Pánico en el Transiberiano

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I have learned about a new streaming service funded by libraries. My local does not offer Kanopy, but apparently they offer Hoopla. Which is nice, because the last two movies [that I haven’t seen] presented by my horror movie podcast were both available on said network. Thanks, Carrollton Public Library!

Anyway, the randomness this time was Hammer Studios[1] crossed with aliens, which is a hard sell since Hammer makes mostly movies with draculas. In fact, I’m being informed that this is not a Hammer Studios production, and my podcast people done screwed up. But in their defense, the movie stars both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, so the only thing missing (aside from a dracula and/or some of its brides) was a couple of gallons of just enormously bright red paint. I can understand, when you’re desperate for a match, overlooking a little thing like not technically made by Hammer, if almost everything else lines up, y’know? They were in a real fix.

So, Christopher Lee is a paleontologist I guess, and he’s just dug up a maybe missing link in China, and now he’s on a train back to civilization with his find. But Peter Cushing wants to see inside Lee’s comically overprotected trunk in the storage compartment, which sets off an unlikely chain of events when the thing in the trunk is not as dead as previously believed, and is furthermore[2] a visitor from the depths of space and not the missing link at all! …sort of.

Soon undead alien apes and countesses and Rasputins and Hammer Studios talents and Tellys Savalas are running up and down the train, trying to solve the mystery without getting their eyes boiled out of their heads and/or without being caught and exposed as the alien. If Horror Express were wildly popular, one could easily imagine a hidden roles boardgame being developed from the IP. But my point is, hijinx ensue as they necessarily must have, until there is eventually a final showdown for the fate of humanity. (I mean, probably? It was after all just the one alien.)

Still, good times. I especially liked the sci-fi backstory,

[1] out of London, although the movie was made in Spain, and furthermore my brief research indicates this was not in fact a Hammer Studios production at all, and great, now I have to talk about this outside the footnote.
[2] I would consider this a spoiler, but as an alien was necessary to this being the movie I watched, the cat was kind of already out of the bag.

Lyorn

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After Lyorn, there are two books left in the Vlad Taltos series, and you can really tell. This is a book that is tying up loose ends in an effort to rush headlong toward a finale. But, and here’s the good news: it’s also a book that’s about something besides tying up loose ends.

In the words of General Rieekan, “A death mark’s not an easy thing to live with.” So Vlad has decided to lay low at a theater (because of sorcery-related reasons) to plan his next move. Which quickly turns into a series of musical numbers and side quests, but the former are unobtrusive to the reader (if that’s not your thing) and the latter are quickly rendered apparent to be the actual point of the book. I’ll explain myself below the spoiler cut, not because it is especially a spoiler for more than the book’s themes, but for brevity, because I’m about to overstay my welcome.

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Emelie

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I have to say, babysitter horror movies[1] cannot possibly hit the same if you don’t have kids who need to be watched, if you are ever to leave your house and go on a date. Like, I don’t mean you have to have empathy to enjoy a film, that is not my point. I mean, having experienced the same type of movie before and after, I can tell you with certainty that the one I watched while in possession of a four-year old hit harder than the one I watched without one. And so we have Emelie, a movie about a babysitter implausibly named Anna, and about her unique methods of childcare. Subjects include pet-feeding, puberty, uncommissioned art, and hide and seek.

On the one hand, I feel like I should say more. On the other, what more is there to say? This is exactly the movie you expect it to be, and why should I spoil it for you, if you were inclined to watch it? The one thing I would say is a relatively big spoiler, but it’s worth mentioning. I liked the movie a lot better when the babysitter’s motivations had not yet been explored. That reveal was a big disappointment, even though in retrospect it also is exactly what you’d expect. Unfortunately.

Maybe worth pretending it never happened, or wasn’t true.

[1] That is, the ones where the babysitter is the threat, not the ones where the babysitters are the victims

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death

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So this is one of those movie titles that I’ve seen over and over again, and I think I always just assumed it was the same as April Fool’s Day[1] where Jessica, having died in the opening scenes or else via flashback, would be taking her revenge on her teenage bullies for the rest of the flick. Let me start by saying that Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is decidedly not that movie.

So Jessica is a schizophrenic who has just been released from psychiatric hospital, and now she and her husband have moved out to a farmhouse in the sticks near a small town, I suppose to get away from it all. Only, their house has a squatter as well as a history, and Jessica keeps seeing a girl in white, and the townspeople are creepy, and who is that under the lake? Plus, she keeps hearing voices that do not have her best interests at heart (which is how I know she was a schizophrenic).

The mystery isn’t whether or not we should be worried if Jessica is imagining things. It’s nearly a first person movie, and that is her fear the whole time. As such, it is the central tension in one of the tensest psychological horror movies I’ve ever seen.

