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Posts Tagged ‘Alaska’

The Golden Seal

Thursday, August 24th, 2023

August 19, 1983

THE GOLDEN SEAL is a PG-rated movie about a 10-year-old boy named Eric (Torquil Campbell) who befriends a seal matching the description of one from Aleutian myth and local poacher legend. It’s directed by Disney-animal-movie veteran Frank Zuniga and written by John Groves (TARANTULAS: THE DEADLY CARGO), based on the book A River Ran Out of Eden by James Vance Marshall (a.k.a. Donald G. Payne, whose novels were also turned into SANTA FE, WALKABOUT, and THE ISLAND AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD).

I expected this to fit somewhere in that cloying kid-and-animal subgenre we know today, and yeah, there’s a section in the middle with montages of seal frolicking. But it kinda leans more on being an old fashioned family adventure movie. There’s a remote island, a violent storm, a rope bridge, a cave, some rescuing, some father and son conflict. I kinda liked it. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Reviews, Family | 11 Comments »

Hold the Dark

Monday, May 22nd, 2023

HOLD THE DARK – not to be confused with Julie Taymor’s musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark – is a made-for-Netflix movie from 2018. I guess time flies, because I didn’t realize it had been that many years I’d been meaning to see it. It was on my list because it’s the fourth film from director Jeremy Saulnier (MURDER PARTY, BLUE RUIN, GREEN ROOM), and it’s written by Macon Blair, who appeared in all of those as an actor (and directed the upcoming remake of THE TOXIC AVENGER).

The best label I can come up with to describe this one is an Alaskan Gothic. It’s quiet and gloomy, with lots of snow, tiny fire-lit cabins, death and superstition. A movie that gives you the feeling of cold, wet socks inside your boots, and wearing a heavy winter coat indoors. It starts with a little boy playing outside in the small Alaskan village of Keelut, and a wolf approaches. And then the kid is gone – apparently not the first child to disappear around here. His mother Medora (Riley Keough, MAD MAX: FURY ROAD) sends a letter to a wolf expert named Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright, SHAFT) who once had to kill a wolf and wrote about it in a book she read. She wants him to kill this wolf before her husband Vernon (The Northman himself, Alexander Skarsgard) gets back from the war. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Reviews, Horror, Thriller | 15 Comments »

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