A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE is something rare and kind of lovely: a big franchise genre movie that uses those expensive trappings for something modest, simple and beautiful. As the title implies, it takes place right before and during the initial onslaught of super-hearing monsters from space that eat anybody who makes a sound, quickly causing the fall of society and leaving a smattering of by-necessity-non-verbal post-apocalyptic survivors. We get those monsters, some tense set pieces, some clever ways to deal with them, some (I believe) new information about how they work and how mankind first reacted. But really it could be almost any disaster scenario, because whatâs great about it is that it spends this day of almost certain doom with a protagonist who was already about to die anyway.
You see, it opens in a hospice somewhere outside New York City, where Sam (Lupita Nyongâo, NON-STOP) is grouchily living out her last days. We see a little bit of her life before the aliens, but at that point sheâs already dealing with a different apocalypse. Before that she was a poet, daughter of a jazz pianist, we donât know much else. Now sheâs funny but kind of a bummer, anti-social, disruptive of the peace. A friendly nurse, Reuben (Alex Wolff, HEREDITARY) seems worried about her, is trying to nudge her out of her grim mood by convincing her to come on the weekly field trip to see a performance in the city. He bribes her with a promise to get pizza afterwards, and she brings her cat Frodo. (read the rest of this shit…)
At some point in the last decade or so the movie-discussers really latched onto the term âbody horror.â They kinda act like if you can identify a movie as body horror that means itâs legit. But also when they say it they almost always mean one thing: it has some David Cronenberg-inspired New Flesh type stuff at some point. I kinda wonder how many of the people comparing any vaguely misshapen flesh to Cronenberg bothered to see his last movie, but I suppose thatâs irrelevant.
INFESTED (Vermines) is a very good French giant spider movie I watched on Shudder a while back and Iâm happy to recommend it for your October viewing (or otherwise). Itâs a movie with tons of style, energy and personality as well as, you know, spiders. The opening has almost an INDIANA JONES, adventure movie kind of feel, as we follow a pick up truck of Arab smugglers into the desert where they smoke a swarm of rare spiders out of a hole to capture in plastic containers. These things are so deadly that when one of their crew gets bit they have to put him out of his misery with a machete, but they still pack some of them up. And one of them will end up in Paris.
As I write this thereâs a terrible sickness going around. All the worldâs authoritarian assholes have agreed itâs time to whip out the olâ âimmigrants are scaryâ cliche to rile up the dumbest motherfuckers on earth. In my country thereâs a specifically idiotic one where the two sweaty goblins running on the Keep Trump Unaccountable For His Crimes ticket purposely spread a racist myth about Haitian immigrants in a specific town in Ohio, leading to weeks of chaos, harassment and bomb threats. And of course they’ve refused to apologize, doubled down on the lies, and promised to deport these (legal!) immigrants if they manage to take power again.
KNOX GOES AWAY is, somehow, the second movie I watched in a week where a professional killer is diagnosed with the fatal neurocognitive disorder Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In 
A sequel to BEETLEJUICE was first announced when part 1 was still in theaters. Director Tim Burton started developing it in earnest, went through a couple different ideas, it seemed like it was really gonna happen in the early â90s until he and Michael Keaton shifted their focus to 
A while ago I reviewed 
You bet your ass Iâm gonna go see a theatrically released Dave Bautista vehicle directed by action legend J.J. Perry. THE KILLERâS GAME came out during the week I was traveling and itâs already down to limited showings but I got in there in time. I’m glad I did, but I gotta admit I can already feel it dissolving from my memory as I type this. I didnât know it was based on a book and that it’s been in development since the ’90s (more on that later), but coming now itâs very well-worn material within the familiar Wacky Assassins mode of action filmmaking (think 
REBEL RIDGE is the latest from writer/director Jeremy Saulnier, whoâs now five for five in my book. He did the gory art world satire 
I’m going on a week long trip for family stuff, so I will not be posting any new reviews next week, and possibly the week after that (depending on how fast I get rolling again). So consider this my end of summer break and/or your break from me. But I promise after I get back I’ll catch up on new releases I miss like Jeremy Saulnier’s REBEL RIDGE and Hot Topic’s BEETLEJUICE2, and hopefully I’ll get in some time to enjoy the freedom of September, when I’m out of summer mode but not fully in Halloween mode and can just review whatever random things catch my interest for a bit. Have fun everybody, be respectful, no parties, I left some money on the table to get pizza and rent videos.
