Horror remakes: Night of the Living Dead

And I conclude on Halloween -- as a posting day, not a viewing day -- with my final horror remake of October 2025. 

Last night I finished with Tom Savini's 1990 remake of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, and there was a point where I was considering making this a double feature of NOTLD remakes. It was hard to resist Jeff Broadstreet's 2006 version, only 80 minutes long and starring Sid Haig. But it's been a busy week at work and of finalizing my son's Halloween costume -- he's going as the Reverse Flash -- so even an additional 80 minutes was too much.

I suppose there's some scenario where I watch a horror remake tonight, but I seriously doubt it. I'll most likely be watching something with my wife, and I need to get busy figuring out what that is. 

And I have to say, it was a good way to go out. I pretty much loved this movie.

First though, Savini, who has been in my viewing life multiple times this month.

This would certainly be a name familiar to people who read Fangoria and watched a lot of horror movies when they were growing up. I didn't watch a lot of horror movies back then, but I've since made up for it. The name was familiar to me. Beyond that I was a bit in the dark.

And then I rewatched From Dusk Till Dawn, where Savini plays the hilariously named Sex Machine. They talked about him on the podcast that prompted the rewatch, The Next Picture Show, and I have since looked him up and realized he was an effects artist who worked for Romero on five of his movies, including two in the Dead series. Since he's also an actor and stuntman, it seems pretty clear how he would become an iconic personality to a certain subset of filmgoers and filmmakers tuned in to a certain frequency. 

Me? I'm just getting all my exposure to him in one month.

And of course he would have had Romero's blessing to make a remake of Night of the Living Dead, whether this was something he needed or not. (I'm not currently checking Romero's right to decide who remakes that movie, but presumably he does have some right.) In fact, even more than having Romero's blessing, Romero wrote him the screenplay for this remake, a role he split with John A. Russo. Romero is also credited for the screenplay of Broadstreet's film, so whether he was happy just to keep churning out remake scripts, or was credited more as the author of the original work that was being adapted, is not totally clear to me.

But that does bring me to another point: This is a proper remake! Like, the plot is almost identical to the original! Its primary deviation is how the movie ends. This is a refreshing way to end my month of remakes, many of which were more like reboots or reheats of the original, with differing plots. Nice to finish with a pure example of the theme I set out to explore this month.  

I wasn't sure what I was going to think of this film in its opening minutes. There's a lot of ADR in that opening scene. As we follow the car driven by Barbara (Patricia Tallman) and her brother Johnny (Bill Moseley) up to the cemetery where they will be visiting the grave of their mother, we hear an entire conversation between the two before we even see them on screen, with the car filmed from on high. This looks fairly cheap, or like they forgot to shoot this dialogue at the time they had the actors available on set, so they had to record it after the fact and dub it over. It was not a promising beginning, and put me in the mind of poorly made B movies like Manos: The Hands of Fate. 

Never is there another moment that feels cheap in this way. Oh this is not a film with a huge budget, that's not what I'm trying to say. However, it is a well-made film that uses its budgetary constraints to forge creative solutions, which it does throughout.

You'd think you'd judge the success of a zombie film on its zombie effects (good, but maybe not standouts like I was expecting from a person with Savini's reputation) or on the kills involving the zombies (also fine but not memorable). What made the movie really click in for me was the choices made by Patricia Tallman as Barbara.

It's not clear to me that Tallman is what you would call a great actress. Of her 52 credits on IMDB, the most recent of which was in 2023, many are actually uncredited appearances in bigger films, like two Austin Powers movies and two Roland Emmerich movies. She's very pretty -- in fact, she reminded me of someone I went to high school with -- but she obviously did not make a lasting name for herself in the industry, despite some more high-profile work. (She appeared in 47 episodes of Babylon 5, for example.)

But it's not often that I've so believed a person's reaction to a sudden zombie apocalypse.

In most movies where characters suddenly have to fight off zombies, they adapt to the scenario pretty quickly. There's some initial shock and disbelief, but 15 minutes later they're like "Okay, there are zombie. What's our plan?" 

Not Tallman as Barbara. She gets fucking rattled by this. When Tony Todd's Ben -- great choice, by the way, for the role originally played by Duane Jones -- has to introduce himself to her and start to get her focused on a solution to their problem, she is initially speechless. She can't even produce words for about the first five minutes of screen time after their first respite from attacking zombies. This is not to say she's weak or incapable in this situation -- she proves herself exceptionally capable, almost too capable, as the movie goes on. It's that her brain simply can't comprehend this change in circumstances, which, as far as she can tell, may apply to the entire planet, but at the very least the patch immediately surrounding her. She shakes and stares and just looks shell-shocked as hell. It's a great performance. Even after she's started using various weapons to dispatch various zombies, eventually with great skill, she still occasionally succumbs to the disbelief of this situation. After putting one particular woman out of her misery, she lets out the words "Oh God!" in this sort of rapid, involuntary shriek. 

Details like this matter, and Savini gets it. It's been too long since I've seen the original to remember how well Judith O'Dea comports herself in this role, but if it were as good as Tallman does it, I think I'd remember it. Wikipedia does say that Barbara spends much of that movie in a catatonic state, which is not what this version of the character does, and it's probably right to give her a little more agency than she had in a film made 22 years earlier. So O'Dea may have done well with that, but maybe I don't remember it because there was a part of me that also loathed her for never becoming any more useful after the initial shock wore off. 

I enjoyed the dynamics between the other characters who eventually arrive in the house, which seem to mirror those from the original, now that I'm fully reminding myself of those details through the Wikipedia plot synopsis. Many of those details are the same, though there's a pretty big difference in how this movie ends, which I won't spoil if anyone reading this wants to treat themselves -- and it is a treat -- to this Night of the Living Dead on Halloween. There's a very good copy available for free on YouTube.

Anyway I will say, without going into specifics, that there's something about the ending of this movie that reminds me of the ending of 28 Years Later, though I'll be vague about what that is. I wouldn't be surprised if Boyle was paying homage to Savini, in his way. 

Does Savini get to be the auteur here, and not Romero? If a different choice is made in this movie than in the original, my inclination is to attribute that change to the person who was not involved with the original. Though if Romero wrote the script for both, perhaps he intentionally made the ending different, just to explore another way this could have gone. 

I do think it's a bit sad that I've written this whole post about a movie I really liked and not really said much about the gore and makeup effects. They are pretty tame by today's standards, though I never thought they were less than effective. And though I'm not usually "scared" by a zombie movie, I did find some of these walking dead to be eerie and unsettling in ways that approached fear, and the way Savini prepped them for our viewing pleasure certainly had something to do with that.

Happy Halloween to you and yours. 

Tirsesome tropes: Talking through the dial tone

Please note: The term "trope" is used very loosely in this periodic series. 

So I saw Roofman on Wednesday night, and all I have to say is "Why do movie characters always talk through the dial tone?"

(Actually I might have a second Roofman post, but tomorrow's Halloween so it will have to wait until the weekend.)

So what I mean is, this old trope, which appeared again in Roofman:

A character gets hung up on. We know this because we, the audience, can hear the dial tone on the other end. 

But apparently this character can't hear it, because the character keeps saying "Hello? [Name]? HELLO??"

So there are two choices here of what the character thinks is going to happen:

1) The dial tone exists simultaneously with a connected phone line. If the character keeps asking for someone on the other end to respond, just desperately enough, maybe a voice will emerge from behind the dial tone to continue the conversation.

2) The line has actually been disconnected, but by repeating the other conversant's name urgently, the line will magically reconnect.

I guess it's too dramatically flat to have a character just immediately give up when he/she hears the dial tone. The realistic sequence of events would be just to look a little bit embarrassed or frustrated and hang up the phone. 

But here are a few realistic alternatives to that:

1) Look at the reliever in disbelief. It won't rejuvenate the call, but it will effectively express the character's disbelief that it has come to this, being hung up on by the person on the other end, this person who was once so close to them.

2) Scream "Fuck!" and hang up the phone violently.

