mandate to control the land collapse within their own rhetoric under the weight of itself while Theroux stands by with a grimace on his face is perhaps the best way to expose the whole notion for the murderous insanity that it is. While he does include all the expected hand waving about how bad the October 7th attach was and subsequently implying the beginning of the war was justified there’s an effort made to point out the length of Israel’s colonial efforts even if the format here isn’t long enough to properly discuss it. Then again it’s not really trying to be an encapsulation of the ideology of the colony, just a series of interviews with the Israeli settlers that are confident or crazy enough to be interviewed in English and a few asides with some Palestinians that expose how increasingly precarious their living situations are. If you know someone who has absolutely no clue about Israel’s colonial existence this is a decent place to start.

Workprint Cut

Feels odd calling this a cut considering it's basically an editing tool that got leaked, but there are bits of it that I enjoyed and perhaps even prefer over their various release counterparts. They tended to get a bit laborious but having Doors songs play in full without any diegetic sound is very spatial and resonating in a strange way. All the cuts that got made for theatrical are warranted, save for maybe some of the ending sequence which while unwieldy should be more restored in some quality.

Ron Howard shoots the shit out of some fire in Backdraft, flinging his cast in to screamingly real infernos that have tangible and pressing danger to them with an astonishing degree of consistency. While the comparative flames of Billy Baldwin’s character Brian’s relationships, one strained with his brother Stephen, played by Kurt Russell, and one smouldering with love interest Jennifer, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, never burn quite as hot their sufficient enough along with the secondary running plot of an arson investigation headed up by Robert De Niro to tie together the separate firefighting scenes. The plotting and the relationships never quite get as textured as they should be, and without a nuance beyond the most basic stated frictions to latch on to the audience is essentially waiting for each new emergency in the same way the firefighters are. This results in a very interestingly engaging stop start pacing, which would normally be a failing but in this case Howard makes work to his advantage. The photography during the fire sequences has an urgency and tightness that it intentionally lacking in the more staged slower portions, and though there’s a heavy reliance on slow motion it’s in service of capturing huge fireballs absolutely pummelling people which is hard to argue with. Probably doesn’t communicate the pathos of firefighters as well as it wanted to but it does sell the fear and danger ingrained in the service.

Still think this is too involved in expounding on necessary mechanisms and teleology for its own good, but also still can't fathom it doing as poorly in theatres as it did. Shame.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone have complained a lot about their involvement in BASEketball, but the humour feels exactly the same as theirs if slightly less complaintive and intentionally offensive. They definitely have a better hit rate on their own show in any case, and the jokes here range from occasionally quite funny to mostly tepid to occasionally quite terrible with an even spread. Parker and Stone are fine actors but it’s clear that their heart isn’t in the script for the plot necessary sections of dialogue and while they get through it it’s with much less gusto than the self contained gags and non sequiturs. The whole hospital sequence feels like it’s been ripped straight out of a Farrelly Brothers movie, and while there are moments that you can see David Zucker’s Naked Gun style dry spoof humour peek through the film tends towards the gross out and sex jokes heavily. Shot decently for a ‘90s comedy, with the production taking advantage of the limited scope of the setting and doing a decent amount of set decoration and wide photography in the indoor arena sequences so the whole film isn’t close ups of Parker and Stone. Also commendations to the creators for inventing a game which mostly makes sense and does seem relatively engaging to watch and/or play.

Tries to model itself after a Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker spoof comedy but lets too much Euro political satire slip in, meaning that swathes of S.P.Q.R.: 2,000 and a Half Years Ago that aren’t focused on slapstick or perving are mocking some Italian political scandal from the late ‘90s that if one doesn’t know anything about is basically indecipherable. That said you don’t need much political background when the central gag is a frumpy comedian engaged in said political scandal who manages to charm the hottest woman you’ve ever seen in your life with astonishingly little effort. There’s a whole lineage of European comedies with exactly the same gag and it really doesn’t get much play outside of an extremely contemporary audience, leaving films like this strangely out of time to watch in the decades following their initial release. There’s not much that actually leaves an impression apart from Italian dubbed Leslie Nielsen, who puts in a valiant physical effort in a role that does not take advantage of his natural energies, the campness of the production design really rocking the cheap Rome look, and the scant few clever sight gags that pop up on rare occasion.

