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Reviews
Scooby-Doo! Moon Monster Madness (2015)
A lot of facepalm humor
This has the vibes of "Trick or Treat, Scooby-Doo!", despite predating it by seven entire years. Nothing really seems to matter and the logic behind jokes seems to change on a whim.
So the setup for this one is that the Scooby gang wins free tickets to be among the first people to take an interstellar cruise and end up stranded on the moon as they are hunted by a not-quite-Xenomorph.
One ongoing joke is that Fred thinks his space suit is really cool and refuses to take his helmet off; the joke being that he can't hear people with the helmet on. Except... sometimes he can? And whether or not Fred can hear someone or not changes completely at random. Those kinds of extremely dumb, low-hanging fruit jokes are all over this thing.
Nobody in this movie seems to enjoy it. Velma's skepticism comes off as being a nagging buzzkill in the worst ways. She's constantly being harassed by a paparazzi TV show host and jealous that one of the space crew seems to think Daphne is the smartest member of the gang. And that whole plot point, that Daphne is somehow smarter than Velma, is obviously never going to stick in a series that's 60+ years old. And Fred falls back into the role of everyone barely tolerating his dopey antics.
Most of the supporting cast is annoying, too, from the Steampunk-themed Elon Musk stand-in, to the paparazzi guy, the sports star, and the alien conspirator. A lot of them are written to be funny, but they come from the class of being annoying as a substitute for comedy. It's a lot of facepalm humor.
Also on the list of frustrations: Jennifer Hale playing two different characters and doing the same voice for both of them, barely an octave apart.
There are honestly a million ways to pick this movie a part. At least the animation's pretty decent, and the alien attack scenes are fun. But when it comes to the rest? Not much of a fan, and I'm starting to wonder if I'm the problem, or if most of the people who put these movies together just don't care.
Scooby-Doo! and the Curse of the 13th Ghost (2019)
Practically an insult
This movie is such a waste. Like, obviously somebody had the idea to revisit 13 Ghosts, but didn't seem to have real love for the series or any idea on how to successfully revisit this setting. So the story meanders around, throwing the viewers a few table scraps of references, but nothing ties together or feels very cohesive.
The worst being the inclusion of Flimflam. We're told only a year has passed since the events of the 13 Ghosts TV show, but Flimflam has aged a good ten years if not more, with nothing more than a simple "I had a long overdue growth spurt" to explain it away.
The 13 Ghosts TV show was all about chasing ghosts with strange powers and we get none of that here. There's a big focus on getting Velma to believe in ghosts, meaning a lot of this can't be too fantastical or magical, and that really sucks all the fun out of something that notably featured a wizard.
It also features Fred going through an identity crisis after he learns Scooby, Shaggy and Daphne had a string of adventures on their own. A lot of Curse is him trying to figure out "what he's good at," in a world post-Mystery Inc. Where his whole deal was being obsessed with learning about and setting up elaborate traps. It does not land.
The whole thing feels like it was written by a focus group and I was very bored and let down.
Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase (2001)
Not quite as advertised
I was under the impression this was "one of the good ones," but I'm willing to bet those opinions came from people who were born in or after 1990.
I remember this movie getting sold on the Scooby gang having to face off against all of their old villains again while also meeting computer clones of themselves (modeled after their classic appearances, as opposed to the modernized ones that appear in this movie).
That doesn't happen until the last, say, 20 minutes of Cyber Chase, which feels like a bit of a rip off. And almost all of the "old villains" are third stringer nobodies; outside of The Creep, none of them are the iconic Scooby villains you'd think of.
I also remember there being video game adaptations of this movie specifically, and most of it is spent teleporting the Scooby Gang around to different locations in cyber space -- something that blatantly felt like a setup for a video game. Which is... actually just the plot of this movie. I don't know whether to give it points for that, or take them away. It's cheap, but it's thematically appropriate.
I'm taking away points for how dead simple this mystery is, though. Obviously since the gang spends half the movie trapped in a video game there's not much time to set up suspects or play with red herrings, but you'd have to be blind not to figure this one out, because they lay it on really thick. It's pretty softball stuff.
Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders (2000)
Not a lot going on
The story here is coasting on fumes. It's pretty obvious what's going on by the end of the first act and it feels like the villains get unmasked barely even halfway through the movie. The rest of it is just going through the motions.
