Starting and ending on tarot cards

I wouldn't have guessed that my month of watching horror comedies would be flanked by tarot cards, but here we are.

The opening moments of The People Under the Stairs included tarot cards, and so did the closing moments of The Love Witch. The main character in the former is nicknamed "Fool" after a tarot card, and the title character of the latter fulfills the destiny laid out for her in the cards at the end of that movie.

The Love Witch isn't really a horror movie, nor is it really a comedy, though I suppose it is funny in spots. I'd been wanting to catch it since it came out, and after not finding it on my other streaming services most of this month, I finally realized it was on Kanopy. On Monday night, I wrapped my horror comedy viewings with it. 

I'd probably tell you more about it but it's about ten minutes to midnight on Halloween, and I still want to post this with an October 31st posting date.

So, the only observation you get today is the thing about the tarot cards.

Happy Halloween!

R.I.P. to a great TV star, not a great movie star

There was really only one successful breakout star from Friends: Jennifer Aniston. Even though she's made more bad movies than good ones, there's no doubt that she became a viable movie star, not to mention a worldwide brand and gossip column/tabloid staple.

One could argue that Matthew Perry was the next most promising, though it didn't work out that way.

They kept on trying to make Perry happen during the first half of his Friends run. But movies like Fools Rush In, Almost Heroes, Three to Tango and The Whole Nine Yards just didn't register, although they did make a sequel to The Whole Nine Yards and Perry appeared in that as well. 

More than not registering, some of them were just really awful. I ranked Almost Heroes last of all the movies I saw in 1998, and lest you forget, Christopher Guest was actually the director there. I don't recall Perry being specifically bad, but he certainly didn't save it. The very next year, Three to Tango was sixth from the bottom, though my memory has been even less kind to it. It's ranked even lower than Heroes on my Flickchart, the latter coming in at 6372 while Heroes pulls up at a comparatively respectable 6304. There are only 6397 films on my Flickchart so these rankings are both awful. I probably owe Three to Tango another viewing just to see how it managed to get so low on my chart. I think there was a scene involving vomiting that I hated.

Matthew Perry's movie career doesn't say a single thing about who he was as a performer and what he brought into our lives.

There's a very real argument that Chandler Bing ushered in a whole ironic sensibility that wouldn't be a fraction of what it is today in our culture without him. Perry was a maestro of sarcasm. He owns a whole sentence construction to himself -- you know, the one where the word "be" is emphasized. Best not to quote him, but to quote the homage to him delivered by Chandler bestie Joey Tribbiani, played by Matt LeBlanc, when the two friends are embroiled in an epic argument. Joey goes and puts on every piece of clothing in Chandler's closet and zings him "I'm Chandler Bing, could I *be* wearing any more clothes?"

There's no doubt Perry was gifted at line deliveries and had impeccable comedic timing. But don't forget how much he made you believe in the soul underneath all that sarcasm. We shipped his relationship with Courtney Cox's Monica Geller through the series, because in that chronic sub plot Perry sold the depth of Chandler Bing. I think also about an earlier TV performance, in Growing Pains, when his Sandy character appeared in a memorable guest plot as a character suffering from drug addiction. (That was all too close to home for the future version of Perry, alas.)

The end of Friends was the end of the good times for Perry, career-wise, in that nothing he did after that really stuck. However, he almost became a mini version of Ted Danson in that new TV shows kept betting on the star power and specific comedic persona he brought to the screen. Alas, none of those series lasted like Danson's did.

It's hard to say what role Perry's struggles with addiction may have played in what is being described as a drowning death in a hot tub on Saturday. Pickleball was also involved. We don't know if drugs were involved (if it was an accident), or if depression was involved (if it were intentional). The details are still being investigated. And I suspect we haven't heard the last of the reporting on the topic.

What we do know is when we lost Perry at 54, we lost a comic actor who shone brightly, not for long enough, and not with the perfect showcases we would have hoped for his talent.

RIP.

Intentionally funny, not bad enough to be funny, intentionally terrifying

As we are winding down to Halloween, I'm hitting the last part of my horror comedy schedule, having now watched more than a dozen movies this month that were either straight-up horror comedies or could be considered a horror comedy if you squinted.

This three-movie weekend horror recap includes one horror comedy that lived up to expectations, one that was pitched as a comedy but didn't work in that regard, and one, just for good measure, that isn't a horror comedy, but scared the shit out of me four months ago when I first watched it, so I thought I would show it to my wife.

You only get posters for the first two, because I've already written about the third movie and three movie posters is just too much.

My Friday night double feature was made possible by two movies under 90 minutes long. Unfortunately, I did get tired enough by the end that I had to watch the last ten minutes of the second one after 2 a.m.

Bride of Chucky was one of the unseen horror comedies I might have been able to produce before this series started without the benefit of consulting any lists. The Next Picture Show podcast mentioned it in relationship to M3GAN when they talked about that movie earlier this year, though I only listened to the podcast relatively recently since it took me until April to see M3GAN. I knew that this was considered to be the film where the Child's Play series took a definitive, intentional turn towards comedy -- so I didn't worry so much that I'd be seeing these movies out of sequence, which I usually considered a no-no. I saw the original movie back at the time -- and didn't like it very much, if my subsequent Letterboxd star ratings and placing on Flickchart are an accurate reflection of my feelings -- but didn't see Child's Play 2 or Child's Play 3, the third coming out a mere eight months after the second in 1991. 

The now poorly received series then went into hibernation for seven years, surely convincing most people they had stopped after a trilogy now that the limited initial love for these movies had dissipated. But someone -- writer Don Mancini, director Ronny Yu -- decided it was time to inject a little life into the series and into that doll that was inhabited by the soul of a serial killer, and they came back with what I can only imagine is the best Chucky movie anyone will ever make. (Though I did quite like the 2019 reboot.)

There isn't a moment of doubt that Bride of Chucky is both self-aware and in on the joke. The evidence locker where this murderous doll has been lying in pieces (presumably his fate at the end of Child's Play 3) also contains Jason Voorhees' hockey mask, Michael Meyers' Shatner mask and Freddy Krueger's knife fingers. The release of Scream two years earlier was probably the dividing line that allowed Mancini and Yu to go there, though there's no Ghostface mask -- too recent.

Jennifer Tilly comes in soon after and vamps gloriously, not because she's overdoing it but because a certain vamping quality is built into her performance style. We learn her character, Tiffany, was the girlfriend of Charles Lee Ray at the time he was killed and sucked into the body of the doll, so she's the one who engineers the theft of the doll from the evidence locker so she can extract his soul back into a body. However, she gets mad at the revived doll when she learns Ray never actually planned to propose to her back at that time, and laughs at the mere suggestion. (The ring she thought was an engagement ring was actually booty from a robbery.) So she locks him in a cage and buys a lookalike female doll in a bridal gown, mostly to taunt him as she figures out how she's going to continue to make his life hell. It actually goes the other way around when a bathtub electrocution consigns her soul to the new doll.

Having not seen enough previous or subsequent Child's Play movies to fully have a basis for comparison, I suspect the main way this registers as a comedy is the dialogue and line deliveries given these two characters, and the way they bicker. In order to preserve what's scary about a doll like the original Chucky, you can't give him too much dialogue, and the dialogue you do give him has to be consistently menacing. By giving these two characters a lot of time on screen just by themselves, you have to delve into purposefully banal exchanges that are just funny because of the disconnect between what they're saying and their little murderous doll faces. Effectively one of these two characters is, or both are, the protagonist of this film, whereas the other films would have been told from the perspective of a human.

Oh there are humans here, too -- Katherine Heigl, surprisingly, and John Ritter, plus some other actors who were new to me. (Though Ritter doesn't last too long and his death involves another humorous allusion to a stalwart horror franchise.) But we are interested most in the doll dynamics and they are consistently played for maximum possible laughs -- though not dumb laughs. (There's a scene where Chucky is using a Speak and Spell in his cage and has to spell "woman." He spells it "B-I-T-C-H," and the Speak and Spell corrects him on the spelling. This is actually a smart undermining of and poking fun at his toxic masculinity, since both Tiffany and the Speak and Spell are thwarting him.) 

