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A few years ago I watched this film as part of my Halloween watchlist, which I do every October, and it immediately became one of my favorite discoveries. The version I watched is a degraded copy available on archive.org that looks like it may have been ripped from a VHS, or at the very least hasn't undergone any kind of meaningful restoration, but the visuals still dripped with beauty and atmosphere. Sybille Schmitz is a dark, haunting presence of strength and beauty as Maria, a woman who comes to a small village looking for work. She winds up taking on the role of "ferryman" after the man in charge of this post died while transporting a mysterious gaunt figure (who seems to precede Bergman's vision of Death in The Seventh Seal) across the lake. Over the course of her stay, Maria falls in love with a wounded soldier who escapes to the out-of-the-way town to recuperate while hiding from the enemy, but when the Grim Reaper shows up to collect the soldier, it's up to Maria to outwit him and rescue her beloved.

The only flaw in the movie is the ending--the way that Maria gets rid of Death doesn't really make a lot of sense or live up to the folkloric milieu out of which the story operates, but that's a minor complaint. See it for the atmosphere and Schmitz's hypnotic performance.

Based on the previews, I desperately wished to avoid seeing this movie. But my girlfriend's little brother wanted to go, so hey, free popcorn. I was rewarded with a film that is suitably okay and occasionally pretty good.

This is the origin story of Willy Wonka--so beholden to the 1971 version that it reuses its songs, but apparently not intended to be a canonical prequel. This Wonka is kind and magnanimous to a fault, a pure being who only wishes to inspire joy and imagination through his magical confections. It's difficult to imagine this character growing into the cynical, eccentric, and occasionally sadistic recluse Gene Wilder played. Wonka's relationship with the Oompa Loompa (Hugh Grant in a scene-stealing performance) seems carefully constructed to avoid invoking the residue of enslavement that hangs over the novel and its other adaptations. In a way, creating a backstory for a character like Wonka is as foolhardy as trying to set the Joker's origins in stone--he just works better when he's nine-tenths mystery--but the filmmakers establish so firmly early on that they're doing THEIR OWN THING that you never really feel like they're cheapening the classic interpretation of the character by over-explaining him. This is almost more of a parallel universe story, a what-if, a big-budget fan fiction that takes what it wants from the source material and doesn't sweat the rest of it.

The acting is variable. I've enjoyed Chalamet in everything else I've seen him in, but his performance as Wonka is a touch too "musical theater kid". I suppose it's good that he's having fun, smiling and dancing with a kind of sexless energy that conveys to the audience, "I'm not a threat!" But it doesn't exactly make for a character with depth. Given that this is generally meant to be a fairy tale, I suppose it's all right to play a superficial archetype, but there were times when the character felt "vacuous" as opposed to "relentlessly optimistic". Olivia Colman and Tom Davis are a lot of fun as the unscrupulous owners of a sweatshop laundromat--very Roald-Dahl-esque in their playful grotesqueness. (Fan fiction prompt: What if Willy Wonka met Sweeney Todd? But keep it PG, please.) Calah Lane is unfortunately rather flat as Noodle, the obligatory sad-eyed orphan. Perhaps the writing failed her, perhaps it's that Chalamet was only giving her a single note to play against, but I found her lacking in charisma, which makes her character very slight and difficult to really invest in, which in turn hampered the sweetness of the ending. Everybody else is suitable to their roles.

The biggest problem with Wonka is that it never really soars as a musical. The numbers are perhaps entertaining in the moment, but the staging often feels unimaginative and the music is forgettable. The only tunes you'll be humming on the way out of the theater are the standards from the '71 version. It almost feels as though the filmmakers made a straight narrative film and some studio head saw the result and was like, "No songs? But the audience will expect songs in a Wonka movie! Quick, go shoot a few." The third act pretty much eschews musical numbers altogether until the (underwhelming) reprise of "Imagination". Everything feels weightless and inconsequential the moment the characters start belting out a ditty, and the excess of CGI doesn't help. The movie works a lot better as a gentle comedy--pleasantly formulaic, at times emotional, and occasionally even whimsical.

Wonka is no Paddington, but there's enough to put in the Plus column that I look forward to director Paul King's next endeavor.

There's not really anything new in Quiz Lady. If you've ever seen a comedy before (and I don't even watch a lot of modern comedies), every joke here will feel telegraphed a mile away. Nothing surprises you.

The tricky thing about a road movie is that you really have to fall in love with the characters, and I didn't here. Sandra Oh's character is so obnoxious and selfish that I couldn't warm up to her even after the gooey "heartfelt" reconciliation. I mean, it's a really good performance by Oh, needless to say, but in service of what? She spends her entire life walking all over and manipulating other people and we're supposed to forgive her because we find out that ONE TIME she did ONE nice thing for her sister. The movie does so little to acknowledge her flaws that you wonder if her intrusive, overbearing, and entitled personality isn't being spun as some kind of twisted "girl power". Sort of that "Well guys get away with being aggressive jerks all the time, so it's empowering to flip the script and have the WOMAN be the awful one, right?" brand of feminism. I mean, yeah, her relationship with Awkwafina is better by the end of the movie, but she doesn't seem to acknowledge or attempt to make amends with anyone else she's hurt over the course of the past forty years. I get the feeling that by the end of the movie she's ready to snap back to her former personality and go on treating everybody else in the world like garbage.

Awkwafina's character is more sympathetic but pretty dull--her only real defining characteristics are that she's The Responsible One and that she's pretty much a trivia prodigy. She would have been a much more interesting character if she had been pursuing the quiz show of her own accord rather than simply being dragged through the movie by her controlling sister.

The supporting cast really buoys the movie--even if you get the feeling that the self-same movie that benefits from their presence is making fun of most of them. Sure, I'm supposed to give Sandra Oh's awful character the grace of seeing her as a fully-dimensional human being, but the guy running the Bed and Breakfast who enjoys dressing as Benjamin Franklin? It's okay to portray him as a ridiculous geeky idiot who's too dumb to cosplay correctly. Do you want me to feel compassion for your characters or not, movie? Holland Taylor is a standout as Awkwafina's miserable duplex neighbor, Jason Schwartzman goes the Justin Long route of flipping the "adorkable dude" archetype on its head by exposing its toxicity, and Will Ferrell brings a warmth and humanity to a talk show host who, on paper, is a pretty boring guy. And the cameo by "Alan Cumming" steals the movie.

