"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Companion

COMPANION, which played in theaters a couple months ago and is now on disc and streaming, features certain genre elements that are strategically withheld for a while. For almost a third of its 97 minutes we can tell there’s something we’re missing about the main character because of some of the weird things people say to her, so we’re very intrigued. I don’t include myself in “we” though because I knew the premise of the movie, controversially (but understandably, I think) included in the second trailer and other promotions. There is good reason to go in blind, but I can confirm that the movie is still fun without being surprised by that part. And I’m not gonna write a review on eggshells, so I’m gonna get into it a couple paragraphs from now.

The movie is about a group of friends who go stay together at a rich guy’s fancy-ass lake house. Iris (Sophie Thatcher, MAXXXINE) is our narrator, these are friends of her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid, LOGAN LUCKY), and she’s worried she’s going to embarrass herself in front of them. Sure enough Kat (Megan Suri, IT LIVES INSIDE), who answers the door, barely acknowledges her presence. Poor Iris just stands there forcing a smile while a conversation goes on next to her. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 6th, 2025 | 19 Comments »

The Shrouds

I’ve enjoyed David Cronenberg’s movies for most of my life, and he’s been highly respected for as long as I can remember, especially in horror circles, but also elsewhere. I was still a kid when THE FLY came out, and yet I remember it being a phenomenon, a genuine blockbuster that everyone talked about, with an appreciation for its weird grossness.

These days he’s a bigger icon than ever, but I feel his work is being unintentionally diminished by the way he’s been short-handed as the “body horror” guy. I don’t think he’d still be going if that was all there was to him. In the most recent issue of Fangoria, Phil Nobile Jr. did a great interview where he asked about that. Cronenberg said he was proud to have Coralie Fargeat and Julia Ducournau as his “cinema daughters,” but “I still don’t know what ‘body horror’ means.” (read the rest of this shit…)

May 5th, 2025 | 16 Comments »

The Legend of Ochi

THE LEGEND OF OCHI is a beautiful and imaginative PG-rated fantasy from A24. Since the number of friends I recommended it to this week that had never heard of it is higher than the number of people at the Saturday matinee I went to, I’m thinking there are limits to that company’s marketing powers. But future adults who remember seeing it in a theater will know they had cool parents. This one is special.

It was filmed “on location in the remote mountain villages of Transylvania” and other parts of Romania, set on the fictional island of Carpathia. Apparently it’s the early ‘90s, though the time doesn’t matter that much. Maxim (Willem Dafoe, LIGHT SLEEPER), who lives in a small village on the north side of the island, is obsessed with fighting off furry, ape-like creatures called Ochi, who live in the nearby mountains. He trains the local adolescent boys in riflery and leads them into the woods on night time hunts. This is not a situation where he’s the lone true believer and everybody else thinks he’s crazy – Ochi are a fact of Carpathian life. In the opening scene the troop encounters a group of them, gets attacked, shoots some of them, but not fatally. (read the rest of this shit…)

May 1st, 2025 | 6 Comments »

Havoc

HAVOC is the long-anticipated, straight-to-Netflix fifth film of Gareth Evans, director of the 21st century classic THE RAID. It contains plenty of the brutal, incredible action you’d hope for from such an artist, but it’s a different type of movie, an atmospheric and stylized (but also ridiculously violent) noir about a deadbeat homicide detective whose claim to heroism is that he’s the one guy in a circle of corrupt cops who felty guilty after they executed an undercover cop during a robbery. Now he has no friends or family and he does dirty deeds for a powerful real estate mogul but if he performs this one difficult task he can be out from under his thumb forever. And in the process he might sort of do the right thing for once.

His name is Patrick Walker (Tom Hardy, THE DROP), and he’s introduced buying his daughter (Astrid Fox-Sahan, Young Wallander) last minute Christmas gifts at a mini-mart, then being annoyed that the clerk won’t wrap them for him. So we get it when his wife (Narges Rashidi, UNDER THE SHADOW) won’t let him come over. (I’m unclear if this starts on Christmas Eve, actual Christmas, or what.) (read the rest of this shit…)

April 30th, 2025 | 23 Comments »

