Tag Archives: Random Number Generator Horror Podcast #9

The Addiction (1995)

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It’s been a while since I have been faced with categories this easy to remember. I have never heard of The Addiction, but boy howdy did it meet the intersection of vampires as scare and 1990s as style. You know how Clerks screams indie comedy, from the dawn of independent cinema? This is like that, but for thesis horror, here defined as “horror for people who would never admit that horror has value, so I made an art house flick instead.”

So what’s actually happening is Lili Taylor is an NYU philosophy student, grappling with important topics like who, at a generation’s remove from the events, was the actual bad guy in Vietnam? But between walking around town to the soothing strains of gangster rap, she gets introduced to heroin.[1] And then she takes the heroin to each of her friends and classmates and professors who she is also dating, and gets them addicted to heroin as well. At one point, a dude tries to tell her about Jesus, and he does not get addicted to heroin, but neither does she quit her addiction and move to the suburbs.

That’s it. That’s the whole movie.

Wait. You said this was a thesis horror movie dressed up as art house drama. That’s just purely arthouse drama. What gives?

Oh. Crap. Um. Let me do some quick rewrites here. Um, let’s see. Okay, what if she’s bitten by a vampire, and then wanders around doing soliloquies in dark sunglasses about who the bad guy really is, but also turning all of her classmates and friends and professors who she is also dating into vampires? And the vampirism is a metaphor for heroin, you see.

Ah. Yes, that would fix it.

Well there you go then!

[1] Or maybe meth, but I think it’s too early to have been movie meth, even in movie New York.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

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First, I didn’t watch Twin Peaks when it came out. Then I didn’t watch it for an additional 35(!) years. Then, the podcast people decided to[1] watch Fire Walk with Me, which meant I had to watch 32 episodes of TV to be ready for watching the movie. Which I have done, over the course of the past maybe not quite a month. And now I’m supposed to review the movie.

I was prepared for how weird the show would be. I was not prepared for how soap opera it would be. I can really see a direct throughline from this show to Passions. Which makes me sad I never went back and watched it before now, but at least it’s now. Another thing I can say is that it predicted modern television, insofar as 10 episodes for this kind of show is about perfect. The second season, at a traditional 22 episodes? It was a complete and total mess, and definitely needed to be shorter. If it had been two more seasons of 10 each, then a little shorter is still not nothing, but also the arcs would have been more tightly described I suspect.

What I loved the most is how seriously it took itself. When the FBI guy throws rocks at a bottle while the sheriff’s office reads the names of suspects, and the one that got read when he breaks the bottle becomes their prime suspect, and the sheriff’s reaction is awe at how good a detective he is? Actually, the thing I liked least about season two is when the sheriff complains that he put up with a lot of strange behavior from Cooper. Because part of what makes the show work is that nobody ridiculed him or took it as strange. It’s just how the FBI is!

Anyway. That brings me to the movie, a prequel in which some stuff happens a year ago and starring different FBI guys which had 5% bearing on the rest of the movie so far as I could tell, and then picks up during the last week of Laura Palmer’s life[2]. It’s a decent movie. As a character study of a girl who is slowly being destroyed by her family life (and her school life, but mostly her family life), and of the people around her who love her (her best friend) and who think they love her (her boyfriends, who do not know about each other, and also that family I mentioned), it’s definitely a David Lynchian character study, but that’s okay. As an explanation of how Bob and her killer interrelate, it… fell short. Massive spoilers for the show and at least partial spoilers for the movie follow, so see footnote [3].

But anyway. I cannot imagine watching this movie first, or especially as a standalone feature. It would never work. And I’m not really convinced it was entirely necessary, with a handful of exceptions. But was it good? Yeah. Mostly pretty good. And whatever else I might say about it, at least someone finally made me watch Twin Peaks.

[1] Well, random, whatever blah blah. The style was sequel plus, I remember that, but the scare? Man, it’s been weeks. I have no idea.
[2] If you do not immediately associate Twin Peaks with the phrase “Who killed Laura Palmer?” then you were not watching television in 1990. Not sure what else to tell you.

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Malignant (2021)

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I swear I’mma watch a semi-generic action movie soon. I even have one in mind! If I can just get to a stretch of more than zero movies in a row on the horror podcast that I have actually seen before. Well, it didn’t happen yet though.

Malignant is “split” for the scare and “dumb” for the style. I will say that I understand why people would have called this movie dumb, but it honestly kind of worked? Maybe better if I hadn’t pre-known the genre categories they were aiming for, but if I’m being real, I’d kind of forgotten / zoned it out by the time I actually watched.