The dishwater roteness of the script subsides in the third act as Awkwafina makes it to the game show. This is where the movie really picks up and the comedy starts to feel more organic to the plot rather than simply shoved on top of it. I think I would have enjoyed the movie a lot more if it actually explored the subculture of quiz show fanaticism--I mean, it is called Quiz Lady, after all, so it's annoying that Can't Stop the Quiz is pretty much relegated to the role of glorified MacGuffin and deus ex machina.

I was looking forward to Psycho Goreman, hearing in advance that it was sort of an R-rated Power Ranger/Masters of the Universe throwback. I suppose it is, but writer-director Steven Kostanski decides to hew that premise into a comedy, and the result feels like a one-note skit that goes on for way too long. Every scene finds exactly one joke to beat into the ground over and over again. Boy does it get stale quickly. It's too bad, because the practical makeup effects are pretty cool (even if the jokiness of the material hobbles the aesthetics for the most part).

If you liked the hackneyed sensibilities of "Too Many Cooks", you might like this movie.

Fans love to defend movies that get blasted by critics. "This is a movie for real people," they say. "Not elitists in ivory towers." Well, sometimes critics are right, and honestly I get annoyed that fans are so eager to line up for buffets of mediocrity and chow down like they're being gifted filet mignon. "Don't bother making any effort on our part," they say to movie studios, "we'll be satisfied with any crap you want to feed us." Wouldn't it be nice if we held filmmakers to a higher standard? If your favorite IP could be made into a movie AND that movie could also be, you know, good? It's not actually an impossible dream. You just have to stop licking boots.

Oh, well. It's just a movie. It's not like lives hang in the balance, I guess. But they did get my money, so I think I have a right to complain.

Whenever a much-anticipated movie takes forever to get into production, the excuse is always the same: the filmmakers are waiting for the right script. Then you see the finished film and think, "THAT was the right script? Surely at least one of the other two dozen options from the slush pile was better than this one." Five Nights at Freddy's suffers from a standard plot involving a security guard with haunted eyes trying to pull his life together so his aunt won't take custody of his younger sister. Yawn. But wait, if you were worried the dour protagonist doesn't have a Tragic Backstory, you're in luck! His younger brother (a different younger sibling than the one he's raising now) was abducted from a campsite when they were children, and Older Brother feels responsible as the only witness. Do his recurring nightmares about the incident tie in somehow with the current spooky shenanigans unfolding at the arcade-slash-pizza-place known as Freddy Fazbear's? If you think they do not, you've obviously never seen a film before.

Despite the story being so thin you could use it as tissue paper next time you're wrapping a gift, the screenwriters (including FNaF creator Scott Cawthon and director Emma Tammi) stretch the rusty plot mechanics to nearly two hours. Why? Who knows? Even the pre-FNaF cash-ins like The Banana Splits Movie and Willy's Wonderland were smart enough to keep the action under 90 minutes. The film is chock full of characters that absolutely do not matter, like love-interest/cop Vanessa (fulfilling the obnoxious archetype of "character who knows more than she lets on about the scary goings-on but refuses to adequately warn the main character so he has no idea what kind of trouble he's getting himself into until it's too late for everybody") and waste-of-time-and-talent sneerfest Aunt Jane, perplexingly played by the overqualified '90s ingenue Mary Stuart Masterson. I guess everybody needs a paycheck. The screentime dedicated to superfluous characters ensures that our main protagonists, sadboy Mike and his preadolescent sister Abby, receive zero of the development necessary to actually make them interesting or complex.

There's exactly one good scene in Five Nights, involving a group of intruders getting picked off one at a time by the animatronics. Tammi shows the aplomb of a PG-13 Sam Raimi, energizing the sequence with rapid-fire editing and kinetic camera movements and suggesting violence with shadows and abstractions that feel like fun artistic choices rather than concessions to the MPAA. Would that Tammi had been let off the leash more often. As we were treated to the umpteenth scene of Josh Hutcherson attempting to interrogate ghosts in his repeating dream, I kept myself awake by pondering why Cawthon was apparently so insistent that his hollow, schlocky video game premise be turned into this turgid melodrama instead of an adrenaline-fueled, no-holds-barred free-for-all. The final showdown, unfortunately, commits the greatest sin of all: anticlimax.

My two notes of genuine appreciation for the film come down to the impressive, full-size animatronics created by the Jim Henson shop--thank God the film avoided CGI--and Matthew Lillard working his butt off to be the same gleeful scenery-chewer he was back in Scream, albeit with a much weaker character this time around. Other than that, I suppose I'm just glad the film avoids the same cynical, empty "wokespeak" that plagues other franchises aiming for Gen Z (not a self-conscious reference to "patriarchy" or "gaslighting" throughout the entire runtime, wonder of wonders). It's a tired movie, but at least it's merely tired in its old-fashioned storytelling rather than in a futile attempt to be up-to-the-minute as bait for "teh kidz".

If you're going to see it, see it in the theater, with fans of the video games attending in full cosplay regalia, cheering at Easter eggs and applauding any moment that musters even a smidgen of genuine entertainment value. I did, and the atmosphere accounted for about 80% of the actual fun quotient of the entire experience.

I saw Offseason listed on a particular website's year-end roundup of 2022's best horror. I think it was the AV Club but I'm not certain. Anyway, the writer described it as feeling like old-time radio, and I didn't have any other misty New England coastal films lined up for the month of October, so I slotted it in.

The film starts on a bad note--pretty much literally. The music is very in-your-face and melodramatic. I think a quieter, moodier score would have better accentuated the atmosphere. Our main characters are driving into a small island town because the heroine has gotten word that her mother's gravesite was desecrated. As the film goes on you find out that her mother was a film star who escaped the town and gave her daughter strict orders not to bury her there, under any circumstances, but a mysterious change in the will forced our heroine's hand.

Intriguing premise and some good ideas, but you have to stick with it to get anywhere worthwhile. The main couple is obnoxious right off the bat, passive-aggressively sniping at each other in the car. You'd like there to be some kind of sympathetic back story that gives depth to their strained marriage, but you don't get it. After a few moments in the graveyard that aim for eerie but come across as simply overblown (the crisp digital cinematography doesn't help--the scenes are overlit in a way that works against the overcast, sea salt melancholy), you get the obligatory "strangers in a small town" scene where they step into a local pub and the cheerfully noisome locals immediately go DEAD SILENT as all heads turn to leer at the newcomers. A cliched moment like that really has to be handled with delicacy to avoid seeming like parody, and in Offseason it's one of many moments when I wasn't sure if I was meant to be amused or unsettled.