The Accountant 2

In THE ACCOUNTANT2 – yes, that’s the onscreen title – Ben Affleck (DAREDEVIL) returns to his brilliantly ludicrous role of Christian “The Accountant” Wolff (Chris for short), autistic math genius raised in the martial arts who works as a forensic accountant for the mob and on the side helps people with their taxes or with things that require shooting people. In this one part 1 supporting character Ray King (J.K. Simmons, DARK SKIES) is nervously waiting at a bar to meet with a legendary assassin called Anaïs (Daniella Pineda, JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM/DOMINION) when unknown gunmen ambush them and kill him. If I had remembered that he was just a guy from the Treasury Department and not some underworld friend of Chris’ I would’ve gotten a kick out of how good of a fight he puts up. But the scene is kind of upsetting because there are so many bystanders running away screaming and it reminds me of a mass shooting.

Anyway he manages to write “FIND THE ACCOUNTANT” on his arm before he dies, so another part 1 character, Treasury agent Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson, COLOMBIANA), does just that while trying to figure out what her boss was working on and finish the case. One cool gimmick is that Ray’s landlords cleaned the apartment, pulling down his wall of photos, receipts and tax documents related to the case and dumping them in a box. She hangs them back up in an order that seems logical to her, then falls asleep and Chris completely rearranges them into what looks like a bizarre pattern, but of course he’s figured out what ever little piece of it means. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 28th, 2025 | 7 Comments »

Sinners

SINNERS is the first original story from writer/director Ryan Coogler. Not that it matters. After the true story of FRUITVALE STATION he added to fictional worlds and characters created by other people – CREED, BLACK PANTHER and BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER – but he sure seemed like a visionary to me. Working in such worn-out modern formats as “the legacy sequel” and “the MCU” didn’t stop him from constructing crowd-pleasing but deeply personal movies that transcend those categories.

So shit yeah I was excited for him to do a vampire movie. Say no more.

It’s set in the Mississippi Delta, 1932. After some years of infamy working for Al Capone in Chicago, “the Smokestack Twins,” Elijah “Smoke” Moore and Elias “Stack” Moore have returned to their home town of Clarksdale. Both are played by Michael B. Jordan (WITHOUT REMORSE), and they’re introduced passing a cigarette back and forth. Later one tosses his knife for the other to stab a rattlesnake through the throat with. After that they’re often separated, but the illusion has been established seamlessly.

I like that it takes its time getting to the vampires, instead making me really invested in the twins’ plan to set up a new juke joint (with the generic name “The Juke”) in one day. They buy an old saw mill from a very iffy white man (David Maldonado, CAT RUN 2), then split up and go around to people with the resources and talents they need, friends from way back who seem a little bitter or suspicious and hesitate before they see how much it pays but still seem to love them. Family, basically. Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller, HOMEFRONT), for example, just wants to stay picking cotton on the field he share crops, but seems very happy once he’s there watching the door. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 25th, 2025 | 33 Comments »

O’Dessa

O’DESSA is a pretty cool dystopian musical that Searchlight Pictures released straight to Hulu last month. The story involves love and music in the face of fascism – probly not anything anybody would be interested in these days. It’s pretty slick mainstream entertainment, but kind of a cousin to SHREDDER ORPHEUS and SIX STRING SAMURAI, so I support it.

An apocalypse has happened. Something called plasma (a rainbow colored oil-like substance) has poisoned the earth. But people still have farms and stuff. O’Dessa Galloway (Sadie Sink, FEAR STREET PARTs TWO and THREE) is a young woman who lives on one with her mother Calliope (Bree Elrod, RED ROCKET). She has a guitar made of junk and, like Pearl but not psychotic, she’s lonely enough to perform for a scarecrow.

Calliope discourages O’Dessa’s musical ambitions, because O’Dessa’s father Vergil (Pokey LaFarge, THE LONE RANGER) and five generations before him were what they call “ramblers.” Vergil took off one day to travel around playing music, never to return. Some deadbeat shit right there, but sounds amazing to O’Dessa, a regular pre-aunt-and-uncle-being-burned-alive Luke Skywalker. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 23rd, 2025 | 4 Comments »

Dark Skies

Recently I rewatched PRIEST (2011) for a podcast – I’ll link to it when the episode goes up (here it is: Vampire Videos #109). Do you remember that movie, though? Few do, but it’s one I really like, a post-apocalyptic vampire western action movie based on a Korean comic book. The director was Scott Stewart, a visual FX veteran (MARS ATTACKS!, THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK, THE HOST, RED CLIFF, co-founder of The Orphanage) who broke into directing with the weird angel-related action-horror movie LEGION (2010). Since then he’s directed the pilot for a TV continuation of LEGION called Dominion and a segment of the anthology HOLIDAYS, but only one full length feature: the close encounter movie DARK SKIES (2013). (I almost called it a UFO movie, but that’s not accurate, because we never see a space ship.)

