Just a random shower thought I had. Has it really been that long?

Then a month afterwards, we'll be getting James Gunn's "Superman: Legacy"!

2h 11m | PG-13

A mysterious woman's escape from her harrowing captivity points investigators toward the dark truth behind an unsolved disappearance 13 years earlier.

This is a German tv show for Netflix. If you don't mind subtitles, this is a must watch if you like the kidnapped for years genre. It's a slow paced show, but I just couldn't stop watching. Only 6 episodes.

Even though the writers strike that crippled talk shows has lifted, the three co-head writers for Drew Barrymore’s daytime show have declined to return, sources close to the production said.

It was not clear from the sources why the three writers are not returning.

The production sources said offers were extended to all three when they could be extended after the end of the strike, which was lifted on Sept. 27, and all three declined.

Barrymore was criticized after she announced in September that she would resume “The Drew Barrymore Show,” a daytime talk show, even though the strike by the Writers Guild of America had not yet been resolved.

Barrymore was dropped as the host of the National Book Awards in response.

She later walked back the decision, apologized to anyone who felt hurt, and said she would wait to resume production until the strike was over.

Apparently Halloweens 4-6 form something of a trilogy, so before I tackle that, I decided on a nice palate cleanser in the form of rewatching Ghostbusters (1984).

I don't have anything to say about this movie that hasn't been said before. It's great. Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis are just phenomenally funny people, and their script remains one of the most quotable of all time. Bill Murray is Bill Murray (more on that in a second). I always appreciate seeing Sigourney Weaver, and her portrayal of Zuul Dana is delicious. The real stars of the film for me though are the excellent effects, both practical and special. There are so many cool set pieces, and every ghoulie that we see has a distinct design and characterization to them (admittedly there aren't that many, but it's still great, the zombie cab driver cracks me up every time).

The plot follows Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), disgraced parapsychologist, and his colleagues Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) as they address a growing wave of supernatural phenomena in the New York area. Venkman is an asshole. Like, full stop. He's a gross, condescending creep who abuses any position of authority given to him to harass women as his first priority, at all times. Maybe the only real flaw in this movie is that it treats Venkman's behavior as cute because it's Bill Murray, which is harder and harder to swallow as the general consensus on Murray continues to shift over the years. I enjoy Bill Murray the most when his characters are handled by the film with the understanding that he is being an asshole, as in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), or Rushmore (1998), or really any Wes Anderson movie now that I think about it. He's very funny in Ghostbusters, in exactly the same way as he's funny in those movies, but this movie asks us to condone his behavior in a way that the others don't. That's all I'll say about the confluence of real-life Bill Murray and screen Bill Murray, because it's genuinely not that hard to enjoy this movie even if you know that he was probably a raging asshole the whole time they were making it.

Ray and Egon are true believers, and serious men of science in contrast to Venkman's lazy skepticism. After they collectively experience their first confirmed supernatural phenomenon they are all generally on the same page about the existence of the ghosts, though Venkman continues to offer sardonic one liners during each encounter because that is his primary function in the script. The three men go into business together after Venkman is expelled from the university where he works (presumably for all manner of unethical relations with students, given the ESP 'trial' we see him administering at the beginning of the film) and set up shop in an abandoned fire station. They hire a delightful receptionist played by Annie Potts, and eventually add Winston Zeddmore (Ernie Hudson, who I last saw in Leviathan) to help them run the place, and swiftly go about taking calls.

Sigourney Weaver plays Dana, a woman who's very apartment rests at the nexus of dark forces marshalled by Gozer the Gozerian, an ancient Sumerian demigod. Rick Moranis plays Louis, Dana's obnoxious chatterbox of a neghbor. He is so ridiculous, and one of the absolute funniest scenes in the movie depicts a party that he's hosting, in which he roams around obliviously airing out everyone's dirty laundry and essentially calling them rubes to their faces (before being chased out of the room by a gargoyle dog thing). Dana good-naturedly humors him throughout the film, and she is the client around whom the plot revolves. She initially seeks out the Ghostbusters after spectral activity in her apartment causes eggs to go flying and a bizarre portal to open in the back of her refrigerator (where she first hears the name 'Zuul'). Venkman agrees to investigate for purely prurient reasons, and snarks at her the entire time as though he doesn't actually believe in the supernatural, when he very much does.

Over a period of weeks or months, the Ghostbusters take on dozens of cases, and develop a level of fame and notoriety. We get to see some of these early jobs, and they are whirlwinds of physical comedy, great effects, and deadpan snark from everyone. I think this sequence is what paved the way for the cartoons, and I would have enjoyed a live-action Ghostbusters series that was played like an action-comedy X-Files, where they responded to different kinds of hauntings and apparitions each week. I'm aware that that's exactly what the cartoons were, but the movie has a level of slightly more adult comedy (and not just in crassness, some of the best jokes in this movie just flew over my head as a kid because I had no context for them) that I think would have been easier to sell to adults in live-action.

The excellently hateable William Atherton plays a stiff-necked EPA investigator with an axe to grind, and he serves as the closest thing to an antagonist in the film, at least until Gozer is released. It is his attempt to shut down the Ghostbusters that ends up releasing their vault of captured spectres, setting up the conditions for Gozer's return. Zuul Dana and Rick Moranis turn into gargoyles, and Gozer appears in the form of an adrogynous woman with kind of a David Bowie vibe going on. The boys in grey do battle with the Gozerian, but to no avail, and it demands to know what form it shall take to destroy them. We all know what happens next. Something I thought was neat is that in an earlier scene Dana has a bag of Stay-Puft marshmallows on the counter, next to the exploding eggs, so they are established as an in-universe brand prior to Ray summoning the 100-ft Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man to terrorize Central Park.

This is just a fun, hilarious movie. I wrote down like three pages of quotes to work into this write-up, but honestly you should just go watch it for yourself, even if you've seen it before (especially if you've seen it before, there are so many fun little details and I notice new ones every time). 4.5/5 stars, because Bill Murray can be a dick, but only if we acknowledge that he is one, and otherwise this is a perfect movie.

What a blast! The animation is so fluid it's crazy. I liked the first one, but this one is even more impressive.

Also unexpectedly mature for such a movie.

Definitely a solid movie, can't wait for the next one.

What did you think about it?

Tonight's feature was, indeed, Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982).

I'll be honest, I went into this one with fairly low expectations. I knew exactly two things about this movie before tonight: That it was completely unrelated to the plot of the first two movies, and that this was the first one not written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill. They do both return as producers, and Carpenter once more contributes his excellent score. With that in mind, I was quite pleasantly surprised by this movie. I have no idea why it was produced as a Halloween sequel, but it's not a bad movie on its own merits. Instead of a pure Slasher movie, this entry is a genuinely interesting (if very, very silly) Techno-Supernatural thriller, centered around a drunken, philandering Doctor Challis (Tom Atkins) and his somewhat distressingly young love interest Ellie (Stacey Nelkin) as they try to unravel the mystery of her father Harry's death just days before Halloween.

The movie begins with Harry (Al Berry, who played the ill-fated Dr. Gruber in the opening of Re-Animator!) running from a car full of men, clutching a pumpkin mask. He seeks refuge in a junkyard, only to be cornered and strangled by a silent, suited man. He manages to pin the man between two cars and make his escape, aided by the junkyard/gas station attendant (Essex Smith). Later that night, after he is brought ranting and raving into the hospital, another of the suited men shows up and murders him in his bed. Doctor Challis is (rightfully) disturbed by this, particularly after he watches the killer walk out to the parking lot, get into a car, and explode. It's a fairly strong opening.

