I watch a lot of dreck, as longtime readers know quite well. As a horror fan (and amateur aficionado), I’ve seen some bad stuff—just absolute garbage.
But bad is better than boring. This week’s film, 2025’s 825 Forest Road is boring—mostly.
I watch a lot of dreck, as longtime readers know quite well. As a horror fan (and amateur aficionado), I’ve seen some bad stuff—just absolute garbage.
But bad is better than boring. This week’s film, 2025’s 825 Forest Road is boring—mostly.
There’s something about watching bad horror flicks from the 1990s that I always find amusing. This week’s film, Brainscan (1994), really hits that amusement in that it features a teen protagonist living in an attic bedroom full of crazy audio-visual gadgetry that would have been wildly impractical at the time. The film gives that 1990s vision of what the near-near-future would look like, with high-tech communications technology based on Windows 3.1.
The lead character, horror-obsessed teen Michael Brower, spends his time in relative isolation in his gadget-filled attic, but also leads a horror movie club at his school. His best friend Kyle is a lovable doofus, and Michael creepily scopes out his neighbor, Kimberly, who is pretty obviously aware what Michael is doing.
Kyle tells Michael of a cutting edge new interactive experience, the titular Brainscan. The game promises the ultimate experience in terror. Michael, jaded by the death of his mother, an absentee father, and lackluster scares, calls the number (1-800-555-FEAR) and sets off down a path of cyber murder.
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Imagine a horror film that explores themes of elder abuse and stars John Lithgow as an elderly bully in a New Zealand elder care facility. Then imagine that John Lithgow uses and/or is used by a plastic baby doll that’s been fashioned into a crude puppet, the butt of which John Lithgow forces old people to lick as he rules nocturnally.
That’s The Rule of Jenny Pen (2024), which stars Lithgow as he squares off against Geoffrey Rush. Rush portrays a proud, ornery judge recovering from a stroke, and a man who will go to the breaking point before he kisses a puppet’s ass.
The 2010s were something of the golden age of “premise” horror movies; that is, horror films based on some kind of premise or concept, like, “what if a wealthy weirdo made poor people play a sadistic, lethal version of a children’s game?” (the premise for today’s movie, 2011’s Would You Rather). Conceptual horror has always been around, but the last decade was rife with movies that involved putting everyday people into bizarre and terrifying situations. Just think of the Saw franchise (2004-2023), or Happy Death Day (2017), or Escape Room (2019). I could be noticing a pattern that’s not really there, but it sure seems like these kinds of flicks were being made a lot ten-to-fifteen years ago.
These movies are often fun, even and especially if they’re gory, because we imagine ourselves in these lethal, morally-compromised situations. That is the strength of Would You Rather: it has you playing the deadly game along with the characters.
Amid an exceptionally grueling week—and this week will be no different—I somehow managed to watch 1983’s Christine, the John Carpenter-directed film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. The movie is about a 1958 Plymouth Fury with a bad attitude and a malignant influence on her owners. The flick is also a reflection of Stephen King’s obsession with 1950s teen culture. Indeed, Christine “speaks” through the medium of 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, much in the same way that Bumblebee from Transformers (2007).
Yours portly has been on a bit of a foreign film kick, especially weird horror films. Particularly, it seems that French-language films have been turning up quite a bit in my Shudder feed.
International horror—at least, the stuff that gets to us—tends to be pretty good, but I’ve never been too terribly impressed with the French material on Shudder. But this week’s film, The Vourdalak (2023), is a delightful exception.
Yours portly has finally had some time to watch some movies again, and it really went from famine to feast. I’ve watched several solid flicks lately, including this week’s selection, the French-Canadian psychological thriller Red Rooms (2023).
My older brother and I saw Nosferatu (2024) a couple of days after its release, which was on Christmas Day 2024. We attended a 12:30 PM EST showing on Friday, 27 December 2024, and even that early matinee had a very good crowd.
My brother and I had been anticipating the release of this film with an eagerness we rarely experience for movies anymore. I love movies, but there aren’t many films that get me excited to go see them.
Nosferatu promised “a symphony of horror,” according to its tagline (and the subtitle of the 1924 original), and it delivered—in spades.
I’m a huge nerd, which means I love all sorts of oddball things. One of those is stop motion animation.
I suspect that love is a result of nostalgia. I’m just old enough to remember lots of stop motion animation and puppetry still being used in films. There’s also something fascinating about how a good stop motion animator can take figurines and make them do incredible things on camera. The detail and the motions have that trademark jerkiness that, paradoxically, can be incredibly smooth in the hands of a skilled technician.
As such, I decided to dedicate this edition of Lazy Sunday to posts related to stop motion animation:
“Midweek Myers Movie Review: King Kong (1933)” – Audre Myers’s excellent review of the king of classic stop motion animation.
“Monday Morning Movie Review: Puppet Master I-III (1989, 1990, 1991)” – My loving tribute to the corny B-movies that terrified me as a small child.
“Monday Morning Movie Review: The Primevals (2024)” – A recent review that inspired this foray into stop motion animation.
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
Last year I wrote about the Puppet Master series, the brainchild of indie filmmaker Charles Band. Band’s Full Moon Entertainment for years produced schlocky, low-budget, but entertaining films that heavily featured miniatures and stop-motion animation. Like many small filmmakers, Band’s company kept budgets low by reusing models and footage in different films, often creating scripts (a la Roger Corman) to fit the props and sets already on-hand.
The guys over at RedLetterMedia did two long episodes on the Puppet Master franchise, and got into some of the details of Band’s approach to filmmaking in those videos:
They did a third video that continued to look at Band’s use of stop-motion techniques and puppetry:
If you’re not enticed at the thought of watching three lengthy videos to understand Band’s films, no worries; suffice it to say that Band was never one to let good (or bad) footage go to waste.
So come—at last!—to today’s film, the first review of 2025: The Primevals (2024).