3) Scream "Fuck!" and smash the receiver against the phone chassis repeatedly until that cap that screws on the mouthpiece comes flying off.

4) Hang up quickly but efficiently in order to dig into your pockets for more coins in order to call them back.

Though I suppose, sometimes in moments of high stress, we can resort to the dumbest option possible: continuing to speak into a dead phone in the vain hope that you've mistaken the dial tone for a train passing by the other person's house, or a laser ray beaming them into an alien spaceship.  

My top ten five desert island movies from the same five years

That is a very complicated subject for this post. I will need to explain. 

Filmspotting recently (a couple months ago) tasked themselves with finding the answer to a specific question, the kind that my Flickchart puts me in a perfect position to answer:

"If you could take only five films with you to a desert island, and those five films had to come from the same five-year period, which five would they be?"

Now, my Flickchart would give me a very definitive answer to this question, if my ranking on Flickchart were an exact correlation to how much I want to rewatch a movie. If we assume that my #1 movie is the movie I want to rewatch the most, and each after that is a movie I want to watch progressively a little less each time, it's easy to come up with this answer. I just go down the list and cluster movies together until I get five from the same five-year period.

But we all know that this logic does not work perfectly. With this sort of thought experiment -- which the Filmspotting guys talk about in terms of an incinerator, as in, all films not chosen get sent to the incinerator -- it's never as simple as that. 

For one thing, you have moods. You want to feed all your different moods with as much of a diversity of options as possible. I mean, let's face it -- you will get sick of all of these movies long before you die on this desert island, but the idea is to forestall that for as long as possible, and variety helps accomplish that.

And then there are some films that you might like "better" than other films, but those other films are "better quality" films, so you have them ranked higher. We could get off track on a "best vs. favorite" argument here if we wanted to, but it's clear that in this particular thought experiment, "favorite" should win out. But is that how I've been ranking my Flickchart, with any consistency?

So instead of just choosing the first clustering of five that came up, I decided to give myself ten different options of five-year spans. 

Now, some of these clusterings actually cover multiple five-year spans. How is that possible? Well, I'll explain, and my first clustering is a perfect example of it. All five films in that first cluster come from three consecutive years, so that means they are the best five films of three different five-year spans: the one that ends with the last film, the one that starts with the first film, and then of course the one in the middle, where the first film is not the first year and the last film is not the last year. 

And as I was going through, I also came across films that couldn't strengthen any group because all the eligible year bracketings were already filled up with earlier films. 

So my top ten groups of films actually cover 15 different five-year spans, those that begin with 1981, and then begin with every year from 1983 to 1996. Sorry 1982 to 1986, your range got left out in the cold. 

These were expected results. In 1981 I turned eight and in 1996 I turned 23, and that last range would have covered films until the year I turned 27. All parts of my formative years becoming a cinephile. There may be plenty of cinephiles who are in love with periods of cinema long before their birth, but my cinephilia has always had a healthy dose of nostalgia, and I don't apologize for that. 

But how am I going to choose between these? I'll give you each of the options and then tell you what I settled on, with comments on each. I'll list them in order of how quickly they satisfied the five-film requirement on my chart, but I will list the films chronologically within each grouping. 

1. 1992 to 1996 or 1993 to 1997 or 1994 to 1998 - Pulp Fiction (1994) (#3), Toy Story (1995) (#7), Fargo (1996) (#8), The Cable Guy (1996) (#16), Bound (1996) (#19)

Comment: So I can get five movies from three different five-year spans, all within my top 19 films on Flickchart. Obviously I could be happy with this group, but it's a little light on comedy -- though I suppose both Pulp Fiction and Fargo have their lighter moments. Plus the fact that it takes care of three different time spans could potentially give this an edge as a tiebreaker. 

1. 1995 to 1999 - Toy Story (1995) (#7), Fargo (1996) (#8), The Cable Guy (1996) (#16), Bound (1996) (#19), The Iron Giant (1999) (#10)

Comment: You'll see I've listed this as #1 again because Bound at #19 also completes this five-year span, which is just shifted one up from the previous group. So we lose Pulp Fiction but we gain The Iron Giant. Not sure if I need two animated movies though.

3. 1985 to 1989 - Back to the Future (1985) (#2), Raising Arizona (1987) (#1), The Princess Bride (1987) (#11), Say Anything (1989) (#18), Do the Right Thing (1989) (#20)

Comment: This group is hard to resist because it contains my top two movies of all time. We'll see how much a factor that ends up being in the final analysis.  

3. 1986 to 1990 or 1987 to 1991 - Raising Arizona (1987) (#1), The Princess Bride (1987) (#11), Say Anything (1989) (#18) , Do the Right Thing (1989) (#20), Goodfellas (1990) (#13)

Comment: This is a similar thing as my first two, where we're shifting forward one year. In this case the movie we're losing is my #2, Back to the Future, which is not great. But gaining Goodfellas adds a dose of real cinephile credibility and otherwise gives additional variety to the portfolio. 

5. 1996 to 2000 - Fargo (1996) (#8), The Cable Guy (1996) (#16), Bound (1996) (#19), Run Lola Run (1998) (#21), The Iron Giant (1999) (#10)

Comment: Same as 1995 to 1999 except we gain Run Lola Run in the middle of the range and lose Toy Story. I like the addition of the first foreign language film and don't mind losing one of the two animated movies from that group. 

6. 1983 to 1987 or 1984 to 1988 - WarGames (1983) (#22), This Is Spinal Tap (1984) (#9), Back to the Future (1985) (#2), Raising Arizona (1987) (#1), The Princess Bride (1987) (#11)

Comment: New additions are WarGames and This Is Spinal Tap, the latter being my #9 but not having fit into one of these ranges yet. Strong on comedy, and I think the addition of WarGames could quicken my pulse, but maybe I don't need to contemplate the end of the world too much when I'm already on a desert island and have lost 99.99999% of the films ever made. 

7. 1988 to 1992 or 1989 to 1993 - Do the Right Thing (1989) (#20), When Harry Met Sally (1989) (#26), Say Anything (1989) (#18), Goodfellas (1990) (#11), Unforgiven (1992) (#25)

Comment: Welcome to the show, When Harry Met Sally and Unforgiven. A much-needed influx of comedy for this range, offset by Unforgiven being particularly humorless. I might need more comfort and smiles than this group can give me. 

8. 1981 to 1985 - Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) (#4), Time Bandits (1981) (#27), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) (#23), This is Spinal Tap (1984) (#10), Back to the Future (1985) (#2)

Comment: Our earliest range of five years gets in a whole host of new titles, plus This Is Spinal Tap and Back to the Future. I love the diversity some of the new titles bring, but this group may be a little laugh deficient as well.

9. 1990 to 1994 - Goodfellas (1990) (#13), Defending Your Life (1991) (#30), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) (#31), Unforgiven (1992) (#25), Pulp Fiction (1994) (#3)

Comment: A few new titles here doing good work, but again this group won't be getting a lot of guffaws from me, and I'm going to need them. (I think we have to assume a neutral emotional state, even though I mentioned earlier the idea of despairing about the end of the world.)

9. 1991 to 1995 - Defending Your Life (1991) (#30), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) (#31), Unforgiven (1992) (#25), Pulp Fiction (1994) (#3) Toy Story (1995) (#7)

Comment: And here's the same as the previous group, only it gains Toy Story and loses Goodfellas.

I might be able to keep going down and eventually come across a perfectly diverse group of five. And I'd be interested to see what my first date range from the 21st century would look like. But I can't sit here and do this all day.

So ... what to choose here? And how to choose it?

I'm tempted to tell you why I'm ruling each one out, but instead I'll just tell you what I decided to rule in and why:

If I had been a guest host on this episode of Filmspotting, I would have chosen 1983 to 1987 or 1984 to 1988.

Although I've said throughout this exercise that humor would be important to me, I've decided that lightness of tone might be even more important, and this span has five movies with light tones: Back to the Future, Raising Arizona, This Is Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride. (Yep, I am down with the comedic sensibilities of 1980s Rob Reiner.) All of those movies will make me laugh, but more importantly, they'll also make me feel good. And then WarGames can jangle my nerves a bit whenever I need a little bit of that.

