KJ

It's been a minute since I did one of these!

V/H/S/2 (2013). Too much gross, way too many zombies. The zombie helmetcam segment is supposed to be a classic, but a) gross, and b) HOW ARE WE SPLICING IN A WHOLE OTHER SOURCE OF FOOTAGE INTO THE HELMETCAM FOOTAGE. I will allow cutting in found footage but I refuse to accept editing in entirely other sources. I watched the Kill Count for the segments I missed and was not even a little sorry I skipped them. I like found footage, I like anthology movies, but I think I'm done with this franchise.

Resurrection (2022). Rebecca Hall plays a mother who (thinks she?) spots her past abuser/rapist at a conference and completely loses her mind over it. Hall is so good at psychological tension, TOO good in this case. I could not handle it, especially combined with the abuse dynamic. Apparently the movie got even weirder after I stopped, complete with on-screen pseudo-mpreg? IDK, psychological realism combined with plot surrealism is not my jam.

Psycho Goreman (2021). Two kids discover an ancient evil emperor of the universe and get him to do tricks for them. I think in order to like this movie I needed to be a huge fan of a certain kind of cheesy 80s fantasy movie, and alas I am not. Also the kids are really obnoxious, especially the sister.

The House October Built (2011). A camera crew goes on the road to film haunted houses people have set up for Halloween. This opens with the most excruciating "one (1) woman and a bunch of annoying men bicker" found footage scene I have seen in a long time. I lasted less than five minutes. Why is there always one woman max in found footage movies? Why is there basically NO found footage with majority women? Found footage is so cheap to make, why aren't there bunches of these movies by and about women? (Recs welcome.)

Stopmotion (2024). A repressed woman becomes increasingly obsessive about completing her mother's stop-motion film. This was slow and tedious, and I am so tired of movies about quiet, introverted characters inevitably becoming obsessed, deranged, and losing their entire grip on reality. And again with the surrealism, ugh.

Left for Dead (2007). A horror-western about a woman looking to kill a wanted outlaw, with the blurb "Saw meets the spaghetti western." When I bought this for $4 at Goodwill, I want to stress that I did not expect it to be good, but it may be the actual worst movie I have ever watched in my life. Somehow this movie has a wikipedia page, where we learn it was filmed in twelve days. There is copious slow-mo. Every single change of camera angle is preceded by a freeze frame. It is impossible to articulate how painful every second of this movie is, and I strongly recommend you hunt it down just to experience a couple of minutes of it for yourself.

Blink Twice (2024). Two women get themselves invited to a CEO's party island, and then they start losing parts of their memory. Or so I hear; I didn't even get as far as the island invite because the social embarassment squick hit me so hard. Then I looked up spoilers and discovered that the answer to all the mysteries in the trailer is RAPE because this is a RAPE island where the CEO and all his friends are RAPISTS. Did I mention this is a movie about RAPE? (And also about a drug with truly remarkable capabilities in selective memory suppression.)

Gothic (1986). Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary, Lord Byron, and a couple of others party at Byron's house with a lot of laudanum, and stuff happens. This is by Ken Russell, who did Lair of the White Worm, but that movie is a romp and this is... a series of events which may or may not exist within the same narrative? They're not even interesting events. It's like unsexy erotica, interpersonal drama, someone maybe hallucinates a monster, more unsexy erotica. Timothy Spall wears a corset at one point. With half an hour left I turned it off and read about Mary Shelley on wikipedia instead, which was a much more enjoyable use of my time.

Sinners (2025). Twin brothers return from organized crime in Chicago to open an all-Black juke joint in their hometown in Mississipi with their cousin Sammie playing the blues as entertainment, and then vampires.

I held off reviewing this after I saw it the first time because I wanted to process and see it again, and honestly after seeing a second time I don't know what I can possibly add to what's already been said. This is an absolutely gorgeous movie, amazing music, all the acting is great, all the relationships are compelling. Director Ryan Coogler has packed so many interesting historical angles and so many themes that it's a challenge to unpack them all, but a fun challenge. I am especially compelled by all the depictions of religion, Christan and otherwise, and how that intersects with the spiritual power of music as depicted in the film.

Some bits I particularly liked:
- The Chinese immigrants running stores in the Mississippi delta
- The difficult and heart-breaking situation of Hailee Steinfeld's character, who is one-eight Black
- How much Ryan Coogler loves cunnilingus
- Stack's hand tremors, presumably from WWI nerve gas
- How incredibly shippy the MBJ twins are. "You're the best part of me" and "I'm nothing without you." !!!
- The fact that it's set in 1932 and the Depression isn't mentioned even once, presumably because these people's lives were already scraped to the bone. (This movie has got to be Coogler's response to O Brother Where Art Thou, right? Also set in Mississippi during the depression, also full of diagetic music, also featuring the Klan, there's even a scene here driving along the road passing a chain gang. The Black blues player in that movie could BE Sammie Moore from Sinners; even the timeline would line up okay.)

Anyway, this movie is incredible. You absolutely should see it.

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Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes (2021). German psychedelic horror(?) film. The official one-line blurb is something like "A couple visit the rundown castle they've inherited and become trapped in the reality that only exists within its walls," which sounds very cosmic horror, and I guess maybe it's not NOT that? But boy is it a lot of other things too. There might be reincarnating gods? At one point ( spoiler ) and then there's another hour of movie.

It's very low-budget and definitely not what I came for, but it's a trip. Comps might be Triangle if it gave up on trying to make sense or, from a different angle, A Bucket of Blood (1959). If this sounds like your jam, it's worth giving a try.

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Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025). A young woman visiting the grand opening of Not The Space Needle in the 60s has a premonition of disaster and saves the lives of everyone there; decades later, her granddaughter starts have recurring nightmares of that night and realizes that death is coming for her and all her family members who should never have been born.

This is my first FD movie, which I saw solely on the logic that it was free (or "free," because I have a Regal subscription) and I needed something fun and cheesy. And this was indeed that! All the characters were reasonably likeable, and some of the deaths were quite inventive. This movie makes a LOT of hay out of body piercings, and the entire sequence with the MRI machine was inspired. I also really enjoyed everything with the long opening sequence in the 60s and found the young woman very charming. That was probably my favorite part of the movie, actually.

I would not say this was a good movie. For one thing, I have become That Horror Fan, because I found a lot of the CGI pretty annoying and kept wishing for some practical effects for the deaths. I also was entirely unpersuaded by the poor man's version of Laurie Strode and family from Halloween 2018. The generational trauma was all tell, no show, and even the plot logistics with the grandma didn't make a lot of sense given other information we have.

Still, yeah, a cheesy fun time.