I do want to mention that the opening credits sequence is very cool, and foreshadows the technothriller aspects of the plot, but it also includes a strobing light element at the end that is probably not smart to expose people to unprepared, so here's your warning.

Drunk doctors are in danger of becoming a theme in this franchise, because Doctor Challis has two character traits and that is one of them. The other is that he is super horny and will sexually harass and/or trade sexual favors with any number of his female coworkers, concurrently. It's not hard to see why he's divorced. Among his gal pals are a nurse, the coroner, and the ambiguously of-age Ellie (seriously, he doesn't ask how old she is until they have had sex several times, and while she implies that she is of legal age, she doesn't actually give him a straight answer. Their whole thing is kind of gross, very much not a Harold and Maude romance, more an old drunk taking advantage of a young woman's trauma response after the loss of her father).

We are introduced, through a serious of television and radio ads that play throughout the film, to Silver Shamrock, a local company that produces the most popular Halloween masks in the country, in exactly three styles, and not one more, which every kid in America is somehow totally fine with. Early on, in a bit that emphasizes that Challis is a loser who does not even have the respect of his children, they disdain his gift of cheap plastic masks, because their mother has already given them Silver Shamrock masks, which they proceed to put on and then stare into the television as it screams the Silver Shamrock jingle at them, counting down the days to Halloween. This advertisement is playing on every TV and radio in town, and presumably all across America, at all hours of the day and night, advertising not only the masks, but a Halloween Horrorthon with a special prize give-away on Halloween night.

​As Challis and Ellie seek clues to her father's death, she brings him to Harry's joke/toy shop, and we learn that he stocks the Silver Shamrock masks in his store. In fact, he had been on a run to pick up the latest order from the factory before he turned up at the junkyard, so the duo decide to take a trip to the factory themselves. They do not make any kind of plan before or during their considerable drive, and they drive all the way up to the factory gates before realizing this and deciding to go do that first. They head over to the town's combination gas station and motel, and rent a room posing as a married couple.

We meet a whole handful of people all at once, including Buddy Kupfer (Ralph Strait), his Winnebago-riding, all-American nuclear family, and Marge (Garn Stephens) who is also in town to pick up her order of masks, all staying at the same motel. There is also a helpful bum (played by Jonathan Terry from Return of the Living Dead) who directs Challis' attention to the security cameras, and presumably the curfew they are both in violation of, before meeting his end at the hands of yet another suited man. The little town of Santa Mira, where the Silver Shamrock factory is located, seems to be entirely peopled with Irish immigrants brought in to work at the factory, and the bum was one of the displaced prior inhabitants. Finally we are introduced to Mr. Cochran (Dan O'Herlihey, from Robocop) the distinguished owner of the Silver Shamrock company, and practical joke enthusiast.

After Marge is killed by the trademark tag on one of the Silver Shamrock masks (with some excellently disgusting practical effects), in what Cochran describes as a 'misfire,' Challis and Ellie decide that they must investigate the factory (after having a bunch of gross sweaty sex first). Posing as buyers picking up a lost order, they make their way inside, and find the Kupfer family waiting inside as well, apparently to meet Mr. Cochran and receive a guided tour of the factory, on account of Buddy being the highest-selling mask salesman in America. Some quick thinking gets them both invited to the tour as well, and they follow Cochran onto the production floor. At the end of the tour the Kupfer kid begs for a mask, and Cochran swaps out the one he's asking for with one bearing the trademark tag, explaining that the one he wanted had not yet been through "final processing". It very much sounds like he's bullshitting the kid, especially when Buddy starts asking questions and he has to make something up about volatile chemicals and such, but then they walk down the hall and there actually is a room marked Final Processing, which just begs the question; why not lie? Why not say it needed a final layer of sealant, or even just say the tag is part of the mask's value, and that's why he gave him another mask, instead of actually directing their attention to the clearly nefarious happenings in 'Final Processing'? I don't know why this bothers me so much, but it does.

Eventually, Ellie finds evidence that Cochran was behind her father's death, but it is too late, a whole host of the silent, suited stranglers emerge from all around, and seize her and Challis both. Ellie is taken away somewhere separate from Challis, who is taken into Final Processing and given the big reveal, which is that Cochran stole part of Stonehenge somehow and brought it to California. He explains that he is doing some old-school Irish Samhain sacrifice, for the modern day, and demonstrates his plan on the Kupfer kid. When the kid wears his mask and watches a signal broadcast from the TV (the one being advertised constantly) his pumpkin mask is transformed into a real rotting gourd, and his head with it, bursting open and spilling forth snakes and insects which begin attacking the parents. It's a wonderful scene, with a very inventive effect, and it sets the stakes for Challis, because his kids are wearing those masks too. Cochran binds Challis to a chair and puts a mask on him, leaving him in front of a TV set to await his doom.

That would be a bummer, so Challis escapes right away, into the air ducts like a real 80's action hero, and to his credit, immediately tries to warn his ex-wife about the danger to their children. He's an unreliable, drunken liar so she doesn't hear him out, accusing him of jealousy and hanging up. Unable to save his kids that way, the doctor then tries to find Ellie and free her, as well as find a way to disrupt the broadcast. This leads him to a confrontation with Cochran that is bizarre and fantastic. There is a sacrificial circle for the (then) modern age, bridging the technological and the supernatural, and destroying Cochran's small army of what are by this point known to be weird clockwork/biotech/latex masked androids. Cochrane himself (or rather the fakest fake head in the history of fake heads) is lasered with beams of light projected by both the sacrificial circle and the Stonehenge stone, and it's ambiguous whether he is killed or if he has merely ascended to some higher form. He certainly doesn't seem surprised or unhappy at how things turn out for him.

Challis and Ellie make their escape from the factory, before Ellie reveals herself to be a robot doll thing too, although apparently a more sophisticated model than the others. I'm honestly not sure if she was meant to have been a robot all along, or if she was replaced while captive, because both are intelligible ways to read this movie, especially if you think Cochran was trying to manipulate Challis into coming to his town for some reason, a proposition made a little less of a stretch by how often Cochran mentions that he considers what he's doing a big practical joke, with Challis being one of its victims. In any case, they fight a grisly fight, and Ellie must be forcibly dismembered before she gives up the ghost. Challis proceeds into town, eventually running into the same junkyard as Harry did in the beginning of the film, with the station attendant even pointing out the similarity. He calls into the local broadcaster and tries to get them to stop the Silver Shamrock 9pm broadcast, and for a moment it seems that they aren't going to do it. Then the first channel goes off the air. The the second. There are only three channels because the past was terrible, and a long moment stretches out, the tension mounting, and then, it a truly ballsy ending, the broadcast goes out, and we close in on Challis' face as he realizes that every child in America, including his own, has just been sacrificed in a massive techno-druidic bloodletting. End credits.