Plus the fact that this time bracket also includes my #1 and my #2, which is hard to compete with. 

The cherry on top was when I added up their Flickchart rankings -- remember we're going golf scores here, where the lower the score, the better -- and you get a 45 for these two year ranges. The next closest is 52, which is the next group up, 1985 to 1989.

These two groups have three movies in common: Back to the Future, Raising Arizona and The Princess Bride. The group I've gone with gives me WarGames and This Is Spinal Tap on one side, while the group I didn't choose gives me Say Anything and Do the Right Thing on the other. I'm essentially choosing the first two over the second two.

When Adam on Filmspotting was talking about how he chose his date range -- a much harder task when you don't have a Flickchart -- he started out by reviewing their previous episode in which they presented their ten choices for the Sight and Sound list, to see if there was chronological consolidation among his choices. A good way to start the process, and it ended up being the way his co-host, Josh, settled on a range. 

Adam said he ruled out one particular range because the movie he loved so much that might have helped anchor him to that range -- Grave of the Fireflies -- is not a movie he wants to watch over and over on repeat. It's too glum. If you've seen it, you know what he's talking about. 

And that's my problem with Do the Right Thing, I guess. Even though the range I've chosen gives me no real credibility with cinephiles as they are classically defined -- where the selection of Lee's movie would have -- I have to be honest with myself that I don't want to watch on repeat a movie where people spew hatred for an entire movie until it boils over into chaos and death. This probably explains why I've only seen Do the Right Thing once in the past 25 years, whereas all the movies in the group I've chosen have gotten multiple viewings during that period, some as many as four or five. 

Arbitrary? Perhaps. Defensible? Absolutely.

For the record, Adam chose 1979 to 1983, and he selected one film from each year: All That Jazz (1979), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The World According to Garp (1982) and The Right Stuff (1983). I can get behind this list because three of these films are also in my top 150 and I really like the other two. When I get around to ranking The Right Stuff, which I only just watched in August, it'll do very well on my chart. Adam clearly went for the comfort of nostalgia picks, though he won't be laughing a lot. (The most humor might be in The Right Stuff, actually, which I characterized as a comedy when I wrote about it on The Audient.)

Josh? He went arthouse, or rather, cinephile, as the period he chose reached its completion two decades before he was born. His range of 1951 to 1955 allowed him Ikiru (1952), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Rear Window (1954), Ordet (1954) and Pather Panchali (1955). Rear Window and Ordet are both top 150 movies for me, but I found Gentlemen significantly inferior to the similar Some Like It Hot and I couldn't crack Pather Pachali. I haven't even seen Ikiru, but I've seen its remake, Living. I think he will be starved for films with more entertainment value after a couple watch throughs of these films. 

Anyway, this was a fun exercise, and I hope it was at least sort of fun for you to read. 

Horror remakes: The Toxic Avenger

It was only 20 months ago that I saw Lloyd Kaufman's The Toxic Avenger (1984) for the first time. I'd been on a little bit of a Troma jaunt, in which I also saw Frankenhooker and Tromeo & Juliet. I'm going to leave that sentence as is, even though I just checked and Troma actually had nothing to do with Frankenhooker. In any case, I had only recently seen both those films and was feeling very receptive to the sort of thing Troma had to offer.

It's a bit of a shame, then, that Kaufman's film spoke to me little enough that I can't even really tell if Macon Blair's new Toxic Avenger -- which actually first saw the light of day in 2023, before finally getting a proper release in August -- is a remake of that film or not.

Certainly, it doesn't exist in a world in which the Toxic Avenger, and by that I mean the person not the movie, exists and is part of the characters' lore, which distinguishes it from other not-quite-remakes I've seen this month like I Know What You Did Last Summer and Friday the 13th. However, it's not quite a remake in the sense that the title character is an adult looking after his stepson after the stepson's mother died, whereas I'm pretty sure the original Toxic Avenger was a high school kid. 

Actually, I just looked it up, and Mitch Cohen, who played that character, was 32 at the time the film was released -- he just looked like a gawky teenager. That's pretty different, though, from the guy who plays the character here, our treasured Peter Dinklage, who is 56. 

Hey, did I expect every movie I watched this month to be a shot-by-shot remake like Psycho?

There's another thing I should tell you about Toxic Avenger -- or Toxic Avenger Unrated, as it is sometimes billed -- or actually two things:

1) I paid $14.99 AUD to rent it. That's about $9.77 USD. 

2) I watched it as the second movie of a horror double feature, and I was really, really tired.

The first is pertinent because I had said, earlier on this month, that I didn't want to pay the full $19.99 rental price just so I could watch it in this month of horror remakes. And that was a $19.99 USD rental price, which would have been closer to $30 AUD. And so indeed, I did not. I paid half that, which is not really what I wanted to do either, but as I mentioned a few days ago, this theme is starting to run dry for me and I still have another four days until it's Halloween.

The second is pertinent because it explains why, two days later, I can barely remember Blair's new movie. 

I know I generally liked it, and I do have some general thoughts on it.

One is that I was really glad they cast Dinklage in this role, where it does not seem his size is a relevant part of the story. Or rather, it's not relevant at all when he's just a janitor looking after his stepson, one with an aggressive brain cancer who is likely to die in a year's time. (Humorously, every time the doctor gives him bad news, he engages in an excessive amount of small talk before getting to the news, which drives Dinklage's understandably nervous character crazy.) No one comments on his size and we are not meant to question why the boy's full-height mother went for him. Dinklage has done a good job making his height an unimportant aspect of the movies in which he's cast, and this was another example of that. (I do find it a little disappointing that Dinklage did not actually get made up in the Toxic Avenger practical effects suit. Wikipedia says it was actress Luisa Guerrero, so I guess not even a man, who did that work.)

However, I do think that Blair found there to be something that was right about Dinklage that made him worth casting in this movie, perhaps some sort of match with the toxic sludge superhero we see in the second half. And indeed, some characters do refer to him as a "little guy" in that form -- though at that point, they don't recognize him as the janitor, thought to be dead, who is revived by the rejuvenative effects of the sludge on his person. I'm not sure if this was the intention, but it has the impact of suggesting people are polite enough not to talk about height with a human little person, but it's still something they'd mention if they thought they were dealing with an actual monster.

The other thing is that I was surprised how little this film deserved what I would consider the very prominently listed notion that it is unrated. The first film in the evening's double feature, which I watched with my wife and my older son, was Osgood Perkins' The Monkey, a second viewing for me. The Monkey's gore seemed more worthy of being unrated than the gore in this movie. Maybe sometime I'll try to figure out what gore offends the censors too much and what gore does not.

Another interesting tie-in with The Monkey that I would never have anticipated? Both movies feature Elijah Wood. So I'm sure if I weren't already writing a post about a horror remake, I'd be writing about a post about an Elijah Wood double feature. 

This does have the spirit of Troma all over it. Blair is a big Troma fan, and Troma is the actual production company here. So we get a lot of big, intentionally absurd moments, and you get geographical locations described thus: "Depressing Outskirts," rather than an actual name. There's good glee in this movie, always a hallmark of Troma.

Lastly I'll just mention that Kevin Bacon is the antagonist in this movie, and he has a lot of fun. 

I wish this piece about The Toxic Avenger were more substantive, but they can't all be masterpieces -- the movies, or my essays about them. 

Grindhouse streaming

I listen to a lot of podcasts where they tell us in advance the movie they're going to talk about in the coming weeks so you can watch it to get more out of the discussion. ("A lot" might be a stretch. I have two main movie podcasts and then others that sometimes involve movies.) 

With new releases, you might be seeing those movies anyway, especially if you like to keep up on what's current. But you likely were not planning to watch the old movie they're planning to talk about, unless they prompt you to do it.

I don't usually, but on Friday, as I was about to listen to a podcast that discussed Robert Rodriguez' From Dusk Till Dawn, I decided it had been a long time since my last viewing, and why not watch it tonight?

