Murder of a Cat - Gillian Greene - 2014

★★★- Not an easy film to follow. Love the idea, and the script was apparently pretty popular. Neo-noir with a cat murder at the center. Lotta potential but poorly executed. Extra points for cats though.

The Blue Dahlia - George Marshall - 1946

★★★★★- Very pretty ladies in this one with Veronica Lake and Doris Dowling (who plays the awful wife). Coming in hot, this movie. The first 20 minutes are like seven different movies. 

Starts with casual racism, however, I’m not really sure if the guy that gets called a “monkey” is not actually a swarthy white guy. Then we say that the guy who dropped the “slur” had a traumatic brain injury and has a plate in his skull. He also seems to have some PTSD and major memory issues. Turns out to be sort of a gentleman though.

He comes home to a bunch of drunks and his wife making out with some dude. Then they have this exchange after he slaps the guy shooting his wife. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I think you had better leave. My husband would like to be alone with me... He probably wants to beat me up. Perhaps you wouldn’t want me to apologize. “Apologize, darling? But you don’t have to; you’re a hero. A hero can get away with anything.”

I think this sort of thing happens a lot. Soldiers get married young before they go off to war. Come back to find their wives or husbands who they probably don’t know that well with someone else. I had a great aunt that Had some other guy besides her husband’s kid and he was basically just like, “well, get rid of the kid but I guess we will stay together and I’ll just treat you like shit for the rest of our lives.” That was before people got divorced and what have you as is this film. It looks like it’s going to be a wonderful life there, soldier. 

Before he and his wife get everybody out of the house pretty much his buddies call. They said they would whenever they found an apartment. I thought this would be like a month from then or something, but they’ve already got one, moved all their shit in, and everything like 10 minutes after tying one off at the bar/causing minor property damage.

The neighborhood has a house detective, what the fuck is that? Tell him to keep it down and pull the shades down if he’s going to push his wife around. The tone, I thought, was definitely, “don’t fucking touch her.”

This movie is just one thing after another. Find out that they had a child that is now dead. Dude starts grilling his wife about it and she went to one of her parties got wasted and then has a “car smash.” This appears to be fine legally back then. Sort of just frowned upon, killing your child while drunk driving.

Then the real action starts. Great film. Highly recommend. But be ready, this movie is a pretty demanding watch.

Watcher - Chloe Okuno - 2022

★★★★★- Solid flick. Love Shudder for showcasing new and diverse voices.

Gist is a woman moves with her BF to Bucharest, Romania. She thinks that a guy across the way from their apartment is watching her whilst someone is going around decapitating women. 

It’s a psychological, Hitchcock-esque horror film. Hits all those beats of a Rear Window or Suspicion. Simple, slow moving, classic type of flick. Rosemary’s Baby vibes at times, even. 

Stars horror darling Maika Monroe as the lead, Julia. Might recognize her from It Follows and The Guest. She is sort of it market correct Keira Knightley type for lowish-budget horror. 

Within the movie, Julia goes and sees the Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn movie Charade, which is a personal favorite. I am a sucker for a scene where someone goes to a movie theater to watch an old movie, especially one I love.

You really sympathize with her if you’ve ever spent any time somewhere where you don’t speak the language. Even though she does a lot of questionable shit for a woman in a horror movie. 

Makes me realize, again, that being a woman must be incredibly hard. Especially a woman in a foreign country who doesn’t speak the language. Plus her husband, this gaslighting mother fucker, being all dismissive even though there is a serial killer in the neighborhood and shit. I don’t know, with people getting murder in front of the apartment, maybe if I were a cop or a guy whose wife was like “this guy is fucking following me, giving me murder dreams,” maybe I would fucking listen. That just me though.

The guy she thinks is stalking her, by the by, looks exactly like Elon Musk except with more hair.  Also, less of a psychopath.

Intense final 20 minutes. Wasn’t sure about it. But I liked where it went. Great final shot.

Hocus Pocus 2 - Anne Fletcher - 2022

★★★- Watched this for the final night of Nightmare on Film Street 31 Days of Halloween challenge. This one set on Halloween. Behind a few with posting, obviously.

Exiled from Salem, which is actually good for them considering what all goes down in there. Assume the studio people were like, “meh, who knows what really happened with witches in Salem at this point.”