It's a great ending that I think makes up for some of the very questionable choices made in the script, and I applaud Tommy Lee Wallace for going through with it. I actually enjoyed this movie a good deal, not least because it felt very much like it could have been adapted from the script for an X-Files episode. A lot of the best episodes featured a theme of ancient terrors adapting for the technological age, and that's exactly what's at the core of this film. It never reaches the heights of the first two films, and has some significant lows, but I did like this movie. I'm going to give it a 3.5/5 and reiterate that it is very strange that this was produced as a Halloween sequel instead of its own thing. They even lampshade that fact by having the original movie playing on TVs throughout the film, to establish it as a completely separate universe.

Oh, also Dick Warlock does do stunts for this one too, even though The Shape is nowhere to be seen.

Alternative headline: Paramount Accidentally Reinvents Quibi

Happy Mean Girls Day to all who celebrate!

In observance of the date, Paramount Pictures launched an official account for “Mean Girls” on TikTok (at this link) — and has made the entire one hour, 47 minute film available for free on the platform, broken up into 23 clips.

The bio for the official “Mean Girls” TikTok account says, “Get in loser, we’re going shopping.” Mean Girls Day has become popular among fans of the 2004 film because of a scene where Aaron Samuels (Jonathan Bennett) asks Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) what day it is, and she replies, “It’s Oct. 3” — as shown in this clip.

If you prefer to watch movies the old-fashioned way, “Mean Girls” is currently available on Paramount+ and free to watch on YouTube with ads (as well as available to buy via digital video stores like Amazon and Apple iTunes). The TikTok account links out to Paramount’s website listing retailers that offer DVD, Blu-ray and digital versions of “Mean Girls” for purchase.

Co-starring and written by Tina Fey, “Mean Girls” stars Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried, Lacey Chabert, Lizzy Caplan, Daniel Franzese and Amy Poehler.

Here’s the synopsis of the cult-classic teen movie: After living in Africa with her zoologist parents, Cady Heron (Lohan) must brave the wilds of high school where she is taken under the wing of the popular girls, The Plastics, led by the cool and cruel Regina George (McAdams). “What follows is a treasure trove of sharp, witty humor that defined a generation, inspired a hit Broadway musical and popularized countless catchphrases,” the studio says.

Paramount’s musical movie of “Mean Girls,” based on the Broadway adaptation, is set for theatrical release on Jan. 12, 2024 (after it was originally planned to debut on Paramount+). Reneé Rapp, Angourie Rice, Jaquel Spivey and Auli’i Cravalho star in the new movie, with Rapp reprising her turn as Regina George from the stage production.

!lupin2021@lemmy.film

New season is coming out in a few days, you can gather here to talk about the show and discuss in the discussion threads.

If you have thoughts on how the community should be run, please voice your opinions. I'm happy to make improvements.

I've decided that I want to watch the entire Halloween franchise this October, so I went ahead and moved on to Halloween II (1981) tonight.

This is such a great movie, and such a great follow-up to the original. As I was watching, I wrote down the phrase 'Bigger, Louder, and Meaner' and I think that sums it up pretty well. Everything from the score, to the sets, to the kills benefits from the significantly beefier budget that this sequel had over the original, without completely sacrificing the minimalist ethos that drove the first film. There is also a dark humor that feels much more like the rest of the 80's slasher crowd than the first flick, which had laughs, but mostly not at the expense of the victims. That's not to say that this is a mean-spirited or particularly transgressive film, just that the script has been fleshed out some and the universe feels a little less quaint and innocent than in the first movie. It feels more like a world that Michael Myers belongs in, rather than one he has invaded.

The plot picks up during the climactic ending of the first film, giving us an abbreviated version of events, and fairly smoothly transitioning into the continuing action. Donald Pleasance returns as Dr. Loomis, as does Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, and Jamie in particular seems to have grown into her acting chops in the three years since the first movie was released. Donald Pleasance's beard visibly fills out as he emerges from the house three years older, which is kind of funny as well. I should mention that the song 'Mr Sandman' serves as both intro and outro to this movie, and it works so well, despite not being set in the 50s/60s when that song was actually popular. I vaguely remember it becoming something of a recurring theme in these movies, but I guess I'll find that out.

Dr. Loomis pursues Michael out of the house, after firing six shots into his chest and blasting him off of a balcony. As we saw in the original, Michael is already gone by the time Loomis makes it downstairs. From here we get to see Michael stalking through the neighborhood, in what I like to call 'Michaelvision', long POV shots accompanied by Michael's masked breathing. The mask POV is arguably done better in the original, with the small eyeholes visibly obscuring parts of the screen, but the overall effect, with the heavy breathing and unfocused edges, is still very strong.

While Michael roams the alleys and houses of the neighborhood, the town is beginning to discover what has happened already that night, and flocks of people begin to converge on the house. Loomis and Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers) continue to search the streets, and Laurie is carted off to the local hospital. In the ambulance we are introduced to Bud (Leo Rossi) and Jimmy (Lance Guest), who recognizes Laurie as attending the same school as his younger brother. I'm pretty sure this chatter between them is just to establish who Laurie is for anyone who didn't see the first film, but it also gives us our first glimpse at the wider cast this one will employ.

Arriving at the hospital we are treated to the sight of a child with a razor blade stuck in their mouth, presumably hidden inside a halloween treat. I knew this was something the news would get up in alarms about every Halloween when I was a kid, but I think this is the first time I've seen it depicted, or implied to be a real thing that happens. It's a great practical effect, and one of the 'meaner' jokes I mentioned, as the situation is definitely played for laughs. This is what I mean when I say it feels like a world Michael belongs in; there's casual cruelty in the background, without him needing to be there to inflict it. We also learn that the only doctor available (Ford Rainey) has been drinking, which might explain why he sedates Laurie to give her a few stitches, as well as draws about half a liter of blood from her right after mentioning her blood loss.

Back on the streets, Loomis and the sheriff spot a figure that resembles The Shape (this time portrayed by the legendary Dick Warlock), walking down the street among the trick-or-treaters. He's even wearing a similar mask. Loomis gives chase, and the figure lurches out into the street, where a cop car fucking annihilates him. It's so sudden and unexpected, the cruiser comes out of nowhere and just explodes into a massive fireball, with the object of Loomis' pursuit slammed between the hood of the car and the side of a van that also explodes on contact. The person in the mask is incinerated in seconds, rendering it extremely difficult to confirm whether it really was Michael or not.

​We are next introduced to Karen (Pamela Susan Shoop), a nurse at the local hospital who has been out at a Halloween party. We get a short scene with Karen and a friend of hers, that smoothly transitions into exposition via boombox, as a man walks by, the radio blaring out a news story about the murders, and broadcasting Laurie's location to the world. The film doesn't leave us hanging for long, and we get confirmation that Michael was not the boy killed in the explosion (It's later revealed to have been Ben Tramer, the boy Laurie has a crush on in the first movie) when he bumps into boombox-man. With his destination now known to him, Michael proceeds to the hospital himself. Ben Tramer's death is never mentioned again after it is confirmed that he was the one who died, and presumably the cop who killed him faced no consequences, as is tradition.

The rest of the film, more or less, takes place at the Haddonfield hospital. We are introduced to Karen's boss, Mrs. Alves (Gloria Gifford), as well as her fellow nurses Jill (Tawny Moyer) and Janet (Ana Alicia), and the hospital security guard, Mr. Garrett (Cliff Emmich). During one scene in the hospital cafeteria/break area we get my favorite exchange of dialogue in the film, between Bud and Janet:

Janet: "Every other word you say is either Hell, or Shit, or Damn!"