Also, like, the villains don't really seem to be doing anything wrong? This movie isn't about a land dispute, or property ownership, or any of the usual Scooby-Doo trappings. It's about an unclaimed gold deposit, and there isn't even any demonstrable conflict over it. But the bad guys are bad and the Scooby Gang is good, so they need to be stopped, I guess. It's very strange.
A silly moment: there are military police in this movie that are visibly carrying pistols but they never ever think to use them on anything for any reason.
With the way the movie plays out, it's possible their guns aren't real. But it's never addressed, and the movie's so thin on plot, there was more than enough room to at least comment on it. Or at least to make sure they weren't visibly armed.
Lego Scooby-Doo! Blowout Beach Bash (2017)
Better than a lot of other Scooby movies
As far as Scooby-Doo movies go, this one's pretty good. The gang heads to the beach to take a well-deserved vacation and get roped into a mystery involving the ghosts of evil pirates. Shaggy, Daphne and Scooby are upset that Velma and Fred can't pass up the chance for a good mystery and the pair try to prove they can let their hair down.
The mystery in this one is a little more complicated than you typically get from most Scooby-Doo media, which leads to a really good reveal scene at the end where the layers of who did what, where, and how get peeled back bit by bit.
My only question is: why did this have to be Lego branded? Lego stuff barely comes up. Every now and then characters will gesture at the idea that their world is made out of bricks, but almost nobody ever uses legos as legos. There's maybe two whole scenes in the entire thing where it actually matters.
This could have just been a normal Scooby-Doo movie and it wouldn't have lost very much.
Cuckoo (2024)
Hard to talk about without spoiling it
This is a hard movie to describe without giving away a lot of what it's about. It's a very layered movie and there's a lot going on. It's so tightly woven that if you tug at one thread you kind of have to unravel the whole thing in order for it to make sense.
The short of it being that a 17 year old girl named Gretchen moves in with her dad right as he takes a job in a remote part of Germany in order to build a new resort for a touchy-feely weirdo. Family tensions run high as Gretchen begins piecing together strange occurrences and sounds she's hearing right as her half-sister begins suffering from epileptic seizures.
The vibes are like a less-funny version of Get Out, but not quite. Again, there's a lot going on here, but the long and short of it is I was pretty enraptured. Some of the creature stuff can be a little silly when you get to see it head on, and there are hints that there could be more creature stuff we don't get to see -- and I wish we did.
Pretty decent, though.
Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995)
The fun kind of dumb
The more of these I watch, the more I miss this era of action movies.
This is a blisteringly stupid movie where terrorists hijack a commuter train because they think that makes it impossible for the government to track them, as they remotely dial in to a secret killer satellite that shoots an earthquake beam.
Unfortunately, Casey Ryback is also on this train, the former navy seal turned sous-chef. Ryback's name is spoken in this like a hushed whisper, as if every mercenary and criminal knows who he is, because he's the best of the best of the best. He's Batman, MacGyver, and Dirty Harry all rolled into one.
Most of the actors present in Under Siege 2 chew the scenery as you'd expect from this era of action movie. Unfortunately, they're put opposite Steven Seagal, who only really has two modes: squinting and mumbling.
That's honestly part of the fun. When this movie's good, it's really enjoyable! And when it's bad, it's firmly in so-bad-it's-good territory. From the questionably dated green screen effects to some of Seagal's awkward fight scenes and the wild crash scene, it's all a great ride.
A stunningly dopey, very entertaining movie.
Bubba Ho-Tep (2002)
Getting old sucks.
Imagine being 19 years old in 2002, recently discovering and falling in love with Bruce Campbell movies, and excitedly booting up Bubba Ho-tep, a horror-comedy... about how getting old sucks and the world will abandon you as you wait for death. And it was specifically Bruce Campbell playing an old, pathetic, washed up Elvis impersonator who might actually just be the real Elvis in disguise.
I did not want to confront the idea that one of my new favorite actors was over the hill. And they really pull every trick in the book to make this guy look fat and crusty and withered.
I didn't find it funny. I didn't find it scary. It was sad and unnerving.
Bruce was only 44 when this was filmed. This was before Burn Notice. This was before Ash vs. The Evil Dead. This was before a lot of stuff!
And now 22 years later, I am approaching the age he was during shooting. And this movie hurts a lot less.