Our heroine's flashbacks to her mother's final days give a bit of weight to her otherwise insubstantial character, and the payoff of the last few minutes is enough to make me forgive the movie's lack of originality. I can't help but think there was a much more interesting angle for the writer/director to take on the story, though, rather than this cobbled-together Lovecraftian pastiche that brings nothing new to the mythos.

Funny how every single slow-paced indie movie on IMDB has a top-rated negative review that's prefaced with, "Look, I normally LOVE slow-paced indie movies, but this one..." It's really starting to seem like something reviewers say just so they can pretend they have the proper "credentials" to hate on a low-budget, slowly-paced indie film. Little Miss Sunshine is not an indie movie, you guys.

But whatever. People who leave low ratings on critical darlings let me know that it's actually a movie I'm going to enjoy. For some reason that's my sweet spot--critics adore it, audience members hate it. "Nobody gets killed with a machete in this, how can it be a horror movie?" Streaming services have given people such entitlement--if you're not entertained in the first five seconds, you can switch to something else instead of settling in and trying to give it a chance. I grew up in the days of movie rental stores, where you got one or two movies for the weekend and that was it, so you might as well try to enjoy them and meet them on their own terms. The irony, of course, is that a film like We're All Going to the World's Fair probably wouldn't have gotten any traction whatsoever in a pre-streaming world.

As a 36-year-old man, I don't have any authority to say what is accurate representation for modern-day teenage girls, but Casey, as portrayed by Anna Cobb, feels so much more authentic to me than all the Gen-Z hipsters spouting woke Internet lingo in Netflix's Wednesday or even another recent horror film, Bodies Bodies Bodies (which I actually enjoyed, outside of the empty satire of social media parlance). She reminded me of the friends I had in high school--moody, troubled, silly, angsty, dramatic, lonely, impulsive. A girl who is very much still a child trying to navigate adult-sized feelings in her still-developing body.

Casey takes part in an online viral challenge that is something like an interactive creepypasta, instigated by repeating three times into the webcam, "I want to go to the World's Fair". The specifics of this role-playing game are never entirely elucidated, but the purpose seems to be to instigate changes in one's body and mental state, culminating in a "visit" (real, imagined, invented?) to a timeless, placeless fairground. Other YouTubers post videos of their "symptoms" over time--mental breaks, numbness, scabs and scars. Casey documents herself sleeping and exhibits strange nocturnal behaviors. The question at the heart of the film is whether something truly bizarre and supernatural is actually going on with Casey, if she is experiencing mental illness, or if she simply wants to take part in something larger than herself, to garner a sense of community, to create a narrative around herself that is more dramatic and fulfilling than her isolated days spent dancing in her attic bedroom or wandering aimlessly around her small town.

Complicating matters is a man named JLB who contacts Casey online, warning her she might be in actual danger. They talk over Skype, but his face is hidden, the screen displaying only an avatar. His voice indicates that he is a much older man. It's unclear exactly what his intentions are--is he simply participating in the MMORPG? Does he see something of his depressed teenage self in Casey that he wants to protect? Or is he a creep trying to groom a child under the innocent guise of a horror game? This is left ambiguous until the very end, with writer/director Jane Schoenbrun refusing to dictate how the viewer must feel about this unconventional, apparently unsupervised relationship. Casey's behavior toward JLB alternates between cautious intrigue, vulnerability, and passive-aggressiveness. Sadly, it reminds me very much of girls I knew in high school who got into relationships with older men: flitting from hot to cold, affection to rage, desperately seeking love and approval but lashing out at random intervals. Playing the drama of adult relationships without having the maturity to understand their depth. It's like Casey suspects, on some unconscious level, that she's being exploited, that JLB's interactions are perhaps less than appropriate, but he's also the only person in her life giving her the attention she craves, so she can't bring herself to walk away.

The cinematography, mostly filtered through cell phone lenses and webcams, is distinctly uncinematic. I wouldn't say the film is documentarian--even documentaries aim for striking imagery. But We're All Going to the World's Fair is more concerned with capturing a time and place, a feeling. When Casey ventures outside, she wanders alongside highways, trudging over sidewalks caked in dirty snow, traversing through thin forests to sit in unremarkable graveyards across the street from an ugly strip mall. The environment is all cement and chain link fences, about as far as one can get from the Gothic heights of vampire castles and fairy tale villages one traditionally associates with horror. I'm not sure where it was filmed, but it reminded me of where I grew up--the stark, flat lighting of the winter sun, yellowing grass underfoot, the boxy downtown area strung up with Christmas lights and populated with denizens who look like they just got off their shift at a car dealership rather than walking to set directly from the catwalk, as extras tend to look in Hollywood movies.

The late comedian Mitch Hedburg had an infidelity joke that went like this: "I don't have a girlfriend, but I do know a woman who'd be mad at me for saying that." I'll paraphrase that to describe the genre of We're All Going to the World's Fair as best I can: "It is a horror movie, but I know a lot of horror fans would get mad at me for saying that."

If you're looking for suspense, the first half hour of The Strangers delivers. A couple at their isolated home hears a knock on their door. The girl on the other side asks for someone who doesn't exist, then disappears into the night. Already unsettling. What happens when the knocking continues? When you start to see lonely figures out the window staring back at you, standing in wait? What are they waiting for?

Then the second act happens. A lot of poor decisions, predictable obstacles, hiding in closets and lights going out, that kind of thing. It doesn't feel quite so terrifying because it's familiar, if only from other horror movies.

The ending, though. The Strangers tie the victims to chairs. A ritual group unmasking. If they no longer feel the need to hide, you're not going to survive the visit. The inevitable stabbing is slow, almost clumsy, in stark contrast to the lightning-quick reflexes evidenced by the Strangers in previous scenes. Even though the camera doesn't quite let us see their faces, we know now that the Strangers are not supernatural boogeymen. They're just people. Ordinary, boring people, who decided one day to try murder. As though it's simply a hobby one picks up of an afternoon. They're not interesting enough to be evil. Now that the adrenaline rush of the chase is over, they may not even be certain they want to do this. But there's no going back; they've already crossed a line.

As they pull away from the scene of the crime, a couple of Mormon boys going door to door ride past on bicycles. The Strangers stop. "Can I have one?" asks the blonde girl, indicating their pamphlets.

"Are you a sinner?" asks the boy.

The dialogue is a bit on the nose. But it takes the blonde girl a long time to consider. "Sometimes," she decides.

She gets back into the car. The girl with black hair says, reassuringly, "It'll be easier next time."