In fact, I was surprised at how much intelligence went into making this movie. Yu came out of Hong Kong cinema and has some credibility as a filmmaker, which shows up here on multiple occasions. Can you believe there would be split diopter shot in Bride of Chucky? That's where a split lens is used to allow both the foreground and the background to be in focus simultaneously. Overall I was just surprised at how good this movie looked, especially since I thought Idle Hands (shot a year later) looked so crappy. It turns out it wasn't just that movies made in the late 1990s looked bad. 

I could go on about the joys of Bride of Chucky, but I have two other movies to get to.

It may have been too much to expect a movie made in 1982 also to be self-aware as a horror movie and exist in the realm of comedy, but I was led to believe The Slumber Party Massacre might be that movie. It made it onto at least one of the lists I consulted, and it was a title I was aware of just because of its B-movie pulpiness. 

As I began watching, though, I quickly concluded that if it was included on lists of horror comedies, that was because someone found its technique worth of ridicule. Alas, The Slumber Party Massacre had to be a lot worse than it was to fall into the category of "so bad it's good."

This is a classic example of the horror movie's sale of female flesh to its prospective audiences. That poster is a rather brazen admission of that agenda. At a slumber party, of course teenage girls get semi-naked (or fully naked) and have pillow fights, right?

In fact, the gratuitous nudity in some of the earlier scenes that take place in a high school locker room shower are exactly the types of things no filmmaker could get away with today. The camera goes up and down the naked bodies of the showering girls, with no other purpose than to reveal their flesh to the audiences. Imagine my surprise that the film was directed by a woman, Amy Jones -- likely with explicit instructions from a lot of men who knew what this movie had to contain for audiences to buy tickets.

The killer is an escaped convict who gets his hands on a drill. I did find there to be something sort of funny about how the film doesn't do anything to shroud his identity in the sort of mystery that is necessary to add extra menace to his character. No, when we see him, it's just some ordinary, perhaps slightly mean-looking guy without a mask or anything other means of preventing people from seeing his face and identifying him in a police lineup later on. (The mask has a practical purpose in addition to making the killer more terrifying.)

A number of characters gets sliced up by the drill in ways that are rarely imaginative enough to remember, but never incompetent enough or with poor enough effects to cause laughter. If you were expecting poor acting to push this into the realm of comedy, you'll be disappointed there too, as these are competent enough professional actors. The writing is a bit of a disappointment, too, in that it is perfectly passable. 

I felt like a movie like this would get either a Bride of Chucky-esque four stars on Letterboxd, or one star because it would be so terrible. The two stars I gave it were an indication of it disappointing in either direction and just being a bland, mediocre horror movie rather than a delight -- for either of the possible reasons it could have been a delight.

The last movie I am talking about today is Skinamarink, which I watched back in April and then tried to watch again Saturday night with my wife.

I say "tried" because she didn't last the whole movie. She did last long enough that I thought she would have overcome the initial barrier to entry, which would mean she'd be on board for the whole thing. Alas, she expired after 52 minutes, acknowledging that it was a good movie but that it was more creepy than scary, and that its slow pace meant she'd be asleep after watching ten more minutes -- so that would mean she wouldn't see it anyway.

I applaud her on the effort. She doesn't watch a lot of movies these days, and Skinamarink demands a lot of its viewers. There is almost no plot. We experience a haunting in a house seen almost exclusively from weird, canted angles, lit by sickly lamp light or the light of a television, where it is always night and where the images are captured through the fuzzy and grainy technology of a 1995 camcorder. Only once do you see the face of any of the four characters, only two of whom make any significant appearance. The creepy things that happen -- and there are plenty, eventually -- don't really start to gain in intensity until the second half of the movie, before which you are left entirely to imagine that something might be about to scare the crap out of you, some not-quite-seen thing moving in the grainy black. In fact, my wife was less than five minutes away from something that might have kept her involved until the end, but really, she probably just wanted to get to her own Saturday night viewing, and I can't blame her. She did try, and knowing the type of movie it was, I had given her permission to bail before we even started. I thought making that explicit was the least I could do, given her willingness to trust me on a movie she hadn't heard of and knew nothing about.

The anticipation of horrors to come certainly sustained me, even on a second viewing, as this environment tingled my spine throughout, even though I knew the approximate intervals at which the conventionally scary things would happen. Even those conventionally scary things are minimalist in nature, which I think only makes them more effective than some banal jump scare. The fact that I am getting chills even as a write about Skinamarink is a good indication of the sort of headspace this movie creates. I continue to find it a singular accomplishment in horror. Though now that I've watched it twice in just more than four months, I'll probably wait a couple years before a third viewing ... time enough to forget some of the things I know about it and again find myself in a constant state of anticipation and terror.

It's possible I will watch one more horror comedy on either Sunday or Monday night, but if not, it's certainly been a good theme this month. On Halloween itself, my wife and I plan to watch this year's horror movie Talk to Me, which neither of us has seen -- and which she should watch in its entirety, since it has her full buy-in. 

My first Netflix movie in the theater

Roma. Marriage Story. The Irishman. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Mank.

All these titles from acclaimed directors, and plenty others I don't want to look up, had their debuts in the cinema before streaming on Netflix, where the majority of people saw them. I have always been one of those majority.

In 2023, I'm finally seeing my first movie in the theater that I could have waited just two weeks to see on Netflix.

Unlike other people, though, I didn't have to pay for it. (Thank you, critics card.)

I wasn't actually planning to see David Fincher's The Killer this week. In fact, I didn't even know it was coming out this week. All my cinema-related yearnings had been geared toward another movie with "Killer" in the title, Killers of the Flower Moon, which I wanted to review this week to inject some life into the recently sluggish ReelGood website. It eluded me last weekend in Sydney when my wife suggested I go to a movie to pass the time on Saturday before our flight, then reneged the offer when she learned I wanted to see a three hour and 26 minute movie. With my mother-in-law in town from Sunday to Tuesday, and the movie never starting later than 7:30 on any given night, it just hasn't worked out.

Since I may now wait until my opportunity on AppleTV+ to see that one, it seemed appropriate that I jump the Netflix debut on The Killer. I mean, I can't have movies by Martin Scorsese and David Fincher come out in the same seven-day period, and wait until their streaming debuts weeks later to slake my readers' thirst on what I thought of them. (Said thirst is entirely hypothetical.) 

But until Wednesday, I didn't even know The Killer would be an option. That's when I saw it already listed on the marquee of the theater downstairs from where I work, a day before you could actually see it. I did end up seeing it the next day, and churned out the review that very night so I could get some new content up on the site before the weekend. (Here's the review if you want to read it.)

It may not have been the ideal movie to pop my Netflix/theater cherry. Although we do get some decent Fincher technique in this film, not to mention enough locations to make James Bond wonder why he never goes anywhere, I didn't think this was one of Fincher's most cinematic films. In fact, I am almost certain it's his least cinematic. Which is not to say it isn't cool to watch at certain points. It's just not a very interesting, original story, and the craft that is applied to that narrative skeleton doesn't stand out in a way that would justify revisiting this familiar territory. (I get into some particulars in the review if that interests you.)

More to the point, there isn't anything about it that I thought begged to be seen on a big screen. As I was watching it I kept thinking of a Steven Soderbergh movie that I found similarly underwhelming, Haywire, though I like this movie more than that one. As I also touch on in my review (I promise I will stop begging you to read my review), Soderbergh makes so many movies that you really don't care if one of them feels like a throwaway. (And it does seem to lessen the disappointment when three or four in a row feel like throwaways.) With Fincher, this is only his third feature since 2011, so if one doesn't land with you, it might be a long wait for the next.

Fincher is starting to have that in common with his most regular collaborator, Trent Reznor, though it would be more like their careers are trending in opposite directions. Reznor, as part of Nine Inch Nails, used to only put out an album every five years, only lately becoming so much more prolific and churning out about three musical scores a year. Meanwhile, it's almost unimaginable that Fincher had a five-year period that included Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. He's now become the comparative recluse.

