Tag: movies

Monday Morning Movie Review: Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

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This week’s pick is the definition of niche:  a British indie film about sound design for an Italian giallo film.  If you’re a horror aficionado and interested in film scoring and sound design, you’ll love this film, as I did.  If not, it’s still worth watching, but you’re probably not going to appreciate it as much.

That’s my basic take on Berberian Sound Studio (2012), the story of a meek British sound engineer who finds himself working in a hostile Italian sound studio on an (apparently) very graphic giallo flick.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Puppet Master I-III (1989, 1990, 1991)

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Good old Shudder has been putting up some real classics of schlock lately, and that includes the first three films in the popular direct-to-video Puppet Master series.  These are not good movies, but they are a fun distraction.

The brainchild (children?) of Charles Band, whose entire career seems to have been dedicated to churning out super low-budget horror films with a strong sense of self-awareness, I remember the various Puppet Master flicks being terrifying as a kid.

For context, my parents did not plop five-year old Portly down in front of Puppet Master.  The early 90s were the golden age of direct-to-video flicks ending up on cable as reruns years later.  Somehow, at some point, I caught a few minutes of one of the films, and was thoroughly spooked.

Consider:  as a kid, the prospect of murderous, spooky-looking puppets coming to life is pretty scary.  I’m sure everyone reading this blog—even my older readers, who probably got a cedar log and an orange for Christmas—had at least one weird, creepy toy, and had some vague dread that it was filled with malice intent.  My mom had these creepy dolls that were supposed to be a little boy and a little girl, with heads made from some kind of 1960s-era molded plastic.  Those things still give me the jeebies.

So, do they hold up years later?

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Ad Hoc Halloween Edition

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It’s almost Halloween!  Yours portly couldn’t be more excited for this fun holiday.

Unfortunately, yours portly has been extremely busy lately, and I simply haven’t had the time to write proper posts over the weekend.  I was planning on reviewing the 1963 Alfred Hitchcock classic The Birds today (I saw it on the big screen the weekend before this past one), but I’m holding off on that for another week.

Instead, here are some films I’d recommend to get you into the Halloween mood:

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Lockdown Tower (2022)

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What would happen if a multiethnic, multiracial apartment tower in the Parisian projects found itself blocked off from the outside world, surrounded by a total blackness that consumes anything that attempts to pass through it?  That’s the premise to the 2022 French film Lockdown Tower, and the answer to that question isn’t pretty.

Fortunately, it makes for a riveting film, and while the world it paints is pretty bleak, it’s also unsettlingly realistic.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: The Exorcist (1973)

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On Sunday, 1 October 2023, I had the opportunity to catch 1973’s The Exorcist on the big screen.  It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the film, if you can believe it; it debuted the day of Christmas the year my Dad graduated from high school.

That was astonishing to me.  I’m thirty years younger than my Dad (to the year), and was born twelve years after the film’s release.  That said, it was very much a part of the Zeitgeist of the early 1990s.  To be clear, I did not see the film at that tender age—thank goodness!—but it was spoken of in hushed whispers as “the scariest movie of all time.”  I vividly recall my older brother telling me how he stayed up late to watch the film (he was probably a young teenager at the time) on television, and how it scared him so much, he couldn’t sleep.  Powerful stuff!

I saw the film years later—I don’t recall when or how old I was—and while I found it creepy, I didn’t understand all the hubbub.  Yes, it was an excellent film, but “the scariest movie of all time?”  C’mon.

Then I saw it on the big screen.  That experience changed my assessment of the film and its horror substantially.  In the dark, in the theater, the film’s incredible cinematography and effects demanding my full attention, left an indelible mark upon my mind—and, perhaps, my soul.  I get it now:  The Exorcist is terrifying.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Threads (1984)

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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.

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Memorable Monday Morning Movie Review: They Live (1988)

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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“:

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Retribution (2023)

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There are a handful of actors whose films I will always see:  Nicolas Cage, Kurt Russell, Liam Neeson.  Maybe it’s not always on the big screen, but I’ll find a way to view their films.

If the movie is just $4—as it was when I saw the latest Liam Neeson vehicle Retribution (2023), it’s a no-brainer.  What’s not to love?  An aging action star with improbably young children taking on a dangerous criminal and all of the Europol and the Berlin Polizei?  Take my money, please!

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Back to School (1986)

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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.

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