Phone it in Friday CVII: YouTube Roundup CLXVII: 31 Days of Halloween, Part II

17 October 202516 October 2025 The Portly Politico8 Comments

On 1 October 2025 I launched a YouTube Shorts series, 31 Days of Halloween. The concept is simple: one, one-minute (or shorter) Halloween/horror movie review every day for the month of October. These reviews are super lo-fi—just yours portly recording on a phone, sitting at a desk. No frills, no fancy editing, just me giving my impressions of the films in an unscripted, fast way.

In case you’ve missed any installments, I’m featuring the several days of reviews. If you want to catchup on Days 1-9, check out last week’s YouTube Roundup.

A quick note: most of the links below are Amazon Affiliate links, typically linking to the movie on DVD or Blu-Ray, as well as the books they’re based upon (or the novelizations of the films). I receive a portion of any purchases made through those links, at no additional cost to you.

Ponty Praises: The Descent (2005)

15 October 202514 October 2025 The Portly Politico8 Comments

Ponty is back with another great movie review, this week featuring the claustrophobic thriller of 2005’s The Descent. The film explores the tension of being trapped in the dark with something sinister and lethal—a core human fear.

When I was a kid, we took a big trip to the mountains to visit my great-grandmother in the mountains of western Virginia. On that trip we visited Mammoth Cave, a large cave system in Kentucky, and I believe Bat Cave in North Carolina as well (I could very well be conflating multiple trips into one in my mind). At one point on a guided tour of the caves, deep underground (we took an elevator to descend into the chamber), the tour guide turned off the lights in the cavern. The darkness was so total, so complete, it was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. I think I instinctively moved closer to my family so I at least had some sense of security.

That experience very much captures, albeit in a very safe, tame, and controlled manner, what this flick feels like to watch. We take it for granted that, even in the dead of night, there’s usually some source of light: the moon, a cellphone, an alarm clock, the soft green of a charger indicating it’s doing its job. Total blackness—complete darkness—is something truly unsettling.

Ponder that as you enjoy Ponty’s review of The Descent (2005):

Monday Morning Movie Review: Hitchcock Films

13 October 202512 October 2025 The Portly Politico4 Comments

Yours portly has been working on several higher-level, real-life projects lately (besides planning a wedding in about six weeks), so today’s post is going to be a very quick reflection on the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Shudder has featured several of the director’s films lately, and it’s been a pleasure to revisit them. In particular, I’ve watched Psycho (1960), Vertigo (1958) and Rear Window (1954). The Birds (1963), which I saw in the theater two years ago, is also on the streaming platform, but I’ve yet to re-watch it.

Phone it in Friday CVI: YouTube Roundup CLXVI: 31 Days of Halloween, Part I

10 October 20259 October 2025 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

In case you’ve missed any installments, I’m featuring the first few episodes today!

Day 1: Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

Day 1 is the 1983 classic Something Wicked This Way Comes, the adaptation of the classic Ray Bradbury novel.

Grab it on DVD here: https://amzn.to/42dfK8Y

Or get the book: https://amzn.to/4nuKBq4

Monday Morning Movie Review: Spree (2020)

6 October 20256 October 2025 The Portly Politico6 Comments

Yours portly is playing catch-up on the blog after a grueling Homecoming Week at work. Apologies for delayed and/or missing posts lately. —TPP

I’m not a huge fan of “found footage” films, most of which are just knock-offs of The Blair Witch Project (1999). Of course, I see the appeal for studios: these flicks are cheap to make, and offer (at least in theory) a more visceral experience. There are exceptions (such as today’s film), but found footage flicks typically devolve into lots of shaky camera work and improbably perfectly placed cameras that always seem to capture the exact video and audio that they need to tell the story.

Naturally, that’s because it’s all directed and staged, but it reveals the lie inherent in these films. Far from being “found,” the footage is actually quite curated—but in a sloppy manner to create the illusion of us just picking up someone’s perfectly edited (in-camera!) VHS tape.

Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of reviewing security camera footage will know that they rarely capture anything worthwhile. The footage is too grainy to identify anyone positively; audio is lacking or non-existent; footage gets overwritten with new footage quickly. The frustration for law-abiding citizens, of course, is that security cameras never seem to get the right angle to catch criminals, but always keeps an eye on the rest of us. CCTV might help keep down crime, but it really just ends up monitoring the rest of us. It’s the definition of anarcho-tyranny.

But I digress. I recently watched a good found footage film, 2020’s Spree. It’s a horrific dark comedy, mostly because it shows the extreme toll of living in a terminally-online world, in which shallow and hallow people gauge their self-worth in terms of likes, impressions, and reactions.