To business! See, there’s this pregnant lady and she has had a lot of miscarriages, apparently because her boyfriend is down to just shove her into a wall so hard the back of her head caves in the drywall. But that’s okay, because a shadowy mysterious figure obliterates him later that night. And now Madison and her sister are in a race against time and the ever more suspicious police to figure out who the figure is, why she keeps having visions of his murders, what he has to do with the fact that Madison is adopted and remembers nothing of her childhood before that, and what all of this has to do with the psychiatric hospital in the first prequel scene where things were not really going well for the staff.

Were there dumb character decisions? Unquestionably. Who breaks into an abandoned hospital in the middle of the night to look for old files and just assumes everything will turn out fine? …okay, besides me. I would absolutely do that. But who else? This is not survival behavior! Was some of the plotting dumb? Here I mean plotting around certain emergences and especially certain retractions, about which I should not say more. But the special effects were cool and it did undo a previous massive plot hole.

My point is, I’ll forgive a lot when a movie can keep you guessing for a little while and is also, if not scary, at least pretty horrifying to boot. I’m not sure how I missed this one, to be honest. I think when it came out I mentally classified it as part of the Conjuring cinematic universe and then completely tuned it out. I now deem this to have been a mistake, but 5 years late is better than usual, to be honest? Still, I hope they do not make a sequel. It’s a complete story! Let it be, y’all.

Honogurai mizu no soko kara

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I was so excited to see a movie in the upcoming list for my podcast that I had actually seen before. It’s been so long in a row that I’m kind of losing confidence in whether I’ve ever seen any horror movies. Then I got to the point last episode where they were doing the randomizing, and, you know what, aquatic scare, based on a book style? Yeah, that tracks. But then they did something that was incredibly obvious in retrospect but which I never saw coming. They picked the original Japanese version of Dark Water. Why wouldn’t they, unless the style was specifically “remake” or something?

Like I said, I’ve “seen” this movie, so there wasn’t a lot I needed to figure out about the plot. What details I had forgotten were non-critical, for sure. Thus, I was mostly watching for character beats. In the cast, we have: one kindergarten aged child, with no agency; one kindergarten aged ghost, with minimal agency; one ex-husband, who exists only to be an antagonist; one lawyer, who exists only to be a white knight; a handful of apartment employees, who use their agency to avoid taking responsibility for anything that’s happening; and one mother, who abrogates her agency whenever possible. Indeed, the pivotal moment of the story is her finally deciding to take an action, instead of being acted upon. (And even then, I could make a pretty compelling argument that she had no meaningful options open to her in said pivotal moment.)

If it sounds like I’m unimpressed, well, I am. But not with the acting or the plot, just with how the writing was on such hardened rails that all I could do was be annoyed with people for not making choices or with the story for not giving them any. Said story, at its bones, was this: an ex-wife is fighting for custody of her daughter against a father who never showed any interest until now, and he’s playing dirty tricks. So all her money is tied up in white knight lawyers, which means she has to get a pretty bad apartment. Like, water damage on the ceiling, cloudy water in the faucets, half the residences are empty, even the floors in some cases. And also there’s a spooky kid’s bag that keeps showing up in her daughter’s possessions, and missing child posters from years ago. And then it gets creepier.

Mood, mystery, I already mentioned acting, these were all fine. And I already complained about how few of the people who felt like real characters were also characters who could (or would) take actions. So I guess that’s the movie. All things considered, I think I liked the Jennifer Connelly version more. But, I would, wouldn’t I?

Update: I just learned from Google Translate that the name of the movie on the poster above is From the Dimly Lit Depths of the Water, and that’s just an all around better title. (I mean, unless you need to market it to American audiences as a horror movie, maybe.) So there is one thing I like better about the original, after all!

The Innocents (1961)

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I have a better than usual reason for not remembering the podcast categories, I mean aside from how I watched the movie days ago and have not yet reviewed it. See, their style was 1960s, okay, sure, but their scare was wildcard, which functionally means “pick a horror movie from the 1960s.” And they did!, but you can see why that would be hard to explicitly remember.

Anyway, the movie they settled on (from a group of 6 and then selected randomly) was The Innocents, a Victorian era ghost story[1] based we think on Henry Miller’s The Turn of the Screw, a book I nearly read once. I wonder if in 1961 a movie with a Victorian setting would have been considered a period piece, or if that bit of genre definition did not yet exist.

A nanny, or “governess” as the British would have us believe, is hired to nannify two orphaned children on a massive English estate off in the countryside, because the uncle who inherited them has no interest in children. So off she goes, to find a mostly empty house except for the cook and the maid and the daughter and, before long, the son. Only, there are weird sounds and musics and people up on the tower who shouldn’t be there, and before long the nanny thinks there might be ghosts around.