Something about trying to do sexy modern horror comedy vampire films just sinks film makers. First Landis with Innocent Blood and then Wes Craven with Vampire in Brooklyn.
Emblematic of Eddie Murphy’s ‘90s output it’s very vainly positioned towards making Murphy look good at all times and utterly convinced in the efficacy of mostly flat comedy. Trying to combine a sincere dark love story with bit asides where Murphy does his Coming to America masked characters shtick is baffling, and it’s solely on the strength of the performance of Angela Bassett that the romantic angle is at the very least able in regards to chemistry. The film is also strangely tightly framed, especially fro Craven who normally excels in creating small sets that he shoots with great breadth that are here instead smothered with so many hard close ups. It’s a shame because the sets and some of the art design is actually fairly inventive and fun, in stark opposition to the action playing out on screen which rarely ever raises itself above tepid. Very strange to see Kadeem Hardison playing what is essentially an Eddie Murphy motormouth role opposite Eddie Murphy playing cool and coy, though Hardison at least does a good job of it and plays well enough off of the always funny John Witherspoon.

Cinema Astragale
Extended Cut

Despite director Joseph Losey’s protestations that his original two and a half hour version of Eva was mangled by producers to fit in to a one hour forty minute version for release the addition of footage to round it out to two hours doesn’t fix any of they key problems. In fact the last thing the film needed to be was longer as all that does is let the audience soak in the lack of dynamic development that the leads express. Not problematic in the case of Jeanne Moreau’s Eva, who’s cat like stoicism and poise set her up immediately as an unsolvable riddle that beguiles men with her mere presence, but it really hurts Stanley Baker’s Tyvian. Tyvian is supposed to be a former Welsh miner thrust in to high society by sudden success, but despite Baker’s own past mirroring that of the character the script gives him no affability to latch on to. This leads his character to start off as wretched and end up as wretched, levelling the pitiable nature of everyone around him that constantly forgives his constant indiscretions. Capturing all this dramaless drama is Losey and legendary Italian cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo’s gorgeous camerawork that captures the cloying decay of Venice and the natural allure of Moreau, but everyone involved here has done far better in other films.

The Pink Flamingo Cinema's EVEN DEATH MAY DIE

I think I'm only now realising that I've drawn a good deal of myself from Dellamorte Dellamore after seeing it at a very formative age. It and I share the exact same penchants for deadpan black humour, hanging out in cemeteries, being forlorn, and disliking Italians. I'm very glad the Pink Flamingo audience enjoyed it.

King of Staten Island plays at being a personal journey more than it actually is a personal journey and also plays at being a stoner comedy more than it is an actual stoner comedy. There’s setups and punchlines on occasion but the bulk of the humour is more atmospheric in its attempts and about as successful as it is not so, as Pete Davidson tries to channel his own comedic energies in to the format of the film. A lot of the appeal will come down to whether or not you think Davidson is funny because the film is so much more biographic than Apatow’s other work and so trades in the everyman communicative approach of his oeuvre in favour of making the film directly more about Davidson. For his part Davidson is fine if outclassed by every other actor around him, especially Bill Burr who is uniformly far funnier and far more endearing. Around the story of Davidson’s character there’s an engaging plot regarding Marissa Tomei’s character finally getting over her husband’s death with Bill Burr’s character who’s working through his own romantic issues, but the focus is drawn on Davidson and his adolescent anguish so none of that is fully explored. Maybe I’m just tired of seeing films that feel deeply apologetic for burnouts, but even if I wasn’t I wouldn’t have found this all that funny.

