Attachment - Gabriel Bier Gislason - 2022

★★★★-Oh, the dangers of being a deep sleeper. This movie is scary as shit. 

Shudder original that came highly recommended. Part of the horror genre's New Queer Cinema that we're getting now. 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. 51% Audience Score. Not sure what the disconnect was there. I thought it was great. 

Drawing inspiration from Jewish folklore, this horror flick follows a woman in cohabitation with her girlfriend and girlfriend's mother in a Hasidic community. The idiosyncratic/domineering mother, she finds, is obsessed with supernatural perils to the point that shit gets scary 

I used to have a hard and fast rule that if I went over to a friend or girlfriend's house and the meeting with the parents or roommates was super weird, then I immediately checked out. Mostly because of movies. Blue Velvet comes to mind. This is of that persuasion and a good reason to keep it in place. By the time you realize something is wrong, it's way too late. 

Stars Sofie Gråbøl as the mother Chana, Josephine Park as the outsider girlfriend Maja, Ellie Kendrick as daughter Leah, and David Dencik as uncle Lev. Kendrick is the only one I've seen. She played Meera Reed on Game of Thrones. She was the girl who took care of Bran and hung out with Hodor. Directed by one Gabriel Bier Gislason. This is his first feature film, which is pretty remarkable.

Crazy good flick.Goes from a sweet love story that ruminates on the nature fears of relationships and family, then become completely terrifying in a different way. I highly recommend. 

M3gan - Gerard Johnstone - 2023

★★★★★-AB says "check it out." Second from auteur Gerard Johnstone that I loved. The first, Housebound, is one of my favorite horror movies from the 2010s. It is crazy good and will keep you guessing. Check out my take on that here.

So M3gan. Total masterclass in bad ethics. Shitty parents probably watch the first 30 minutes of this movie and think “open up the fucking pod bay doors, mother fucker!” Then M3gan kills a dog and it is all down hill. 

The movie is basically your standard cautionary tale involving artificial intelligence. In a world that learned nothing from The Terminator nor The Matrix nor like 10 other movies I can think of off the top of my head (2001, Age of Ultron, the whole Alien franchise, Blade Runner, Dark Star, Deadly Friend, Ex Machina, RoboCop, Singularity, Wall-E, WarGames, Westworld [that's like 15 without looking up shit]), AI is the new big thing in tech. For years we've heard that AI is going to probably make all of us irrelevant and will definitely end the world. And here we are, expecting to see M3gans rolling off the assembly line any day now and murder us folk with annoying doggos. 

Anyway, the creator of this literal monstrosity, is robotics engineer Gemma, played by Allison Williams, who embarks on the risky endeavor of having the robot she just created raise the child that is thrust upon her by her very selfish sister who went and died. Real frumpy dump, this sister, dying and all. The orphan niece child, Cady, is played by a kid named Violet McGraw. She does a fine job of playing a terrible child. 

Something fun is that “resting bitch faced” M3gan is something of a gay icon. From the New York Times: 

“Gay men are protective of women like M3gan, the gorgeous and loyal but messy and insolent ones. (In the horror genre, where awful is wonderful, looking good and being depraved is a métier.) We consider our M3gans to be family, and we will fight you if you even look at them cross-eyed.

“To find M3gan’s gay roots, flip the calendar back to October, when Universal dropped the first trailer. A gay perfect storm helped it go viral: It was National Coming Out Day and Halloween month. Gay stan Megan Thee Stallion tweeted it. And — for me this was the clincher — the trailer featured a snippet of the sinister, awkwardly leggy dance M3gan does that’s set to a remix of Taylor Swift’s “It’s Nice to Have a Friend,” a song that isn’t even in the movie...

“The trailer’s gayness might not be readily apparent. My mom wouldn’t notice it. But to me it’s there, and nowhere more so than when M3gan enters a room and pointedly removes her sunglasses, as if she’s Miranda Priestly surveying her panicked minions. Here’s the thing: M3gan doesn’t need sunglasses. She’s a doll. She wears them for drama.”

"I will murder you for this indignity"

Before you make M3gan a part of your chosen family though, remember all the murder, which shouldn't be too hard since you don't often see uncanny valley push a shithead child in front of a pickup too often these days. I mean, as soon as you put that doll with the other toys, it will murder the shit out of someone just to cope. 