I did enjoy hearing the works of Reznor and his buddy Atticus Ross, as I always do -- if you don't remember, Nine Inch Nails is my favorite band. (There's actually a cheeky reference to nine-inch nails in the dialogue of The Killer, as the trio of writers do their best Tori Amos impersonation.) However, I don't plan to buy the score, something I've done for both Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl, hoping they'd do something similar for me as what the Social Network score did. Much as I love the musical genius of Trent Reznor, he can't top his own work with that Social Network score -- not to mention the majority of the band's output.

The Social Network also seems to have been a peak for Fincher. Although I've admired each of the movies he's made since then, I haven't loved any of them, and The Killer will now be tussling with the likes of The Game to stay out of the bottom of my Fincher rankings. 

It may be no coincidence that he's started to shrink a bit, now two movies into his Netflix deal. Mank certainly didn't preview a receding of his ambitions, though I did wonder why he'd be willing to let the majority of people see that movie on such a small screen. So The Killer concerns me in that regard as well, because now he's making a movie that does not demand to be seen on the biggest screen possible.

I went to the cinema hoping I could urge it in that direction, but The Killer killed my aspirations. 

Video game brand confusion related to movie titles

When we were in Sydney over the weekend, we saw a series of bicyclists, about five in total, riding around the city in a straight line, each towing a miniature billboard for the video game Spider-Man 2.

All I could think was "That movie came out 19 years ago."

It's true that Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2, a sequel to Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, came out in 2004. This video game has nothing to do with that.

In fact, confusingly, Wikipedia tells me that it is the third game in a series that began in 2018 with Marvel's Spider-Man, which was followed in 2020 by Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. So not only are we inclined to confuse it with the movie of the same name, but even if our only context is video games, it still doesn't make sense within the chronology of its own franchise.

There are a couple reasons movie franchises have largely gotten away from numbering sequels -- or at least, having a number be the only factor differentiating the title from its predecessors. One is that it doesn't say much about what actually happens in the film, whereas a title like, say, Rise of the Silver Surfer makes it easier to say "Oh yeah, that one." 

But then there's also the fact that you can really only use a numbered title once. How much confusion did it cause when the second Rob Zombie Halloween movie was called Halloween 2 -- same as the sequel to the original Halloween. Maybe not confusion in the moment, but at least confusion when you are looking back on it years later and trying to discuss one of the two without all sorts of qualifiers to clarify what you're talking about.

The issue exists even when you are talking about different types of media. Because the title Spider-Man 2 belongs, in a very real way, exclusively to Raimi's movie, it leaves a person like me wondering if this is actually some weirdly delayed video game adaptation of that movie. The existence of two Spider-Men and the absence of Dr. Octopus might tell me it wasn't, but I don't know for sure. I don't really understand the video game world and most of the time, I don't try to.

And then there's just the basic lameness of the title. There's no intrigue in it at all, and the packaging, with puts Peter Parker and Miles Morales against a generic red background, is the perfectly boring accompaniment to that title. Like, if you didn't even want to make the game, just don't make it.

Well, the game is a huge hit. Again according to Wikipedia, it debuted last Friday to critical acclaim, and sold 2.5 units in the first 24 hours, making it "fastest selling first-party title in Playstation history."

It's clear that I should just bow out of the discussion because I have no idea what a "first-party title" is. But the lame title obviously didn't negatively impact this first-party title. Gamers bought it up even if they did think it was the long-awaited video game incarnation of Dr. Octopus.

And then suddenly I did find Dead Alive

I think I have now made three mentions on this blog how I did not expect to be able to get my hands on Peter Jackson's 1992 film Dead Alive during October to watch as part of horror comedy month, given its total absence from streaming services, rental outlets, and even Internet Archive, the free internet library I have recently discovered where you can find all kinds of lost causes. (My first opportunity to rewatch Dominik Moll's Lemming, a favorite from 2005 that I haven't been able to find anywhere since, will soon be courtesy of Internet Archive.)

But as has happened numerous times before, I forgot to check YouTube. And there it was.

I am not sure how strenuously the lawyers are protecting the copyright of things like Dead Alive. But I wonder if its total absence from everywhere else means that it is somehow in the public domain -- though that would make me think I'd find it everywhere rather than nowhere.

In any case, I did finally harpoon my white whale for October, the movie I felt was most likely to fulfill exactly what I'm going for by watching horror comedies this month.

That assumption could not have been more correct.

Before I get into the discussion of the film proper, I do want to discuss its title. As I was watching and the title Dead Alive flashed up on the screen, I felt certain that this was confirmation of its "true" title. Just now when I checked on Wikipedia, I realized that this was never the proper basis for any confirmation, because it depended on whether an American version was uploaded to YouTube or a Kiwi version. In New Zealand (and presumably everywhere else other than North America), this film is called Braindead, so that's undoubtedly how Jackson thinks of it. Logically, I should do the same.

Why am I not? I guess because it is a movie I have been at least distantly aware of since it first came out, when I was still living in America for another 20 years, and when every reference to it would have been as Dead Alive. It's like how I will always list Natalie Portman's film debut as The Professional even though I know it was called Leon in the director's home country of France. To be clear, if an Australian film were released today and given a new name for the U.S. market, I'd certainly go with the Australian name, because I would have encountered that first. I don't think there can be a hard and fast rule on this, so you just have to go with your gut on a case-by-case basis. And part of it is that I just like the title Dead Alive better.

However, to honor Jackson, I will also include a Braindead poster, then will forever afterward use the title Dead Alive.

Dead Alive starts out fairly tamely, although I should acknowledge that a man's hand and arm do get cut off in the opening scene. The more fascinating thing about this opening scene, if we are considering Jackson's entire career, is that it takes place on Skull Island -- you know, the home of King Kong. Given that this was still deep within Jackson's DIY phase, and only his third feature overall, it's hard to imagine his expensive and lavish King Kong remake was only 13 years off -- not to mention that he'd be making his first Lord of the Rings only nine years later (and starting on it well before that). 

The central affliction in Dead Alive is passed by bites, and indeed a crew from New Zealand is bringing back a rare monkey from this island (not the oversized one who is its most famous occupant) to house in a zoo in Wellington. It's an ugly little bastard called a rat monkey. I didn't get this from the movie itself -- maybe I didn't hear it properly as I was still adjusting to the Kiwi accents -- but Wikipedia tells me that this creature was spawned from "the rape of tree monkeys by plague-carrying rats." I have some questions about the biological logistics of this but let's move on.

Anyway, this awful monkey -- the first great practical effects creature we are introduced to -- is given to grabbing and tearing off the appendages of monkeys in neighboring cages, an activity you'd think would be enough to get him isolated a safe distance from all other creatures if not entirely put down. He gets a bite into the arm of the domineering mother of our main character, Lionel (Timothy Balme), a neurotic man whose father was killed in a drowning incident when he was young. Lionel is in love with a Spanish Romani shopkeeper's daughter, Paquita (Diana Penalver), despite the objections of his smother mother.

It isn't long before she gets sick, before flaps of her skin begin peeling off and before she loses an ear into the soup she's eating one day at lunch. No worries, she just catatonically eats it again, spitting out the pearl earring.

What follows is an increasingly hilarious spreading of a zombie plague that includes all sorts of partial and complete decapitations, exposures of rib cages, vomiting up of guts, sprays of green goo, popping of eyeballs, severing of limbs, extracting of teeth with pliers, halvings of bodies, and funniest of all, a scene of a priest karate kicking a half dozen zombies all around a church cemetery. 

This is just an absolute gore-soaked, viscera-laden joy. The labor of love that is evident in every single frame of Dead Alive makes this, understandably, a favorite of horror fans everywhere. Coming 11 years after Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, this movie pays loving homage to the mother of all horror comedies at every turn. (Well, at least Evil Dead II was clearly defined as horror comedy.) I mention this only because I am hard-wired as a critic to make explicit connections between movies when I write my reviews. Dead Alive is its own thing and only owes its zany, raucous spirt to what Raimi and others put in motion. (Raimi, of course, has his own debts to George Romero.) 

