Tag: movie

Monday Morning Movie Review: 28 Weeks Later (2007)

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This summer’s 28 Years Later may have been the best film of 2025.  Apparently, the film is already getting a sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, slated for release in 2026:

I’m excited to see that sequel, so I was even more excited to see 2007’s 28 Weeks Later on Shudder.  Shudder experienced a bit of a dry spell this summer, with basically just a bunch of low-budget French and Indonesian films from the the 1960s and 1970s.  I like foreign flicks, but sometimes I just want to watch a movie, not read one.

I’ve still got to see 28 Days Later (2002), but I enjoyed Weeks immensely.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Intruder (1989)

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The first, tiny hints of autumn are in the air in South Carolina.  Temperatures have been down the past few days, and I can just make out the tiniest bits of golden-brown in the leaves.  I announced the home varsity football this past Friday, and driving back up to campus with the windows down (my car’s A/C is still not working) gave me that sensation that only fall can give.

Naturally, this weather brings to my mind the best autumn holiday:  Halloween.  And Halloween means (among other things) horror movies.

Now, I’ve never been big on slashers, but one I re-watched recently on Shudder is a good example of the genre:  Intruder (1989).  Its unique setting—it takes place in a grocery store—and colorful cast of characters makes it really enjoyable.  It’s also strangely wholesome for a slasher; as I recall, there aren’t the usual lurid displays of teenage sexuality, just lots of grocery kills.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

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A few weeks ago Dr. Fiancée and I went to see the new Wes Anderson film, The Phoenician Scheme (2025).  I’ve long been a big fan of Wes Anderson’s unique style, but Dr. Fiancée has never seen any of his films.  For the first twenty or so minutes of the film, I was thinking, “Good Lord, what I have done to her?”  But her first outing into the world Wes Anderson went well, and she enjoyed the film.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: The Loved Ones (2009)

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For whatever reason, Shudder uploaded a bunch of Australian horror movies about a month ago.  I’ve watched a few of them (like Coda, 1987).  That brought to mind the classic episode of The Simpsons where the family goes to Australia so Bart can apologize for a prank phone call:

Well, that brought to mind another Australian flick I watched recently, The Loved Ones (2009).  I would really classify this flick as a “dark comedy,” but it made for a compelling watch.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Blood on the Stars (1975)

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After last week’s review of a summer blockbuster, your portly is undertaking a complete reversal to an obscure horror film.  In fact, it’s an obscure Welsh horror film, in the incomprehensible Welsh language, and funded by the short-lived Welsh Film Board.  The Welsh Film Board, it seems, was a body dedicated to the revival and preservation of Welsh language—in other words, the preservation of cramming as many consonants together as possible (today, there exists Ffilm Cymru Wales; why is it that every nationalist movement and/or organization in the British Isles is inevitably just woke internationalist globohomo garbage in a language that pre-dates the Roman Empire?).

The film in question is Blood on the Stars (1975), which one reviewer on Letterboxd called “a fever dream.”  That is an apt description of this weird little relic of the glorious Welsh 1970s.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Dead Mail (2024)

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The run of films based in the grimy past of analog technology keeps rolling.  This week’s movie is a great example of another horror thriller that explores dated technology in fresh ways.  Most flicks that attempt to look back at the 1980s tend to do so through rose-tinted glasses, and focus on the neon and the crazy fashion.  Dead Mail (2024) looks back at the 1980s as I vaguely remember them—a drab post office in a small town.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Would You Rather (2011)

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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.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Anything for Jackson (2020)

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What happens when you take the disconnected lifestyle of liberalism of upper middle class elites to its logical conclusion?  The answer is the couple at the center of Anything for Jackson (2020), a film in which an affluent couple attempt to bring their grandson back to life through a “reverse-exorcism,” which involves hijacking a young woman’s pregnancy for their own nefarious ends.  Naturally, in the process, the bumbling and desperate couple unleash for more sinister forces than they ever intended, with horrifying (and, frequently, grimly hilarious) consequences.

The result is one of the creepiest, funniest, and most original films I’ve seen in some time.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: The Exorcist III (1990)

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Sequels can be a dicey proposition.  The mentality with most sequels is “the same, but bigger”—build upon what made the original film successful and lovable, but with more of it.  That formula seems to work in terms of generating cash, but tends to leave audiences leaving with the sensation that what they saw was “good, but not as good as the original.”

The Exorcist III (1990), which ignores the events of the (so I have heard) disastrous Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), is certainly “not as good as the original,” but it is still very good.  It’s a film that takes a few viewings to drink everything in, but it’s worth the effort.  Indeed, I’d argue it is an underappreciated masterpiece.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Humane (2024)

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The Age of The Virus may be a distant memory now, one we’ve all done our best to forget collectively, but it revealed a great deal about the compliance of Westerners to technocratic authoritarianism in their respective nations.  Yes, there were pockets of ornery resistance—thank God I live in South Carolina!—but the full might of the weaponized media, elite toadies, and cat moms came out to scold us all for wanting to breathe free and enjoy public gatherings (the latter protected, albeit seemingly only on paper, in the First Amendment).

It’s little wonder that we try to suppress the memory of that benighted time, but like all such attempts to forget the past, it only serves as an unhealthy way to deal with deep trauma.  By pushing all of those bad memories down, we avoid thinking about the unpleasant consequences that our society-wide foolishness wrought.

Of course, part of that response is that everyone got super bored talking about The Virus because, after awhile, it did get boring.  Like all diseases, it reached its critical mass and then ebbed away, each new wave being less virulent, less lethal, and less widespread.  The Left seemed eager to memory-hole the entire thing, and the Right was just glad we didn’t have to read another boring article with a lot medical lingo that we all pretended to understand.  The Age of The Virus really did reveal how shallow and gutless we all are.

One realm in which the trauma has endured is film.  Whether intentionally or otherwise, it’s hard to suppress those memories in works of art; after all, art is, at least in part, an expression of our innermost feelings and struggles.  In vino veritas, yes, but also In arte veritas est.

The Age of The Virus crystallized a number of unpleasant Truths:  the cowardice of our populous; the brazen indifference and hypocrisy of our elites; and the paradoxical grasping to stay alive at all costs while viewing millions of other, “lesser” lives as expendable.  No film more aptly captures these wretched qualities of the twenty-first century developed world better than 2024’s Humane.

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