Actually it took a long time for my first viewing of From Dusk Till Dawn, so long that when I finally saw it at the start of 2013, it prompted me to write only my second in my nascent "I finally saw" series, which gets periodic entries and has had another 18 in the dozen years since then. Rewatching movies you didn't see until 17 years after they came out means that those movies have entered into your group of personal favorites, though I suppose it takes the second viewing to confirm that.

My second viewing was about as positive as my first, though it might not have been if I'd listened to the podcast first. On The Next Picture Show, where the four hosts are generally inclined toward politeness, they each came in with a different variation on how it didn't hold up very well. So I guess I'm glad that wasn't in my head as I watched it.

Yes there are some icky things in there. For example, it's quite a choice to have one of the two main characters you're following -- played by Quentin Tarantino, who also wrote the script -- rape and kill the woman they've taken as hostage, in such a grisly fashion that you only see flashes of it. Though the film steers this clear of being completely lurid and prurient, in the following sense: This hostage is not some beautiful young girl, but a middle-aged woman, indicating perhaps that Richie Gecko has more screws loose than to just be written off as a deviant psychopath who craves young flesh. (Which he also does with the Juliette Lewis character, though fortunately, that has no similar outcome.) The movie is not tawdry with its choice of victim, and what it confronts us with is in that way more complicated. 

Anyway, I'm here today not to give the movie a full analysis, since I likely talked about what makes the movie a ton of fun (a lot of things) and what gives me pause (a few, one of which I've already touched on) in this post when I first wrote about it. I'm here for two observations and they are both variations on the title of this post.

So one use of the term "Grindhouse" is an intentional callback to the "film" -- actually separated out into two films when subsequently available -- that Rodriguez and Tarantino made in 2007. Rodriguez' Planet Terror and Tarantino's Death Proof were originally mashed together as a single film called Grindhouse, which is still how I have this listed in my movie lists, though they are two different stories with two different casts, divided from one another by fake trailers -- most of which have also resulted in their own movies.

In the same way that Grindhouse was divided between Tarantino and Rodriguez, so is From Dusk Till Dawn, though I don't remember really considering that until this viewing (and until they made reference to it on the podcast). Although the two halves of FDTD are not of equal length, it does take a suspiciously long amount of time to get to the Titty Twister in Mexico, a lot longer than you would expect given that this is going to be main thrust of the film, ostensibly. The Tarantino portion, the dialogue-heavy first half that features more traditionally Tarantino content about violent men on the run, gets about the first 40 minutes, while the Rodriguez' portion, where we start getting exploding vampires and other practical effects, run for more or less the last hour.

On the podcast they debated which half they actually preferred, and I don't know that I myself have an answer to that because I like the whole thing. But it did make me realize that this was essentially a dry run at a jointly divided project that would have a more intentional incarnation in Grindhouse. (Where, for the record, I do like the Rodriguez half better. I've only seen each that one time, which means I haven't ever given Death Proof a second chance, but I vibed better with Planet Terror back then and I suspect I still would -- even though obviously Tarantino's is the career I vastly prefer.)

The second use of the term "Grindhouse" indicates more the style of B movie and its projection, not the movie Grindhouse.

You may recall that the film itself is meant to look really shitty in that movie, full of cigarettes burns (the type that used to mark the changing of reels) and other attempts to make the physical film look like it's been damaged and gone through the ringer. Like it was sitting around in some dusty theater where people might have stepped on it, torn it, or poured coffee on it. Or more likely, beer.

Well, I got a little of that effect watching From Dusk Till Dawn, through no fault of the film itself.

I have an occasional problem with streaming on Stan, and I thought it was something that had been fixed when I went through all that testing and contacting of customer support earlier this year, trying to diagnose and resolve an issue with the image quality. (It turns out it was something having to do with the HDMI port I was using on our TV, though I still haven't figured out why that should have been the case.) The problem I thought was resolved at that time was the tendency of the stream to double back one second, then skip forward a second, bringing the dialogue momentarily out of sync, and creating an overall irritating viewing experience. This partially derailed my most recent viewing of The Crow, timed to the release of the Crow remake last year.

This phenomenon was back with FDTD. I don't know why. The HDMI port should not have anything to do with this, as it would seem to be an internet speed issue of some sort, though I wasn't willing to rule out Stan just being an inferior product. 

But this time it did not bother me, because I made it part of the experience. It was like I was watching the same sort of compromised celluloid that they showed in the grindhouse theaters, suited to the outrageous subject matter of this movie.

That aesthetic used by Rodriguez and Tarantino in 2007 was designed to throw us back to an era that was well and truly gone. But that was even before streaming and before shooting on actual celluloid became a thing of the past. Eighteen years later, when everything is digitally projected and most of us no longer have a problem with buffering, it was fun, for a moment, to be reminded of a time when everything was still a bit rough around the edges, kind of like From Dusk Till Dawn itself.

Horror remakes: Friday the 13th

I had at first wanted to watch Marcus Nispel's 2009 remake of Friday the 13th as the final film in this month of horror remakes. That place of pride had nothing to do with its expected quality. It had to do with this stupid joke that I love:

"Wouldn't it be crazy if there was a year where Friday the 13th fell on Halloween?"

You know it's a stupid joke pretty quickly -- but maybe not as soon as you hear it. For half a second you're like "Yeah, I wonder if that's ever happened?" And then you say "Oh wait."

So in that respect it's a good joke, because it gets you for a second but no one has to explain to you why it's a joke. (And I suppose it's more of an example of what I call "dumb guy" than an actual joke. "Dumb guy" is when you say something earnestly pretending that you are dumb and that you really believe it. "Double dumb guy" is when someone else responds back to you in the same vein, and it can often cause confusion because sometimes the first person doesn't get that the second person is also doing "dumb guy.")

I ultimately decided this was not good enough reason to save what could well be the worst movie I see this month for the hallowed viewing ground of Halloween night. Besides, my wife might want to watch something with me that night, and it sure as hell wouldn't be this.

So I decided as a compromise, I would watch it Thursday night and at least post it on a Friday. (I could have watched it next Thursday and posted it on Halloween, but I didn't. I'm running out of viewing options until I can think of a few more, so I couldn't afford to sit on it.) 

I didn't hate this movie, but I started out thinking I would.

Two thousand nine is only 16 years ago. I don't usually think of it as different enough from our current era for it to have a distinctly different look and feel on film. And while of course I would notice differences between then and now in any film from 2009 I were to see for the first time today, you tend to notice these things more when the film is of the lowest common denominator, like Friday the 13th.

It started with the opening credits. We see images of flashback to 1980, when the events of the original Friday the 13th took place. (Making this, like I Know What You Did Last Summer, more of a reboot/reheat than a remake. Though I didn't know that would be the case until I saw it.) The credits are in this very basic sort of typewriter font, and they break up the grainy, desaturated flashback footage at intervals of about every two seconds. Which is highly annoying. These days we rarely see the names of most of the cast and crew on screen at the beginning of any movie, as opening credits have become increasingly passe, and I'm sure no one would opt for this specific incarnation of that, where you have to cut away from the images at least two dozen times to show a typewritten name of a cast or crew on a black screen by itself.

The other big difference between then and now is that 2009 was the last gasps of giving us nudity in horror movies. I can't say exactly when that stopped, but porn was likely not as prevalent on the internet 16 years ago, meaning that horny kids still benefitted from getting a glimpse of it at the movies. It may be that this actually didn't start to really change until Harvey Weinstein was revealed as the creep that he is, at which point I think the whole industry started taking more seriously the depiction of beautiful young women in movies. But Friday the 13th is still in the heart of the previous era, and I was really surprised by the sheer quantity of T&A here.

To be clear, this is not a good movie. But there are things I liked about it.

One of these was that I thought the characters we follow felt slightly more believable than you usually get in a movie like this. In fact, we follow two sets, one of which gets killed off before the title of the movie comes on the screen, which is way after the opening credits and comes late enough that we think we've already passed that point. The fact that these characters feel reasonably fleshed out, even though we're ultimately only going to follow them for about ten minutes, is an indication of someone doing something right in the screenwriting. The characters we follow for longer, before they also start getting picked off one by one, have similar depth that I appreciated. We're talking "depth" in a totally relative way where, but it was more than they needed, and I thought the performances were pretty good.