Bud (deadpan): "Sorry. I guess I just fuck up all the time."

Comedy gold. Bud also delivers the appalling line "Amazing Grace, come sit on my face" which is either genius or madness.

Jimmy is the first person to actually tell Laurie that the monster who attacked her is the same Michael Myers who killed his sister fifteen years prior, which seemingly unlocks some repressed memories, and we get our first big hint at the movie's big 'twist'. It has been pointed out to me that this movie is where I got the idea that Laurie is Michael's sister in the first film, because that is precisely what is revealed in this one, a little later on. It's been about twenty years since I watched any of these movies apart from the first one, and H20, which I saw in theaters just... oh god... stop thinking about the passage of time.​ Anyway, the idea that the two were related is something I had carried around, but I had forgotten that it was actually established as canon in this film.

The middle portion of the fim cuts between Michael eliminating the small staff on duty at the hospital one by one, with some pretty inventive kills thrown in, and Laurie desparately trying to hide and/or escape, while Loomis continues his search for Michael (I'm not actually sure why nobody thought to put even a single cop on Laurie-watch, or why they all thought he was done with her that night). Bud gets offed in the background of a shot focused on Karen, which is very artsy and cool, and then Michael drowns Karen in scalding water, which is a little less artsy, but still very entertaining. Mrs. Alves is exsanguinated off-screen at some point, and Garrett gets to experience Hammer Time. I'm honestly not sure if Jimmy is dead by the end of the film. He slips in a pool of Alves' blood and hits his head, but he makes it out to the parking lot with Laurie later on, only to seemingly die at the wheel. Maybe it was blood loss from the head wound? I don't think he shows back up in any of the sequels, but it was kind of odd how ambiguous his fate was left. I'll be very impressed if he does make a return. I won't spoil all the kills, there are a couple other great ones, and just about every moment that Michael is on-screen is impossible to look away from.

​The run-up to the climax is filled with great moments, and Dick Warlock really escalates the super-human force of nature feeling given off by The Shape, frequently just walking straight through doors and exhibiting freakish strength. The mask continues to be an incredible choice, because it translates the blank emptiness of Michael's psyche into an outward persona in a way that even the most talented actor never could, and paired with Warlock's implacible physicality, the effect is deeply convincing. I want to be far away from Michael Myers at all times.

There is a short scene a bit earlier in the film with dialogue between Loomis and officer Hunt (Ben Tramer's killer) where Hunt (Hunter Von Leer) offers Loomis a cigarette, which he takes, and then a lighter which he also takes. The scene continues and Loomis notably does not light the cigarette, he only took the items handed to him because he was talking and didn't want to interrupt himself to explain that he doesn't smoke (or so I imagine) and he walks off with both still in his hands. This becomes important later.

Loomis (who has been ordered by the governor himself to return to the mental hospital) carjacks the Federal Marshal sent to escort him, once he learns of the connection between Laurie and Michael Myers, and the Marshal takes it pretty well, all things considered. He, along with a woman who I think is meant to be the nurse from the beginning of the first film (although I thought she was dead?) and the Marshal return to the hospital, just missing Laurie in the parking lot. A tense sequence follows where Laurie screams for help and pounds on the door to the building, Loomis letting her in at the last moment. This is one of the moments where Michael just ignores the existence of a door and walks through it without breaking stride, only for Loomis to plug him six more times with his revolver, with exactly the same efficacy as the first time.

The climax takes place in one of the operating rooms, and it is absolutely perfect. Laurie finally gets to take her own stand against michael, shooting him once through each eye. By this point Michael's supernatural durability has been well established and it comes as no shock when this does not put him down. Instead The Shape blindly slashes around the room with a scalpel until Loomis hatches a plan.

Loomis and Laurie begin opening the gas valves on all of the Ether tanks in the room, flooding the room with flammable gas (Which, if I understand Ether correctly, probably would have killed everyone in the room on its own. "There is nothing so helpless and irresponsible and depraved as a man in the depths of an Ether binge" and all that). This is where the pocketed lighter resurfaces, with Loomis shepherding Laurie out of the room and then igniting the gas, killing himself, and seemingly Michael as well. The Shape emerges from the roaring flames one last time, before collapsing and burning away. It would be a convincing end to Michael if A. he had not already had one immolation fake-out death in this movie, and B. you didn't know that there are 11 more movies in this franchise.

Overall this movie is a very solid follow-up to the first, and makes excellent use of the larger budget without losing sight of the original's minimalist charm. I'm going to give this one 5/5 as well, although I doubt that trend will hold throughout the rest of the series. The third one is pretty rough if I remember correctly (and also has absolutely nothing to do with any of the other films). My final thought is that for all the bad sequels billed as Something: Part 2, this is one film that actually is just a straight up Part 2, and they decided not to go with that naming convention for some reason, which I find odd.

#Patriot# is a show about a covert spy dude from the u.s. who is very depressed, and a quiet folk singer, and unusually adept at violence. His task is to get hired undercover at a Milwaukee industrial piping firm so he can do spy shit in Luxembourg and Iran. They managed two 10-episode story arcs out of this, and I love it.

Fantastic ensemble cast, fantastic writing, fantastic cinematography, fantastic soundtrack, often annoyingly quirky in silly ways, and dark because the characters' actions have consequences.

also, Terry O'Quinn (Lost) in this is calm and weird and creepy.

#Perpetual Grace, LTD# Classic pastiche of scammers screwing up in a silly, morbid scheme in a lot of pretentious, but well-done, acting and noir-ish cinematography.

edit forgot to add: Jimmi Simpson, aka Liam McPoyle from It's Always Sunny, is the lead

Cut from the same insanity as Patriot, with many of the same creators and actors. A bit more annoyingly quirky. If you don't like Patriot, you probably won't like this.

if you remember, a criticism of Breaking Bad was that scenes in Mexico were always kinda sepia-toned... this just has weird tones, sometimes in Mexico.

Both have Steven Conrad as one of the principal creators/writers/directors, or some combination thereof. He wrote Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which is even more silly, but not too far off.

A family’s (Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke) vacation is upended when two strangers (Mahershala Ali and Myha’la) arrive at night, seeking refuge from a cyberattack that grows more terrifying by the minute, forcing everyone to come to terms with their places in a collapsing world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvWUroNu61E

​Sticking with the spooky season theme, tonight I watched Wes Craven's directorial debut, The Last House on the Left (1972).

Serious Content Warning on this one, I'm going to talk about sexual assault a whooole bunch in this review, so hold on to your butts.

Holy Shit this was a weird movie. Wes Craven's first picture is a bewildering nightmare amalgamation of exploitation, horror, and slapstick comedy that I am struggling to wrap my brain around. I had picked up the basic plot of this film through cultural osmosis long ago, but this was my first time actually seeing it. I feel like I need to set up the context of the movie before I start talking about it, because on the surface of it, this is an ugly, heinous, offensively edited trainwreck of a film, but I am pretty sure that was the intended effect.