I'm still not sure it's funny, though. Or scary. It is weird, though. It kind of has the vibe of a weirder episode of The X-Files. That strange sort of dark tongue-in-cheek quality. It's definitely got the special effects budget of your average X-Files episode, too.
And I enjoy it a little more than I did back in 2002.
But only a little.
Alien: Romulus (2024)
Way too derivative
For the first 30-40 minutes, this was a great movie. A really interesting look at colonist life under the thumb of Weyland-Utani. The characters it sets up are interesting, their situation feels fresh and it makes sense they want to give the company the middle finger.
Unfortunately, once we're full swing in being an Alien movie, it feels like it probably fell prey to executive meddling, because the next hour and a half is almost non-stop references to other, better movies. The only thing scarier than a xenomorph is the studio being afraid that it's been more than 10 minutes without referencing something they've already done before. There are multiple, extended, repeated tips of the hat to everything from the first movie all the way up through Alien 3, Alien Resurrection and Prometheus.
And not in a cute sort of "it's lore!" way, either. I mean there are characters that dress, do, or say things just because it's from one of the previous movies. It is a cowardly lack of originality.
Every now and then you catch glimpses of the movie we saw in the first act. A little bit of that creativity seeps back in. It is then immediately followed by someone yelling "Get away from her, you (...)" in maybe the single most out-of-character moment I've seen in a movie in my entire life. But they said the thing. Remember the thing? From the other movie? They said it here too! That's cool, right?
That kind of stuff wears you down. Even when Romulus is being new, creative and interesting, it slowly stops mattering. It simultaneously feels like a movie made for people who have never seen an Alien movie, and for people who have obsessively re-watched every Alien movie. It struggles to find a common ground between the two, and that kind of unraveled the whole thing for me.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
Scattered, jumbled, but better than I expected
I was kind of dreading this movie. Digging up a beloved 80's classic and making a modern sequel rarely works.
I... was actually pleasantly surprised on just about every level by Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
For one, when you get sequels like this, they're almost always over-stuffed with references to the original movie(s). There's always this desire to recapture the magic by simply repeating classic lines of dialog and scenes wholesale. There is a status quo that must be preserved in order for the movie to be marketable to the 30-and-40-somethings that are being hooked by their desire to feel 10 years old again.
BJ2 actually has a lot less of that then you'd think. This is very much about what happened to these characters over the last 30 years and how they've grown and changed over time. Everybody is a different sort of person now, and that's okay. It's fresh and doesn't feel too cloying, even though Michael Keaton growls as Beetlejuice now more than he cackles.
It's far from a perfect movie, though. Mainly, there's a little too much going on. This movie is jammed full of four or five competing plotlines and some of them are clearly given more priority than others. We're juggling Beetlejuice's problems, the afterlife's problems, Lydia's problems, her daughter's problems, and her mother's problems all at the same time. Things that feel like they should be more important (like Beetlejuice's problems) get sidelined for what feels like half the movie, even though they are potentially more exciting. Worse still, sometimes plot threads get resolved with nothing more than a simple hand-wave.
It's also a lot wackier than the first movie. The first Beetlejuice was definitely a comedy, but to me, it was a lot more dry, subtle, macabre humor. BJ2 goes much more Looney Tunes with the concept of dead people, and is on the whole a much sillier movie overall. Heck, there's even an animated segment.
I'm divided on how I feel about that. I like the added creativity, and it's nice getting to see other departments in the afterlife. A lot of this movie is an expansion of these characters, this world, and these concepts. But it also feels like it's bringing in more elements from the Beetlejuice Saturday Morning cartoon. That's a whole other thing to unpack -- I loved that show as a kid, but it's also an extremely different vibe from the first movie. BJ2 at times feels like its trying to split the difference between the two.
But that just contributes to the overall feeling that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is its own creature. It definitely references the first movie, but it does a better job breaking out of its shadow and coming into its own than most movies of its ilk. It's more than just a two-hour nostalgia bomb. It's just got two or even three movies worth of story tearing it apart at the seams.
It could be better. But suffice to say, I had a good time.
Transylvania 6-5000 (1985)
Hard pass, yikes
My diagnosis: bad director.
Transylvania 6-5000 is trying very, very hard to be "Young Frankenstein" for the 80's, and Director Rudy De Luca was even known for working with Mel Brooks.
But despite having some of the funniest actors of their era, it is a deeply unfunny film. It is a void where humor goes to die. That's largely because the director insists on holding on every punchline way past its expiration date. Jokes linger until you're sick of whatever tattered threads of comedy were present. It is immediately and constantly exhausting.
Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley Jr. Are the worst choices for these roles. They play a pair of reporters following a lead that Frankenstein is alive in Transylvania. Goldblum is filling the role of the smooth playboy, and Begley is supposed to be the nervous nepotism hire whose only here because his dad runs the newspaper.
Goldblum doesn't have the right kind of suave the movie's asking from him. He's that specific kind of 1985 borderline sleazeball, the sort of guy that aggressively pursues women even when it's clear they aren't interested in him.
Begley simply isn't pathetic or wacky enough. He's a little nervous, but his role is played much too straight.
Both of them exude the energy of people who know they're in a comedy, and are kind of phoning it in. They aren't trying to be funny, and they aren't taking it seriously enough to sell their roles, so they come off totally flat.
It's not a complete and total wash, but I can count the number of jokes I liked on one hand, and I can only remember laughing once and only once. Mostly, that's thanks to Carol Kane, Transylvania 6-5000's single ray of light.
Otherwise: Man, what a slog.
V/H/S/Beyond (2024)
One of the better ones; maybe my personal favorite
I've been pretty hot and cold on past VHS releases, and often more cold than hot. I kind of got the sense that these things get rammed through production and come out the other end sometimes a little under-baked.
Beyond might be my favorite, though admittedly, I skipped VHS '94 and VHS '85. Whereas most anthologies of this breed are relentlessly mean and chaotic for no reason, most of the stories in Beyond have at least one decent hook and aren't necessarily embarrassing or nasty about it.
The two worst ones are in the middle -- "Dream Girl" mainly exists as an excuse to tear a bunch of people limb from limb, and is far and away the most bloody story in the collection. That's almost all it has going for it, but I can at least appreciate its sense of humor. And then there's "Fur Babies", something that feels the most like your classic, traditional VHS short because it's this mixture of satire, black comedy, and just plain weird vibes where it stops making any sense if you pay even a little attention to it.
The rest of the shorts are kind of great, though. "Stork" has some really incredible practical effects work and avoids many of the cliches you're expecting. "Live & Let Dive" is simple almost to a fault but I'll forgive it for having a pretty creative setup and some very inexplicable creatures. "Stowaway" is total horror, where you know somebody is putting themselves in a LOT of danger for no reason, but you can't stop watching.
And then there's the wrap-around story that ties everything together. It's shot like a real documentary on UFO evidence, and uses real archival footage of supposed UFOs while talking to various filmmakers (and Youtubers) about the veracity of such claims, all in a long setup for the final segment, "Abduction." It's so caked in fuzzy video noise and isn't even really a story that it comes off more like somebody's Tiktok or Instagram visual effects demo reel. But at least it's not offensive, it's just creepy, and I can vibe with that. It works better being as simple as it is.
For a series I'm hot and cold on, we'll call this one something I feel warm about.
Kamera o tomeru na! (2017)
Genius best served cold
Incredible movie. I'm glad nobody, not even the synopsis blurb I read, spoiled the twist of what's really going on here, because this is definitely something that's best seen cold.
At first, you see a simple found footage zombie movie. It's all done in one, single, long take. And then it... blossoms.
I will echo the sentiment some have that the second act drags a little bit. Once you get to the *thing*, there's a stretch where "One Cut of the Dead" understandably has to spin its wheels for a little bit in order to get its dominoes in place for the equally incredible third act.
What a wild thing. What a balancing act of spinning plates in order to spin plates. Creative as hell.
Deadly Blessing (1981)
The real blessing in this movie is Ernest Borgnine's chinstrap beard.
I dunno. This is pre-Elm Street Wes Craven. It's not a bad movie, but it does feel a little plain. It's a bit of a Scooby-Doo plot on some level, where Amish -- sorry, Hittite farmers are involved in a land dispute and suddenly folks related to that start turning up dead, as claims of a monster, The Incubus, are to blame.
It's the sort of movie where you know the killer's identity is going to be a major twist, so you start scanning the cast for the least likely suspects, since that's definitely how these things work.
There's a little bit of spooky tension, but it's up against the movie's glacial pacing. It feels like there's absolutely forever between most major story beats, like one dude will go missing and it'll be a full 30 minutes before that gets brought back up and resolved. It's that kind of movie.
