William Friedkin often said that he didn’t think of THE EXORCIST as a horror movie. It was a drama “based on a real case.” If that claim grew out of any kind of anti-genre snobbery it must’ve melted away by 1990 when the director gave us THE GUARDIAN. It also has magic and monsters, but it’s definitely not based on a real case. It’s just a straight up horror movie in the ‘90s mold – a story about grown ups trying to be grown ups but running into some gore, some weirdness, some wild trashiness.
Friedkin’s way of talking it up was calling it “a contemporary Grimm’s fairy tale,” and that’s pretty accurate. It’s the ‘90s but there’s a druid wood nymph that carries babies off into the forest. And there’s wolves and shit. (read the rest of this shit…)
BORIS AND NATASHA, a.k.a. BORIS AND NATASHA: THE MOVIE, went straight to Showtime, but I’m counting it as a Weird Summer movie because it first aired on April 17, 1992, and presumably kept playing in subsequent months. And yes, it’s a live action movie centered on the villainous spy characters from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, which is a pretty weird idea.
That beloved Jay Ward cartoon was 30+ years in the past at the time, but still showing in reruns. I know I watched it in the ‘80s. I remember having a t-shirt with Rocky and Bullwinkle parodying the ENDLESS SUMMER poster, even though I didn’t know what that was. It was a great show, so I’m not complaining, but my parents’ generation gave us their nostalgia as hand-me-downs, and we took it. I had Gumby shirts too. I never got Showtime, though, so I never saw BORIS AND NATASHA: THE MOVIE, and couldn’t exactly picture how you’d make a movie about them.