This is the story of a middle class suburban family, the Barretts – real estate agent mother Lacy (Keri Russell, HONEY I BLEW UP THE KID), trying-to-find-a-new-job father Daniel (Josh Hamilton, MAESTRO), teenage son Jesse (Dakota Goyo, DEFENDOR, REAL STEEL) and younger brother Sammy (Kadan Rockett, “Mini Howie Mandel,” America’s Got Talent). They all have their normal human difficulties they’re going through and then one night Lacy gets up and finds the kitchen completely trashed, like an animal got in. Then another night she finds all the objects in the kitchen perfectly stacked and balanced, like a brilliant installation artist got in. And then all the family photos disappear, like a… I don’t know. Like something weird is going on here.

Increasingly bizarre things happen and what else can they do but in the moment be horrified by the inexplicability then in the sunlight the next day try to treat it like a normal problem with a normal way to deal with it. They talk to the cops, re-up their lapsed security system, add cameras. Surely something will work. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 22nd, 2025 | 8 Comments »

Urban Vengeance

ZERO EXTERNAL REVIEWS ON IMDBURBAN VENGEANCE, not be confused with Seagal’s URBAN JUSTICE, is a D.I.Y. skateboard action movie I stumbled across on Tubi. The art looked old but the release year was listed as 2024, and I got curious. Sometimes these things you gotta watch for a bit to get an idea if they’re even gonna be watchable at all, but this one I knew pretty immediately I would keep watching because the hero, Jack Urban (Will Martin), is riding his skateboard through an L.A. River type cement ditch called “Skate River” when a guy wheelies in on a motorcycle firing an uzi at him. Jack ducks under a low tunnel, the motorcycle somehow explodes into a fireball behind him, there’s a distorted guitar strum, Jack turns to grimly survey the damage and then skates off into the title sequence powered by retro synth arpeggios (score by Derlis A. González). Off to a great start.


Jack is supposed to be a teenager, and Martin looks like he could actually be one, but he’s also the writer and director of the film. On his websight he calls the movie “an homage to cheesy skateboarding dramas of the ‘80s such as GLEAMING THE CUBE and THRASHIN’,” but thankfully there is no winking or parodying. It comes across as a serious attempt at a CLASS OF 1984 world-gone-insane youth movie, with a sprinkling of DEADBEAT AT DAWN rawness.

(read the rest of this shit…)

April 20th, 2025 | 10 Comments »

How To Blow Up a Pipeline

HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE (2022) is about a group of young people who have determined, quite reasonably, that the only voice they really have in stopping an oil company from poisoning their communities and exacerbating climate change is if they figure out how to sabotage their infrastructure enough to disrupt their business and make it less profitable. So that’s what they’re ready to do. They all rendezvous at a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, West Texas, some meeting for the first time, but they all know the plan, and they get to it.

I was a little thrown off by the opening, because it didn’t seem like the raw, authentic approach I had pictured. The filmatism is trying to make these twentysomethings rigging the security cameras at their maid jobs look like HACKERS meets OCEAN’S ELEVEN. And I was not buying this disparate team we see coming together – two messy punk rock kids (Kristine Froseth [THE ASSISTANT] and Lukas Gage [the villain the younger bouncer from the ROAD HOUSE remake]), one rugged camo-hat-wearing redneck (Jake Weary, MESSAGE FROM THE KING), etc. – how would they have gotten together? But it’s immediately thrilling with its blunt sense of purpose, its 16mm grain (cinematographer: Tehillah De Castro) and its un-ostentatious score by Gavin Brivik (The Pitt), with synths looping over beats banged out on oil drums. And though there will be scenes here and there that don’t ring true (like a cartoonish documentary director [Sam Quinn, JANE GOT A GUN] who says all the worst things to interview subjects in his one scene) it turns out to mostly play closer to “this must be what it would really be like” than just fun Hollywood bullshit. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 17th, 2025 | 12 Comments »

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