Here's something to freak you out, just because. AI is here already, by the by. It is unfathomably smarter than people think. It can do remarkable things like not only recognize faces, but also pick up subtle shit that gives away things about your mood and behavior. Like, for example, if you are cheating at cards in a casino, this shit is gonna know. It can pick up things like fucking eye movement and betting patterns and know what you're up to before you even do it. That's what's fucking up. 

Honestly, it would know how people around her talk, something that it fucks up on in the movie. AI don't make mistakes like that. With enough data, it'll write in your voice. It has access to pretty much everything on the internet, doesn't need to learn, just access information and it runs with it. AI is way more conceptually terrifying than is fucking believable. This movie is indeed terrifying, and AI probably isn't going to kill you as it's not evil, but the people behind it might be. Looking at you Google, Facebook, Amazon, so forth. 

Last thing, the flick has pretty good movie references sprinkled throughout. A lot of Sam Raimi style slapstick. There is a silliness to it that I knew was inspired by the The Evil Dead himself. Googled that shit and director Johnstone sites Raimi as an inspiration, of fucking course. A second robot named “Bruce,” which doesn't seem like a co-een-kee-dink, looks like the big bad ro-bit from RoboCop 2. Plus, M3gan Terminators around the work shed at the end of the movie. This movie is fucking awesome. 

They/Them - John Logan - 2022

★- Another Nightmare on Film Street challenge movie I did in October. This one for twist endings.  

Yeesh. Went to school with several people that went through this conversion camp shit. Extremely fucked. On top of portraying all that, this flick packs in a shitty movie with a completely inexplicable tone. 

Lot of shit that don't make sense. Why would they split up constantly like they do? Why would the camp have straightbait? Why wouldn't that bait guy get conversion therapy?  

In any case, this is how you make a slasher. Torturing kids. Makes sense.  

Super bad movie. Also, it is very bad. Should have payed more attention to the audience score which is a paltry 22%. 

Makes the cardinal sin of killing the dog and features a bunch of bullshit. Fuck this movie. One of the worst I've ever seen. Also, Anna Chlumsky from My Girl shows up after god knows how long for this POS? Whatevs.

Knife + Heart - Yann Gonzalez - 2018

★★★★★ - Wow. Brilliant movie. A contemporary queer giallo-inspired movie. Follows this group making gay pornography in 1979 Paris. They are lead by this director chick, played by one Vanessa Paradis, who is the star of the movie. This masked killer shows up and starts killing them one by one. 

I'm not exactly the target audience, but I have seen more giallo than anyone I've ever met. This is contemporary, subversive giallo.

Several great scenes. One is where all the actors have a wrap party picnic when it starts storming. One person gets caught out in the woods. As she (a trans actor) yells for her mates, the camera pans in fast circles giving the viewer a sense of being lost. A few times around we see the killer in the distance. Every time it goes around after that, the killer gets closer and closer, before you know. 

I thought it was a great, beautiful, captivating flick with a killer score by M83. However… let’s say this is not a family film. Not one you’re gonna wanna watch for your kids. You’ll know pretty quick what you’re in for when you fire it up.

My favorite thing about the movie is that the porn director gets questioned by the police about an actor in her stable who is murdered by getting repeatedly stabbed in his rectum. She immediately turns the experience into gay porn. I am crazy about films within films. This is an interesting, unique take on that. There is also a sacrilege porn, which was indeed something. 

The premiere for this movie based on the killings of the actors looked fun despite everything. JK, it was depressing and crazy as shit. Then after it is over you hear all the dudes in there buckling their pants. A lovely touch. Then there is more murder. 

This might sound sort of funny, but it ends up being a pretty moving scene where the fluffer cries and talks about how fucked up it is that they are filming a scene based on this dude's extremely violent and disturbing death. But then, with tears in his eyes, he's called in for duty. A professional, this guy. Turns out he's not even getting paid. Yeesh.

I like that about the flick, that they make the porn star lifestyle way less glamorous than say Boogie Nights. I'm not against it or anything, but it seems like a pretty sad grind, and this is definitely of that mentality, with all the stars on heroin or traumatized or what have you. 

One of my favorite things about the movie is that when the Killer is revealed and dealt with, they give him a really sweet and touching sendoff by showing a story and having this pretty profound voice over that tells a really powerful story. We see he is a victim too. The backstory of a slasher like Jason Voorhees for example it’s probably super sad and fucked up. Makes you think about me that. Then again, the deaths are so fucked up that maybe that lessens the impact a bit.