I was pretty much in love with SJP in 1993. She’s definitely still my favorite, besides the zombie dude from The Shape of Water, Doug Jones. Plus Tony Hale and Sam Richardson, who is kind of an asshole in this.

Sort of goes down a road I wasn’t expecting… but wasn’t surprising. It was kinda touching though. 

Actually liked it better than the original. Watched it last year and wasn’t a big fan. This one was ok. 

Only Murders in the Building

★★★★★- First season was near perfect. Doesn't get better than Martin Short and Steve Martin. The Three Amigos was one of my favorite films as a child and I love when they are together. They are treasures, these two. Great premise too. Been going to New York a lot lately. The guy I visit has a nice apartment, but nothing like this, which is sort of like the Dakota, if you are familiar with that famous location. It's where John Lennon lived and the building where he was shot. The exteriors are from the Belnord. I'd love to live in an apartment where the residents talk and solve mysteries and shit. 

★★★★- Didn’t like the second season nearly as much. Too much Selena Gomez and her artsy girlfriend. Thought it was a little mean spirited too. Really shits on this Poppy chick who is just some country girl who faked her death trying to make it in the Big Apple. Still liked it though. Will definitely watch season three. Martin Short and Steve Martin are amazing, of course. As are many of the other peripheral characters.

The Curse of Bridge Hollow - Jeff Wadlow - 2022

★★- Fun dumb kids movie. Nothing spectacular. Pretty forgettable. Sort of in that whole Goosebumps lane.

Gist is an evil old spirit named Stingy Jack brings Halloween decorations to life, which is a pretty cool premise. The protagonists are Brooklyn transplants, among them a dad (a teacher at the local high school) that hates Halloween, a mom who wants to start a vegan bakery but can't bake for shit, and their overachieving daughter who sort of hates her embarrassment of a father, forced save their small New England town.

People you'll recognize include Marlon Wayans as the dad, Kelly Rowland of Destiny's Child fame as the vegan baker, John Michael Higgins as a harmless Satan worshipping principal, Lauren Lapkus who is most recognizable from her time as a guard on Orange Is the New Black and is always unhinged, Rob Riggle, and Helen Slayton-Hughes who just died the other day.

Halloween Ends - David Gordon Green - 2022

★★★-  Just going to get right into it. Great opening. Great ending though it’s cray. Not exactly what you’d call SOP. Everything else was trash. A huge swing, sure, but no where near to connecting. Michael Myers is barely in the movie and when he does pop up, he is a bitch.

Not a good sendoff for the character of The Shape. At one point I thought it was maybe the worst movie I’d ever seen but it got better from there. However, it was fun AF and I thought it was a crazy way to wrap it up. 

Gist is this kid Corey, whom we've never seen before, is canceled after he accidentally kills a kid. He ends up working at his dad’s junkyard instead of going off to college. Corey, this fucking guy, is bullied by the band kids (no way these token stereotypes would ever hang out in real life, by the by). He eventually finds and has a wrastlin' match with Michael Myers (who has been on loose, living in the sewers for years. The Myers mystique then starts rubbing off on him and things get cray. Needless to say, dude really should have got out of Haddonfield when he could have. The film is mostly his becoming a monster. 

Laurie Strode, remember her?, is even crazier somehow in this movie. She was a shut in when Michael Myers was locked away in an insane asylum for 40 years and now that he’s out of the lamb she’s living her best life and shit in fucking Haddonfield. Fucking insane. 

Also insane is the black sheriff in the cowboy hat who in Kills was the “law and fucking order” candidate. At the end of this movie when Laurie straps Michael Myers onto the top of her car to put him in a car crusher at the junkyard some cop is like “yeah, we don’t do that with dead bodies in an active murder investigation,“ and the sheriff is like, “tonight we do.“ Then Myers explodes in a car shipper. Spoiler. Wait, so that isn't standard operating procedure.

An extremely messy film. I feel like it shouldn’t have worked, but did to some extent. The ending, as insane as it was, was pretty satisfying. Had a great time (the picture of me and my buddy Levi was from opening night in New York at an Alamo Drafthouse, a phenomenal way to watch a movie. 