They ride off in their truck. Back to their banal lives, wearing masks of normalcy as they plan their next endeavor. No one said that it would be BETTER next time; only EASIER. As though this is something they are compelled to do, an obligation. A task to master for its own sake. They don't seem any happier than the victims they're leaving behind.

Why are they doing this, asks the female they're tormenting? "Because you were home." Not "Because you deserve it" or even "Because we enjoy it". It's bleak, a self-perpetuating cycle of violence that doesn't even grant the perpetrators a sense of fulfillment. Just emptiness and confusion. Maybe they can't answer the question of "why" because they themselves don't have an answer.

Look, I'm a horror fan. I normally roll my eyes at pearl-clutchers who fixate on the genre's lack of moral value or whatever. But watching The Funhouse gives me some sympathy for those people. This must be what all horror movies look like to them.

The Funhouse is grimy and disgusting and just makes you feel unclean. The entire film looks like it was shot through a special lens filter made of crystalized vomit. From the opening scene, in which a pervy kid pranks his sister with a rubber knife while she's soaping up in the shower, the entire universe of this movie only seems to exist to make you feel queasy. Was that Tobe Hooper's intention? If so, what was the point? I think Texas Chain Saw Massacre is kind of a miracle of a film in its uncompromising ode to depravity, eccentricity, and bad taste, but The Funhouse is like the mirror version of that, where everything that went right in Chain Saw goes wrong here. The characters are unappealing, the writing is dull, the setting is ugly and the pacing is baffling. Even the villains can't manage to be entertaining. Things just barely start to pick up in the finale, but even that goes on forever. You just want to shout at the main character, "MOVE!"

Artless grotesquerie, sculpted in wax.

Is there anything more embarrassing than writers who don't understand comedy trying to write comedy? I had to pull up a game on my phone so I could devote only half my attention to the episode, that's the only way I could get through it.

I stopped watching Criminal Minds the previous season--too many cast changes, and the writing just got progressively thinner as the show went on. But I tuned in to this episode for Paget Brewster's reunion with her Thrilling Adventure Hour co-star Paul F. Tompkins. Well, Tompkins is on the show for all of five minutes in aggregate so I should have just found an edit of his scenes on YouTube. He handles the paper-thin caricature--a mockery of conspiracy theorists--with aplomb, but it's barely a footnote in the overall episode.

We get to see what the Criminal Minds writers think is funny--I mean beyond Garcia calling Morgan "sexual chocolate" or whatever. First we have Matt struggling to assemble a crib he bought online while his pregnant wife nags him for buying the wrong color. Then Garcia stumbles upon a stalker case and brings in the victim's ex-boyfriend so A. J. and Tara can interrogate him and snidely comment on what a loser he is. (The guy's alibi is that he was having a threesome and they're just like, "Ew, who'd wanna bone this guy?" Um, at least two women? They're not even good at bullying.) Then Prentiss finds out her crazy former neighbor is suing her and brings him into the station so she and Tara can comment on what a psycho loser he is and how out of his league his ex-wife was. Meanwhile, Reid meets a woman in the park who accuses him of being a creep after her unsupervised nephew wanders up to him and starts bothering him, and when the nephew insists Reid comes along while he plays, the woman continually rejects Reid before he even has a chance to open his mouth, telling him his dreams are boring and he's a loser for being out in the park trying to have a conversation with another human being--and this is AFTER he tries to get her out of a parking ticket she very much deserved to get. Noticing any kind of pattern here?

Tara, A. J., and Prentiss come across as shallow mean girls who use their positions of authority to harass and snipe. Both of the guys they mock behind their backs are complete victims--one of a stalker, another of his paranoid delusions. No compassion for either of them. It's treated as a joke that the stalker is a self-loathing homosexual--when they think he's after the woman, he's the biggest most threatening scum of the earth, but when it's revealed that he's actually after the ex-boyfriend the show is like, "Wakka wakka! Silly stalker!" Matt's "dopey husband who can't even assemble a crib!" shtick is worse than sitcom level writing. I don't even remember this character, but his wife sure sucks. Garcia abuses the privilege of utilizing the BAU office for her hacking workshop by blasting music to the point that it bothers everybody else in the building, and she doesn't appear to be a very encouraging teacher either, just walking by everybody's computer and berating them for not already being master-level hackers even though the reason they're there is presumably to learn from her. Everybody's either a jerk or an idiot and that's all the writers can think to do in this "humor"-filled episode. Well, except for referencing memes. My God, the cringe.

The episode deserves one star, but I gave it one more for the only genuinely funny exchange in the entire 40 minutes:

Max (annoying lady in the park who's mean to Reid the entire time for no reason until he falls for her): Remember when you were a kid, you could just get on your bike and just ride until you had to come home for dinner?

Reid: Conceptually yes, but practically, no.

If you think there's nothing funnier than that T shirt in your closet that reads, "I'm not as think as you drunk I am!", this episode is for you.

Book of Henry is what happens when you take a script intended to be a dark comedy and have the actors play it straight and put in a lot of heartfelt music to show that it's meant to be sincere. It's a weird, shambling, obnoxious Frankenstein that doesn't have the media literacy to understand how absurd and tonally dissonant it is. This is hardly surprising coming from Colin Trevorrow; Jurassic World was one of the worst movies of the 2010s. Whatever the guy does, he does with the smugness of the fourteen-year-old edge lord who just skimmed Infinite Jest and is now convinced he's got everything figured out. Suffice it to say Naomi Watts plays a mother who can't make a single life decision without consulting her eleven-year-old son, Sarah Silverman kisses a child full on the lips, and sexual abuse against the underage neighbor girl (who is not developed as a character whatsoever) is only treated as important insofar as it affects our hero Henry.

I'd say skip this one, but there are a lot of unintentional laughs to be had. Save it for a bad movie night.

There was an uproar when Chris Pratt was announced as the voice of Mario. Personally, I don't hate Pratt (although I don't love him, by any means) but it was a disconcerting sign that The Super Mario Brothers Movie might be taking the typical Illumination Studios route of throwing a big-name cast on top of an uninspired script. Now that I've seen the movie, were those fears justified? Yes. Yes they were.

I'm not, by most definitions, a "fan". Especially by current definitions, which require you to Stan anything you even remotely like to the point of issuing death threats against anyone who dares to speak ill of it. If I like things, I like them for personal reasons, not to tie my identity to them or to take part in some screaming mob. I don't tend to get hyped for, and subsequently disappointed by, the latest big-budget movie. Worst case scenario: I'll forget about it a year from now.