Shoutouts to the ending, which springs for some real last second special effects. I feel like that had to be half the movie's budget right there, for a sequence that can be measured in seconds. Hooray for the 1980's theatrical equivalent of clickbait in the form of "dude you gotta see how it ends."
Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990)
Unexpected slow-burn character study
I, uh. Hm.
I was ready to say this movie's kind of a bummer. It's not much of a horror movie, at least not in the way Psycho 3 was. I don't know if there's a single drop of blood in the whole entire thing.
Instead, it's just... kind of sad? This is basically the origin story for Norman Bates, where we see first hand accounts of the relationship he had with his mother. Almost the entire movie is spent in flashback to Norman's childhood, a decent portion of it narrated by Anthony Perkins.
Instead of being scary, a lot of the movie just feels hopeless. The thrust of Psycho 4 is that despite being cleared from the mental institution yet again, Norman still doesn't feel well. He goes on a radio show under a pseudonym and talks about his life, including his plans to kill again, something that's treated as inevitable.
Fortunately, the movie is going somewhere. Without giving too much away, I was actually weirdly satisfied by the ending. I didn't always like how it got there, but I liked the end result. Or to put it another way: without the last five or ten minutes, this movie would be a one star.
Psycho 4 is ultimately pretty flat. A lot of it is low hanging fruit about Norman's origins that anyone could have guessed or simply made up. There's not much in the way of suspense or excitement. It's a lot of talking. But at least it does try to close the book on the Bates Motel, and it does so without cynicism. I can appreciate that.
Even if it contains one of the dumber sequel hooks I've seen.
Abigail (2024)
I went in blind and don't regret it
One of the worst things I think that can happen is guessing the twist to a movie that's trying to be clever. I watched this with a group of friends as one of the openers to our yearly Halloween festivities, and I unwittingly blurted out the twist as a joke.
And you know what?
Abigail was an awesome movie anyway.
Truth be told, I did not go into this totally blind. I'd heard mumblings about a movie where "a little girl is more dangerous than she seems", but that was basically all I knew, and I still landed a perfect hole in one on guessing the premise. Heck, I didn't even know this was a horror movie.
But just, wow. For starters, Alisha Weir deserves a lot of awards for this performance. The way she so effortlessly shifts between different methods of speaking is incredible to watch. She knows how to ride the line of almost overdoing it while also having a lot of fun.
The whole thing's fun, really. It's my favorite kind of horror movie, where it's got this edge of comedy around the whole thing. Definitely worth checking out.
Oddity (2024)
Fun, but not outstanding
This is a curious little movie, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about it.
A lot of "Oddity" is in the way its central mystery unfolds. Much of the information and the layers of that information are all delivered in the wrong order, having to be re-assembled a bit like a jigsaw puzzle.
In the opening minutes of the movie, we're shown a woman, who encounters some kind of a transient. Its implied that the transient died horrifically, but then we're told he killed the woman. Getting more context and putting everything together in the right order is the heart of this story.
The real meat involves the sister of the woman who gets murdered; she runs a curio shop full of supposedly cursed/haunted items, something she takes quite seriously. Using these cursed items (and her apparent sixth sense), she intends to figure out who killed her sister and see that they are punished.
The problem is... I'm not really sure the movie is saying anything? Like, you know, at the heart of a really good movie is a theme. A statement it's trying to make, or a lesson it's trying to teach, something like that.
"Oddity" has great atmosphere. It's oppressive and unnerving and there's some really great jumpscares that got me good in the kind of way you can't really be mad at because it earned them. The curio shop lady is an odd little woman with odd little items at her disposal and you're on the edge of your seat waiting for them to do something.
But it's kind of just spooky for spooky's sake, I guess. The best I can come up with thematically is "don't mess with a lady that owns a haunted curio shop", I guess? But that just seems like common sense, if you ask me.
Psycho III (1986)
Pretty unremarkable
So I'd pretty universally heard: this movie's not great. The thing is, for the first two thirds, it's actually... fine?
I mean, yeah, it's not as clever as Psycho 2. That movie plays with your expectations and respects the character of Norman Bates, whereas this movie is basically just a slasher movie. "Mother" is back, Norman's back to killing again, and annoyingly convenient circumstances let bodies continue to pile up.
But once the movie enters its final act, it springs its twist. I guess they figure it's a trademark of the Psycho franchise at this point. But folks, it's bad. It stinks. It's rotten. It barely makes sense.