Overall, this is probably my fourth favorite Halloween movie. Maybe lower depending on the day. The original is a work of art. Season of the Witch is batshit fun. H2O, Halloween II, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, the Zombie films, and this movie are all on this next tier. Maybe a little flawed, but solid or at least a lot of fun and interesting. The rest range from really bad to fucking disastrous with Resurrection at the very, very bottom. 

Doctor Sleep - Mike Flanagan - 2019

★★★★★ - God, I love this movie. Liked the book a lot. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from the movie. What an experience though. Jesus. Making this a sequel to both the book and the movie is just genius. Takes the best from The shining both in movie and book form. Flanagan makes peace with both groups, fans of the novel and fans of the movie, and completely knocks it out of the park. Grand fucking slam.

There were of course some things I liked in the book better, but overall, man, this movie. The last half hour when they are in the Overlook is just incredible. More on that later. I think it is as good as The Shining and Carrie. At worst, the very best Stephen King adaptation sense the early 80s. 

I love Wendy. Reminds me so much of my own mom especially in this movie. When I was growing up my mother was the spitting image of Shelley Duvall, much to her chagrin, but I always loved Shelley Duvall because of that. As an INFP, I relate to a lot of King’s protagonists. See a lot of myself in Danny Torrance for sure. At least when life was hard. 

The True Knot is insanely terrifying. Rose The Hat (Rebecca Ferguson) is an incredible villain. Type of chick I’ve always done well with and found super attractive. A hippie/gypsy type of gal. She’s trouble though. An evil Rachel (my female companion). A top King big bad. The actress that plays her gives a performance that is not to be forgotten. Hard to outshine Ewan McGregor. This whole cast is crazy good but she is on another level.

Good old fashion high octane Stephen King horror. The shit with the little kid Brad is fucked. It is hard to watch that as anything on Dahmer. I feel most kids are terrible actors but that one was really moving. And as he is dying and Danny’s chalkboard cracks and he says “REDRUM” in the mirror. Incredible filmmaking. The main girl is GREAT too. 

Random note: When I go, I want a sweet, beautiful cat to comfort me and lead me to the other side. 

Minimizing Crow Daddy was a good call. Just seeing his name made me grown in the book. 

The scene where she tries to ambush Abra is incredible. Especially when Rose gets trapped and then is thrown back into her body.

The last half hour of the movie is unreal. It’s what separates the book from the movie and what makes the movie just an incredible watch. Going back to the overlook is more than I could’ve ever hoped for from a movie pretty much. All builds to this reunion. Once they hit that gas station that Dick Halloran was at it is fucking on. You see it, recognize it, then the music kicks on, and we get the drone footage except at night. Incredible. It does not disappoint. Some hottest take territory stuff, but I might like it more than The Shining.

V/H/S 99 - Flying Lotus, Maggie Levin, Tyler MacIntyre, Johannes Roberts, Joseph Winter, Vanessa Winter - 2022

★★ - Little behind here posting my watches. Counted this for the new release for the Nightmare on Film Street Halloween challenge. 

Got to see the new anthology flick V/H/S 99 a little early at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival last week. Some of the segments were better than others, but the last one, “To Hell and Back” was great. Overall, not great. 

Shudder put the film fest on and I got to see some of those like-minded horror teevee machine people milling about. Even saw Shudder curator Sam Zimmerman, who I know is not someone most people are going to geek out over but he impresses me.

Rosemary’s Baby - Roman Polanski - 1968

★★★★ - From hell night for the Nightmare on Film Street challenge. 

My first ever watch of this believe it or not. My dad was just telling me that he saw it at the drive-in with his parents when he was like eight years old or some thing and it scared the shit out of him. Watched it on the plane on the way to New York. Liked it enough that I went and checked out the building it was filmed that.

Never gets better than early on in the weird orgy scene where Mia Farrow’s husband rapes her in the best case scenario. Dreamlike and fucking crazy, getting crazier. Then she realizes it isn’t a dream. “Oh my god! This is real!” Really fucked and terrifying. 

Ultimate mother terror as excitement about being pregnant gives way to terror. 

Lot of solid talent in this movie. Mia Farrow is cute AF, by the by. Maude from Harold and Maude. Husband’s an asshole. Gives Mia Farrow shit about her hair, for example. She has had a pretty rough in her day. 

Not an all-time favorite, but I really appreciated it for its influences down the line. Hereditary, for example. A Horror 101 movie.