The kills? Not so much. There's almost zero cleverness to Jason knocking them off. I think in a movie made today, these would be drawn out, and would only result in the release of the gore we're seeking after each character had been stalked a bit, had almost escaped at least once. There'd also be fakeouts, times you thought a character was about to be slaughtered but then it was just narrative misdirection. Well, nothing like that here. Within seconds of popping up next to a character -- Jason Voorhees being especially famous for popping up out of nowhere in defiance of space and time -- he's already shoved a machete through their head, leaving us little time to appreciate what might be about to happen. 

It's been long enough since I saw the original -- like, at least 30 years -- that I don't remember if Jason is consistent with his weapons in the original. But that I found a bit disappointing here too. I guess the machete is the one he uses most often, but there's also a screwdriver death here, and one with an axe. At least give the guy an MO that he repeats.

Maybe the deficiency that surprised me the most, especially after the intro flashback that heavily featured Jason's mother, was how little they tried to develop the Jason back story after introducing it. The characters are aware of some of the lore surrounding Jason, but in terms of actual impact on the character or his motivations, it's quite shallow and gets basically dropped. I guess this is also before the era when movies were trying to understand serial killers and give them more dimension.

Two other quick thoughts:

1) For a movie that appears to be pretty cheaply made in all other aspects, I was really surprised to see that they paid to use Night Ranger's song "Sister Christian" in one scene. That scene also stood out because they obviously didn't have the money to buy any other songs. Usually you try to make this a consistent approach.

2) There's a bit of Blue Velvet homage here, out of nowhere. One character at a campfire briefly sings the praises of Pabst Blue Ribbon, much as Frank Booth does in Lynch's film. He doesn't belabor it, but the similarity of the dialogue is enough that it couldn't be a coincidence. 

Okay, I think I'm going to watch at least two more of these movies over the remaining week before Halloween, and at the moment I've got three candidates -- though one is new so it's still at the full $19.99 rental price, and the other two are both remakes of the same movie, which I may or may not watch as a double feature. I think I'm going to need some more options here in case these don't all work out like I'm planning. 

The first 10 minutes of Raising Arizona on my new projector screen

It was my birthday yesterday, and given the fact that we've just returned from a long (and expensive) European sojourn, it's not surprising it was a pretty unremarkable birthday.

In fact, as if to underscore how intentionally mid I expected it to be, I actually made a dentist appointment for yesterday morning. While we were in Europe, I lost a filling the dentist had given me previous December, designed to prevent so much food from getting lodged in the space where a tooth had broken away. When that filling broke out, it returned me to where I'd been the year before, going through several toothpicks a day. I finally got around to making the appointment on Friday, and I hadn't realized that "Monday" was also my birthday until she repeated the date back to me. I had the opportunity to set the appointment for a different day, but I just shrugged and kept it.

Oh and let's not forget where I was on my last two birthdays. Two years ago, I was in Sydney on a surprise trip to celebrate my 50th. And last year I was in Singapore. So, a low-level birthday was several years in the making. 

But one remarkable thing did happen yesterday: I'm back in the projector game in our garage.

Yes that's right, my wife got me a new projector screen that can be assembled on collapsible poles, meaning not only can it provide a viewing surface in our garage, it can be taken on trips and the like if need be. (Road trips, I'm thinking. It wouldn't make sense to take my projector on the plane.)

Our garage has been through various incarnations of various junk pushed up against various walls, and it hasn't felt like the right space to watch anything for some time now. The wall that used to be clear for projecting -- clear, other than the grooves between the white-painted cinder blocks, which you stop noticing after about a minute -- but in the last year it has had other responsibilities. You can clear out a spot, but it's work, and then you have to find a spot for the stuff you've cleared out. The last time we used the projector in the garage, just about exactly six months ago, we oriented things entirely differently and hung a sheet from the ceiling, with the couch in the middle of the room instead of against the wall. That was meant just for that one weekend and was not sustainable. 

But with my birthday present, I may have entered into a new era of projecting frequency and versatility. 

Since the screen can go anywhere in the garage, that means I can set up anywhere, and even if it temporarily scrambles the direction of the furniture, it isn't such a difficult thing to put it back. It's not an insurmountable problem even on a random evening when I decide I want to watch a movie this way.

The more difficult problem is, I would say, the positioning of the projector. In order to get it the ideal distance from the screen, so the image is small enough to fit within the screen's parameters, you have to place it obtrusively in the middle of where everyone would like to sit. I'm pretty sure there's a solution for this, and now I just need to make it my business to find out what it is.

Anyway, the kids were -- or at least one kid was -- excited about it, as was the giver of the gift, as was the receiver of the gift, so we went to work assembling it quickly so we could all watch something brief together, and I could watch a proper movie myself, at least to give my birthday a bit better of a send-off. (Why it needed that better send-off: My older son's basketball team also lost their game by one point, blowing their lead with less than a minute remaining, and he didn't play well. Because of the need to get to that game on time, and because of the slow service at the Mexican restaurant, we had to rush out of my birthday dinner before our food could be delivered, and take it in takeaway containers. My son didn't end up eating his until after the game. Yep, it was one challenge after another.)

At first my wife was concerned about what she called the "Made in China" aspects of the projector screen. She had no problem acknowledging that this was not the most expensive one she could have bought, and I wouldn't have had it any other way, given the money we've already spent in the past two months. And it looked like there'd be some challenges reaching both poles with the velcro loops, without which we couldn't pull it taut.

But after we lay it on the ground and took a second run at setting everything up properly, it did come together quite nicely, and then I went to work positioning the projector for optimal viewing. 

And finally that meant getting to watch the first ten minutes of my favorite movie of all time, Raising Arizona.

You may recall from this post and this post that I have been watching Raising Arizona at approximately four-year intervals, accidentally for a while and then sort of purposefully the last time. My most recent viewing was only the start of last year, so that means it wouldn't have been due up again until early 2028. But it seems likely that timeline will be accelerated.

It started with the fact that my 11-year-old drew H.I. McDunnough on my birthday card. Seriously! Don't believe me? Here he is:

Don't you just love it?

By the way, the inclusion of the Flash has to do with the fact that my son is watching the Flash TV show and finds it vastly superior to what he's seen of the movie, which is basically just the way the Flash runs, which they make fun of online. It's something about his arm movements of holding out two fingers and sweeping away from his face downward. Anyway, it became an inside joke for us in Europe.

When the new projector screen came out a few minutes after this card, Raising Arizona was fully on the brain, and I thought the 11-minute pre-credits prologue would make a perfect amuse bouche to a full-length viewing, which the 11-year-old has been saying recently he would like to do. He'd have liked to do it yesterday, in fact, but we were getting started around 9:30, so it just wasn't practical.

The reactions were generous by my wife, who of course has seen the movie multiple times and also appreciates it (though not like I do), and the 11-year-old. The 15-year-old sat in stony silence, but I wouldn't have expected anything different. She laughed several times and the 11-year-old laughed a couple times too, though that could have been merely because of his overdeveloped sense of empathy. He knew I hadn't been having an awesome birthday, and if a few courtesy laughs at my favorite movie would help improve that, he was more than willing to give them. Good egg.

I suppose the test will be to see how quickly he requests a complete viewing. That'll tell me whether he really liked what he saw or was just being polite.

So my next Raising Arizona viewing may not, indeed, come until 2028, when I'm ready for it again. Or it may come this weekend.

And if it comes this weekend, I know I'll have a pretty great new projector setup on which to watch it. 

As for the movie I did actually watch, it was Opus, which I told you earlier this month I didn't want to watch on the plane because I'd been saving it for a more optimal viewing environment. In fact, given that I also watched the last 30 minutes of the Netflix movie Steve earlier that afternoon, I almost called this post "A birthday of naming Bloom County characters." Yes, Opus and Steve Dallas are both in the comic strip Bloom County, which I read obsessively around the age my younger son is now. Here they are:

I haven't yet fully processed my feelings on Opus, and I think I need to go back to the Wikipedia plot synopsis to review a couple details. But let's just say I went from liking it a lot to not liking it nearly as much, to not being sure if I actually liked it. I'll give this one some more thought.

