If you know me you know I love those Baby Assassins, the adorable pair of professional killers from the movies BABY ASSASSINS, BABY ASSASSINS 2 and BABY ASSASSINS 3, as well as the tv series Baby Assassins Everyday, which I’m currently watching now that it’s on Home Box Office Maximum. (You could start there, if you’re curious.) The Babies are two hilarious young Japanese women who have murdered for a living their whole lives but otherwise are total sweethearts who enjoy soups, desserts, friendship, etc. It’s hard to explain, but they’re the best.
So I didn’t need convincing when I heard some film festival hype about GHOST KILLER and I looked it up and saw it was BABY-adjacent. It’s written by BABY writer/director Yugo Sakamoto, and directed by BABY action director Kensuke Sonomura. You may also know him from directing HYDRA and BAD CITY or from choreographing John Woo’s MANHUNT. He’s developed one of the most distinct and consistent action styles of the modern era. You can’t really go wrong with Sonomura, and for better or worse this has more violence than desserts. (read the rest of this shit…)
SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE came out Friday. It’s a sequel to the 2022 film 
CHRISTY is a biopic of Christy Salters, once known as Christy Martin, a pioneer of women’s professional boxing, competing from 1989-2012. It’s a very effective movie that hits some of the pleasing notes you want out of a normal sports drama, plus the additional joys of watching a woman be tough and rowdy at a time when most of society demanded she be “ladylike.” And if you know any biographical details of Salters at all you will be able to imagine a few other ways it stands out from every other boxing movie.
Okay, I’m gonna be up front about this: RED SONJA (2025) is a movie that I kinda liked, but it took some effort. It’s an underdog movie, you kinda gotta be rooting for it to work, I don’t know if it’s gonna win over anybody standing there with their arms folded. But maybe I’m wrong. It has a sincerity to it. It doesn’t seem self conscious. That can go a long way.
Today I’m looking at a pair of crime movies adapted from books by two of my favorite authors. I almost said “recent crime movies” because you know how time is, but it turns out one is more than five years old and the other is more than ten. It’s just that I put them off forever because I was afraid I was going to hate them. It turns out they’re both pretty well made movies, but yeah, I don’t think they have the spark I’m looking for.
I don’t say this lightly, but I think Guillermo del Toro’s FRANKENSTEIN might be up there pretty high among the top Frankensteins? Or at least it hits hard for me. It’s one of the more faithful adaptations of Mary Shelley’s 207-year-old novel Frankenstein: But If You Think About It It’s Almost Like a Modern Prometheus, but it’s reinterpreted enough to feel like pure, personal del Toro.
At some point on this here internet I started seeing people refer to the alien species from the 
You know from the jump that BASKET CASE 2 (1990) is gonna have a little more money behind it than the first one, because it has both Troma and Shapiro Glickenhaus credits. That’s power right there. For those just joining it starts with footage from the end of part 1, with poor Duane and his murderous, surgically separated lump brother Belial hanging off a hotel sign, falling and splattering in front of screaming New Yorkers. We also get a news report from Times Square, describing Belial as “a small, grotesque monstrosity” and a “small, twisted deformity whose most startling feature is an unnervingly human face” and a “strange little being” that “might actually be human.”
BASKET CASE (1982) is one of those cult movies everybody knew about in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It stayed alive by having a couple sequels and being in video stores or being mentioned often in Fangoria. Now it’s on 4K disc and on Shudder with credits saying it was restored by the Museum of Modern Art. But it was genuinely a creature of the grindhouses, a $35,000 exploitation movie conceived in Times Square by twentysomething New Yorker Frank Henenlotter, written on napkins at Nathan’s Famous, and shot in 16mm, partly in front of XXX theaters on 42nd Street. The producer was a hospital administrator whose only other films are Henenlotter’s and two yoga videos.