But I was cautiously optimistic for the Super Mario Brothers Movie. I'm not a gamer, but like many of my generation I have a lifelong association with Mario. My first video game console was an NES. In high school I played Mario Party and Super Mario Kart for hours on end with my friends. Recently I completed Super Mario 3D World on Switch--probably the first video game I've played all the way through in at least a decade. I guess you could say the franchise is important to me.

Beyond the actual games themselves, I like the universe Nintendo has created for Mario. It's colorful and comforting and fun. I like the gentle characters, the imaginative game mechanics, the simple storylines and low-key conflicts. If I ever got an urge to write fan fiction, I'd probably set it in the Marioverse. It might not be great, but it would be sincere and nostalgic and full of the joy that the games have given me. Super Mario Bros., by contrast, feels like it was made by a team that never played a single Nintendo video game, much less understands what is appealing about them.

Everything about this is boring. The story is rote and chock full of confusing decisions. The characterizations are flat and dull. The action sequences move so fast, with so little impact, that none of them really matter. The animation is...well, fine I guess, but I'm not giving anybody credit for simply NOT ruining the visually-pleasant environment that game designers have been building upon for forty years.

The screenplay--as per usual in such cases--is the culprit. It's the standard kids-movie template with nothing in the way of heart or wonder. Just a bunch of famous people talking fast and pretending that's an inherently funny thing. Every animation studio apart from Pixar is terrified of sincerity these days, so SMB takes the typical approach of being its own episode of Cinemasins by having the characters constantly lampshade every bizarre aspect of the Marioverse that the games have simply taken for granted over the years: "Okay, so these bricks float in the air, that's normal." "Whoa, a talking mushroom, I guess that's not weird or anything." I think studio executives have this idea that they need to pander to the adults in the audience with these constant self-referential quips or else we'll spend the entire movie laughing at how little sense it makes, but guess what, Hollywood: not every adult is a detached YouTuber who cynically combs through genre movies to crow about "plot holes". Some of us just want to invest in a fantastical world without reservation. Some of us want to go on an earnest adventure without a jaded peanut gallery continually cracking wise and undercutting everything that makes a magical realm special. Can you imagine how insufferable Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy would be if every other line was Aragorn being like, "Okay, an evil wizard made a ring that turns people invisible. Random!" Then he leads a a ghost army and Galadriel shows up for no reason other than to deliver an aside like, "Well, THAT happened." Raise one eyebrow to show how unflappable and nonchalant she is. Then she does kung-fu or something because STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER (who will be completely marginalized in the third act so the men can save the day).

So yeah, all the usual criticisms. A talented cast with nothing interesting to do. A shallow story that has no meaning and serves no purpose except to link together a bunch of pre-existing things you already know you like. A sense of humor that plays into the modern "alternative" comedy tradition of standing outside of things and ironically observing them rather than participating and having genuine feelings about things. A stupid and obvious soundtrack with thirty-plus-year-old pop songs. (That's especially egregious when Mario games have amassed possibly the most iconic musical library of all time. Does the tired training montage really benefit from the made-famous-again-by-Shrek-2 Bonnie Tyler hit "I Need a Hero" when it could be using, I don't know, ANY Koji Kondo track?) A movie that chooses to keep apologizing for its own existence rather than having any fun whatsoever.

That live-action adaptation just keeps looking better and better.

Remember how, for the longest time in American cinema, straight filmmakers couldn't possibly conceive of any way to plead for an audience's sympathy for gay characters outside of portraying the lives of LGBTQ+ people as unrelentingly miserable marathons of tragedy, inequity, and prejudice? Usually they had to die at the end of the movie (or maybe in the third act as the main character is hitting their low point) so that all the straight viewers could cry and pat themselves on the back for feeling human emotions for a character who WASN'T LIKE THEM. "How sad that there are cartoonish bigots in the world," they think to themselves, wiping tears from their eyes and thinking about how superior they are for deigning to view homosexuals as actual people. What important work. Not that those same people will do anything about institutionalized prejudice or believe that microaggressions are a real, psychologically damaging, self-esteem-destroying social phenomenon--anybody who complains about stuff like that is just entitled and oversensitive. Gay people aren't REALLY suffering until they're turned into martyrs--either by their own hand or the hands of bad old two-dimensional violent homophobes--and you can hold a candlelight vigil in their memory and decry the fact that nobody was doing anything to help them before it was too late. Nobody except YOU, of course, because weren't you always polite to them? And what more could you have done.

Well, nowadays we can get a few well-rounded LGBTQ+ characters in mainstream cinema, so that problem is finally and forever 100% solved. What other prejudice, wonders Hollywood, can we now turn our attention to fixing? Ah, how about Fatty the fat fat man? Here comes Darren Aronofsky to let us know that we are, indeed, FINALLY given permission to empathize with the overweight. Perhaps even--GASP!--the morbidly obese. DARE WE??

I mean...the allowance is on a provisional basis, you understand. As long as Jumbo has it REALLY, REALLY HARD IN THE MOST EXTREME POSSIBLE WAYS. You know, like their lover died and their daughter hates them and they feel like they've wasted their entire lives without doing anybody any good and they're dying. Then we can invest in their plight. Anybody who binge-eats just because they have a disorder and don't have all that external sad crap in their life, anybody who experiences even fleeting moments of happiness and self-worth, anybody whose depression isn't justified a hundred times over to the satisfaction of the most cynical person in the audience--you're free to go ahead and keep on loathing them, because they're just not doing the work.

Seriously, this movie is such buffoonish misery porn. Every single background character who sees Charlie has the most over-the-top reaction to his physical appearance. Yes, every SINGLE one. Nobody in this universe has an ounce of kindness or compassion? Nobody can even fake a decent poker face? That's how you know this movie is made BY skinny people, FOR skinny people, who just want to feel good about themselves for doing the bare polite minimum by keeping their revulsion in check when interacting with an overweight person. LIke it's IMPOSSIBLE to imagine how an overweight person can feel bad about themselves unless they're CONSTANTLY being reminded by others that they're disgusting, grotesque abominations. Is the simple act of "not gawking" really that much of a virtue? It feels like the target audience for The Whale are people who get all weepy at those awful "Random Act of Kindness" TikToks where an able-bodied person throws money at some stranger in a wheelchair and then gives an insipidly inspiring speech to their phone about going out and changing the world or whatever, but of course the real message of the video "Aren't I great? Let's all feel good about how great I am." The same audience will then get mad at the person in the wheelchair when they say something like, "Being filmed in public without my consent for an act of charity I didn't ask for just so.some content creator can reap the benefits on their social media page is actually really patronizing and quite dehumanizing to me as a person. Please don't do stuff like that." BOO HISS shut up wheelchair person we're supposedly trying to help! You're harshing our buzz. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GRATITUDE? It's almost like the people who watch those videos don't REALLY view the disabled person as a human being, with thoughts and feelings they respect and whose opinions they actually want to hear and engage with.

