Last Monday I wrote about one of the best horror movies—indeed, one of the best movies—of all time, 1973’s The Exorcist. My review barely dipped into the complex religious themes of the movie, as well many of the flick’s subtle shades of implication and visual storytelling.
Today I’m reviewing what is intended to be a modern sequel/reboot of the classic, arriving fifty years later: 2023’s The Exorcist: Believer. Well, you’d better believe(r) that it doesn’t stack up to the original.
Other than a trip to the Pee Dee State Farmers Market (more on that this Saturday), I spent most of Saturday playing Civilization VI and watching horror movies on Shudder.
Just when I think I’ve exhausted Shudder’s extensive offerings (seriously, I watch it so much, I find myself rewatching movies I’ve already seen, sometimes multiple times), they throw me a total curveball and deliver up something fresh—and genuinely unsettling.
A side effect of watching a ton of horror movies is that one becomes desensitized to them fairly quickly. I’m still not a fan of gore-for-the-sake of gore, but I’m accustomed to it. As such, I like horror that is unsettling, and there’s not much of that these days. A lot of modern horror is snarkily self-referential, and Shudder seems to love to show lots of feminist horror. Some of that is actually okay, but does every horror movie have to be about the loss of personal identity when a mother raises children? Come now.
So it was refreshing to watch the made-for-television film Threads (1984), a stark depiction of the aftermath of a series of atomic detonations in England.
Longtime readers know that I love John Carpenter‘s films. Weird, funny, thought-provoking, action-packed, scary—they all have a certain “quality” that is quintessentially, uniquely Carpenter-esque.
So when my local cinema screened 1988’s They Live a couple of weekends ago, I naturally had to go.
I wrote an entire piece about They Live, entitled “They Live: Analysis and Review” back in 2019. I rereading my original review, I find that I agree with most of my original summary and assessment, but I think my analysis was colored too heavily by the derring-do of the Trump Administration.
In viewing the film again, I’d still argue that it makes a compelling point about our worship of Efficiency and her consort, Productivity, at the expense of everything else (like God, family, friends, community, art, etc.). Our elites will sacrifice everything to keep GDP growing, even if it means grinding us into a spiritually empty enslavement to mindless jobs and mindless entertainment—drudges in a machine that only wants to keep us mollified until the next deadening shift at the salt mines.
With that, here is 20 May 2019’s “They Live: Analysis and Review“:
It’s been a big moviegoing summer for yours portly, and I’ve availed myself of the offerings at my local cinema quite frequently. While I was still on summer vacation I managed to slip into a 4 PM showing of The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023), a film about the doomed ship that carried Count Dracula to England in the original Bram Stoker novel.
I was hoping for a delightfully blood-soaked (and blood-thirsty) romp on the high seas, blending the manliness of stoic sailors in the waning days of the Age of Sail with the Gothic horror of old-school Dracula. Instead, I got a disappointingly plodding film and a stomach ache from eating too much popcorn, albeit with a pretty terrifying depiction of the dreaded Count.
As readers are doubtlessly tired of reading, classes at my school resumed last Wednesday, 16 August 2023. Today marks the first full week of classes, which means that we’ll all be settling into a typical school year routine quite soon.
Modern education, like any institution, creates its own culture, complete with its own rituals, milestones, rites of passage, “canon events,” and the like. These are all quite familiar to anyone who has attended a public or private school in the United States (and I imagine my British readers have similar milestones): surviving exam week; reciting the Pledge of Allegiance; finding your table in the cafeteria; attending the dance; celebrating homecoming; attending football games; buying back-to-school clothes and supplies; graduating; etc., etc. In the midst of these and other events, students (and teachers) live in, create, and adapt to an ever-changing school culture, the petite dramas—the successes and failures, the triumphs and tribulations—of their lives playing out amid hormones and deadlines.