31 Days of Halloween Starts Today!

1 October 20251 October 2025 The Portly Politico8 Comments

Today I’m kicking off 31 Days of Halloween, a series on my YouTube channel. Each day in the month of October I’ll offer up a lo-fi, off-the-cuff, rapid-fire, one-minute, hyphen-hyphen, Halloween/horror movie review. These are quick and, therefore, not very comprehensive, but they give my quick impressions of some classic (and not-so-classic) flicks.

I started the series with the subject of my most recent Monday Morning Movie Review, 1983’s Something Wicked This Way Comes:

New Shorts will post each morning in October 2025 at 6 AM EST. If you enjoy them, leave a comment on YouTube (or here!) and share with your friends!

Happy October!

—TPP

Monday Morning Movie Review: Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

29 September 202528 September 2025 The Portly Politico4 Comments

When I was very, very young, I saw Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), probably recorded to a VHS during one of the rare free Disney Channel weekends, and it terrified me. The images from the film, particularly the scene where the demonic circus’s parade searches for two young boys through the streets of Green Town, have always stuck with me.

Based on the novel of the same name by Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes blends fantasy and horror elements with an ostensibly child-friendly story into a spooky tale of friendship, fear, courage, and resisting sin.

Monday Morning Movie Review: Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

22 September 202521 September 2025 The Portly Politico4 Comments

Yours portly is kicking off the Halloween season a bit early this year—after all, it’s the first day of autumn! I’m doing so with a classic Universal Pictures monster flick, 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein.

Prior to seeing the flick for the first time a year or two ago, I only really knew about the plot from Young Frankenstein (1974), which spoofs key scenes from Bride and Frankenstein (1931). Shudder had Bride back on its service as of last week, so one night I watched it again, and really enjoyed it.

Bride of Frankenstein moves in a more comedic direction than its bachelor predecessor, with Frankenstein’s Monster smoking (and becoming addicted to) cigarettes and humorous homunculi—like an overly amorous king—offering up some laughs (and padding out the film’s refreshingly swift seventy-five-minute runtime). But it still offers up some classic scares.

Ponty Ponders Attack of the Meth Gator (2024)

17 September 202515 September 2025 The Portly Politico8 Comments

Good ol’ Ponty is back with another B-movie review. 2023 was apparently the year of exploitation films about drug-addicted animals, with Cocaine Bear (2023) as the prime example of this bizarre subgenre. I wonder if any desperate indie filmmakers made Fentanyl Fox or Oxy Otter or the like.

Well, somebody made Attack of the Meth Gator (2024), which demonstrates well the B-movie tendency to jump on the latest fad and churn as many bucks out of it as possible. The Asylum made the film, which should come as no surprise—they’re the same folks behind the terrible-but-popular Sharknado franchise.

Apparently, the film is based on a joke Tweet (long since deleted) from a police department in Tennessee, warning residents not to flush their drugs, lest gators become hyper-aggressive “meth gators.” Such a thing might not be possible, but even the remotest possibility is too terrifying and silly to contemplate for long.

With that, here is Ponty’s review of this timeless classic:

Request for Reader Recommendations

15 September 202512 September 2025 The Portly Politico12 Comments

Happy Monday, TPP Readers!

In lieu of my usual Monday Morning Movie Review, I wanted to do something a bit different: what are some of your favorite films to watch during the month of October, in the build-up to and/or on the day of Halloween?

I have an idea for a little YouTube project: a series of brief (one-minute or less) reviews/synopses of thirty-one horror flicks, one for each day in October. I’d release these as YouTube Shorts, so I only have one minute!

These will also be super lo-fi, as a.) I believe in the lo-fi ethic and, more honestly, b.) my video editing skills and capabilities are virtually non-existent. We’re talking one take with minimal in-camera editing—and that’s it. No fancy cutaways to clips from the movies; no wacky angles; no green screens placing me in a haunted castle. At most I’ll hold up a DVD of the flicks if I have one, and maybe I’ll dress up in some mildly goofy outfit occasionally.

I have a vast archive of reviews of crappy (and good!) movies to pull from for this list, but I want to know your recommendations. If it’s something I’ve already review, great! It’ll definitely save me some time. If it’s something totally new, even better—I get to watch and review your favorite flicks!

I can’t promise I’ll get to all of them, but if there’s a surplus, I’ll bank them up for next October.

Let me know your picks in the comments below, or through the contact form on this site.

Thanks!