Does away with the simple conceit of the first film in favour of just having the container bump in to each other. There’s times where this works great for Waxwork II: Lost In Time, like the entire The Haunting inspired section that finishes with a wonderful straight five minutes of Bruce Campbell led slapstick, and times where it buckles under the lack of structure like in the increasing dithering medieval section that dominates the second half. By and large it’s not shot or staged any cheaper than the first film, but there’s small yet extremely noticeable production failings that make it appear weaker on the whole, and not just Zack Galligan’s wigs. All of the interiors in the second half are shot with the cameras jammed up against the actors in what looks like an effort to hide the backgrounds and makes everything look so much cheaper than it probably would have had they just shown a cheap set. More so the failing is that it’s boring, beholden to the individual premises and transitioning more from light horror to middling adventure to far lesser returns. Watch the Bruce Campbell bits on their own and save yourself from the rest.

So much of the conceit of Waxwork barely holds together under even the slightest degree of scrutiny and yet it manages to maintain enough cohesion to hold together the disparate portions into something of a singular idea. Granted the whole thing is an excuse to use a lot of little sets in self contained episodes rather than commit to one of them wholesale, and with the effort being split like that none of those episodes are all that deep or well rounded. Most of term are dependant on one big effect piece, whether it be the Howling inspired werewolf or the stripped leg flesh in the Vampire castle or just the general melee at the end, but there’s enough of them and enough variety to be engaging. The Marquis de Sade portion is more strange than it’s worth though, and it’s a stark tonal deviation from the Universal horror timing the rest of the films runs by. That last fifteen minutes which is capped off by that melee is so jarringly energetic that it verges on mania, throwing Zack Galligan in to a whole new plot line involving a league of partially handicapped English paranormal enthusiasts who go up against David Warner’s strangely absent big bad which ends up being a nice capstone for the whole endeavour.

Fantastic Fest 2025

A great first act slowly unravels in to a series of increasingly jarring textual leaps and a finale that all but yells the resolutions that Salt Along the Tongue fails to actually reach in its own film making. The technical aspect of that film making is of a uniformly high standard, playing with the limitations of the productions by purposefully limiting the scale of the mis en scene and focusing on natural rounded blocking which allows the camera to settle in close and fill the frame with detail. That detail does start to get the better of the film though, with the script not providing a structure that encourages the development of the thematic ideas and leading to a slow, grinding halt to the pacing that occurs around the halfway mark. Spirited performances from Dina Panozzo and Laneikka Denne can’t provide the connections that their respective characters are missing in the scripting, and when the film then starts to introduce more notions of past traumas and connections to unseen characters there’s nothing to stop it from spiralling into inconsequence. The notion of parental trauma and lingering psychic injuries are workable if not especially fresh in modern horror, and while the film is well made, well meaning, and does honestly measure to grapple with them it’s too clumsy to reach any real conclusions.

Watched on Saturday April 26, 2025.

Expansion on a part of Dracula that really does work best with as little expansion as possible. There’s an idea behind Last Voyage of the Demeter that’s valiant, a creative crew trying to wring an original idea out of budget IP fare, but unfortunately the film never truly brings that idea to bear. All of the aspects that could have been interesting, the characters, the sequencing, the art design, are average in their execution both in regards to quality and to inspiration. Even with an on screen child death the ing characters are flat and obvious, making the first act of the film dull and failing in its effort to endear the audience to those characters so that their dispatching in the second half can have any consequence. Most of those exsanguinations take place on the deck of the ship at night which is very much an open soundstage that the camera can crane around while the film flings its effects work. I’d like to note I’m not critiquing the movie for being shot on a sound stage, I’m critiquing it for not using the tight corridors it sets up better. Nothing in the manner of a minimalist horror is utilised here despite how obviously beneficial it would have been, and that makes watching this mostly boring and occasionally irritating.

Hack-O-Lantern can’t be entirely accurately described as a slasher; sure there’s successive and different kills undertaken by a masked murderer but the film’s much more situated around the dynamics of the Drindle family and their fractured relationship with Satan. The vector of the dark lord is Grampa, played by a bubbly Hy Pyke, who directs Tommy, played by Gregory Scott Cummins, to succeed him as the leader of a very Midwestern coven and continue their efforts to praise (and maybe summon?) the dark lord. What this relates to practically is scenes of of the family complaining about each other and getting in to romantic scrapes in between the murders, with high points like Tommy fantasising about being in a rock band as he leis on his bed listening to a Walkman and low points like younger brother Roger bumbling around a sparse party and a cemetery while stuff happens off screen. The strange disconnects that all this back and forth cause are arguably the most intriguing part of the film as it becomes a small challenge to actually comprehend where everyone is in relation to each other and which character the film is focusing on, but at least you do stay invested. Dumb, dumb, dumb, fun.