NEWS FLASH: People who are overweight, gay, disabled, living in poverty, whatever it is that makes them "less fortunate" than anyone at the top of the bell curve of normalcy--they don't exist solely for privileged people to feel sanctimoniously sad about. If you perceive your ability to sympathize with Charlie as some kind of vindication that you are a good person...try harder.

Anyway. Is the movie ENTIRELY bad? No. Just a few tweaks here and there probably would have left me feeling a lot better about it, though it still wouldn't have been a masterpiece by any measure. The screenplay is of the "a bunch of archetypes get thrown together and talk a lot" variety. That's not inherently bad--I mean, The Breakfast Club does it pretty well. But that's because The Breakfast Club actually forces its characters to grow and change by virtue of their interactions with one another. Everybody in The Whale is introduced as a particular TYPE of character and not one of them ever breaks out of their standard mold over the course of the dismal running time. Nothing anybody does will actually surprise you. The script is just a wind-up toy: get everyone into position, turn their keys, and watch them totter to their predetermined destinations.

Maybe I would have liked it better if Aronofsky had leaned into his melodramatic strengths. Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, The Wrestler--heck, even the ambitious misfire Mother! Are composed of stylistic choices that convey a heightened reality. They are subjective, impressionistic movies that use the camerawork, music, and editing to immerse you in the main character's worldview. The Whale, apart from a laughable flight of fancy at the very end, just sits outside its main subject with faux-documentarian realism, observing but not interpreting. This approach is ill at ease with the more writerly flourishes, such as scenes of Brendan Fraser staring at the ceiling from his bed and reciting an important essay out loud...to himself. Instead of just, you know, thinking about it. Come on, movie, is this supposed to mirror actual human behavior? I'm not buying it, but only because Aronofsky isn't giving me the tools to do so. (Apologies for the mixed metaphor.) The lines in this moment might as well be, "I am sad. I am feeling sad. I am full of regret and sad, and I am talking to myself about it as I stare into space." Powerful? In SOME milieu, perhaps...but certainly not a realistic one.

So what works? Well, the performances. The Whale began life in the theater, an actor's medium, and the movie respects that. It gives the performers the room they need. I'm as happy as anyone for Fraser's return to high-profile projects, and he deserves a chance to show he can do "more" than chase after Looney Tunes and slice through CGI mummies. ("More" is in quotes because I don't believe one's level of talent can be quantified by what TYPE of projects they do, but rather by how well an actor conveys everything that a particular project needs them to convey, and Fraser was always stellar in what would be considered lightweight fare like George of the Jungle or Encino Man. But a project like The Whale will certainly garner him more respect.) Hong Chau has the less showy but equally challenging role as his friend, nurse, and enabler; you can see the indecision, hope, and resignation warring in her eyes as she regards Charlie, watching him implode and trying to make peace with the fact that she cannot save him, however much she wishes to, even as he alternately ignores, deceives, and betrays her. If there's any power at all in this ham-handed wake-up slap of a film, it's due to their relationship, which somehow manages--in spite of everything--to feel authentic.

Nothing to really say about this movie except that I remember having seen it. I was scrolling through Brett Leonard's filmography after having watched his 1995 magnum opus Virtuosity and the title jumped out at me. I remember my mom shouting, "Back to the Cretaceous!" pretty much any time the topic of dinosaurs came up for a good few years after seeing this. I guess the phrase really struck her fancy.

The reviews here are pretty negative. Probably they are correct in that the film isn't very good. I was only 11 when I saw it at the IMAX at Navy Pier, now sadly closed for good due to the pandemic. Pretty much all I remember are those sweeping shots of the desert that open the film--quite effective in large-format 3D. I knew that the movie wasn't as good as Jurassic Park, and the effects were quite cheesy, but due to the short running time and the 3D gimmick I basically viewed it as something of a combination of one of those videos you would watch in science class to fill time while your teacher recovered from a hangover and a theme park show, like the T2-3D: Battle Across Time at Universal Studios. Let's face it, you don't expect stellar acting or solid storytelling from either of those subgenres.

I guess the one thing this has over the Spielberg movie is that it knows which Mesozoic period the T-Rex lived in.

I've been watching a lot of these '90s steamy neo-noir thrillers lately (others include China Moon and Dream Lover) and for a good portion of its running time, it seems as though Shattered is set to be one of the better ones. This is due in no small part to Wolfgang Petersen's stylish direction. The repeated motif of glass shards spinning through the darkness in slow motion reminds one of some of the more expressionistic sequences in film noir from the '40s, where square-jawed heroes were getting beaten up or drugged and their descent into unconsciousness was shown in violent Freudian montages of spider-webs, doors to nowhere, and endless plummeting through shadow.

Things unravel pretty quickly near the end as solutions are provided. I can imagine some of these outlandish plot contrivances working okay in a novel from the '60s, where you'd be inclined to interpret them more abstractly, but in the cold light of '90s cinematography it all feels nonsensical and unsatisfying. Unless the whole movie is meant to be one long fever dream experienced by the patient in a coma following the opening car crash.

Tom Berenger is okay, if wooden, in the lead role. Bob Hoskins is fantastic as usual as a pet-store-owning private detective; he can always go pretty far over the top in his performances while still seeming real, and he's a lot of fun to watch as this colorful and sympathetic supporting character. Joanne Whalley is rather intriguing but under-utilized as the wide-eyed astrologer who has misgivings about Dan's seemingly attentive, loving wife; it's hard to pin down whether she's the only one willing to tell the truth or if she's simply more deluded than anyone.

After the scenes depicting that beach in Mexico, I'll never look at a bottle of Ocean Spray the same way.

Why is American "reality" TV SO scripted? Because Americans watch it, I guess. This might be the worst example of such fakery I've ever seen. The acting is so over-the-top it would make Pauly Shore cringe. Guys put on cowboy hats and start monologuing to the camera like Larry the Cable Guy knockoffs--one guy says something stupid, the other guy does a take to the camera, and the music kicks in with a "WAH WAH" to let you know that the first guy is stupid and it's hilarious. If you grabb a bunch of people at random off the street, dress them up like stereotypical rednecks, and say, "Okay, we're filming a show that's basically like The Office but it's Storage Wars: Texas and you're improvising all of it--GO!" this is the kind of crap you'd get. So bad and grating and terrible and dumb. Why couldn't we have actual INTERESTING people talk knowledgeably about their profession and the items they acquire instead of this condescending, pandering, artificial drivel?