Recommended.

[1] Why, you ask, did I for years think April Fool’s Day was about a girl named April? I cannot help you out with that.

Abigail (2024)

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I decided to do a movie outside of Shudder, as I do every so often. And this time I thought, hmm, there are two recent horror movies with little girls on Peacock, but which? And I decided to go with the newer one, since the older one I’m already way too far behind to accomplish anything useful for my hungry public.

And so, I watched Abigail, which is a crime turned horror movie about a kidnapping. See, there’s this ballerina kid, and a whole bunch of people in masks who don’t know each other (a la Reservoir Dogs) come together to kidnap her. Then they go to an isolated estate to lay low and wait for the ransom, which might have gone according to plan except that they decide to not trust each other. And once things start going wrong, boy howdy do they escalate, in all kinds of ways that you would never have considered possible.

I mean, unless you watched the trailer. Don’t watch the trailer, for the love of all that is holy.

But that aside: you know what, obviously the Tarantino movie does a better job of being a crime movie, and I could name a few horror movies along these lines that do a better job of doing what they do (spoilers below the cut), but as mashups go? I’m pretty happy with this one!

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Deadpool and Wolverine

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On the one hand: you guys! I saw a movie in the theater! On opening night[1]! On the other hand, how does the only Marvel movie this year drop during the two month window when there’s no Alamo Drafthouse accessible to me? Ugh.

Nevertheless, we forge ahead. I just rewatched the two prior Deadpool movies, because this was coming[2]. (I should note that Deadpool 2 has grown in my estimation.) This movie is… well, it’s completely different in virtually every way from the two that preceded it. Wade doesn’t have a girlfriend, he isn’t inextricably tied to the X-Men (as a team nor as a franchise), and he is all in on becoming a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

In fact, the driving force of the movie is his attempt to join the Avengers, and what he’s willing to do once someone offers him a chance to accomplish exactly that. Naysayers will tell you that multiversal shenanigans are what is wrong with the MCU post-Thanos, but no, what is and has been wrong is the complete lack of any plan to tell an actual story. (Well, and the story they were not especially telling being rather mid.) I cannot tell you with any certainty that Ryan Reynolds just saved Marvel, but it’s the first Marvel movie I’ve watched in years now where I believe that this could all come together and actually work.

It would work better, of course, if he starts showing up in all the rest of the MCU movies, the way you had a Steve Rogers or a Tony Stark in basically 90% of the first three phases. But at least there’s a potential for something, now.

(Wolverine was cool too.)

[1] And then I fucked it up by taking nearly a week from when I started writing this review to actually finish it.
[2] Later, Disney+ suggested Logan, but I ran out of time to rewatch that. Alas.

Dagon

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The random qualifiers for this podcast-inspired movie were: a foreign film (I think?) with monsters from under the sea. I have a hard time, though, considering Dagon a foreign film when it is a) directed by Stuart Gordon (of Re-Animator fame, as outlined in the poster) and b) mostly in English, and without subtitles when it is in Spanish. As in, it’s pretty clear that the audience is assumed to speak English and to not understand along with the main character when anyone else isn’t speaking English. All the same, its originating country is Spain, so what do I know?

What’s weird about this movie, though, is I have played it as a game, both video and board. …but I’m probably getting ahead of myself. See, the first act is a bit silly. Dream sequences, mermaids, early ’90s quality CGI (ie, budget quality as of 2001 when the movie came out), and eventually a storm and a shipwreck near an isolated fishing village, and quickly our cast of four is whittled down to one. Which is where the game reference comes in, because there’s your character in a hotel room surrounded by subtly aquatic people with torches and pitchforks or whatever, trying to get away from room to room and then from alley to alley, completely outnumbered and outmatched but maybe able to survive if the shadows can be kind.

I’ve never read The Shadow over Innsmouth, but the scenes people have created in homage to it are so evocative that it must have been pretty chillingly written. Then, eventually there’s an act three where things come together nicely and also horrifically. But then again, Stuart Gordon is known to be able to deliver in this genre, so, hooray!

Virgin Witch

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My horror movie podcasts’s next movie [that I had not already seen] was meant to be a grind house movie about a witch. My instant internal response was, does that even exist?? Turns out, there’s at least one! (And I’m betting not many more than that.)

Here’s how I knew this was a grind house movie: during the opening credits, every image was a still of a topless actress in some situation we would eventually see during the film. It was perhaps as brazen a series of movie credits as I’ve ever seen, but it definitely said “Buckle up, we’re not fucking around.”