Watched on Thursday April 24, 2025.

Of all the Grindhouse trailers that got turned in to movies so far Thanksgiving has been the least expansive of the initial concept, which makes sense seeing as the trailer was a very straightforward pastiche of slashers. The feature length is a less pastiche take on the same idea, as in it is an A to B slasher with very little of the silliness maintained. A lot of that is lost in the move from the crappy film look to glossy digital and the seeming update of the period from the nebulous ‘70s to a nebulous now, both moves that remove a lot of the flair. Without the flair there’s just the basic skeletal structure of a slasher left, and although there’s attention paid to making the characters more rounded, especially the ing ranks, it’s never involved enough there to make it engrossing. That said for a slasher it’s not terrible, with a fair few gruesome kills along with some themed ones in the third act and a peppy edit that does some to make up for the flat photography and digital effects. Really there’s not much reason to watch a gore movie with primarily digital gore, and this one can’t boast much else to entertain. Patrick Dempsey was great, his Massachusetts accent was great, and it's a shame not everyone else in the movie sounded like that.

Miya Miya Film Club

Easy for me to say as someone living in an environment that’s more conducive to Cinema than war torn Sudan is, but there was a lot of Talking About Trees that hit me quite personally as someone who helps run an underground Cinema. Everything from grappling with landlords about empty spaces to dealing with weird local government ordnance issues to wrangling the tech together to actually show the film was incredibly experiential, and even without that background the film does a great job in showing how lightly yet consistently gruelling all of that is to deal with. It’s a little less enveloping when it comes to the expression of the importance of Cinema especially as it relates to Sudan. There’s exposition on Cinema falling apart in the wake of a coup d’etat and some mention of important Sudanese films made before but it doesn’t tie those in to greater notions or ideas of what Cinema might mean for people other than the film makers that it documents. Coupled with a general slowness in the edit this does make portions of the film feel aimless, but there’s enough reverence for the subject on display that comes through the frame to keep the audience involved.

The limited production scope of Bomb City is perfect for the material, with the film looking and textually feeling like it could have been made by the modern descendants of the punks that it follows. What feels most youthful about the project is its ire, the righteous anger over the death and life of Brian Deneke that spurs on its depictions of punks, jocks, and the world that created them. It’s firmly planted in of the punks, and the film does lightly explore the perspective of the jocks that torment them it never gets beyond a surface level engagement with the cutaways to Glen Morshower spouting puritanical scaremongering. While that perspective is definitely missing as an ode to Brian and all the other kids like him it’s very touching. The cast are fantastic in portraying that close nit but economically fractured faction of punks even if most of them look a few years too old to hammer home how young everyone involved in this incident was. They’re shot with an intimate lensing that places the viewer within the circle and a desiccated but still present colour palette that intentionally sucks the life out of the vistas to make them look even more run down than they already are. A world of squats and parking lots is flat hellscape.

The Electric State has an impressive number of defects founds in overblown and over budgeted popcorn cinema; turbid performances laden with exposition and smarmy jokes, formless and bland visual topography focused on contextless digital effects, a structure that’s too big for its own good, and perhaps most importantly to his film a societal critique that’s so burdened with conflicting imagery that it actively makes less sense the more thought one puts in to it. The idea of robots as a purpose built proletariat that’s a metaphor for immigrant workers deported and cordoned off behind a border wall is already asinine, and coupling it with the most toothless critique of overbearing technology and corporate overreach possible only serves to make it all the more vague and formless. I’ve used over a fair few times in this review and yet despite the film’s many excesses it still feels decidedly empty, spending nearly the entirety of its one hundred and ten minute runtime (it’s listed as one twenty five but there’s a full fifteen minutes of credits) in cavernous sound stage locations where all of the movement and action is undertaken by battling digital creations. The CGI robots do have more personality than Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt, who play characters so proscribed by archetypes they may as well be animatronics. A downright impressive waste of two hundred million dollars.