But watching a whole movie on my new projector screen reminded me of great times past and previewed great times ahead, so that was nice.

Hey, we movie people, we like our screens, the bigger the better. 

Horror remakes: Nosferatu the Vampyre

So what, you thought I was going to watch only inferior horror remakes from 2010 onward?

I was reminded of my latest choice for a horror remake by doing an intentional search for other movies I might be forgetting, and Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre, which I'd always meant to see, made a particularly good choice given that Robert Eggers also just made a version of this movie last year.

And I have to tell you, I was sailing toward a full five stars on Letterboxd for the first half of this film.

Some of the choices in the second half didn't sit as well with me, but particularly the sequence of Jonathan Harker's approach to Transylvania was downright mesmerizing. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. 

Actually, now that I've started this post in a sort of discombobulated way, let me ask a question up front. You can leave the answer in the comments if you want. 

Given that the various Nosferatus -- including F.W. Murnau's 1922 version, which is what makes Herzog's 1979 version qualify as a remake -- are also effectively remakes of Bram Stoker's Dracula, why is there such inconsistent use of the characters and their names? Here the apprentice attorney sent to Transylvania to close the deal, played by Bruno Ganz, is called Jonathan Harker, same as he was in Stoker's novel and in my favorite Dracula adaptation, the one directed by Francis Ford Coppola in 1992. However, in both Murnau's and Eggers' versions, he's called Thomas Hutter, and is in a relationship with a woman called Ellen.

I'd say Harker's fiancee, when he is called Harker, is at least always called Mina, but Herzog's version breaks with that apparent alignment as well. Here she's Lucy (Isabelle Adjani), and Mina is the much smaller role of her friend who looks after her while Jonathan is away. Whereas Lucy is the friend who looks after Mina in the original novel, and in Coppola's version.

Ah, okay, so Murnau's original was an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula, which is how we get the name Count Orlok in both Murnau's and Eggers' version. Herzog, in his famously idiosyncratic way, takes a little bit from wherever he wants, calling his vampire Dracula and using the other names from the novel, but giving him the severe appearance of Count Orlok, and also scrambling which woman is which for no reason I can understand.

Anyway. 

I knew as soon as I started that I would spend this movie deeply in the embrace of my favorite era of filmmaking. I'm not going to say the 1970s has more movies I love than other decades, because I was only six when 1979 turned to 1980, and you can't discount the role of personal nostalgia in the films you love. So strictly speaking I probably love more films from the 1980s and 1990s than I do from the 1970s. But the 1970s are my favorite decade for the look and feel of a film, and within that I'm also including the sort of independent spirit that Herzog gives us here.

This is not a polished version of Wismar, Germany in 1850, but that's not what I'd want from Herzog or this film. It looks believable and lived in, probably close to how it would have actually looked (though the film was actually shot in the Netherlands). The "polish" -- this film's version of it, anyway -- comes when Harker sets out for Transylvania.

The look of Nosferatu is a triumph of cinematography by Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein, but I'm not sure the selection of shots would have felt the same in the hands of another director. We know Herzog has made a career on communicating the fear and awe nature inspires in him, and that's fully present here. In fact Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Herzog's 1972 film, is evoked several times here, first in a scene involving a raft going down a river, and later in a Wismar overrun by rats, which must have tested every resource of Herzog's rodent wrangler, just as Herzog tested every resource when he ordered a ship hauled over a mountain in Fitzcarraldo (which wouldn't occur until three years later). As you recall, the closing scene of Aguirre involves a raft overrun by monkeys. 

Harker doesn't encounter vermin of any shape or size in his travels to Transylvania, many of which are conducted on foot, but he does encounter a living, breathing nature, suffused with fog and clouds and other conveyers of exquisite beauty. Herzog and Schmidt-Reitwein really linger on these passages. I think specifically of one entrancing sequence where we just watch the clouds move over a mountain peak for something like two minutes before the shot is finally broken. I was fully in this film's spell.

One of the reasons for that -- and I forgot to mention this when I first wrote this post, so I'm adding this a day later, sorry to those of you who missed it -- is the not one, but two different musical pieces I Shazam'd that are not the sort of music I usually Shazam. Both sounded familiar to me from elsewhere. The first was Richard Wagner's majestic "Vorspiel" from Das Rheingold in the Ring Cycle, which I was later able to piece together as having been used in Terence Malick's The New World. Then later there's Georgian folk song "Tsintskaro," which Kate Bush incorporates into her song "Hello Earth." Both are total mood setters. 

Anyway, the spell continued with the arrival in Transylvania and the introduction to Dracula, as played by frequent Herzog collaborator Klaus Kinski. This is an interesting role for Kinski as it involves him being a lot more contained than he usually is on film, particularly than he is in the two Herzog films mentioned above, one on either side of Nosferatu. As I was watching Kinski relish the role and be particularly creepy in it -- and the chiaroscuro use of light just enhances this -- I thought to myself that Kinski is the rare actor who could play either Dracula or Renfield, a character actually played by Roland Topor in this film. Renfield falls more within Kinski's traditional skill set. (Maybe Nicholas Hoult could pull it off too. Although he played the titular character in the movie Renfield from a couple years ago, he didn't play that character with the sort of histrionics one usually sees, and his actual look might be more suited for Dracula.)

Anyway, Kinski is great here, but I don't think it was possible for me to love any part of Nosferatu as much as I loved its first 30 minutes, and that more or less coincides with our introduction to Dracula. It was this portion of Eggers' film that also left me the most entranced, but there, my disappointment with the version of Count Orlok they introduced was more explicitly responsible for why I started being less enchanted with that film as it went. Here I think it was more of a coincidence, because I do really like Kinski's performance. (I guess all you have to do is make Orlok look sort of like Max Schreck. The deviation from Schreck's appearance is what gave me pause with Eggers' film.)

The time spent in Transylvania is quite good, and I particularly liked the return to Wismar by ship, in part because it does not go out of its way to present us with a macabre setting for this ship voyage. In many a Dracula adaptation, perhaps only excepting the feature-length version we saw in Last Voyage of the Demeter (which I also liked), we see only a small bit of this trip, and therefore, every shot is by night and by storm. Here, we get a lot of shots of this ship in the daylight, seeming to make it less mysterious, and in keeping with an intentionally stripped back approach by Herzog throughout. He still has a huge amount of joy filming this, as Herzog captures this boat and its crimson red sails through sweeping helicopter shots and the like.

The return to Wismar has some plot stuff that I wasn't sure about and some moments of unintentional goofiness. Most filmmakers find it unnecessary to show the logistics of Dracula's arrival/settling in Wismar -- which is, of course, London in other versions of the story -- but here Herzog shows a shot of Kinski carrying a coffin over his shoulder as he sets up his new home base. Did we need that? Probably not. Is the shot itself a little silly, and does it remove some of the mystery? Yes, for sure. We kind of feel like Dracula would have minions who would do this, even if we don't know who they are. We know he has Renfield, who could certainly take care of it, and this film also includes a scene of Dracula and Renfield together in which Dracula seems vaguely annoyed by his familiar, waving him away with his hand. This is also a bit comical and I think there are reasons we don't see their in-person interactions in other films. 

Then there's some stuff I won't go into that appears to be just Herzog's deviations from previous material. I'll just say I'm not sure it all works. One thing I did think sort of worked was the danse macabre in Wismar, which also included a restaging of the last supper. It didn't necessarily work for me as a literal plot development, but it was a satisfying distillation of what Herzog has always called his "ecstatic truth." And then you have scenes of rats everywhere, as this story has a link to the bubonic plague that I don't believe other versions of the story have. You should see Nosferatu even if the only thing about it that sounds appealing is to watch the literally thousands of rats that you know are real, not digital as they would be today. How did they get all those rats?