Naturally, compulsory education provides many ripe fields for reaping and sowing narrative stories. Just a school year has its own rhythm and tempo, so do good stories follow certain “beats,” so it’s only natural that screenwriters find ample storytelling fodder in school. It’s also relatable, as virtually every American has, at one point or another, darkened the door of a classroom, and has enjoyed and/or endured the complicated thickets of modern education.
There are many excellent examples of films that deal with schooling. There are also many terrible ones, as anyone who ever watched melodramatic WB teen shows in the early 2000s can attest. Some of the real gems range from the dramatic—To Sir, with Love (1967)—to the ludicrously funny—Billy Madison (1995).
This week, I’m looking at one on the “ludicrously funny” end of the drama-to-comedy axis, but closer to “good, but not great” on the terrible-to-excellent axis: the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Back to School.
The cinema is either making a major comeback, or it’s enjoying one last gasp of box office dominance before fading into obscurity. Either way, it’s a great excuse to look back on some past posts about the movies!
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
Yours portly has, admittedly, pretty trashy tastes in movies. Thanks to a subscription to Shudder, I’ve watched some pretty gnarly horror and suspense films over the last couple of years, not to mention plenty of sleazy exploitation flicks.
Even yours portly has his limits, and recently endured one insufferable exploitation flick from 1977, Death Game.
Saturday evening my neighbor invited me over to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) on his outdoor inflatable screen. My neighbor, his wife, his son, and I had a blast watching this classic under the stars.
Raiders is one of those films that has so many iconic scenes, I sometimes forget the actual order of events. I experience the same sensation with the original Star Wars (1977) film, which I also watched outdoors with my neighbor and his family: I know the broad strokes of the story and all of the memorable moments, but I am always amazed by how much I have forgotten between viewings.
I don’t know if anyone else experiences this sensation when watching these modern classics, but I think it accounts, in part, for their enduring freshness (even if Star Wars looks like the 1970s in a samurai-western space opera). Every viewing feels, in a small way, like seeing the film for the first time. I suspect it’s due in part to the young age at which I first saw these flicks, and the marked but incomplete impressions they left upon my young mind.
But enough navel-gazing! Raiders stands the test of time, and I was reminded again how great Hollywood blockbusters used to be.
Last Friday Americans got blitzed celebrating the short-lived victory of Mexican forces against the invading French army on 5 May 1862 at the First Battle of Puebla. Cinco de Mayo enjoys greater observance here in the United States than in Mexico due to a.) the strong ties between the United States and Mexico dating back to the nineteenth-century (ties that are increasingly fraying as Mexico becomes a failed state) and b.) major marketing campaigns by American alcohol manufacturers. Now we invoke the spirit of the Puebla and General Ignacio Zaragoza with tequila and tacos, a sort of Mex-American Independence Day.
To commemorate the occasion, streaming service Shudder has uploaded some Mexican horror films to their lineup, and I managed to squeeze a couple of them in over the weekend between The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023; review coming soon), a second screening of Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. III (2023; I enjoyed it more the second time), Mother’s Day, and recovering from last week.
I’d never heard of the two films before, but both were enjoyable. The first was Darker than Night (1975; sometimes “Blacker than Night” or “Blacker Than the Night“; Más Negro que la Noche in Mexico); the second—my favorite of the two was Poison for the Fairies (1984; Veneno para las hadas in Mexico).
Last week I reviewed Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, which prompted several readers to recommend the 1963 film adaptation, The Haunting. I rented the flick on YouTube for about three bucks, and found it to be a mostly faithful adaptation of the book.
Indeed, beyond a few changes to some of the characters (Dr. Montague is now Dr. Markway, and his wife is not an insufferable Spiritualist but instead scoffs at the idea of ghosts) and the elimination of Arthur, the overbearing boys’ school headmaster, it does a great deal to enhance the book, a rare case where the movie, if not necessarily better than the book, is at least a worthy supplement to it.
The Portly Politico 