Watched on Monday April 21, 2025.

Robocop is Verhoeven’s slyest satire, a spoof of the American reverence for technology, guns, and bootlicking that is so on point in its imitation of the real that it has now become part of ‘80s pastiche canon without even the semi-conscious push back that Starship Troopers gets. That’s probably because this film is emblematic of home grown United States fascism rather than in the image of a foreign form, and the contradictory and nonsensical political positions of the film make perfect sense in a country that can so worship free enterprise along side anti-corporatism and celebrate freedom while lionising an oppressive force. The film’s weaker in regards to the latter than it is the former, but Robocop’s dedication to solving every problem with the immediate application of violence and destruction is both hilarious and grim. A large degree of the purpose and drive of the character is tied in to Weller’s physical performance with his robotic choreography bringing his small tics and jitters of personality to bear in a way that makes one actively question his humanity. Even when the film pronounces it, it does so in the most sarcastic way possible, having a smiling Weller declare himself to the CEO of the company that murdered, mangled, processed, and packaged him for mass consumption.

A stale bread dry detailing of economist Richard Werner’s assertion that the Japanese Real Estate Bubble and the market crash that followed was all positioned by the Japanese Ministry of Finance under the instruction of international monetary powers in order to allow those groups to cheaply buy out Japanese assets. Whether or not Princes of the Yen actually proves this point will depend on how closely one ascribes to the reasoning of the conspiracy minded. Like almost very other one of these projects the direct damning evidence of the assertion doesn’t exist, so the film lays out all of the circumstantial evidence and then has the narration posit the connection. Strange choice to have narrator lay out all of Werner’s points and then in between the stock footage have clips of Werner on news reports stating basically the same notions. I suppose you could consider it well made in that it delivers a lot of cascading information on a logical proceeding and a digestible pace, though maybe being a little more insane and Adam Curtis like in its presentation would have served to make it a little more engaging for a less pre-convinced audience.

The only instance of Frank Hennenlotter being anything less than total in his film making, and the reason that Basket Case remains the enduring entry in a filmography that frankly has superior entries is the raw quality it has leaves it with a genuine viciousness that the others don’t possess to the same degree. In the rest of his work there’s always an undercurrent of humour to each pang of violence, each burst of insanity, but there’s moments here that feel mean spirited and driven by pained pathos and devoid of comedic disconnection. Duane and Belial’s relationship is co-dependent and parasitic in a framing that Duane not seeing is understandable, and while Kevin Van Hentenryck’s performance can’t really be called good the spirit that he injects in to his scenes conversing with the lumpy puppet brings both of them to life. The dirtiness of the photography, often consisting of a 16mm camera jammed in to the corner of a real New York rathole apartment, only adds to this strange sense of fantastical realism that’s developed almost instinctually on the part of Henenlotter. The beauty of the piece lies in its imperfections that are naturally organised around its expressiveness, telling its story and detailing its characters through a series of near spoofs.

Jacob’s Wife manages to rise just above being the most simple analysis of the personage of its lead by actually giving some credence to her being committed to her husband. Anne, played wonderfully by the incredible Barbara Crampton, being dissatisfied with her life is played against her new found powers but never entirely superceded by them, and ultimately her internality is the most important part of her character. This would have been better executed had the third act not been so plot dense, and while it does provide resolution to her arc it does so in addition to finishing the story rather than the other way around. That said the genre aspects of the film are quite deftly handled, with director Travis Stevens providing all the bloody pulp that one would like from a B grade vampire movie whilst maintaining a thematic resonance for all of the gore scenes and a genuine atmosphere to the cinematography enforced by the softly faded colours and harsh naturalistic lighting. As a character piece it’s commendably well rounded and rather charming, as a horror movie it’s got a fair few strong points, and as an opportunity to gaze longingly upon my sweet, sweet Barbara Crampton it’s a welcome addition to an ever growing lineage.