I just looked them up, and Raimi is only two years older than Jackson. What a wee little pup Raimi was when he got started. It seems likely that the title Dead Alive was chosen specifically in the U.S. market to remind us of both Romero and Raimi, and if that's the case and it brought more eyeballs to see the eyeballs that pop out of their sockets in Dead Alive, then all the better.

One thing I love about it, that you don't get from those other two franchises, is the Kiwi sense of humor that courses through this movie. Although I think the scenario would be funny as presented in any language or with any cultural origins, there's something about the New Zealand line deliveries and these characters in general that makes it all the more so. Just imagine Taiki Waitit's sense of humor in a full-on zombie movie and you'll get what I'm talking about. (In fact, I reckon What We Do in the Shadows is kind of his own version of this.)

And the gore -- oh the gore! It's delightful. I don't think I'm one to giving audible reactions to the films I'm watching, but I couldn't get through Dead Alive without laughing and making vocal grimaces ("Ugh! Ohhh! My God!") at the places Jackson gleefully goes in this film. 

Lastly I should mention the one fully practical "human" character in the film, which is a zombie baby that was the result of the posthumous sexual relationship of a zombie nurse and a zombie priest. This is pretty much the movie's signature character, so if you see a single image from Dead Alive it's likely to involve this guy:

I think this might be the evil twin of Kuato in Total Recall.

Dead Alive is the kind of movie where if I knew you'd seen the movie, I'd double the length of this post and keep saying "Remember the part where ________? That was awesome." With credit to Chris Farley.

But since I don't know if you've seen it -- and since I know you can find it on YouTube -- maybe I'll leave it to you to make these wonderfully gruesome discoveries yourself. 

I'm afraid it may be all downhill from here in terms of horror comedy, but I've got one more full weekend to try to top Dead Alive before I probably settle in for some more conventional scares leading up to Halloween. 

Not the same Stuff

We have Stuff in our refrigerator right now.

Oh, it's not the same white Cool Whip-looking dessert that starts bubbling out of the earth in the horror comedy I watched on Wednesday night, leading those who discover it to think that they can/should put it on the supermarket shelves for mass consumption. Our Stuff is a little different than that.

Early on in our marriage, when my wife and I started to establish a regular shopping list every time we went to the grocery store, she would often ask for a bubbly water with a hint of lime that she liked to drink with dinner. On one particular occasion, she could not think of what to call it so she said something like, "You know, that stuff I drink."

For whatever reason, the name stuck. Now it is shorthand between us. When she wants this bubbly water, she just says she need some Stuff. 

I don't think we'd capitalize it, but it's not something I ever usually have to write out. In fact, I'm capitalizing it primarily because the horror comedy I watched on Wednesday is called The Stuff. It's from 1985 and was written and directed by Larry Cohen.

Among the movies I've watched so far in October, this is clearly the farthest to the comedy side of the horror-comedy spectrum I'm exploring. One dead giveaway is that it co-stars former Saturday Night Live comic Garrett Morris, though he disappears from the narrative for entirely too long. (In fact, you'd say that they forgot about him except that he does reappear in the final scene.) Another is that it has a number of openly absurd moments, especially involving the military in the climax, that cannot be interpreted as anything other than comedy.

From a filmmaking perspective, though, it's pretty shoddy -- poorly edited, poorly directed, and generally poorly acted, despite the presence of big names like Morris, Michael Moriarty, Danny Aiello and Paul Sorvino.

I should tell you a little more about this Stuff than what I shared in the opening of this piece.

With zero preamble -- literally from 0:00:01 on the clock, the story has started -- we see a couple of old geezers on a work site in the snow. One discovers a white substance bubbling out of the ground, and as you do, he tastes it. The other walks up and thinks he's eating snow, but instead he's eating this weird substance that no one has ever discovered, with no consideration of the fact that it could be toxic. (I think you're seeing the comedy present from the start.) Seeing, I suppose, that the first guy has not toppled over, the second one has a bite and they both immediately start dreaming of millions in their pockets.

Due to some dubious paying off of testers at the Food and Drug Administration, the product is soon flying off the supermarket shelves and filling up the refrigerators of every home in America. (There are a number of time leaps in this movie that are handled very awkwardly in the editing.) Sensing that it is losing a significant portion of the dessert market, Big Ice Cream hires Moriarty's character, Mo Rutherford, a shady former FBI agent who will try to infiltrate The Stuff and figure out what it is made of so they can make a competing project. Of course, no one knows what it is actually made of, only that it is addictive as hell ... and eventually starts having unanticipated consequences for those who consume it.

What are these consequences? Well this is where the horror comedy gets really fun. Not nearly enough times in the story, we see a character's mouth open wide beyond normal human means, as seen in the poster above, and extrude a big oozing avalanche of that marshmellowy foam, often destroying the body on the way out. We first see this with a dog who is fed The Stuff. Why this doesn't seem to happen more often, and only on certain people/animals, is never really explained. Given the success of this product, we'd expect it to affect millions of people, but (spoiler alert) the final death toll is only reported in the thousands.

The slipshod way this film is thrown together is part of the fun. We can tell that everyone is on the joke, but I still think the script and the execution of this material could have been better. (I was going to say "tighter," but the movie is only 87 minutes long, so I guess that's pretty tight.) I had to demerit the film for its poor filmmaking, so I gave it only 2.5 stars on Letterboxd. I did have fun with it though.

And indeed, it was great to see the practical effects used during the film's too-few real horror scenes where the effects of The Stuff on the body are depicted. Between this and last Friday's Society, I'm more than making up for missing out on the practical effects in Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, which I don't expect to be able to find this month.

Surely the most representative image from Expend4bles

Reminder #7,681 that sex sells. 

When I post my reviews on ReelGood, there's always a master image that goes on the front page, and advertises the review to anyone scrolling through the site. In my view this should be the most representative image of the film I can find. You know, if I were reviewing Forrest Gump, it would be Tom Hanks on the park bench. That sort of thing.

The people who desperately try to sell tickets to their movies so their whole chain doesn't go under have a different agenda.

I mean, in the shameless field of movie advertising, there's accentuating an attractive woman in your movie who is one of the movie's main characters, and then there's just throwing flesh out there for flesh's sake.

I can't actually tell who this is a picture of, other than Jason Statham, but I looked on IMDB, and I don't think it's Megan Fox. It might be Levy Tran, but her hair appears to be blonde in the movie. And she's the 11th listed in the cast.

Okay in looking at other pictures, I guess it is Megan Fox. I guess she still has some remaining bits of sex appeal.

But the point is, is a picture of her in mid-ecstasy with Jason Statham really what you want people to believe they'll be getting if they go to this movie?

And in these desperate times, does that even matter anymore?

Expend4bles needed to figure out how to put Barbie, Ken or Robert Oppenheimer in the ensemble and they'd've been fine. 

Watching Mercy Road four times

The Australian film Mercy Road is the only film I was scheduled to see at MIFF but didn't actually see. One other film (Banel & Adama) got moved to a different night, but Mercy Road is the only one I had to cancel due to a scheduling conflict. (In fact, my Mercy Road ticket became my Banel & Adama ticket, before my Banel & Adama ticket became my Banel & Adama ticket on a different night.)

I've seen it now thanks to a screener link in advance of its theatrical release next Thursday. Ordinarily I would have watched it a little closer to that release date, but the link expires on Sunday and I'll be out of town for two of the four remaining nights before then. 

The early expiration isn't the only unusual thing about the Mercy Road link. The other unusual thing is that it's good for four views.

I know we critics are supposed to take our jobs seriously, but watching something four times is a bit much -- even if it is only 85 minutes.

There are likely explanations for this generosity in the quantity of views. For example, perhaps a single view is registered if you inadvertently press play on it and then stop and start over again. I don't know how a view is determined and they want to guard against the technical incompetence of especially the older critics.

