Suspiria (1977)
1977 gave us some pretty important movies. Some influential ones. Some we still talk about today. STAR WARS was a big one. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. ERASERHEAD. SORCERER. THE HILLS HAVE EYES. And hailing from Italy, Dario Argento’s SUSPIRIA. One of the greats, a true original, and I think it’s safe to say one of the most beautiful looking horror movies ever made.
When I first saw it as a young man it set my brain on fire. I was pretty new to the world of Italian horror and had never seen anything quite like it, but it turns out that’s also because there’s not anything quite like it. Since then I’ve seen it many more times, including once in a theater with a Jessica Harper Q&A, and its reputation has grown even stronger as a generation or two discovered it in the age of screen caps and gifs. Its stunning visuals require no context to knock you on your ass. (read the rest of this shit…)
Rosemary’s Baby
The central theme of ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) is right there in the title. It’s about someone having a baby, so it’s about fears surrounding a healthy pregnancy and beginning a new life as a parent. That’s part of what makes the movie so powerful, but one way I know it’s good is how effective it is even for someone like me, a non-parent, a childless cat lady. I’m sure it kicks your ass harder if you’re an expecting or aspiring parent, but it has other things going for it too.
My main association with ROSEMARY’S BABY is that it was my mom’s favorite horror movie. That might just mean it was one of the few she’d seen. But I remember when I was a teen obsessed with Freddy Krueger and Clive Barker she said “Do you want to see a real scary movie?” and we rented it. As far as I remember I thought it was pretty good, but not enough that I thought of as a favorite. It didn’t make it into the rotation.
That was more than three decades ago. For years now I’ve been wanting to revisit it and review it for the day before Halloween, my mom’s birthday. But I always get behind on all my other plans and get bogged down. I decided to make it happen this year even before I realized there was a new prequel on Paramount+, but I’ll review that soon. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Invasion (second review)
THE INVASION (2007) is the fourth (and final, the way civilization is going) official movie adaptation of Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers. I actually reviewed it for The Ain’t It Cool News when it came out, which is one way I can prove it exists. It’s documented! Anyway I after I watched the other three I figured I oughta complete the set.
This one stars A-listers Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig and is the Hollywood debut of acclaimed German director Oliver Hirschbiegel (DAS EXPERIMENT, DOWNFALL), as well as the first movie written by David Kajganich, who later wrote A BIGGER SPLASH, SUSPIRIA and BONES AND ALL for Luca Guadagnino. But it was kind of a fiasco, losing money and getting poor reviews, universally considered the weakest of the four versions. I’m sure we would’ve noticed it was kinda sloppy even if it hadn’t been widely reported that producer Joel Silver thought it wasn’t working and spent $10 million on reshoots written by the Wachowskis and directed by their guy James McTeigue (V FOR VENDETTA, NINJA ASSASSIN). It was delayed over a year and moved from a confident June release to a resigned August one.
And, would you believe it? It doesn’t really work. But it has its moments.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Body Snatchers
Abel Ferrara’s BODY SNATCHERS (1993) was my first body snatcher invasion movie. I saw it when it was new on video, and I knew it had been poorly received, so I figured my ignorance of the original and the original remake must’ve helped me to enjoy it more than everybody else. But watching it now with a deep appreciation for the other ones, yeah, it’s still good anyway. So maybe I liked it better because I’m a unique individual with my own feelings and not a plant programmed only for survival. Or because I was ahead of my time – it seems to have a pretty good reputation now.