And then before much longer than that, she thinks the children might be possessed. And then, it’s time for a spoiler cut, because stopping here would be extremely unsatisfying for me, but reading further could potentially be unsatisfying for you.

[1] maybe?

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Le Pacte des Loups

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I legitimately miss having a few movies in a row that I’ve already seen, before needing to watch another new one [for the podcast]. Like, I don’t want this to turn into a chore. Even if I alternated seen it / didn’t see it? That would be better. Or then again, maybe I’m just tired of my phone’s hard drive being full. That would make sense. Or also then again, maybe I just don’t like feeling like I haven’t seen enough horror movies. Even though I objectively have not. Just, usually the knowledge is not so in my face.

Anyway.

This week’s movie (from January 2022 I think) was in the scare of a creepy town and in the style of French. Brotherhood of the Wolf is set in 18th C France, prior to troubles they had as that century wound down. Out in the countryside, a wolf has been terrorizing the populace, as have the King’s men sent to stop it. Into this situation rides a marquis and his Mohawk companion, fresh from the French and Indian War, which I bet was called something else by France. (Impossible to know, really.)

Naturally they are invited to the local lord’s manor, where they meet all the relevant people. The lord, his one-armed son[1], the fetching redhead who I thought was his daughter but later decided might not have been after all, the narrator, and Monica Bellucci. Having done that, they proceed to work on solving the wolf problem, but run afoul of various obstacles, such as the King’s wounded pride, noble savage tropes, and aforementioned fetching redheads.

Honestly, it was fine and for sure would have been better instead of worse if I’d watched it in a row, plus also possibly if I’d watched it subtitled instead of dubbed. But even with those caveats, it was only fine. The thing that will stick with me is nothing in the plot or the humor[2], but the treatment of the Mohawk companion. The marquis tells his (the marquis’) story to someone, and I’m betting it was the redhead, about how his commanding officer had murdered the entire tribe with smallpox blankets, and this led the marquis to help the lone survivor kill his (still the marquis’) whole platoon and then run off back to France as best buds, and, look. This movie was made in 2001, and I’m glad that by then people were secure enough in the idea that genocide is bad to use it as a tool to demonstrate how someone is heroic when he opposes it. Cool.

But at the same time, 2001 is closer to 2026 than it is to when Moby Dick was published, so maybe leaning so hard on the noble savage thing is something we could also have already outgrown by then? Especially when you mix it with a spoiler that was first originated in comics, if you know what I mean, and maybe you do, at that.

[1] There was a whole tragic backstory, which I forgot by accidentally watching this movie spread out over the course of nearly a week
[2] It was definitely funny now and then, enough so to call it out even

As Boas Maneiras

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This movie is way too easy to spoil, and so I report with a great deal of satisfaction (both for myself as a viewer and also for myself as a writer) that I do not have to give anything away by explaining what random elements came together for this to be my next podcast horror movie. The scare was mythological, and the style was from the 2010s. See? Nothing. And the title of the movie, Good Manners, is if anything more opaque, to the point that I still do not fully understand how it fit with anything I watched, at least not in a specific way.

The movie is essentially a play in two acts. In the first act, a pregnant woman who is recently isolated from her former life hires a nanny about midway through the pregnancy, with the intent to get her help around the house and at appointments leading up to the birth, and then transition her from helper / housekeeper to full time actual nanny. The prospective nanny, herself rather isolated from her own former life such as it may have been, forms a fast bond with her employer. But then she starts to notice certain oddities.

In the second act, seven years later, an isolated mother and her son navigate their isolation, his allergies and related special needs, the secret that lies between them, and his growing dissatisfaction with the carefully crafted strictures that fence his existence. Also, mostly but not exclusively in the second act, there are random musical numbers that come across as Greek chorus-like, even though main characters are often the ones singing.

The movie: mostly pretty great. Solid slow boil tension, compelling characters, sense of impending, unavoidable doom. The music numbers: weird, but also very distinctive.

The Brood

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I have not seen many David Cronenberg movies. The Dead Zone and The Fly in my misspent youth.[1] Rabid, via The Last Drive-In. Videodrome recently also via my horror podcast. And now The Brood. The scare was “evil science”, and the style was wildcard, i.e. they just picked six evil science movies and then rolled again to see what they watched. So, technically, no specific style.

This was a weird movie, but until the last 15 minutes it was not what I think of as David Cronenberg weird. See, there’s this father of a small girl who easily could have been (but probably was not) Carol Ann from Poltergeist. And his ex-wife is institutionalized at a weird experimental psychiatry place that has a name that stood out to me[2] but which I can no longer recall, which the lead psychiatrist has published work about. The husband is annoyed that he’s never allowed to talk to her, but once he finds that his daughter is all bruised up after one of her weekly visits to mom’s padded room[3], he goes immediately scorched earth. Which is fair, but it’s no surprise to learn that Cronenberg had just gone through a contentious divorce / custody battle, because this script and direction, both of which he was responsible for, are informed by said battle in every frame and every line.