But I do think there is at least the suggestion that you might watch this film, in part or in total, four times in order to analyze it perfectly before you write about it.

Some critics may have the time for that. I do not.

Because we certainly know the movie isn't for sharing with friends. In fact, this particular screener link is the only one I can remember ever having received that had my email address burned into the upper right hand corner of the screen, so that the lower half of a g just barely hung into the actual picture. If it gets pirated, they'll know exactly at whom to point the finger.

To the credit of John Curran's film, something did happen at the end of this movie -- which takes place almost entirely inside a single car, Locke-style -- that made me want to go back and watch it a second time. But then detracting a little of that credit, the urge to revisit what I'd seen stemmed not from missing clues they had cleverly dropped in the narrative, but rather, a potential incoherence to the storytelling. I can tell you that I googled "Mystery Road ending explained" after I finished, and because the movie isn't actually out yet, well, I didn't get my answer.

I probably won't watch it that second time, and just write my review based on what I did glean from the first viewing.

And viewings three and four will just disappear into the ether.

Audient Classics: The Birds

This is the tenth in my 2023 monthly series rewatching movies from before I was born that I loved but have seen only once.

I don't like magpies.

Australian magpies, I should say, which are different from what's called a magpie in other parts of the world.

These black-and-white birds are the most territorial I have ever encountered. Now granted, in my late teens and early 20s I worked on an island where if you went out on the rocks and approached a seagull nest, they would attack you. We carried sticks with us, not to use to hit the birds, but so they would attack the top of the stick when you held it up, rather than your head. 

I assume the same is true of magpies, or might be anyway. The problem is, their territory is the same as yours. You don't have to walk way out on the rocks to get to their nests. They build their nests in any old tree that they fancy, right in your neighborhood, and when it's nesting season, they swoop. Unless you want to carry a stick with you at all times you walk outdoors -- a strange look to be sure -- you are in constant danger of being swooped in the Australian springtime. Which is now.

I have not actually had a traumatic swooping experience, though about a month ago, a magpie flew very close to my son and me as we were walking to school. I think it was intended as a swoop, but the bird didn't touch us. Around the same time, though, my wife was swooped closely enough that she felt the bird's wing against her neck.

There was a swooping incident in the Sydney area some ten years ago where a mother carrying her infant was swooped and lost her balance. The baby suffered a traumatic injury in the fall and ultimately died. If I remember correctly, a Japanese tourist himself died from a perfectly located peck that perforated some part of his brain through his ear canal. Would have been one in a million, but it did happen. 

So, magpies are no joke. When I'm walking past one, I keep a wide berth and I eyeball it like David Duke walking through Harlem.

I even saw one weird situation recently where one magpie was walking along the bike path on the ground, and another one was flying in a tight circular pattern above it, changing altitudes from about waist height to head height if measured on a human. It was like they were some two-pronged attack machine -- even if this maneuver was primarily devised for defensive purposes. 

So I thought this was a good Halloween season to finally rewatch Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

Ranked #777 on my Flickchart (out of 6395 films), The Birds makes easily the lowest ranked "favorite" I've rewatched for Audient Classics, and therefore, the least qualifying for the definition of "classic." There were probably higher ranked pre-1973 horror movies I could have watched if I wanted a horror movie for October, and certainly higher ranked Hitchcock movies I've seen only once. (Rope, I'm looking at you.)

But keeping in mind the long preamble of this post, The Birds seemed like the right movie.

If you wanted, you could call it a horror comedy, keeping with the theme I'm pursuing this month in my other horror viewings. By today's standards, there is something funny about the snapping beaks of fake birds as the film's human characters fight them off. Sixty years ago, Hitchcock didn't have the more sophisticated effects we have today. (Thank God for that, I'd argue.)

Watching the film, though, you are not inclined to laugh. It's sinister as hell. We don't know why these birds are attacking, which makes them different from a magpie protecting a nest. They just decided they were fed up with millennia of micro- and macro-aggressions from humans and now, enough was enough.

A thing I really noticed on this viewing, which I'm sure is one of the regular talking points about The Birds, is that there is no conventional musical score, Bernard Hermann or otherwise. The only soundtrack is the menacing screeching of the birds, when they are attacking. Otherwise the only sounds are silence and dialogue.

What I found fascinating and unnerving -- another talking point I'm sure -- is why the birds sometimes attack, and sometimes don't. The movie's most famous scenes are undoubtedly not the attack scenes, but the ones where characters move slowly through an avian field perched on various fence posts and jungle gyms, as though waiting for a signal to attack, but not actually attacking. When a character gets close enough, a bird offers some mild pecks, kind of like a puppy's first attempts to nip someone's finger. But they know they do not have -- permission, would it be? -- to really go at this human. Not at this exact moment, anyway.

The thing that makes it a great horror, rather than just the genre of suspense that gets applied to the majority of Hitchcock's films, is the bodies left in the birds' wake. The first we see is a man whose eyes have been pecked out, lying in the corner of a room in his house, which he certainly would have thought was a safe haven. Then there's the character played by Suzanne Plechette -- who I initially mistook for Shirley MacLaine -- lying at the foot of her front steps, one of her own feet cocked up at an angle as it rests on a step. We don't really get to see her face -- a little bit of mercy from Hitchcock on that one -- and we only learn what happened to her because young Cathy explains it to Teppi Hedren's and Rod Taylor's characters after they extract her from the situation. Could Hitchcock have showed us the birds swarming on Plechette's Annie Hayworth -- covering her, as Cathy says? Maybe, but maybe he knew he couldn't get the effect right to convey the horror. Better leave it to our imagination.

One effect he does get right, I think, is the relentless close-range pecking of the birds in other situations, as they open new wounds and steadily exhaust the stamina of the victim. It's chaotic and unrelenting and you really feel the anxiety Hitchcock is going for. If you went into this film thinking someone couldn't be pecked to death, you emerge feeling quite the opposite.

Because it is a Hitchcock film, I found myself looking for the mise-en-scene techniques Hitchcock was famous for, ways of arranging elements in the shot that we always studied in film class. I don't think The Birds is really that sort of film, and that could be why it isn't among the director's most revered. Again this is something that would have been written about, but without reading anything about it myself, I'm concluding that Psycho was such a radical film that prompted so many varying reactions that he just wanted to make a more contained genre picture with his next film -- even though this does get into some of that movie's same themes about mothers and sons. (Jessica Tandy plays Taylor's mother, something I might not have noticed or at least remembered from my first viewing.)

I do think, however, that there was a little more carryover from Psycho. With the editing of the birds attacking at close range, I couldn't help but think of the knife strokes that end Janet Leigh in that film's infamous shower scene.

Other random observations:

1) The girl Cathy is played by Veronica Cartwright, who went on to a long career, including the woman who screams so horribly when she sees the alien burst out of John Hurt's chest in Alien.

2) I continue to be surprised that this is from a novel by Daphne Du Maurier. I think of her as a writer of latter day Elizabethan novels, as her books Rebecca, Jamaica Inn (which I've read) and My Cousin Rachel all are of that ilk (and all adapted into films, in some cases multiple films). That she would write a horror novel about attacking birds has always struck me as a disconnect, and continues to do so.

3) And while it was indeed based on Du Maurier's novel, I learned just now that part of the inspiration came from a real-life event Hitchcock heard about in a seaside town in California, in 1961, when the film was already in development. Sea birds dive-bombed the town as a result of what is now known to have been toxic algae, though the cause was a mystery at the time.

Okay, only two more months in this series ... time to clamp down and really figure out which, among my dozens of remaining choices, are most demanding of my attention. 

Reason #462 I love the Sun

The Sun in Yarraville is randomly having a weekend where they show all 25 Bond movies, and there are no overlaps, so if you wanted to watch all 25, you could.

As far as I know, there is no reason they are doing this except that they can. It's one of the reasons I love them.