The title sequence is admittedly chintzy compared to the one in Kaufman’s version. Something about the long sequence of the title flying through a crude starscape and letter-by-letter turning from red to black, set to the score by Joe Delia (MS. 45, FEAR CITY, THE SUBSTITUTE 2: SCHOOL’S OUT), was putting me in mind of a Stuart Gordon/Brian Yuzna type movie, but that might’ve been my subconscious remembering that this was actually from a screenplay by Stuart Gordon & Dennis Paoli, rewritten by Ferrara’s guy Nicholas St. John. Gordon was supposed to direct but couldn’t get a commitment from the studio to actually make it until leaving to do FORTRESS. He told Fangoria that his version was originally designed as a sequel to the Kaufman version and went into more detail about how the pod people are plants. “It’s not like they have a brain in their head. The creature’s consciousness is throughout its whole body, so that if you destroy the head, it doesn’t kill or stop it.” That would’ve been fun! But what Ferrara did is good too. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Shadow Strays
(This review is pretty detailed and spoilery. The movie is great, so consider just watching it and coming back.)
THE SHADOW STRAYS is the latest ultra-violent crime/martial arts epic from writer/director Timo Tjahjanto. Like THE NIGHT COMES FOR US (2018) and the more comedic THE BIG 4 (2022), it was produced by Netflix Indonesia, so you can probly watch it right now wherever you are. (Important subtitle tip: at least on my Roku you have to click “Other” to find the full subtitle menu if you want to choose English instead of English CC.) Like HEADSHOT (2016), it takes place in a world of elite assassins trained (at least in some cases) from childhood. These ones are known as Shadows, and they’re more of a global mercenary agency, like militarized ninjas.
We begin in a snowy Yakuza fortress in Japan, where seventeen year old Agent 13 (the incredible Aurora Ribero) rises up out of an armor collection to decapitate a sleazy boss. She kills so many guys, almost eliminates the entire clan, but gets distracted by collateral damage and has to be rescued by her mentor Instructor Umbra (Hana Malasan, THE TRAIN OF DEATH). Afterwards, Umbra gets called off to “some shit show in Cambodia,” so 13 is sent alone to an apartment in Jakarta. (read the rest of this shit…)
Terrifier 3
In 2022, a transgressive gorefest called TERRIFIER 2 was given a limited unrated release in AMC theaters. Kinda like GODZILLA MINUS ONE the next year it proved to be so popular they kept adding another set of screenings and another and another. There was enough of a buzz that I set aside my usual disdain for clown horror and fired up the first TERRIFIER on the ol’ Roku. That went pretty well so when TERRIFIER 2 screened in Seattle again I went, and kind of loved it. Later I caught up with ALL HALLOW’S EVE, the anthology made from two short films that introduced the idea of TERRIFIER.
So by the time of TERRIFIER 3 I’m a fully converted fan of the series, and there must be a whole lot of other people who followed that path, because this is truly unprecedented: an extremely gory unrated part 3 slasher movie that opened #1 at the box office. For extra laughs, it happened to beat out week two of a Hollywood evil clown sequel with literally a hundred times its budget. I’m pretty sure no one in the TERRIFIER camp was even trying to do that. But it’s a genuine phenomenon. (read the rest of this shit…)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
For their 1978 remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, director Philip Kaufman (writer of THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES) and screenwriter W.D. Richter (later did BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA) updated the Don Siegel film and/or Jack Finney story into a chilling paranoia tale for their era. But it has held up incredibly well, remaining one of the more unsettling alien invasion movies in existence. The original was a low budget indie production, this is a much slicker production, but they were allowed to keep their gut-punchingly pessimistic ending, and that goes a long way.
This came out the year before ALIEN, and its opening has a similar combo of timeless practical effects and matter-of-factness about mysterious threats from the dark reaches of the universe. The credits play over a gorgeous sequence of strange plants on some planet somewhere – transparent tubes, whisps of smoke, I don’t know what – as their seeds float up and drift through space, as mentioned in the Siegel film.
In San Francisco the seeds land on some wild plants and, over time, produce some sort of slime. I have no idea how they did the shot of tiny tendrils reaching out from a leaf. Small pink blossoms sprout on top of other plants, and a woman notices one and plucks it off. She is Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams, SHOCK WAVES, DAYS OF HEAVEN), she works at the health department and has an interest in plants and says she thinks it’s a grex. “That’s when two different species cross-pollinate and produce a third completely unique one.” (read the rest of this shit…)