Found this and the celebrity counterpart on Pluto TV, which has an entire channel dedicated to it, and I've been watching it constantly for about a month. It's an easy thing to throw on in the background while you're doing other things, or if you just want something pleasant to pass the time. The antiques experts are (for the most part) really fun and have great chemistry with one another--I've only seen one or two who are kind of off-putting or take the game too seriously.

I do wonder if a random customer walking into these antique stores off the street could negotiate the same kinds of deals these experts get; sometimes they'll talk the dealers down by over a hundred pounds and the dealer will even complain that they're losing money at that price--and then lower it even more. Maybe they're going soft because they know they're on camera and the auctions are for charity?

It's entertaining to hear the experts rattle off facts about items they pick up off the shelves, but sometimes they outsmart themselves by picking out items that only fellow experts can appreciate. I can't tell you how often an expert will rave about a boring-looking chair because it's from the Edwardian era--the age! The craftsmanship! The history!--and then it will fetch ten pounds at auction because, well, it's just a boring-looking chair. But that's all part of the fun, and the experts take both profits and losses in good humor. It's not the kind of ruthless win-at-any-cost competitive spirit we always see on American reality shows. It's sort of the antiquing equivalent of Great British Bake-Off.

And, thank God, it's NOT heavily scripted and fake, like all the shows we have over here, where every single interaction seems to be choreographed. I caught about three minutes of Storage Wars and was appalled at all the monologues to camera that were so obviously written beforehand by Blue Collar Comedy wannabes. Sickening! Antique Road Trip does it right--low key, lighthearted, organically amusing and informative.

The Velvet Vampire tries for an air of ethereal arthouse exploitation and lands somewhere between Jean Rollin and Ted V. Mikels (whose Girl in Gold Boots landed on MST3K and for good reason). I suppose Rollin, even at his best, isn't any LESS cheesy than The Velvet Vampire, but he employs a dream logic that makes his films feel like trashy poetry, whereas this film just has characters who can't behave rationally to save their lives.

The main problem is the couple targeted by Diane LeFanu, possible vampire. They're pretty sleazy and unappealing even from the beginning, so when they allow themselves to be seduced by the vampire you're not really sure if they're falling under her hypnotic spell or just emotionally immature hedonists who probably never should have gotten married in the first place. That might be intentional, though, since director Stephanie Rothman keeps it ambiguous as to whether Diane is actually a vampire (as in the creatures of legend) or merely demented. Nothing overtly supernatural happens in the film, with the possible exception of some shared dreams; atypical of vampire characters, Diane casts reflections, seems at least resistant if not fully immune to sunlight, and rarely kills her victims by biting them on the neck--some other, more mundane methods are usually employed, like knives and pitchforks.

The whole affair is given an arthouse sheen with slow pacing and a few surreal dream sequences in the desert, flavored with slow motion and raga rock in a kind of Woodstock/Jim Morrison mysticism. The character of Diane prefigures Anne Rice's bread-and-butter mix of enigmatic eroticism, hunger, tragedy, and loneliness...not that Bela Lugosi's Dracula didn't have passages where he adapted a forlorn, haunted visage. I wouldn't be surprised if the opening scene of the Buffy TV show, which lays out its thesis by having the seemingly innocent and virginal female turn out to be the true predator in what seems like an otherwise typical horror scene, was influenced by some midnight showing an adolescent Joss Whedon caught of The Velvet Vampire on TV. Not to mention the vampires here exist in the sunny California climate that was always giving Angel trouble on his spin-off, even if the Mojave Desert is a far cry from suburban Sunnydale or Los Angeles.

Perhaps the most striking scene occurs at the end, where Diane brazenly chases the wife through a crowded bus terminal and across busy city streets. Usually in fiction, even the most powerful vampires prefer to keep their identity secret, hiding behind a charming and urbane smile in the guise of your handsome neighbor or that eccentric but ultimately harmless kook who lives in that creepy mansion on the hill. They tend to perform their dirty work under cover of darkness. Diane, on the other hand, seems to have no fear of being exposed in a metropolitan area; you get the feeling that if she catches Susan, she's going to sink her teeth into that throat in front of dozens of witnesses and authority figures, draining her victim's life right there on the street. I thought that was a neat idea and would love to see it in more vampire media--after all, what do vampires really have to fear from the police if bullets don't kill them, bars can't hold them, and they lack a heartbeat to pump a lethal injection through their bodies?--although I guess the not-canonical-until-Nosferatu idea that sunlight represents a vampire's certain demise is too well-ingrained into the broader mythology at this point to give us many bloodsuckers walking around at high noon. Alas.

Overall, The Velvet Vampire is an intriguing curio if you're into '70s exploitation and pulpy drive-in cinema. I just wish it had as much depth of thought as its idiosyncratic and ponderous style seems to imply.

The only really good thing about Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark is seeing Stephen Gammell's iconic illustrations masterfully brought to life in the third dimension (although a few of the realizations involve a bit too much CG). The rest of the movie just feels tired and lacks intensity. How many stories do we need about a ghost indiscriminately inflicting evil on the living after having been wronged in both life and death? There's no particular reason to attach that particular framework to an adaptation of Alvin Schwartz's macabre trilogy--an early source of dreadful fascination for any millennial. Would have been more satisfying as an anthology rather than forming itself around the misadventures of a misfit group of teenagers. I have a feeling some studio executive kept giving the note, "Make it more like Stranger Things."

The impact of the books was largely due to the surreal, gory, folktale quality of the tales, which read like campfire stories that had been passed down through the generations, becoming progressively more bizarre and fanciful with every telling. The movie tries to rationalize the scares in some hollow attempt at emotional resonance, and sucks all the air out of them in the process.

If you say you didn't like a movie like Climax, most would respond, "Too much for you, huh? Couldn't handle it?" Certainly that's what I would think if my mom accidentally watched the film and told me of her reaction to it, but I don't think that's quite the case with me. I saw and loved both Irreversible and Enter the Void prior to watching this, so I thought I was generally on board with Noe's "thing", but Climax mostly left me cold.