Not even necessarily bad in a way where the humour just aged in the same way that Police Academy is; most of Revenge of the Nerds is actually just bad. Sure there are a lot of jokes based on racial stereotypes and sexual impropriety that don’t work at all in a modern context but it’s not like they were great jokes to begin with, and with so much of the film’s efforts to make the nerds sympathetic predicated upon this humour being endearing there’s a gaping hole the motivation of the film should be. Anthony Edwards is at least kind of charming enough engender that endearment, along with some of the secondary characters like Curtis Armstrong’s Booger and most prominently Donald Gibb’s Ogre who are genially messed up and malignant in a manner that feels decidedly real compared to the overblown comic nerdiness of their compatriots. The film’s also not shot particularly well, reeking of ‘80s budget limitations though just spacious enough in its bigger moments to enforce the idea of scale. Really it’s just a dull, deformed, and self pitying take on Animal House, and there’s no real reason to watch it now aside from the small sliver of name value it has left.

Praising The Girl Can’t Help It for being a formative disseminator of Rock and Roll to the masses is both perfectly accurate and not quite encapsulating of the film. The music is definitely there and it’s definitely on screen, but only in service to the plot and often handled no more deftly then a cut away to a performance that’s happening somewhere in proximity to the main characters as in the case of Gene Vincent. The thing is though, both the cutaways and the real film itself are great; seeing Eddie Cochran and a remarkably subdued Little Richard perform and having a great light romantic comedy led by the incomparable Jayne Mansfield happen in concurrence is fantastic even if they aren’t linked. Getting colour footage of now Rock and Roll legends at a time they would have been segregated, in most cases literally, away from mass audiences and Hollywood and being able to see Mansfield along with the dazzling costume and art design from people who worked on Cleopatra and Gone with the Wind in stunning deluxe colour excuses any saccharine excesses of the film itself. An enduring delight for the senses and an undersung era defining work.

Long lost Full Moon film about finding a long lost civilisation of stop motion animated reptilians. The Primevals was one of the more ambitious works of the Full Moon era and you can definitely tell that looking at the production. It’s not just that the stop motion is incredibly crafted and mingled wonderfully with the live action elements, but all of the aspects that are so often maligned with Full Moon films, locations, sets, ing actors, are all great here. The script could have done with a second and the structuring along with it, but for an adventure film that was slowly assembled over the course of fifty years (thirty if you’re counting from the principal photography) it is remarkably cohesive. Even the necessary preamble sequences are bolstered by early appearances of the beautiful stop motion animation and a direct effort to minimise how much time is just spent walking and talking. The only downside to the production is that because the photography was done thirty years ago and the stop motion finished this year there’s a separation between the live actors and the models in the third act that makes the cutting back and forth between them egregious at points, though practically with the edit it’s nt a huge issue. While it’s not exactly the kind of introductory piece that you could show to someone to extol the virtues of stop motion it’s not far off, and along with Mad God shows that there’s a real artistic desire and maybe even a market for more of it.

Aside from the monkey of it all there’s not much to Better Man to separate it from its ancestors, all the other big budget music biopics that follow a musician from stunted childhood to fame to anguish and finally to redemption. The clever thing about the monkey is that it lets the audience focus on Williams’ story rather than an actor doing an impression of Williams, which does legitimately grant more weight to a story that is by most measures quite standard. As much as the film might to trying to portray itself as some kind of anti-ego trip Williams never comes off as negatively coded, always prodded in to being callous and cruel by his crushing fame or his myriad addictions or most often an apathy that’s painted as cheekiness. At least it looks quite good, with the size and force of the musical numbers befitting the magical realism of the visual language making a plus two hour runtime still feel somewhat brisk in how feverishly its paced. The more inventive sequences do highlight the more uninventive sequences though, and for every great transition or bombastic musical number there’s a scene of people talking that goes on longer than it should. Important to note that while there’s some leaden portions focusing on the redemptive angle here they never get entirely maudlin, and the parts that try do mostly manage to be genuinely sentimental.

Watched on Saturday April 12, 2025.

• Babygirl
• Eyes Wide Shut
• To Die For
• Birthday Girl
• Stoker
• A Family Affair

Will update as I discover more.