This does not sound like a horror movie though, right? That’s only because I haven’t mentioned yet how random deformed dwarfs[4] or possibly children have started killing everyone who might have somehow crossed the mother. Nor how everyone the father can find who has graduated from this particular psych ward seems crazier than when they went in, but also how damn few have graduated in the first place. And especially because I haven’t explained my mention about the last 15 minutes when it goes full Cronenberg and finally earns its title.

But honestly, don’t watch it for the horror or the mystery. Watch it for just how unhappy Cronenberg was about his divorce / custody battle. Because… wow.

[1] “and Dune, obviously,” I nearly said, but no, that’s David Lynch. Other people superficially mix them up, right? It’s not just me?
[2] I’m not saying he was going for the feeling of it being Dianetics, but I’m not not saying that, if you catch my drift.
[3] Probably her room is not padded. I don’t think I ever saw her in any context that was not the therapy room though, so who knows?
[4] I know what you’re thinking, but I’m pretty sure the actors were not little people, is why I am choosing my terminology as such.

Green Room

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I know I said I have a lot of new movies from the horror podcast in a row, and this is evidence of that. But even though it’s only been a few days, I could zero percent remember the categories they randomized! I’m just astonishingly bad at that. But okay, they tell me right at the beginning of the episode, which makes things easier. So anyway, Green Room is at the intersection of “hunter/hunted” as the scare and “critically acclaimed” as the style.

Which, of course it’s critically acclaimed! It has Patrick Stewart in it, what else would you expect?!

The premise is at least relatively straightforward. Unsuccessful punk band on tour in the Pacific Northwest, and they’re on their way home, one siphoned gas tank at a time (because of how they are not successfully earning the money to pay for the gas for the tour, much less any extra). Once their out-of-the-way stop based on a fan tip is a complete bust, he apologizes by promising them something that really will make them money, and is not out of the way. Just, don’t talk politics with them, because they’re the kind of punk music fans that shave their heads and have lightning bolt tattoos, if you know what I mean. …and I think you just might.

So of course they piss off the Nazis at the Nazi bar by playing as their first song something whose chorus is basically (or literally? I don’t recall) “fuck Nazis!”, but then before they are thrown bottlesed off the stage, they settle into music that is a little more palatable. So I guess everything would have been okay, only when they took their break between sets they went into the wrong, and I use this term only because the movie heavily implies it via the title, green room, and saw something they should not have seen, and suddenly they’re in a tense standoff.

I think what makes this movie the most horrifying, aside from the extensive gore I mean, is how true it is. This is exactly the kind of situation you could really find yourself in, with just one or two bad choices and a lot of bad luck. No isolated, inbred families or youth cults required, just people that we all know exist and try to stay away from the places where they congregate. …until we don’t, because gasoline tastes terrible, and options have truly run that low.

The lesson is, no they didn’t. Your options have never run this low, and your safest path to survival is realizing it. Oh well. I’m sure Patrick Stewart will be cool about the whole thing, though, right?

…right?

Gau Ji

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Another horror podcast movie. I have a lot in a row right now, it turns out. But anyway, this one’s scare was magic, and style was foreign language. So I watched Dumplings, a Chinese[1] movie from 2004 about a lady who sells specially made dumplings[2] mostly to other women, because of their implausibly effective age-defying and even restorative properties. And about the actress who is approaching the hill and doesn’t want to lose her shitbird husband, but is also maybe more curious than she should be about the cooking process employed. Or, more precisely, about the ingredients.

I think I want to say basically nothing else because of the spoilers, even though there’s really a lot to cover. I should say this, though. I have not been scared by a movie for a long time, and even then only by very isolated scenes. The film student standing in the corner in Blair Witch. The head-on mirror hair-brushing scene in Ringu[3]. The lady standing over her husband for like 6 hours straight without moving in Paranormal Activity.

However, there are movies I find disturbing. Hostel springs to mind. Human Centipede as well, solely in prospect, because I still haven’t got up the gumption. My point is, Dumplings was a hard watch. Lotta “oh no, they’re actually doing that” combined with virtually no sympathetic characters, and no good outcomes for anyone who is. Yikes.

It’s not per se a bad movie, but I think I must disrecommend to almost anyone who has not read the above and thinks they absolutely have to know / affirmatively want to feel disturbed.

[1] Well, Hong Kong. Technically the same thing by that time, but still, I think the distinction could be relevant?
[2] who could have guessed
[3] I know how they did it. But if you accept the premise within the movie, that’s some real life ghost shit.