Psycho 3 never really recovers after that. It tries to go back to being a slasher again, but it's too far off the rails.
The problem isn't that this movie makes Norman a generic slasher villain. It's that it tries to be a little more than that, and those bits are the worst parts by a country mile.
Psycho II (1983)
Better than you'd think
There's a lot of pomp and circumstance around the original Psycho and what it did for the horror genre. Psycho 2, at first blush, cannot possibly live up to the original's legacy in any way shape or form.
Does that mean it has to be a bad movie though? No, and Psycho 2 isn't. It has as much fun with the idea of "what if they try to rehabilitate Norman Bates and release him back into society?" as it can.
There's some fun references (and swerves) to the original movie, all while trying to be smarter and more thoughtful than just making it into a corny slasher movie (as was the fad in this era). Psycho 2 was made by people with a decent amount of respect and understanding for the original movie, and it genuinely tries to expand on the character of Norman Bates in a way that isn't just "stab stab stab."
It could never be as shocking or surprising as the original movie was, but for what it is, I think they made a pretty good movie out of what they had.
I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
Bummergaze
Watching this in the shadow of "The People's Joker" was probably a mistake.
There's a lot of cool ideas in here, some fun visuals, and some overall parts that I think I will remember fondly, but this movie is a little too in love with itself. As you get into the back half, there are long stretches where it goes full art house film in a way that doesn't really land with me.
As a kid, young Owen is introduced to a show called "The Pink Opaque", a pastiche of Are You Afraid of the Dark, The Adventures of Pete & Pete, and a little bit of Space Cases thrown in for good measure, and it airs on this universe's off-brand version of Nickelodeon (simply called The Young Adult Channel). Despite being a show "for girls," it's mysterious and intriguing in a way that completely hooks Owen. But he grows to discover there might be more than just a show here.
I think I pick up what this movie is putting down. I don't want to be unkind, but it's also sort of like, how could you not? The thing about this movie is that it loves to be precious and mysterious but every now and then you turn around and it hits you with its subject matter like a freight train.
Like, you ever see Scrooged, the Christmas Carol riff with Bill Murray? The Ghost of Christmas Present in that is played by Carol Kane, who is this sweet, cute, bubbly little fairy lady that will suddenly grab a tire iron and use it to break a few of your ribs. That's kind of what it feels like watching I Saw the TV Glow. You'll get weird, memorable, haunting visuals punctuated by the movie grabbing you by the neck and shouting "DO YOU GET IT?"
And yeah, when Owen passes text on the street saying something to the effect of "THERE'S STILL TIME," I get it. And don't get me wrong, it's something that needs to be said. Someone out there needs to hear that.
But the movie straddles the art house line a little too much for my tastes, punctuated by its abrupt and moderately sad ending. It's just not what I look for in movies.
Saint Maud (2019)
Not my cup of tea
I am not super religious, but I'm just religious enough that I think this movie kind of sucks.
A nurse begins to believe she can feel the presence of God and struggles to maintain "purity" before him. If you're thinking, "it sounds like she's crazy" then yes: she's crazy. That's it. That's the entire movie. She's struggling with a mental problem. She becomes a maniac and starts hurting people.
And as someone who is "just religious enough" it's like, you start to notice there are mainly two paths a story about religion takes:
1. God is the greatest thing to ever exist, and we need to hold on to our faith even as he tests us
2. God is the worst thing to ever exist, and people who believe in him are psychotic zealots
Our character in this movie believes she is #1 while everyone else (including the audience) knows she's #2. And, I just...
I dunno. I'm tired of these two types of stories. Particularly the second one. It's always one of the two. There's no in between. Though I suppose you could say "in between" is literally every other movie ever made, where they just don't mention religion at all. Which is fine.
This is not one of those movies.
Psycho (1960)
Nostalgic
Rewatching this, I found myself lost in nostalgia before the days of even DVD commentary tracks, where cable networks like TNT would do more than just show movies, they'd turn them into what felt like an all-night event. In between commercials they'd talk about important scenes, what was controversial about a movie, what was interesting about the direction or the camera work, who made the music, and so on. It was a movie with little snippets of a making-of documentary peppered around it.
That was how I first experienced Psycho, probably around the age of 15 or 16. It imbued the movie with a reverence for its historical context. Without that, I don't know what I would have thought about the film. It was almost like attending a film literacy seminar, or something. It taught me to respect old movies.