The plot of the film is loosely based on Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, of which Craven is a big fan. The idea for the film came from Craven's desire to present a shocking tale of violence, like in that film, but without the sterilization and glorification of the violence that he viewed as common in film at the time (in particular he apparently felt that the way Westerns portray violence as a force for good was damaging to Americans' ability to understand the Vietnam war). So he set out to make a hardcore pornographic film that depicted rape, assault, and murder in as realistic a fashion as possible, to pull the gauze away from his audience's eyes, as it were, and give them a taste of what violence actually looks like. He did not end up making that version of the film, which is probably for the best. What he did make is still devastatingly uncomfortable to watch, and it mostly accomplishes the goal of producing a watchable film that depicts its violence realistically without making it pornographic.

The actual plot of the movie begins on Mari Collingwood's (Sandra Peabody) 17th birthday. She and her friend Phyllis (Lucy Grantham), a queer-coded girl from the wrong side of the tracks, that Mom disapproves of, are going to go see a show to celebrate. We get to see a bit of Mari's fairly happy home life, with her mother Estelle (Cynthia Carr) and father John (Richard Towers) gifting her a golden peace-symbol necklace before she runs off to meet Phyllis in the woods.

The two girls run around by a picturesque river, share a bottle, and talk about their lives in what, to me, is a pretty clearly budding sapphic romance. It's not made explicit, but the chemistry between the two girls is easy and flirty, and they each represent countercultures that were becoming more accepting of sexual non-conformity at the time, the Hippies and the Punks. Having two young women at the center of the story rather than a hetero couple does a lot to ground the violence; you are never expecting the musclebound male lead to come rescue the damsel in distress. In fact, the police officers who appear in this movie are subjects of mockery and ridicule both by characters within the film, and the film itself. The message is clear: real violence is ugly and terrifying, often you cannot make a hollywood escape at the last moment, and help doesn't always arrive on time.

As the girls make their way towards the venue, we are introduced to the villains of the piece, a quartet of scum led by Krug (David Hess). Krug is male violence incarnate. He is insatiable. He imposes himself on everyone and everything around him, taking exactly what he wants and leaving only wreckage behind him. He is joined by his son, Junior (Marc Sheffler) whom he has gotten hooked on Heroin in order to better control, Weasel (Fred J Lincoln) the knife-wielding pedophile, and Sadie (Jeramie Rain) the bisexual sadist. The performances by these mostly first-time actors are bizarre at times, but gripping throughout. David Hess' Krug in particular is a force of nature that reminds me of a Stanley Kowalski type turned up to 11. Junior is used and abused by the three others, and it is he who lures the girls into their crash pad with the lure of cheap grass (himself desperate for his 'fix').

What follows is a deeply uncomfortable sequence in which the girls are tormented, and Phyllis raped, while Mari is made to watch. This is the first part in the film that we get to experience the insane tonal whiplash that will characterize the rest of the runtime. Phyllis' assault and the molestation of Mari are intercut with Mari's parents flirting and canoodling set to comic music. This juxtaposition will continue throughout, with slapstick gags and utterly inappropriate banjo music cut directly into the most graphic sexual violence in the film. An extended gag is made of the cops who are investigating Mari's disappearance trying to catch a ride after running out of gas, with everyone they meet trolling the shit out of them for being cops. It's a confounding choice, because on the one hand, portraying the ineffectiveness of the police force does seem to tie into Craven's larger ethos about realistic violence, but the actual comedic framing (and the horrifically tonally dissonant music, seriously what the fuck?​) are just so bizarre because they are juxtaposed with the most serious elements of the film's violence in a way that makes it seem like the violence is part of the joke.

The morning after they are assaulted, the girls are bundled into the trunk of the gang's car, and they hit the road. Krug has sex with Sadie in the car full of people, with the top down, as Weasel asks him what the 'sex-crime of the century' might be. Sadie quotes some rad-fem literature (she has a quirk where she mispronounces words, having only read them and not heard them sploken, that is actually an incredible bit of characterization for an otherwize sterotypically psychotic character) and eventually the car breaks down just up the road from Mari's house.

What follows is even more graphic rape and torture of the two girls, involving escalating acts of humiliation, including forcing the two girls to perform sex acts on one another (this is another scene which I think strengthens the sapphic narrative, as Phylis, the more experienced and queer-coded girl, comforts and directs Mari. Mari also seems far more devastated by this than any of the other assaults to her person, making me feel that the corruption of her feelings for Phylis are an intended reading of the abuse taking place, although Phyllis does call Sadie a dyke at one point, so who really knows where this movie's sexual politics are really meant to lead?). Eventually, Phyllis engineers an opportunity to escape, and give Mari an opportunity to run as well. She makes a valiant attempt, but is ultimately killed by the gang. In the goriest shot in the film the gang pull her intestines out and play with them as a group.

While Phylis is running for it, Mari tries a different tactic. Left alone with Junior she tries to appeal to him, to befriend him, and to get him to take her to her parents' home. Her efforts might have succeeded had the others not returned before she could wheedle him down. Krug rapes Mari once more, in the most graphic assault of the film. It is immediately followed by jaunty banjo music that made me actually shout "what the fuck?" at my screen. The gang+Mari look almost as lost as I felt in that moment. They all stand and sort of shuffle around, only briefly meeting eachothers' eyes, until Mari begins to pray, and walk into the river. Krug takes a pistol from Weasel and guns her down, with her body floating in the water like the painting of Ophelia.

We then crash headlong into another slapstick bit involving the cops trying to catch a ride on a chicken truck from an old lady who could not give less of a fuck about them. It's an objectively funny bit, but it is so, so jarring that it exists in this movie at all, much less as an immediate follow-up to the death of our leading lady.

The next that we see the gang, they have found Mari's parents' house and convinced them that they are just travellers experiencing car trouble. The parents offer to let them stay the night, until the mechanic opens in the morning. I should note that throughout the film so far characters keep commenting on the status of the phones at the house, informing us that they are 'still out' or 'just came back' in an order that left me entirely unable to tell when and whether they had phone access at all. To simplify that headache, Weasel simply cuts the phone line in this scene, and we're done worrying about it.

The next segment of the film involves the gang getting antsy and the parents putting together what has happened to their daughter, with Estelle eventually discovering Mari's necklace in Jr's possession, and bloodstained clothes in the gang's bags. We are treated to a sequence where John sets up a fairly complicated booby trap, as well as just spraying some shaving cream on the floor outside the gang's door, and Estelle seduces Weasel, drawing him away from the house. I won't mince words here, she bites his dick off. It is undoubtably the best moment in the film. I could see it coming from a mile away, and I still cheered when she did it. This is the first moment in the entire film where Craven's ethos starts to come together. The disdain for the police, and the hammering home of the banality of violence has led to this, the only glorified acts of violence in the film, where a middle-aged couple absolutely annihilate a gang of rapists and murderers. This is the film at its most Grindhouse, and yet, it's also the most conventional action in the whole thing. It feels almost like the third act to a real horror movie, and not whatever fever-dream this flick has been for the prior hour.

Just before the actual revenge plot kicks in, we get a fake-out that made me squirm in my seat. Weasel dreams that he has been awoken by the Doctors Collingwood, who proceed to chisel out his teeth with a hammer. That dream sequence I'm pretty sure is the kernel that eventually grew into Freddy Krueger and the whole Nightmare on Elm Street concept.