It's the last weekend of November/first weekend of December, Thursday to Sunday, and they have tiered price entries for various levels of engagement.

And it's obviously a labor of love. You have to get the rights to show the films. You have to get all the prints. (It's probably digital projection, but the Sun does still do some projections of film.) You have to have staff come open the place no later than 7:30 a.m. to accommodate the first 8 a.m. showtimes, when they ordinarily would not be in for two to three hours after that. You have to have some stay well past midnight, when their last shows ordinarily don't start past 9:30, because Moonraker and The World Is Not Enough (of all films) start at 11:30 on those Friday and Saturday nights. Because, of course, they're going in order, though I probably needn't even clarify that.

They're going to allow you to work on Thursday, but not Friday.

The festivities kick off at the reasonable time of 5:30 on Thursday, November 30th, with the one that started it all, 1962's Dr. No. From Russia With Love and Goldfinger also get knocked off the schedule that day.

Things start bright and early on the first day of December with Thunderball at 8 a.m., followed consecutively by You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever, to wrap up Sean Connery and also get in the only George Lazenby movie. At 5 p.m. the transition is on to Roger Moore with Live and Let Die, followed by The Man With the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me and the aforementioned Moonraker.

Saturday the 2nd continues Moore's Bond reign with For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy and A View to a Kill. Timothy Dalton takes over for two at 2:40 with The Living Daylights and License to Kill, then it's Pierce Brosnan time starting at 7:20 with Goldeneye, Tomorrow Never Dies and The World is Not Enough. Three different Bonds in one day, for the second day in a row. 

Brosnan's final film, Die Another Day, kicks off Sunday morning at the same 8 a.m. start time, and then the baton is handed off a final time to Daniel Craig. You mightn't think that Craig would take all day, but then you'd be forgetting he made Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, Spectre and No Time to Die, each of which was made in the era of bloat, when a Bond film rarely clocked in any shorter than two hours and 30 minutes. Still, the final film starts at a reasonable 8:05, to get everyone out and home for a decent night's sleep before starting work again.

How many people will go to all 25 films?

Not many. But if they want to, there is a ticket package for that.

For $377 you can go to all the films. Some people will buy this package, probably, even though the more reasonable ten-film package is likely to be more popular. That one's only $155. But it might be fun to say you bought the bigger package. The Sun probably could have given people a bigger price break on the big one. If you are going to go to 25 films over a four-day period, I reckon you should be able to do so for closer to $10 per film.

But wait there's more. 

There is a super extravagant $777 VIP pass, which includes a ticket to all the shows plus an item from the candy bar for each show. Now this is just wrong. Granted, if you are going to be in movies all day, you have to eat. But I don't know how great you'll feel after eight popcorns or bags of chocolate, even if it is the only thing you eat that day -- especially since that'll be your diet for two days in a row on Friday and Saturday.

I should tell you that if this weren't enough, there is what they are calling an "amuse bouche" the weekend before, when three unofficial Bond films will be shown. That's when the Casino Royale from 1967 and Never Say Never Again will be shown. How does that get me to three? There is also something called "Casino Royale TV," which maybe differs from the Casino Royale movie. But given that this plays at the same time as the other Casino Royale on that Sunday the 26th of November, I guess you can't watch both.

So the big ticket packages include those movies as well, which they are pitching as 28 movies total, though two of them play at the same time. If that's a beef you have, well, you're probably doing it wrong.

Again I come back to the idea that a) there is no reason to do this, b) there are very few people who will probably actually shell out for these tickets and c) there is no c, but you have to list three things. In an era in which the bottom line is considered on literally any venture undertaken that involves some level of financial risk, it's refreshing to see the passion burn this brightly in the Sun programmers, against all odds and with very little prospect of real remuneration for their efforts.

I have to participate in this somehow.

Now, this is of interest to me anyway because I have been working my way through the Bond movies, having started mid-way through the career of Roger Moore and seen every movie since then. Within the past 20 years, I finally saw Dr. No, and then began working my way forward in Connery's movies from there. It's been slow going as I haven't even gotten to Lazenby yet, which means there's still one more canon movie starring Connery after that.

If I were to pick up on Lazenby's movie, which is next up for me, it would mean needing to attend a showing at 12:20 in the afternoon on that Friday. I can't make that work with my work schedule.

However, I could do some homework in the next six weeks before then and finish off both Lazenby and Connery. Then I could rock up at 5 p.m. in time for the first-ever appearance of "my Bond," Roger Moore, in Live and Let Die.

This sounds like a plan.

Now, if I want to take it a step further, I could stay for the rest of the night to watch The Man With the Golden Gun and The Spy Who Loved Me, getting out of there before the wretched Moonraker -- which is the oldest Bond movie I had seen until I finally watched Dr. No. This would finish off all five of the remaining Bond films I haven't seen as of today. And hey, if I weren't already burned out from three straight Bond movies, I suppose I could stay, as that headspace might be the perfect to experience the ridiculousness of Bond going to outer space.

The one thing the Sun website doesn't say is whether I can buy a ticket to just a single movie. It's probably obvious that I can, but I suppose if I had to pay $155, then I should at least stay for the four that night.

And if I do manage to do this, the event will have been going on long enough that I'll be able to tell if anyone has been there for all seven of the movies that had played before I showed up -- or all nine if you include the previous weekend, or all ten if they managed to make a copy of themselves to watch both older versions of Casino Royale. It'll be the perfect environment to strike up that sort of conversation, since the others present will be eager to chat. 

And if there isn't anyone else at Live or Let Die, at least I can get an update/commiserate with the staff.

Part of me would enjoy dipping in and out for the rest of the weekend, but to be honest, Bond movies have little repeat viewing value for me. In fact, there's only one Bond movie I've seen more than once, which remains the one I had on VHS when I was young, Octopussy. I've probably watched that seven or eight times in total.

Though never on the big screen, so maybe I'll have to come back the next morning for at least that one.

If you happen to be an Australian, more specifically a Melburnian, reading this, you can find more information and buy tickets here. 

Two twisted microcosms of society

I'm trying to thematically lump together the last two horror comedies I've watched this month so I don't have to go the unsustainable "one movie/one post" route in writing about them here.

However, I was almost going to write a separate post about how Society, which I watched on Friday night, was my potential practical effects substitute for Peter Jackson's Dead Alive a.k.a. Braindead, which it is looking increasingly unlikely I am going to get my hands on this month. I ended up writing about something else yesterday instead. 

Then on Saturday night I watched a Swedish horror new to Netflix that I had only known about for approximately 24 hours.

Brian Yuzna's 1989 film Society came up on more than one of the lists I looked at for horror comedies, and at the start, I thought the reason it was considered funny is that it's a low budget film made in the late 1980s. Now mind you, most of the technique in terms of acting and writing belies the low budget, but the cinematography itself is not great, and everything looks, for want of a better word, dated. I feel like it might have even looked dated in 1989.

As the film progresses toward a truly nuts climax, though, it became more clear that this is a film that isn't just going to get by on the notions it presents about a possible secret society of people who engage in murderous orgies, but actually show us one of these events ... and all the practical makeup effects it requires.

I don't think you necessarily need to issue spoiler warnings for movies that are 34 years old, but it's possible some of you reading this will be using my words to get ideas for things to watch on your own Halloween viewing schedule. So I won't go into detail about how this movie ends. But I will say that the movie holds back most of its effects until the very end, and they are the kind of thing that Jackson certainly would have adored at that time. (I googled to see if he'd made any public comments about the movie, but I couldn't get the necessary search terms to be sure.)

In terms of the "society" theme, other than its pointed title, the movie does include how the haves and have nots both of their predetermined role in a system that is created by the haves. I won't go into it any further than that.

The Conference is a more straightforward film that might be more like a horror satire than a horror comedy, though the reprehensible nature of some of the characters, and the comeuppance they receive, certainly seems to qualify it as a viewing for this month. (Part of the reason I chose it, also, is that it gives me something to review this week. In a way, being a horror comedy was just a bonus.)