We don't have things like that anymore. You're lucky if a streamer app has room for a couple of puff piece cast interviews next to the movie you want to watch. Not to get all "old man yells at cloud" here, but back in my day, they'd make whole entire 30 minute specials about this kind of stuff and preempt prime time television for it. Very few of the words I just said will make sense to anyone under the age of 21.
Now what do we have? Film buffs on Youtube writing video essays for other film buffs, or, if you're really lucky, the director is alive and sits down to guest on a podcast with a name like REEL TALK WITH DA FILM BOIZ, where they aren't allowed to show clips of what the director is describing because it might get them a copyright strike.
Psycho is not only a classic, it's a landmark, and it's nice to remember an era where the studio that produced it went out of their way to show people why that is.
The Witches of Eastwick (1987)
Second half of the movie doesn't completely match with the first half
I think I get this mixed up a lot with "Something Wicked This Way Comes," neither of which I've seen, but I am trying to correct that.
What a weird movie. I guess it's kind of horny? But not super sexy. Just horny. Susan Sarandon, Cher and Michelle Pfieffer discover that if they get together, they can will things into happening as if by magic. So, one lonely night, they endeavor to summon the perfect man into their lives, and they get Jack Nicholson sporting a ponytail. He immediately casts a cursed shadow across the town of Eastwick.
It's honestly wild to see a movie from 1987 deal with themes that still feel like problems to this very day. Have we really advanced so little as a society that a teacher in this movie has to give a gendered statement prefaced with referring to "he, she, or them"? At one point we get a screaming tirade over whether women deserve to be controlled by men, and the town of Eastwick becomes hushed whispers at the idea of a sexual liberation.
This movie is closing in on 40 years old. I'm not saying its ahead of it's time, I'm saying: people claim it's the end of the world over topics this movie was referencing longer ago than some of you were even born.
One of those films I'm not sure I enjoyed, so much? I mean I didn't hate it. Witchcraft, especially the kind on display here, is not a subject you often see anywhere, at any time. This puts it in the same arena as "The Craft," and, like, what else? "Practical Magic"? Perhaps I'm just ignorant.
This is more fun than "The Craft," and I've never seen "Practical Magic." But it's still, just... weird. I guess my main problem is that the first half of the movie sets up something dark and mysterious, but the second half of the movie loops back around and it almost becomes cutesy? Like, people get killed in this movie, but then it's kind of brushed off as a little fun. It only matters when its one of the three main characters being threatened with death, and even then, by the end of the movie, it's nothing a wry smile won't get rid of.
It's easy to poke little holes like this all over the second half of the movie. It's the sort of stuff you don't notice at first, but the more you think about it, the more it eats away at you and leaves you feeling unsatisfied.
Ultimately the movie is just fine, I guess. Again, I didn't hate it. And there's not a lot out there like it. It just has... problems.
The People's Joker (2022)
I didn't know what I was getting into
I described this to friends as "like a Tim & Eric sketch with a heart" but that doesn't leave a very good taste in my mouth. But I also feel like I could argue with myself how to define this movie practically forever, because it is so much, all the time.
It's often strange, chaotic, a little uncomfortable, but also really funny and ultimately heartfelt. The kind of movie that couldn't have been made (or nobody would be ready for in this format) 10 years ago.
I've seen several reviews from friends-of-friends and I still don't feel like I knew what I was getting into. But, man, what a heck of a thing.
Beetlejuice (1988)
Tim Burton's finest
To me, this will always be Tim Burton's best, and it's no contest. The exact perfect combination of creepy, funny, weird and colorful. You always forget how little Beetlejuice is in the movie despite being the namesake, too. He doesn't actually show his face until exactly halfway through the movie.
So much in this movie is so iconic. Everyone in the afterlife is beautiful, spinning it as a bunch of public service social workers is brilliant, the design of the sandworms is still incredible as heck, I love Delia's weird sculptures, Otho's terrible pretentiousness, the house, the miniature town, Lydia wearing a funeral veil to the dinner table, all of it.
And, of course, Beetlejuice himself. What an incredible, icky character. I sometimes think about what the Genie from Disney's Aladdin did to pop-culture, but Beetlejuice here fills a very similar archetype a full five years before Aladdin. It's just, y'know, BJ is the most wickedly sleazy man you've ever known.
Heck of a movie. Generation defining cinema.