There is a fight between John and Krug that roams throughtout the house, and it gave me intense Clockwork Orange vibes, Hess is fully unhinged at this point, bleeding from birdshot in his shoulder, and goading the older man into swinging at him. There is a split-second moment where you can see a man standing in a doorframe behind the two men, as Krug advances of the wounded John, which I thought was a crew member accidentally in the shot. Instead, that tiny, tiny moment serves as the establishing shot which leads into Jr appearing behind Krug with Weasel's gun (There are tiny moments of technical brilliance like this peppered all throughout the film). There is a tense standoff, and for a moment there is hope that Jr will break free from his father's abusive hold over him, and try to atone for what he's done, but it passes, and Krug bullies his own son into suicide.

We get to see John's booby trap pay off, and Krug meets an appropriately grizzly end, hacked apart by a chainsaw (This film somehow does chainsaw violence better than the actual Texas Chainsaw Massacre...) while Estelle slashes Sadie's throat in the pool. The cops finally show up, just as John is jamming the motorized blade into the helpless, terrified Krug, and merely stand around, utterly incapable of rendering any kind of aid.

The film ends there, and that would be fine, if it didn't immediately jump back into that goddamn banjo music, and roll credits over freeze-frames of the cast that are directly out of some old sitcom. It is so jarring and inappropriate, I honestly could not tell you what the fuck Wes Craven was thinking when he edited this thing. And he did. He wrote, directed, and edited it himself, which is the only way a movie like this ever gets made.

On the subject of the music, there is a sort of 'theme song' called The Road Leads Nowhere that plays at several points throughout the movie. It's a folksy kind of tune with melancholy lyrics, and it's the bit of music that fits the scenes it's used in the most often (although still not always). Apparently that song was written and performed by David Hess, which adds a whole new layer to scenes where it is used, if you imagine it as something of an internal monologue that Krug is experiencing.

I have gone back and forth on how to rate this thing so many times, and I am still not confident in my decision. I think I enjoyed watching this movie, on balance. I was variously gripped, confused, revolted, and actually offended (something that does not often happen to me while watching a film) by the utterly bizarre experience of watching this one, and I think parts of it are just badly made, but other parts are crafted with a care and sensitivity that it makes it hard to write this off as pure exploitation trash. There is a kernel of solid gold at the heart of this thing, but it is totally buried beneath a toxic, cancerous mass of deliberate, in-your-face provocation. I am going to give this one 2.5/5 stars. This is definitely not the best horror movie ever made, but it's certainly not the worst. I don't think I'd ever want to see it again unless I was showing it to a group of friends or something though.

Looking for period shows set between 1920 and the 50s. Shows that have a feel similar to LA Confidential, if that makes sense. I've got World on Fire and Perry Mason on my list. I'm not terribly picky about the genre, it's the period and the setting I am interested in. I am hoping to find some gems I have overlooked that aren't Netflix single season cancels. I'm really looking for shoes, but I'll take movie recommendations too if you'd be so kind.

Thanks for your consideration.

Edit: these are great recommendations! Thank you all for your quick and thoughtful responses. I've seen some of these and loved them, so I am sure the rest will be great.

Edit: It's Lovesick! Thank you, @magic_window@lemmy.world!

Hi! I'm hoping someone can help me out. I'm trying to find a show I streamed a while ago. Here's what I remember:

• It was a British show
• Two guys were roommates; I think the apartment was messy
• They had a woman friend
• One of the roommates and the friend were in love but they kept having bad timing
• I think the other friend was a manager at a company?
• I think the woman had to move in with them at some point?
• There was a guy named Jono (sp?) who kept saying, "I'm Jono"

I imagine that I will be watching a lot of horror this month, so I figured I would start spooky season off right by revisiting Halloween (1978).

This is one of the first horror movies I can remember watching. The image of Michael Myers effortlessly lifting Bob (John Micheal Graham) into the air, pinning him to the wall with a knife, and then just standing there, examining his work, is seared into my brain for life. The rest of the kills are comparatively low-key in this first installment, with Michael resorting to strangulation more often than his iconic oversized knife. Regardless of the method, Myers is one of the few slasher antagonists who I genuinely find creepy, even frightening.

The movie opens with a long POV shot from Michael's perspective (although the POV is situated much higher than where 6 year old Mikey's actual eyeballs should be) as he covertly observes his sister canoodling with her boyfriend. The boyfriend leaves, discarding a halloween mask on the floor as he does so, which Michael retrieves as he slowly, inexorably approaches his nude sister in her room, knife in hand. The murder is quick, and not that flashy, but the first-person POV and the reveal that the killer is this tiny little blonde-headed boy still make for an effective shock.

Fifteen Years pass, and we are introduced to Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance), Michael Myers' psychiatrist during his long incarceration. Loomis does not fuck around. He spends the entire runtime telling anyone who will listen that Michael is pure, inhuman evil, even referring to him as 'it' until asked to do otherwise. It's almost hilarious how little this film does to establish Loomis as an actual doctor who cares about his patients. He's completely right in this case, but I like to imagine him strolling the halls of the asylum, hunting down evil like a modern day Van Helsing of the infirm, blowing away any patients who get a little jumpy with his concealed revolver. In all seriousness though, Pleasance is great, and the speeches he gives throughout the film are an irreplaceable component of this film's perfect formula.

Our true protagonist however, is Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis in her first role on screen. Laurie is a bookish teenager, just trying to navigate high-school, the homecoming dance, and her two friends, who are the worst people alive. Lynda (PJ Soles) is an obnoxious mean-girl type, and Annie (Nancy Kyes) is oversexed to the point of child endangerment. Laurie, by contrast, comes off as chaste and moral without making her a completely sexless figure. She pines for boys, and seeks a more lively social life, but she's also serious about her studies, and committed to being a good babysitter, unlike the other two who took the jobs just to have someone else' house to get laid in. I'm not sure if this is the absolute origin of the trope, but certainly nearly all subsequent slashers ran with the virginal Final Girl outliving her more promiscuous friends, with sexual frustration even being the explicit motivation behind several of the iconic baddies.

The plot kicks off with Michael Myers making his escape from the mental hospital where he is held, on the eve of some kind of parole hearing. I distinctly remember wondering 'How does he know how to drive?' for years after seeing this for the first time, and I was pleasantly surprised to note that there is actually a line of dialogue lampshading this later on in the film.

Michael returns to Haddonfield Illinois, the sleepy midwestern town (depicted quite convincingly by a California suburb strewn with fake leaves) where he killed his sister all those years before. He catches a glimpse of Laurie as she drops off a key to the old Myers' house for her dad, a realtor. It's not clear why Laurie becomes the object of his fixation. When I was a kid I though that she was also Michael's sister somehow, and that he was back to finish the job, but no, she's just the first person he sees while we're seeing from his POV. Regardless of his motivation, he begins a campaign of stalking, following Laurie around town in his stolen car, silently staring, and disappearing as soon as she blinks.

Michael also seems interested in Tommy, the little boy that Laurie babysits, watching him for a while after he is bullied by other children, whom Michael completely ignores. In this installement at least (my memory is hazy on the larger franchise) Michael never actually targets children, despite this one lingering shot of him observing Tommy. My impression is that Michael recognizes something of himself in Tommy. Maybe Michael was bullied at a young age too? In any case, the ambiguity of his intentions all throughout are a big driver of the tension. Michael never speaks. He doesn't explain his motivations, or curse in frustration as his victim slips away. He's an enigma, and that's a big part of his draw.