The Swedish film involves a retreat by a group of nine public sector employees on the eve of breaking ground on a new shopping center that they brought to fruition. They're at a remote camp that's equipped with things like zip lines where the team can engage in trust activities and complete competitive group tasks. Their phones are taken away from them so they can unplug. Of course, it's a great -- though not totally unexpected -- setup for a horror movie.

The mask you see in the poster -- which is supposed to be a mascot for the shopping center -- gets worn by an intruder who begins picking them off one by one. The satire, though, comes from the corrupt leadership of this group, who may be setting the project up to fail for the benefit of another company who is going to sweep in and capitalize on the ruins of the project -- in exchange for cushy jobs to the key collaborators. 

A work conference makes for an interesting dynamic for a horror frame story, because unlike an excursion between supposed friends -- which is the setting for most horror movies -- a truly diverse set of personality types may be represented, since these people only came together because they happened to have interviewed for the same job. And of course the way their dynamic echoes the larger dynamic of different people in a society is ripe with satirical potential.

A good time for sure, if perhaps not quite as memorable as it may have had the opportunity to be.

Eroticizing T-Swift

This movie has just opened this week, having gathered a staggering $100 million in advanced ticket sales, making it already the most successful concert movie of all time. But I've been seeing the posters for a while now.

There was a time when I would prioritize seeing the biggest concert film of the year. Today, I can't remember the last time I've seen a concert film in the year in which it was released (and pretty rarely go back to watch one, either). 

I don't think something like Summer of Soul counts, because that's old footage and therefore fits clearly into the category of documentary. I guess with new concert films, I think of them more as arms of the artist's promotional apparatus than "real" films with something to say beyond selling the music.

(I just thought of the last concert film I watched at the time it was released, which was Beyonce's Homecoming. I liked it.)

Taylor Swift presents sort of a different case than the typical concert movie made for PR reasons. She is almost indisputably the biggest music star working today, though I should be careful how I throw that word "indisputably" around. On a podcast I was listening to this week, one of the podcasters said that Swift was "indisputably" more famous than Madonna ever was. I dispute that.

But because she's such a big star, she crosses over into "general interest topic about which I should know more," not just "musical artist." Not unlike Beyonce. Or Madonna. (Madonna's Truth or Dare may have been one of the first concert films I ever saw, if you want to call it that.)

I don't think I could bring myself to see this 168-minute film in the theater. In fact, I'm sure I couldn't. There would be 'splaining to do with the wife -- why am I going and sitting among teenagers to watch a movie about Taylor Swift? -- and at least at home it clears the lower bar of "movie you watch at home."

Probably part of the reason I think there would be 'splaining to do is that I know I am attracted to Taylor Swift, and I think my wife would suspect that's more the reason I'm watching the movie than being a fan of her music. I actually am a fan of her music, to the extent that a person who would never actually buy any of her music can be a fan of it. But I can't deny that she sort of makes my toes curl too.

And I can't deny that this movie poster is openly trying to titillate me.

To put it bluntly: In this poster, Swift is wearing the same expression that they used to put on the faces of women on billboards for strip clubs around Los Angeles. 

Yes this is a picture of Taylor Swift singing. Yes it is also supposed to look like a picture of Taylor Swift being pleasured.

It's another reminder of a not-very-hot take: Even the artists who cultivate a pure image become sexualized, if they are women and if there is a covert opportunity to do so.

This poster does fall into the category of covert, I'd say. It's a dog whistle for men (and women) who covet her rather than wanting to be her. For everyone else, like the parents of the young children who like her, it's just a woman singing.

And so I don't know at this point if Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour will make it onto my year-end list. My guilty conscience might force me to try to watch the whole two hours and 48 minutes at a time when my wife isn't around, which is a rare window to get. And that's if it's even available on video before the middle of January. The movie has some sort of exclusivity deal and I could see it being a theater-only event. 

However -- and this really could give me the excuse I need to watch it, even if I'm only making that excuse to my own brain -- Wikipedia says that it "received widespread acclaim from critics, most of whom praised the camerawork, editing and sound for capturing the show's spectacle and energy."

It doesn't say "And the rest of whom just liked looking at Taylor Swift."

Sean Whalen, horror comedian

What are the chances that the same actor would appear in two of the first four randomly chosen horror comedies I watched in October?

Would it indicate that you can be typecast to appear in horror comedies?

That might be the case for Sean Whalen, who appeared in the first movie I watched, The People Under the Stairs, and now follows that up with Thursday night's viewing, Idle Hands.

Who is Sean Whalen?

He's a character actor who kind of reminds me of James Gunn's brother, Sean Gunn. You'd know him if you saw him.

Wait, I can show you pictures. This is a visual medium you are currently engaging in.

Here he is as one of the titular people under the stairs in 1991:

And in quite a dissimilar role, as a police officer, eight years later, in Idle Hands:

So I thought it was worth checking his IMDB to see if he's in any other movies I would characterize as horror comedy -- and if, in fact, I might expect to see him again this month.

I clicked into a number of his 140 titles that sounded like horror movies -- he has a lot of them -- and got the following that also were characterized as comedies:

Road Kill (2005) - A short where he plays a man on a killing spree trying to complete one final murder for his masterpiece to be complete. 

Hatchet III (2013) - I think this series is based on a killer carrying a hatchet?

Caesar and Otto's Paranormal Halloween (2015) - Brothers live out some of horror's most terrifying scenes when they housesit a house with levitating objects and signs of possession. Sounds like it pays homage to a lot of horror classics.

Clowntown (2015) - Although this 13-minute short does not actually have horror listed as one of its genres, consider this logline: "Two down-on-their-luck party clowns find their turf invaded by vampire cirque mimes who have marked them for death."

World of Death (2016) - Appears to be an omnibus film as there are three directors listed and it's two hours and 22 minutes long. The logline is only "Death has no borders."

None of these movies are on the list of 48 titles I shortlisted for this series, though one gets close: Hatchet is on my list, but Whalen doesn't appear in the series until Hatchet III. Could I skip straight to Hatchet III? Would I be confused about what was happening? 

So while it's clear that others found him desirable to cast in horror adjacent projects like horror comedy -- especially shorts, where you could get him as a recognizable face for relatively little money -- he was more typecast in straight horror than horror comedy. (3 from Hell and Halloween II are among those sorts of credits, along with a lot you haven't heard of, so he was obviously a favorite of Rob Zombie.)

Two other comments about his filmography, though:

He's in Men in Black as "Passport Officer." Sci-fi comedy is kissing cousins with horror comedy, I reckon.

He's in my beloved The Cable Guy! Which certainly has its horror comedy moments. 

So that'll probably be the end of Sean Whalen this month, but hey, this exercise has put a name to the face of a familiar character actor -- and who knows, if he googles himself, maybe he'll read this.

As for Idle Hands, well, it was a bit of a disappointment. Everything related to Devon Sawa's possessed hand was better when I saw it the first time, in Evil Dead II. Sawa does as much as he can with it and his performance is reasonably entertaining, as is the performance of his two buddies he kills early on, played by Seth Green and Elden Henson. But the script doesn't give us much, including no explanation for how Sawa got possessed in the first place, and way too little about Vivica A. Fox's character who has been searching out this spirit that possesses people's hands. They should have been giving us updates on her character throughout, yet we meet her once and then she's gone for like 40 minutes. 

It's also one of those movies that reminds me how good I thought movies looked in the 1990s when I was watching them, and how bad they actually looked.

One thing that looked good, though, was Jessica Alba when she was only 18. I am reminded this is the first time I became aware of her, even though I only saw the trailers at the time. 

Sorry, that almost got pervy there for a moment. I must have been possessed. 

War. Again.

In the midst of multiple successive posts about horror comedies (or is it comedy horrors?), I am forced again to put the brakes on the frivolity to acknowledge the outside world.

After years of simmering tensions and small-ish outbreaks of violence, which from my vantage point appeared to be quieting down rather than heating up, Israel and Palestine are at war.