I'm out of time on this post, so I'll just say, it dropped a full star from the potential five stars to merely four, though I've gone back and forth on whether to bump that up to 4.5. Let's just say this is another triumph for Herzog and I'm really glad that this month's theme finally gave me the opportunity I needed to see it. 

Understanding Editing: Saving Private Ryan

This is the tenth in my 2025 monthly series watching winners of the best editing Oscar in chronological order, to better understand the craft, choosing potentially fruitful examples and alternating between those I've seen and those I haven't seen.

You may recall that in this series, the six movies I've already seen are designed as all movies I've seen only once. Given that Saving Private Ryan was my #5 movie of 1998, you'd think I'd have had occasion to watch it again in those 27 years. But it turns out, a 170-minute running time tends to curtail the inclination toward casual second viewings, even in films you know are great. Plus, there's the difficult subject matter, G.I.s turned to mincemeat in that harrowing storming of Omaha Beach. 

I wasn't sure when I'd carve out the time this October to give it a second watch, until my younger son took a last-minute invite to go a sleepover at his auntie's house yesterday. (And because he's starting high school this January, which starts here in year 7, she should probably take as many of these opportunities as she can. They will soon evaporate. In fact, I won't be surprised if we look back and realize this was the last one.)

The sleepover matters because when our son is at our house, and he's allowed to have screen time, he's basically fixed on our living room couch, same room as the TV where I like watching movies. While the older one likes his own bedroom, the younger one prefers the communal area for now -- though he says it's because the internet doesn't work very well in his room. I won't be surprised if all the sudden next year, the service there vastly improves.

Anyway, enough getting sidetracked. Without my son camped out in his usual spot on our couch, I got a still-too-late start on the movie around 5:30 yesterday afternoon. It was still too late because after I took a brief nap somewhere in the middle, it still had more than 30 minutes remaining at 8:20 when my wife texted me from upstairs: "What about dinner?"

I had selected Saving Private Ryan because I knew we were likely to get some amazing editing during the aforementioned storming of the beach at Normandy, which takes up more than 20 of the film's first 25 minutes. (Don't forget there's a short prologue of the elderly James Ryan.) I also knew that after this, the movie was likely to devolve into slightly more standard editing as the pace slowed and the narrative became a series of lower stakes vignettes. 

The interesting thing I discovered, though, was that the opening actually relies more on choreography and the work of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski than it does the editing of Oscar winner Michael Kahn.

But before we get in to Janusz, let's establish Kahn's bonafides. 

Kahn has made a career of being Steven Spielberg's editor of choice. Which isn't to say he hasn't worked with other directors, just that Spielberg has rarely worked with other editors. Ryan was the 14th film Kahn had edited for Spielberg, and he has subsequently edited 14 more. I'm not sure if that accounts for the entirety of Spielberg's output since Ryan, but if not, it's close to it. Kahn is still alive at age 94 and he did edit The Fabelmans for Spielberg in 2022. Spielberg has not yet released his follow-up to The Fabelmans, but it's supposed to come out next year, and Kahn is listed on IMDB as the editor. Pretty remarkable career, and it includes two other Oscar wins, for Raiders of the Lost Ark and Schindler's List. He was also nominated for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Fatal Attraction, Empire of the Sun (those last two both coming in the same year), Munich and Lincoln. 

But the thing about that opening sequence is it's not as much of a showcase for Kahn as you'd think. It's a showcase for staging of extras and for the movement of the camera to capture the chaos.

There's one particular moment I always think of, though I remembered the general contours of the moment more than its specifics before being reminded yesterday. Tom Hanks' John Miller is getting minimal protection from a makeshift trench in the sand, and he's going back and forth between someone he's giving orders to on his right and someone he's giving orders to on his left. We can barely hear what's being spoken of in all the gunfire and general cacophony, but it all sounds very real and we're totally immersed. The camera goes back and forth between the people he's talking to on either side, moving the one he's not currently speaking with out of the shot. Janusz goes twice to the guy on his left -- or I guess it would be his right if Hanks had his back to the sand, but it's our left as viewers -- and the guy looks like he's in something of a daze, nodding and completing whatever has been asked of him. On the third time Janusz goes to him, though, there's just a crater in the middle of the guy's face. We have no idea what actually befell him and caused that crater, and how something that could do that didn't catch any of Miller as collateral damage, but it's just one of those perfect moments that ecapsulates the thin membrane between life and death that was the reality for every man on that beach.

I'm not going to say the opening sequence requires no editing. I did like the way the editing was used as we see men fall out of the boat and begin sinking underwater. But it is far more likely to rely on these sort of spatial dynamics that can only be accomplished by camera movements. I'd say that's the key to why it's so immersive, that we know there's nothing done in post to blend together two consecutive images that might have been shot hours or even weeks apart, and not even necessarily in the same location. 

As the movie continued to go on, I wondered if Kahn's Oscar -- though certainly not undeserved -- was another case of getting swept up in the movie that was going to win all the awards. If you remember back to that year, we were all very surprised when Shakespeare in Love won best picture, even in the moments leading up to the moment, since Spielberg had already won best director, and those accolades are usually paired. In fact Shakespeare did win more awards total, but Ryan won the awards that seemed to herald a best picture win, only it didn't transpire. 

It's true, the middle scenes of the movie -- and I guess by that I'm referring to the hour and 45 minutes between Omaha Beach and the big finale -- use a more purposeful, functional form of editing, as few of them rely on anything like sustained gunfire. There are certainly short bursts of combat depicted throughout, but some of them are held at a distance, like the scene where they take out a German nest so it's not still around to ambush the next group that comes through. (Which results in the death of Giovanni Ribisi's medic.) We see this scene more from far off, not up in the midst of it. This section does not have a lot of examples of editing that calls attention to itself. 

In the final battle, where we lose most of the remainder of the characters we've come to know -- sparing only Edward Burns' Brooklynite, Jeremy Davies' pacifist/coward and Matt Damon's Private Ryan himself -- Kahn does start to shine in the obvious sorts of ways that result in Oscars. Given that there are a number of different arenas to the battle here -- everything from a sniper vs. soldiers on the ground, sticky bombs against tanks, hand-to-hand combat and more traditional gunfire -- a skilled technician is required to weave these scenes together and progress them at the same rate. And we really see here what Kahn can do. I was especially noticing the crisp editing in the sequence where Barry Pepper's sniper needs to keep cocking and manually loading a single bullet after his previous weapon has been rendered inoperative from lack of ammo, as we see the targets of his bullets fall. 

A few other thoughts on this film.

1) I loved seeing the familiar faces popping up. I'd forgotten, for example, that the likes of Ted Danson and Paul Giamatti make what amount to extended cameos. Then I never would have known, because I don't think I knew him at the time, that Nathan Fillion played the "wrong James Ryan," who is mistakenly told that his young brothers who are still in grammar school have been killed. The film sets this up as sort of a dark punchline, but it actually has a more devastating impact, in that we see this James Ryan distraught and asking Miller et al if they're sure his brothers are okay, even though the whole thing is obviously just a misunderstanding. War made everyone so fragile that the reveal that it was a mistake doesn't actually cause him relief, it just leaves him in this agitated state of worrying about his brothers and missing home. 

2) It was a Jeremy Davies sort of weekend, as I happened to catch Davies -- who doesn't work all that much these days -- in Black Phone 2 the night before. 

3) It was interesting to watch this on the eve of No Kings Day in the U.S., though I suppose by the calendar it was October 18th in Australia, which would have been No Kings Day itself had that been observed here. (I'm sure it was, in some way.) Twenty-seven years ago, a movie about heroics in World War II, and the weary jingoism that inevitably accompanies it, would have been equally celebrated on both sides of the political aisle. Nowadays, I'm not even sure if a filmmaker would be likely to make such a movie, since the progressives in Hollywood are hesitant to make something that celebrates even America's finest hours in foreign combat. Like-minded people to themselves are generally rejecting traditional incarnations of patriotism, and those who would embrace it are certainly not like-minded. Patriotism itself has been poisoned by the current culture wars.