The real action begins once the sun has set and All-Hallows-Eve has begun in earnest. Michael tails Laurie and Annie to their babysitting gigs, watching silently all the while. Annie and her charge, Lindsey, don't seem to get along nearly as well as Laurie and Tommy, and Annie eventually pawns Lindsey off to Laurie so she can go get laid. This will be her final mistake. Later, Lynda and her boyfriend Bob show up to the now-empty house where Annie had been, and proceed to shag and toss beer cans all over the place, until Michael decides he's seen enough and mounts Bob to the pantry doors. Lynda meets her end at the hands of a telephone cord, while Laurie listens on, thinking it's a prank call.

Disturbed by the glimpses of unusual activity that she's been getting all day, Laurie decides to go investigate, and hopefully find her friends. She does, but arranged in a macabre display including the stolen gravestone of Judith Myers, Michael's first victim. This is the first indication that we get that Michael has anything at all going on upstairs beyond a drive to kill. He is clearly doing something that makes sense to his permanently warped six-year-old psychology, but is utterly incomprehensible to Laurie, Loomis, or anyone else.

The climax is fantastic, with stunts, and fake-outs, and a great split-second reveal of Michael's face (portrayed by Tony Moran. The Shape, as Myers is referred to in the script, is played by the incredible Nick Castle, who also portrayed the Beach Ball alien in Carpenter's Dark Star) that drives home how little there is underneath the mask. Loomis is right, there isn't really a person in there, the mask is who Michael is, and when that mask is dislodged momentarily, Michael doesn't know how to react. The film ends with Loomis blowing Michael away with his revolver, after Myers has already been stabbed in the eye and the chest (at one point, after Laurie believes she has killed Myers with his own knife, he does the slow sit-up thing that The Undertaker always did in the ring, and I just now understood where he got it from. It's an incredible shot.). There is the barest moment of respite, and then, horribly, Michael is just gone. The nightmare isn't over, even if the film is.

Jamie-Lee Curtis does an absolutely outstanding job in her first role, and this movie would be worth remembering just for her. The fact that it also gave us one of the most memorable Horror villains of all time, who is still being depicted in new films to this day, is a credit to John Carpenter. His script, his score, and his direction come together to create something that isn't quite an exploitation film (despite wearing the trappings proudly) and isn't quite a traditional slasher (because this is the film that inspired the genre-codifiers like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street) but is instead a brutally effective tale of terror that I am always happy to revisit.

Halloween rates 5/5 stars. There are places where the finished product could have used more polish, but there is no denying how effective this is as a horror film, or how important it became to the genre. If you've never seen it, this is as good a time as any!

“Saw X” begins with the kind of reverse time jump that only a horror franchise on its tenth film would dare to attempt. After the previous eight sequels advanced the story of John “Jigsaw” Kramer and his many imitators in a relatively linear fashion — while relying heavily on flashbacks to keep including Tobin Bell after his character’s early death — “Saw X” takes place in 2004, just three weeks after the events of the original film.

John Kramer is still alive in the new movie, battling a deteriorating cancer diagnosis that simultaneously serves as his motivation and an explanation for why he appears to have aged 20 years in three weeks. When his prognosis looks bleak, he travels to Mexico City to participate in an experimental treatment program that offers him a new lease on life. But when he finds out that the costly procedure was a scam and his cancer wasn’t actually cured, he sets out to exact revenge in the only way he knows how: playing a game with an arsenal of lethal homemade traps.

The narrative gambit turned “Saw X” into the most emotional film in the franchise, but it also placed its team in the predicament of having to deliver a tenth “Saw” movie that feels like it’s the third one. The early “Saw” films were sparse affairs that took great pride in constructing traps out of easily available materials that actually worked from a mechanical standpoint. But as the series grew, so did its narrative ambitions. It wasn’t long before Jigsaw and co. were using lasers and trains to make outlandish traps that were almost cartoonish in their violence. They served a narrative purpose in the wackier sequels — but for “Saw X,” everyone knew it was time to return to the barebones simplicity of early traps like “The Magnum Eyehole” and “The Needle Pit.”

“We knew we wanted to make the traps less complicated,” executive producer Mark Burg said in a recent interview with IndieWire. “We wanted to make traps that you could basically put together from Home Depot. At some point our traps got bigger and more complex, and we wanted to bring it back down.”

The task of constructing the stripped-down traps fell to production designer Anthony Stabley, a newcomer to the franchise who took the assignment seriously. Stabley told IndieWire that he limited his research to the first two “Saw” movies in order to ensure that his designs aligned with their place in the franchise’s larger timeline. Once it was time to start building, he prioritized simplicity to drive home the point that Kramer built these traps himself with limited resources.

“As far as the traps were concerned, our main objective was to make sure that everybody believes that John Kramer made these traps,” Stabley said. “We wanted to make sure that it reflects the early ‘Saw’ films.”

The simplified ethos extended all the way up to director Kevin Greutert, who previously directed “Saw VI” and “Saw 3D” and has edited all ten films in the series. He told IndieWire that, after 20 years of working on the franchise, he has a keen eye for discerning which shots are actually necessary to advance the larger story. On “Saw X,” he resisted the temptation to indulge in flashy cinematography in favor of a more utilitarian shot list that parallels the earlier films.

“I think I have more experience knowing exactly what kind of coverage I want,” Greutert said. “DPs and directors always want ‘cool shots,’ but to me the cool shot still has to tell some of the story. It still has to ground you emotionally and in the characters and not just be auteurish-looking.”

By simplifying everything, the team was able to pull off the kind of smooth timeline reset that has evaded countless other horror franchises. Bringing the action back to 2004 had the dual benefit of placating longtime “Saw” junkies who missed the feel of the original films and offering an easier entry point for new fans who haven’t ingested all the mythology.

“We tried to accomplish two things,” executive producer Oren Koules said. “We wanted to bring it back to O.G. We wanted an original ‘Saw’ movie. We wanted John Kramer very featured in this movie. But we also wanted a movie that was accessible to people that had never seen a ‘Saw’ movie.”

I followed up Them! with the classic Ray Harryhausen picture The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953).

This was, as far as I can figure, the very first Atomic Monster movie. There had been films with giant creatures before, most notably Kong, but the Kaiju genre as we understand it really began with this film. Beast was released just over a year before Gojira, and the influences on the later film are manifold. All of the basic plot elements are there, and the original script even called for the Beast to breathe atomic flames just like his Eastern cousin. The biggest difference between the two is the way in which the films brought their monsters to life. Gojira famously employed 'suitmation' to deliver a very naturalistic looking monster who interacted directly with the city he was destroying. Beast instead opted for the masterful miniature and stop-motion effects of Ray Harryhausen, integrating matte shots and technical effects with creature effects to sell the illusion of scale. Both films accomplish their goals quite effectively, and both highlight the advantages (and disadvantages) of either method.

The film opens on an Arctic expedition intended to test an Atomic device and collect some unspecified data. Our lead, Professor Tom Nesbitt (Paul Hubschmid, who was a Swiss actor who appeared in light-entertainment flicks produced by the Nazis...) and a colleague are hiking out to the detonation site in order to conduct their readings when they are attacked by a mysterious creature emerging from the ice. Nesbitt survives, but he is committed to a hospital upon his return, with nobody believing his tales of a giant monster.