How the hell did Ritchie Blackmore never end up scoring a terrible fantasy film?

• Death Wish 3
• Communion

• The Naked City
• Barry Lyndon
• Who Killed Captain Alex?

My Hooptober list for 2021. Started one day late, might run over past Halloween but I'll do my best to get everything watched and reviewed before then.

• Viy

  Six Countries - Soviet Union

• History of the Occult

  Six Countries - Argentina

• Long Weekend

  Six Countries - Australia

• Rawhead Rex

  Six Countries - Ireland

• The Housemaid

  Six Countries - Vietnam

• Juan of the Dead

  Six Countries - Cuba

• The Man Who Laughs

  Eight Decades - 1920s

• Island of Lost Souls

  Eight Decades - 1930s

• Invaders from Mars

  Eight Decades - 1950s

• Day of the Animals

  Eight Decades - 1970s

...plus 24 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

All the Feature Film's and Documentaries available to stream for the 2021 Sydney Underground Film Festival, all of which I watched during the course of the festival.

Not on the list is Mu-Meson Archives Presents SHAKE HANDS WITH DANGER, a compilation of industrial films.

This year's line up was slightly worse than previous years have been, mostly due to the lack of a bigger budget genre piece to cap everything off, though a lot of that also comes down to the festival being online rather than in theatres. Looking forward to next year's fest.

• Sweetie, You Won't Believe It
• Bad Girls
• Bone Cage
• Brain Freeze
• Danny. Legend. God.
• Externo
• Fall Back Down
• First Date
• Hotel Poseidon
• An Ideal Host

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The first time I'm playing Hooptober by the rules, and attempting to watch all the films within the month of October. I'll probably end up missing one or two. Many of my choices are better known ones that I either haven't seen or haven't seen in a long while, so if you'd like to recommend any substitutions or propose something for next year that would be appreciated.

6 countries
West : Nekromantik
Mexico: Satanico Pandemonium
: Sheitan
Australia: Turkey Shoot
Indonesia: Mystics in Bali
Italy: The New York Ripper

6 decades
10: Green Inferno
00: May
90: Deep Rising
80: Xtro
70: Shock Waves
60: The Terror

7 2nd films of franchises
Creepshow 2
Sleepaway Camp 2
Howling II: Stirba Werewolf Bitch
Tetsuo 2: Body Hammer
Blade II
Demons 2
Maniac Cop 2

4 body horror films
The Brood
Street Trash
Body melt
Bad Biology

2 films from this year
Underwater
Spree

3 disease based films
Andromeda Strain
The Last Man on Earth
Rabid

The highest rated horror film from the 50s that you haven't seen and can access.
Night of the Hunter

1 film that is set entirely inside one location
Leviathan

1 Invisible Person film
Memoirs of an Invisible Man

1 Non Dracula Hammer Film
Curse of the Werewolf

2 films with a black director or predominantly black cast or lead.
Bones
Ganja and Hess

1 film with a movie theater in it.
Fade to Black

• Nekromantik

  Six Countries: West

• Satanic Pandemonium

  Six Countries: Mexico

• Satan

  Six Countries:

• Turkey Shoot

  Six Countries: Australia

• Mystics in Bali

  Six Countries: Indonesia

• The New York Ripper

  Six Countries: Italy

• The Green Inferno

  Six Decades: 2010s

• May

  Six Decades: 2000s

• Deep Rising

  Six Decades: 1990s

• Xtro

  Six Decades: 80s

...plus 25 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The films I saw over the weekend of September 15 and 16 at The Factory Theatre as part of the Sydney Underground Film Festival.

• Luz
• Sickies Making Films

  Followed by Q&A with director Joe Tropea.

• Relaxer
• Mega Time Squad
• Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich
• Liquid Sky
• Shadowman
• Let the Corpses Tan
• Revenge
• An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
2. Videodrome
3. Martin
4. Wolfen
5. Dracula: Prince of Darkness
6. Bram Stoker's Dracula
7. Re-Animator
8. Bone Tomahawk
9. The Hunger
10. The Fly

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.