4) I'm not sure if I liked this as much as the first time I saw it in 1998, but there's no doubt it is an incredibly effective piece of filmmaking that generates a lot of interesting questions about duty and sacrifice and missions where the many are risked to save the one -- which, in a way, is the sort of mission that popular filmmaking is founded on. We see lots of movies where heroes risk the lives of the many because they can't accept the loss of the one. In fact, it is almost the defining quality of a movie hero to make a decision that endangers the majority because sacrificing the minority is untenable. This codifies that theme into an actual storyline involving military strategy and the questioning of these choices on both sides.

5) I think I should tell you a little bit about the circumstances of my only other previous viewing of Saving Private Ryan, because they are interesting. I saw it in, I believe, Park City, Utah -- which you will be familiar with as the traditional location of the Sundance Film Festival, which is having its last such festival in Park City this January before moving to Boulder, Colorado. (It'll be a crazy year to be at Sundance, both the last in its location and the first since the death of Robert Redford.) Anyway, I wasn't there in January, I was there in August as part of a road trip with two friends where we saw baseball games in 14 different cities across the U.S., over three weeks. I'm pretty sure this was the only movie we saw on the trip, as almost all of the rest of the time we were watching baseball games or driving. Can you imagine, three weeks and only a single movie?

Okay, that's enough for this month, join me in November when I watch my last previously unseen movie of this series, which is also the only best editing winner since Saving Private Ryan that I haven't seen: Paul Greengrass' The Bourne Ultimatum, also starring Matt Damon. That'll be an interesting one because unlike some of the other movies I've watched in this series, we can't say The Bourne Ultimatum was winning all the other Oscars, and best editing just got swept up in a general wave of enthusiasm. It may make an ideal case of seeing editing rewarded purely on its own merits. 

You can't exclude just one

Poor Chloe Sevigny, not famous enough to make the poster for After the Hunt.

Oh her name made it, but her face did not. 

The poster for the new Luca Guadagnino film has five names on it, but only four faces.

Sevigny is obviously edged out, fame-wise, by one of the biggest female stars of her generation, Julia Roberts, and also by a guy who once played Spider-Man, Andrew Garfield. Ayo Edibiri hasn't been around very long but she has skyrocketed during the short time we've been aware of her.

But Michael Stuhlbarg? Sevigny is more famous than he is, right?

We shouldn't even be having this conversation. If you can get five names onto the poster, can't you get five pictures? Does Julia's shoulder really need to take up all that extra real estate?

Not knowing what the movie is about, I'd argue that there's likely a plot reason she's not pictured. I don't know, maybe her character is dead or something, seen only in flashback. Or maybe these characters have specifically adversarial relationships with one another, which could explain why they're all giving such suspicious looks in each others' general directions. Maybe Sevigny is separate from those dynamics. 

The real point, though, is not who is more famous than whom, or who has a plot function that others don't have. I think the real point is that when designing a movie poster, it's okay to have way more people pictured on the poster than names, or way fewer. For the purposes of our argument, "way more" and "way fewer" can both mean "at least two."

A difference of only one, though, calls attention to itself, and results in posts like this one. 

There, I've fixed it. I guess Chloe is not as suspicious of the rest of them as they are of each other. She's just bemused. 

Horror remakes(?): I Know What You Did Last Summer

About 20 minutes into the 2025 version of I Know What You Did Last Summer, I realized that my premise for watching it this month might be flawed.

The scene where the Last Summer Crew "do" the thing that they "did" last summer was unfolding, and they're in the car on the curvy road above the ocean where they're supposed to hit the pedestrian and leave him for dead. "Watch out!!" one character yells, causing another to slam on the brakes. Turns out he was messing with the driver, and there was nothing in the road. Decent fakeout I suppose, though it'd probably create a "cry wolf" scenario when they do have to avoid the pedestrian later on. (Though perhaps that contributes more to their guilt.)

Same character, a bit of a jackass, then gets out of the car so they can watch the fireworks, it being the 4th of July and that being the purpose of the current joyride anyway. In doing this he spends some time flailing about in the middle of the road, not worrying whether he'll be hit by another car, not caring whether he provides a dangerous obstruction on this twisty road. One car blares its horn at him and swerves to miss him, but another comes up more suddenly, doesn't swerve as effectively enough, and crashes through the fence, dangling over the cliff, the drop from which will result in the certain death of the driver. The five friends try to prevent the car from going over but they can't. 

"Interesting twist," I thought. "In this remake, they don't hit a pedestrian, they just cause a driver to lose control of his car."

The scene of self-recrimination doesn't ring as truthfully as it does in a hit and run, though. The characters heap the same sort of manslaughter charges on themselves, even though causing an accident through stupidity is not nearly the same thing as running a man down with your car and failing to report it to the police. But they need the guilt to be equivalent, so indeed the characters panic and don't report it to the police, the logic for which I found pretty spurious.

But that wasn't my only realization during this scene. The other was:

"Oh wait, this is not a remake. It is more properly classified as a sequel."

Or as Josh Larsen on Filmspotting calls them, a "reheat."

Using the same title throws you off, but I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) is not a remake of I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) any more than Scream (2022) is a remake of Scream (1996). (Though in both cases, Summer swoops in for the sloppy seconds of an idea Scream had first.)

Of course, one dead giveaway is that Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt are reprising their roles from the original, which you can't do in a remake. (There's even an unexpected cameo from Sarah Michelle Gellar, whose character died in the original movie or one of its sequels.)

So does that make it a problem for watching in a month thematically devoted to horror remakes?

Maybe? Who cares, it's just a blog. I can watch what I want, when I want, and it doesn't matter, and part of the fun of choosing movies to watch for themed viewing series is potentially realizing they don't all fit in perfectly with the theme.

But there's also the spirit of a remake within this movie, considering that it a lot more closely follows the structure of the original than Scream (2022) follows the structure of the original Scream. If they didn't want it to be considered sort of a remake, they likely would have had a different inciting incident, staged in some entirely different location. Instead, the roadside manslaughter is on I believe the same road in the same town, even possibly the same part of the same road in the same town, and deviates from the original only superficially in its details.

There's another thing this movie has in common with the original, vis-a-vis Scream: It's a vastly inferior attempt at a good slasher movie.

Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, whose Do Revenge was not great either, has a certain basic competence that makes this movie reasonably watchable. I found her writing, particularly her dialogue, a bit more problematic than her directing. There's one scene in front of a town council that's a bad example of both.

Overall, though, the movie just kept losing its footing with me the deeper in it got, until I found all the various plot machinations at the end to be a bit absurd. Also: a real lack of great kills, which other 2025 horror has accomplished a lot better (see: The Monkey and Final Destination: Bloodlines). 

Another thing I found lacking: the way the movie accumulates an additional body count, and the logic behind why the killer would want to kill those people. Since there were only five friends in the car, and you likely want to kill about eight people in this movie, there have to be some other random townspeople who don't have anything to do with what the Last Summer Crew did last summer, but are targeted anyway. There is no rationale within the logic of the film why the man in the rain slicker would want to kill most of them. 

One thing I'll say in its favor, though, was that I am all in on the lead, Chase Sui Wonders. She seemed more familiar to me than from just Bodies Bodies Bodies, like I had just seen her in something the other week. Oh, duh: I just checked her IMDB again and she was in The Studio, which I didn't just see the other week, but saw as recently as about three months ago. Funny, I didn't actually love her character in The Studio, possibly because she's set up as a younger generation adversary to someone in my generation, and I am starting to become an old man susceptible to these generation gaps. But I think I must have unconsciously loved the performer, because I was glad to see her turn up here and I find her screen presence compelling. 

As for Hewitt and Prinze, they comport themselves reasonably well, though I was actually a bit more impressed with Prinze than I was with Hewitt. Having found Prinze to be so lacking when I finally recently saw She's All That, I expected to have a softer spot for Hewitt here. 

Flawed premise for watching or not, this was a 2025 film so I likely would have prioritized it for my year-end rankings, and might as well watch it in the month when you're already watching other horror movies, right? Unfortunately for the film, it does not figure to fare very well in those rankings.