It's not something I'm equipped to cover on this blog. This is a movie blog. The horrors of war are not something I dig into deeply. I've never had a geopolitical mind and though I am of course compelled to read about these horrors to stay across what's happening, I don't struggle to understand the minutiae of these conflicts, particularly the minutiae that contributed to them happening in the first place.

But this particular one, no more or less sad than the Ukraine conflict (at least not yet), hit close to home. That's only one of the reasons I'm writing about it today, the other being that the inherent frivolity of my posts seems callous if I don't write a post like this at a time like this.

On Sunday, an Egyptian police officer opened fire on an Israeli tourist group in Alexandria, his personal instinct to expand the borders of this war. He killed two people and injured a couple others.

My wife's aunt and uncle were in the next tour group over. In fact, my wife's uncle even thinks he saw the shooter.

They're okay. That's not the point.

The point is that we really don't know what the full effects of such a conflict could be, given the hatred that exists on both sides of it, and the likelihood of retributions on allies -- which include people who may not even realize that's how they are characterized in the eyes of the desperate and the angry.

I'm already starting to imagine that somehow the two conflicts currently going on will whip themselves up into a nuclear conflagration that engulfs the whole world. I'm not sure the sorts of philosophical alignments exist to pair various combatants with other combatants, but as we all know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

For now, I don't hope to understand it all, though in this case, the causes go back decades. 

Why now? I guess that's the part I don't understand.

I still cherish the frivolity of writing about movies, an escape from these other issues that dominate our thoughts with regrettable frequency. The next post you read on this blog will be that sort of post. 

But when something has just occurred that some people are calling "Israel's 9/11," well, you'll find no frivolity here today.

Should it be horror comedy or comedy horror?

I'm trying to figure out if I have been incorrectly describing the movies I'm watching for Halloween this month.

"Horror comedy" is the term I am inclined to use naturally. I think everyone gets what you mean when you say that, and it seems to be the most regularly used term out there. 

But when I was on Wikipedia to check some details about both of the movies I watched on Saturday, Teeth and The Voices, I saw them both described as "comedy horror."

Hmm.

I get this usage on a fundamental, grammatical level. The first word functions as an adjective while the second word functions as the genre name. "Comedy horror" is how you should describe a horror movie with comedic elements, as opposed to a comedy with horrific elements, which is what "horror comedy" would be.

Two things give me pause about choosing this naming convention, though.

1) While I think "horror" works as an adjective, I don't think "comedy" does. Granted, they both have a proper adjectival form, "horrific" and "comedic." But "horrific comedy" and "comedic horror" don't really work as subgenre names. The first word in both phrases is functioning as both an adjective and a genre name, but horror still works better in that regard. That can probably be explained by the fact that you say "I saw a horror movie over the weekend," but no one says "I saw a comedy movie over the weekend." 

2) If we do want to use the phrase "horror comedy" to mean a comedy with horrific elements, well, I don't know what an example of that would be. You are talking about a movie that is first and foremost a comedy, but has horror draped on top of it. I guess maybe, if you wanted to make a distinction between them, Scary Movie could be a "horror comedy" while Teeth and The Voices would be a "comedy horror."

But we need these to be casual use phrases, ones that don't require explanation. If you are going to draw a distinction between movies that are primarily designed to make you laugh, that have horror elements in them, and movies that are primarily designed to scare you, that also sometimes make you laugh, it may not be immediately clear you are making that distinction just by using both subgenre names in the same conversation. It may just appear to be inconsistency. And then once you are getting into explaining it, the discussion just gets all the more cumbersome.

And I've just thought of one more justification of the term I prefer. If we're really thinking about it in terms of subgenres, it makes a certain sense to list the genre that's higher on the hierarchy first, and then the modification to that genre. You want to get oriented in a larger sense, then learn the way that orientation is being tweaked. So that would be horror -> comedy, therefore, "horror comedy."

The more I think about it, the more uncomfortable I am with either term. As old a term as it is, dating back centuries if not millennia, "comedy" does bear the burden of a certain sort of low culture. Most of the movies I watch this month that are categorized as either "horror comedy" or "comedy horror" are more likely to have a grim, gallows humor, much more black comedy than straight comedy. Something can be funny without actually making you laugh. "Comedy" tends to have overtones of the sort of desperate, laughs-at-all-cost approach of a hack standup comedian. 

Clearly, though, I'm stuck with one of the two. Above all other considerations, "horror comedy" just rolls off the tongue better. So I think I'll stick with that, whether or not the term really does justice to the all the nuances of the films assigned to that subgenre.

Two horror comedies with teeth, only one literally

Who said my October horror comedies had to be movies I haven't seen?

The lists I consulted to get my (48-movie) shortlist kept acquainting me with a movie I'd squirmed at and loved when I saw it almost exactly 15 years ago in September of 2008, Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth. You know, the one about the girl with vagina dentata. 

Although I have plenty of movies to choose from (not all of which are as available to me as I'd hoped), I couldn't resist the urge to get in a second Teeth viewing, especially since it's available on more than one of my streaming services. I'd actually planned to make it sort of a midnight movie second half of a double feature after The People Under the Stairs on Friday night, but due to my usual episodes of falling asleep during that movie, I didn't finish Wes Craven's film until after 1.

At this point, though, I'd come along too far in my desire to revisit Teeth to exclude it from my schedule. So I made it a first movie on Saturday, knowing that might mean it was the only movie -- though I did manage a second one on Saturday night, this time finishing at almost 2.

Teeth held up. It's got some great gruesome severed penises and fingers, each one of which punches out a guffaw of laughter. This is, in a way, the perfect mode for horror comedy. It's gross enough that you can't help but laugh, while also being in the realm of absolutely horrifying.

It's smart that Lichtenstein never shows us a close-up of Jess Weixler's vagina, and not only because that would push the R rating. (Interestingly, it's not to preserve her modesty -- although one romantic scene is shot to avoid seeing her topless, the subsequent scene shows her checking herself in the mirror where you see everything.) We never find out where the teeth are, whether they are on the outer edge like some kind of Saarlac pit in Star Wars, or only at a certain point back protecting the hymen. 

We do know, I think, that they are retractable. I'd forgotten that Weixler's character actually has one complete sexual experience with one of the characters in the movie, where the teeth never make an appearance, because she is under the impression it's consensual (because she has been mildly drugged by the guy, though at least it was a pill that he offered her rather than one he slipped in her drink). That gives us optimism that she can live a normal sexual life going forward, assuming she remains at ease with her partner. Even consensual sex, though, can become rougher than expected at a certain point, and it remains to be seen whether she can control her dentata in that scenario.

The second movie was another one that came up multiple times on the lists I consulted, and was also available on multiple streaming services. That's Marjane Satrapi's The Voices from 2014, starring Ryan Reynolds, in which he plays a mentally ill man who believes his pets are encouraging him to go on a killing spree. (The cat, specifically -- the dog is the angel on his shoulder. Both are voiced by Reynolds.)

I loved this movie. It is funny -- some of what the pets say is gold. The cat has a Scottish accent (or was it Irish? I get them confused when there's no other context) and is a right bastard, and the dog is sort of a dimwitted farm boy type, but lovingly so. They have a great rapport with each other as well as with Reynolds' Jerry.

But this movie is also dark, which probably shouldn't be a surprise from the director who gave us Persepolis. Jerry semi-accidentally murders a number of the characters we get to know -- the situations he gets himself into start out without that intention, but then end up there through choices he makes. This allows him to retain some of our sympathies. He chops up their bodies and stores them in tupperware containers, and the heads in his refrigerator. Ew.

But the real darkness comes from his emotional damage from his childhood, when he was surrounded by a terrible father and a suicidal mother -- who also heard voices. All the humor dissipates during the scenes in which we get to see this damage, and the resulting effects on his personality as an adult.

Having it both ways is what makes The Voices such an astonishing achievement. It's rare to be able to bounce between tones, and the film ends with an incredible closing credits sequence that steps outside of either of the film's primary modes. I will be watching this film again soon.

Okay, back to normal programming for the weeknights.