Eventually, with the help of Professor Thurgood Elson (Cecil Kellaway, who is great in Harvey, and also every other role where he plays a silly little doctor man) and his beautiful assistant Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond), Nesbitt begins to accumulate evidence that the beast exists. Boats have been attacked, and a lighthouse destroyed (in the sequence that "inspired" the movie, from a Ray Bradbury short story. The sequence was already scripted, but when the filmmakers saw the success of the Bradbury story, they bought the rights to it and heavily pushed that angle in marketing.), making it harder and harder for the authorities to ignore him.

There is a lot of dubious scientific speak thrown around, a lot of it humorous, but one tidbit that stuck out to me was an Anecdote that Lee related about a group of scientists finding Mastodons so well preserved by permafrost that their flesh was still edible. I have no idea if that was true in 1953, but it definitely is today. In 2013 a group of Korean scientists cooked and ate samples of Mastodon tissue, finding that it was tough, but flavorful.

There are lot of great locations in this flick, from the Arctic sets, to the boats and underwater sequence with a diving bell, to the streets of Gotham itself. Harryhausen masterfully blended miniature effects with in-camera split-matte techniques to bring his monster into the same space as the actors, and it works extremely well. I won't sit here and tell you that it looks better than later practical effects, or even modern CGI, but it has a visceral physicality to it that makes it impossible to look away, even if the eye is never exactly fooled. The varied backdrops and destructable environments ensured that the gimmick never wore out its welcome either, I was always eager to see what the Beast was going to do next. The Beast itself is shown on-screen much more freqiently than the ants from Them! and even a lot of later Kaiju movies that rely on tiny glimpses to build suspense. We catch a decent look at the Beast early on, and then it's not a long wait before his full boat-smashing reveal. The action itself is fun and exciting all the way through.

I found the human actors somewhat less compelling than the cast of Them!, although most of that is antipathy towards Paul Hubschmid who seems to be an in-universe Operation Paperclip type figure, in addition to being a dancing monkey for the real-life Nazis. Paula Raymond and Cecil Kellaway are delightful, and I would have much preferred if they had been centered as the film's protagonists with Nesbitt being relegated to a supporting role, probably much like the one Kellaway actually plays. Lee Van Cleef shows up at the end as a National Guard sharpshooter, in a fun little role that foreshadows his long career as a hollywood gunslinger.

I'm going to give this one a 4.5/5. If I liked Paul Hubschmid even a little, this might be a 5 star film.

I am old enough to have witnessed the golden age of The Simpsons as it was happening, and I know that, even then, people thought it was past its prime. I was among the many who tut-tutted that it was trash beginning in the early 2000s, but… I was getting over being sick a week or so ago, and I gave myself an experiment that bore surprising results. I knew there were a couple episodes I liked in the early teen seasons (or at least, ones that stuck in my head and made me chuckle), so how far could I go through The Simpsons before I find a season with NO good episodes? I skipped ToH episodes just so I have more new stuff for spooky season, but I’m in the mid 20s seasons and I’m surprised at how much I’m enjoying these episodes. I skip around based on synopsis, so I’m not watching all of them, but I feel like this show is much better than I thought it was at that point in its life. Just wanted to share this somewhere.

SKINNER: “Children, you can stop writing letters to soldiers overseas- that was just busywork.”

Tonight I thought I'd throw on some true classic monster movies from the golden age of the drive-in. I started the evening with Them! (1954).

James Whitmore leads the picture as Ben, a New Mexico cop on the lookout for a missing person. He and his partner, played by Christian Drake, find a little girl wandering alone in the desert, mute and unresponsive. A little further up the road a travel-trailer lies abandoned, its vinyl siding slashed to pieces. A bizarre footprint is found. Little by little the evidence mounts that something very strange is happening in the high desert.

This is the archetypal western Giant Monster movie. It was scooped (as was Gojira) on the trend by The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms a year earlier, but this is the film that cemented big critters as a mainstay of science-fiction in American cinema. Notably all three films use Atomic testing as the origin for their creatures, though each has a very different take on the concept.

When the local cops realize they are in over their heads (and the bodies start to pile up) they call in FBI agent Bob, played by the star of Gunsmoke! James Arness, who in turn calls in some government scientists to take a look. The doctors Medford are the most entertaining members of the cast; a father and daughter team of pharmacologist/entomologists working for the Department of Agriculture, their chemistry is delightful, and the elder Medford (Edmund Gwenn) delivers some truly excellent speeches throughout the runtime. Bob is less pleasant. His role seems to be to wear an ill-fitting suit, loudly demand answers from everyone, and clumsily hit on the younger Medford (Joan Weldon) while Ben does all the work.

The creature effects in this picture are great. The ants are freakish looking, and the eggs and other debris within their nests are very well done. There is one very naturalistic looking corpse that stood out to me as being almost modern-looking in comparison to most films from this era. There was blood, and visible injuries, but not overdone, and the body was placed very naturally. I think I was expecting this movie to look a lot worse than it did, and that factors a lot into how much I enjoyed it. The title sequence even holds a surprise, the film is shot in black-and-white, but the title, Them! is colorized and swoops in to almost pop out of the screen. I bet that was a real experience for drive-in viewers back in '54

The set design and prop work is all quite good as well. There is a sandstorm sequence near the beginning of the film that is just excellently shot, on a soundstage from the looks of it. It doesn't look real, but it looks like how driving through a bad sandstorm feels, with the claustrophobic curtains of dust closing in all around. There are a few shots like this that lean into almost dreamlike imagery rather than strict realism, and it really helps sell the tense nervousness of the characters as they prepare to confront the unknown.

There is a ton of actual military hardware in this film, from rifle-grenades to Bazookas, to a whole bunch of flamethrowers. The main cast was loaded with WWII veterans who had actually used the things in combat, so they look and act very natural in a way that was interesting to see.

The human drama is also quite watchable. The parts where no monster is on screen are always the roughest bits in traditional Kaiju films, and I can maybe picture three of the human characters from the entire Godzilla franchise, but the whole cast here had distinct roles and were given things to do in them that made for a tight, entertaining mystery/procedural in the early scenes before the reveal of the monsters, and a solid thriller for the rest of the runtime. I actually cared about the fates of most of the cast, and when one of them is killed in the climax, I was pretty upset about which one it was. (Ben. They kill Ben the hero cop, and let Bob the sleazy, incompetent FBI man live.)

The elder Dr. Medford drip feeds his suspicions to the increasingly impatient Bob and Ben as the plot unfolds, and even if you know already what the monster is, it's quite engaging to watch. At one point he gives a short film presentation on Ant ecology which was genuinely just a great little nature documentary (with some hilariously outdated factoids sprinkled in) that happens partway through this killer bug movie. Edmund Gwenn is one of the all-time greats, and he does not disappoint here.

There are jokes, and some of them are funny, but this is mostly a serious sci-fi picture. In fact, the degree to which it takes itself seriously was entirely unexpected. I forget sometimes that the trashy B-movies I grew up on were based on tropes that were originally played straight, and sometimes even had budgets to pull them off. This is a good movie, entirely aside from its legacy as the grandaddy of Big Bug movies, and I should have known that it would be a cut above the derivative stuff that came later. I'm going to give this one a 4/5 stars. If Bob weren't a useless misogynist, and Ben didn't die such a pointless death, I would call this a clean five stars, but alas, here we are.