SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE came out Friday. It’s a sequel to the 2022 film SISU but they didn’t put a #2 in the title, so some friends of mine saw the trailer and weren’t aware it was a sequel. I think that’s wise marketing – this is an old school standalone approach to a sequel where you wouldn’t even have to know there was another one to understand or appreciate the story. So yes, see this one first if you want to, you have my permission. But if you like either one of them I recommend watching the other.
The appeal of SISU, and now of the SISU movie series, is pretty straightforward. Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila, RARE EXPORTS: A CHRISTMAS TALE) is a particularly Finnish bad motherfucker, a rugged and scarred ex-commando who looks more like a farmer than an action star. Stubbornness is his super power; he’ll never give up or give in, so he goes to hell and back and then back to hell again and pretty much just gets dunked repeatedly in hell until he’s totally soaked in it but he keeps clawing his way out again and anybody who does anything to him along the way dies horribly at his hands. And one important thing is that he never says a damn word the whole time, because what is there to say other than you chose the wrong Laplander to fuck with? His deeds speak for themselves
The first movie would be a clever and well executed action/revenge movie in any era, but it happened to come out when it was particularly enjoyable to see some fascists get fucked up. It took place at the end of WWII, when a band of fleeing Nazi pillagers tried to steal the gold nuggets Aatami just found, and got elaborately, joyously slaughtered for it. In Chapter 4, “The Legend” we learned the backstory that he was a Finnish commando during the Winter War, when the murder of his family John-Wick-ed him into becoming a mythical “one-man death squad” known for killing over 300 Soviet soldiers. In SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE he will get a surprise opportunity to directly avenge his family while just trying to accomplish one task that he refuses to give up on. (read the rest of this shit…)
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.
MATERIALISTS is a movie I missed in theaters, caught on blu-ray a while back, and this week it will start streaming on Home Box Office Maximum, if you want to catch it to. I really needed to see it because it’s the second movie from writer/director Celine Song. Her first was PAST LIVES (2023), which I didn’t review, but I loved it. It’s about an American woman (Greta Lee) reuniting with a guy (Teo Yoo) who she knew before her family left South Korea when she was little. He’s handsome and in love with her and reminds her of her roots, but also she loves her life and her boyfriend and oh man. It’s so good. Swooningly romantic, achingly beautiful, keenly observant, feels so true to people and to life, never like a formula. Why didn’t I write about it? Maybe I was afraid I couldn’t do it justice. I should watch it again.