I'm not sure how to characterize my problem with Climax. I'm normally a champion of movies that seek to provide an experience rather than focusing on story and character, and while I admire the technical craft and the no-holds-barred performances on display here, the film as a whole just lacked something. Maybe it was that I felt there was really nothing to grab hold of.

This is pretty much exactly the same as The Banana Splits Movie from a few years ago, except that Nicolas Cage is in it. Don't misunderstand me: having Nicolas Cage in your movie isn't nothing, and he brings his typical committed schtick to Willy's Wonderland, but whenever he's not onscreen, the movie lapses into absolute tedium. The teenage supporting cast is boring and dumb and the movie tries for that same "bad but self-aware" humor of the Sharknado franchise, which is just tiring. Even a movie that's less than 90 minutes long can feel dull when you're just falling into a pattern: clean, fight monster, play pinball, supporting character dies gruesomely, repeat. The cinematography aspires to dreampop artsiness with bright colors and prominent lens flare, but unfortunately it just looks kind of cheap; like somebody ran prosumer camcorder footage through a few Instagram filters. The music is kind of okay, I guess. Clearly the movie is just aimed at preteens who love Five Nights at Freddy's and want to feel more "adult" by watching a movie with swearing and sex (but no nudity) and gore.

If somebody makes a 40-minute edit that just has all the Nicolas Cage bits, it's worth a watch. Otherwise, skip it.

Somewhere along the line, somebody had a great idea: "What if slasher movie, but the killer is a possessed girl?" It's a trashy idea, I'll grant you, but a great one. Regan spends most of The Exorcist tied to the bed, but what if she had an whole sorority to massacre? The last twenty minutes of Killer Party show you what that might look like. Witness the demon-coed climb up walls, blow out windows, and crash through the ceiling to get to her prey. How neat.

Unfortunately, that leaves you with a little over an hour of film in which nothing particularly interesting happens. The screenwriters were so bereft of an idea for the first two acts that they relied on all the old standbys--prolonged practical jokes, sexual tension that goes nowhere, and not one but two fake-out openers--both of which have the potential to be more interesting than the story at hand. Has anyone ever done an entire movie of fake-out openers?

The movie is well-shot, though. It looks better than most slashers of the era. And the image of a killer in an old-timey diving suit is potent.

Piercing is one of those horror-adjacent movies that probably goes too far into dark psychological realms for a mainstream audience, but might be too slowly-paced for horror junkies. I guess the target audience is...well, people like me.

Mia Wasikowska is a really interesting actress, and Piercing falls in line with movies like Stoker or Only Lovers Left Alive in a "Of course she decided to star in this" sort of way. Whether that's good or bad is a matter of personal taste, I suppose. She and Christopher Abbott spend the movie proving how deeply messed up they are, and despite the heightened, sometimes absurd tone of the film, they both manage to avoid the cliches of playing "crazy" and come across as real, if damaged, people.

The cinematography is a highlight. Director Pesce is obviously influenced on some level by European pulp cinema, and it shows in the almost surreal exterior shots of endless apartment buildings in some retro-futurist skyscape. The time period is indeterminate--cell phones don't exist, they take taxis instead of Ubers, the clothing and hairstyles are timeless, but everyone talks like it's modern times; I don't think people were quite so frank about s&m thirty years ago. If you're the sort of person who needs every last element of a film to be accountable strictly to story, you might be frustrated by the stylistic choices. I just found it pleasant to look at.

My one criticism is that the use of music from classic giallo films felt a bit self-conscious. Maybe this wouldn't bother the viewer who isn't familiar with Argento films, but I felt the movie would have been better served by an original score that simply evokes those themes.

I haven't kept up with mumblegore wunderkind Ti West's output since The Innkeepers, which I thought worked really well as a sort of indie comedy about two aimless thirtysomethings but fell completely flat as a horror movie. X continues along that downward trajectory by completely lacking in suspense and atmosphere and also having a cast of bland stock characters.

The only potentially interesting person in the group is Jenna Ortega as Lorraine, who seems to be standing in judgment of the other characters until she decides to join in with them. But as with most slashers, you can't really get invested in anyone besides the final girl because they're all going to get killed anyway, so their hopes and dreams and personalities are completely incidental and you know it.

The sinister old characters are boring, too. From the moment they show up, you know what their whole deal is, and your perceptions never change, so it becomes pretty boring to watch them go through the motions. I kept waiting for some kind of reveal, some depth of character, but nope. They're just psychotic old hillbillies.

("But that's what the prequel is for," you argue. "To flesh out the character of Pearl and explain her backstory." BS. The only thing worse than a boring movie is a boring movie that only exists to get you to buy a ticket to another boring movie. I really need filmmakers and authors to stop making work that only serves as a commercial for their next work. Make things entertaining on their own.)

Why the period setting? There doesn't seem to be any reason, except as an excuse to steal some shots from Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Why the porno storyline? It doesn't seem like Ti West really has anything to say about the sex industry, or sex itself. It's not really just an excuse for T&A, either, since the sex scenes are shot to be either funny or creepy, but never sexy. I wouldn't mind the porno simply serving as a MacGuffin to get these characters to the isolated location where they'll be slaughtered, except that the movie spends SO MUCH time on it: characters shooting scenes, characters talking about shooting scenes, characters doing drugs to get up the nerve to go shoot the scenes. With all this attention paid, It seems like this porno is really building up to something. And then it doesn't. Why is this movie over 100 minutes?

The most damning thing I can say about X is that it casts Mia Goth, who I think is quite a special actress, in dual roles, and then gives her absolutely nothing of interest to do in either of them.

If you want to see Michael Gough hamming it up as a total sociopath, Horrors of the Black Museum is a much better choice than Konga. The killer binoculars are iconic--in fact, they're the main reason this movie is remembered by horror buffs. They've served their purpose five minutes in, however, and none of the subsequent murders are quite so memorable. The portable guillotine comes close.

This is a gruesome movie by 1950s standards; even the Hammer movies weren't this gory quite yet. The cinematography is nice, though, with the red drops of blood as vivid as Shirley Anne Field's lipstick.

Even at under 80 minutes (without the Hypno-vista segment), the film drags a bit. Consider the scene that opens with Michael Gough's character signing books: we sit through four separate interactions with his readers before the scene actually gets going. One or two at most would have sufficed. But in compensation, some of that filler material consists of June Cunningham dancing like a tart (I mean that's the movie's implication, I think) and stripping down to her negligee for some late '50s titillation, so overall I can't complain.

If you're here, you know the flavor of AIP's material from this era. This is that. But with Michael Gough.