Virgin Witch is a movie about two country mice sheltered sisters who have decided to run away from home and go be models in London. And look, I just cannot talk about this movie interestingly without spoilers, as there’s just too much. So if you want to watch it, (and it’s… it’s not precisely worth watching as a movie, but it might be worth watching as a spectacle. Train wrecks, after all, spectacular.) If you want to watch it, I was saying, stop here.

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Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F

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What you have to remember is, Beverly Hills Cop was not an exploitation movie. The ’80s were just like that. What is the relevance of this opening non-sequitor, you ask? It’s this: although Axel F may be the fourth movie in a series, it is mostly a sequel to the first one. Because, you know, that’s the one people remember.

And it follows most of the rules of a good sequel. All the same characters? Yep. Sort of a whodunnit for the first 20 minutes, but mostly a how does he beat them once he immediately figures out who? Yep. Lots of secret identity chicanery that allows Murphy to mug for the camera? Absolutely. Gunplay and explosions galore? Check. I said “rules of a good sequel”, and what I meant was, “same movie all over again”. This is for sure a Beverly Hills Cop movie, and what else would anyone who turned it on have been looking for?

Except, of course, less exploitative. It no longer makes sense to have a scene in a strip club, just because. Murphy no longer lives in the world after Dr. King and Blazing Saddles when we thought we’d fixed racism and he could just be a black cop in a Detroit Lions jacket without that raising eyebrows in Beverly Hills, back before Rodney King showed us that not only were we wrong, but the police were maybe not so cool after all. And this movie could not just ignore that new reality, nor does it. Which is obviously good, but it makes it harder to believe in the purity of Axel Foley as a character, the way we could back then,

But most of all, this is a movie designed to make anyone who watches it feels old. Paul Reiser’s Jeffrey is fat and ready to retire and could not possibly be the same guy who suddenly realized that this is not his locker. Taggert looks just a little worse than the star of Weekend at Bernie’s, and Rosewood looks worse than that, because you expect Judge Reinhold to be young. Even Eddie Murphy himself is looking worn around the edges, and the scene where he starts to scam himself into a hotel room, then says, you know what, nevermind, I’m too tired for this? He speaks for the movie as a whole and anyone who was around to watch the originals in the theater.

It’s not that this is a sad movie that they should never have made, what were they thinking. It actually works for what it is[1]! It’s just that, as nostalgia mines go, this one at least has the courage to be honest about the state of the miners. I know they volunteered to show up and get paid, I do, but the underlying sadness of it all really seems to say, shame on you for letting us.

[1] A throwback action comedy with a bitchin’ soundtrack.

Still Wakes the Deep

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Sometime after I learned that there’s a game about Lovecraftian horrors on an oil rig, I learned that there’s a TV show about strange goings on in the all consuming mist (which may or may not be Lovecraftian or for that matter Kingy[1]; I wouldn’t know, as I have tried to avoid spoilers for The Rig since it seems cool enough to look into), and I have no point other than that’s a weird coincidence. Like, even if they aren’t both Lovecraftian, what are the odds that two media regarding oil rigs would both come across my radar at the same time, much less of both tweaking my interest?

None of that is I suppose especially important to Still Wakes the Deep, a game named after a particularly evocative phrase from a Scottish poem and set on Christmas Day 1975 on an oil rig in the North Sea. This is how I learned that oil rigs are not just built in relatively shallow water, but that rather they float. It is horrifying in its own right to be floating on the surface of the ocean, connected to the surface below not by four legs, but just by the drill with which you are penetrating the earth’s sunken crust. Imagine how much more horrifying, then, were the pocket you opened to contain not oil, but instead colors out of space, growing tentacles, and madness.

Caz McLeary is a man on the verge of losing everything, and his new job as electrician on an oil rig is partly effect, partly cause of this imminent loss. At least, that’s what he seems to believe and what all the evidence in the early game shows us, as he reads an angry letter from his wife, and then faces a somehow even angrier boss waving an arrest warrant in his face. But moments after that scene plays out, we and he learn that in fact he was nowhere close to losing everything, at least not then. It’s all a matter of properly defining “everything”. …and for that matter, “lose”.

I wasn’t expecting this to be a walking sim. That did not make it a bad game, but I sometimes wished for a little more control over events. Just a little, you know? Actually, as I think about it, the most proper audience for my plaintive request for more control over the events of December 25, 1975 is one Cameron “Caz”[2] McCleary, innit?

Is it apparent I liked this game? Well, I did. It was both mostly likable and immensely affective. Definitely worth a look.

[1] Why don’t we have a proper adjective for the way King writes? Probably because he doesn’t mostly write in a specific way, other than when it’s about the human horror of small towns. But it still feels like he deserves one, is all.
[2] British (in the imperial sense) people are really bad at name-shortening. Cameron = Caz? Jeremy = Jez? Come on, chaps, get it together.