Rated R.  This is an intense R.  Honestly, this might be one of the cruelest movies that I've watched in a while.  It is visually brutal, capitalizing on having some of the most graphically violent images.  In fact, most of the scares are exclusively from seeing things that you thought would be too far by any extent of the imagination.  Couple that with nudity, language, underage drinking, and a whole mess of horrible things happening to a child, this is one of the most well-deserved R-Ratings that I've seen in a while.

DIRECTORS:  Daniel and Michael Philippou

This movie is so brutal that I had blurred images galore on Google image search.  I know that this might actually be subtly seducing some of my readership into wanting to see what all the hubbub is about.  But I have to be honest:  I don't like visceral imagery.  It's not for me.  I think one of my most detested horror movies was Cabin Fever because it was just that upsetting to watch.  This movie...honestly, it ranks up there.  There's a scene midway through the movie that still makes me pause.  I know that I'm not putting any kind of format or style into this writing, but I also am still immediately reeling from what I saw.

Okay.  Take a breath.  Here's the deal.  My buddy at work really likes horror movies.  I'm going to be slightly critical and imply that he likes them too much.  There's a mild chance that he might be reading this.  I've given him guff for this before, so this isn't exactly talking out of school.  And I'll be forthright.  A lot of the time, our horror tastes tend to align.  But this was too much.  Maybe that's why I have been so burned out by the Ari Aster stuff and the stuff that A24 has been putting out.  I realized that I'm a far bigger fan of the jump scare than I am anything that has a brutal tone to it.

It just feels like a mean movie.  The funny thing is that I also heard that everyone involved in this movie had a fun time making it, especially the kid who was brutalized for most of the film.  So I should be all "Rah! Rah!  It's just special effects." But it isn't, is it?  See, I'm watching the Final Destination movies right now.  Trust me, these aren't great films.  But do you know what they are?  They are fun.  These movies have that level of shock value.  We're going to see some special effects that are going to make me make some gag faces.  But I don't consider those movies very mean.  Ultimately, what I'm dancing around here is tone.  

The crazy part is that I really had a good time with these guys' other movie, Talk to Me.  It's not like Talk to Me felt like it was made by other directors.  These guys are shaping up to be auteurs.  They have a certain style and they seem to be embracing dark genre storytelling.  But what the difference between Talk to Me and Bring Her Back (even though they kind of seem to share similar title styles) is the fact that Talk to Me didn't forget to have fun.  I'm not saying that Bring Her Back is a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination.  Despite the fact that I had to power through some stuff, ultimately the movie is incredibly effective and does the job it sets out to do.  But I will tell you what.  I bought Talk to Me because it was affordable and I hadn't seen the movie.  I'm really stoked that Bring Her Back was on HBO Max because I can tell you that I never want to see this movie again.

I'm about to parade my complaints down this blog in the more forthright way imaginable.  I can already see myself getting petty while writing this, so be aware that I'm on your team when I state some incredibly whiny things.  I, too, wish that I had a better critique of this movie than what I'm offering you.  But again, I don't hate it.  It's just that there's a couple things that really bother me about the movie.  

Part of what bugs me is Laura, the central antagonist of the film.  I really like Sally Hawkins in this role.  My goodness, Sally Hawkins knows what to do with parts.  She's in a bunch of stuff that I'm not the biggest fan of, but I can always attest that Hawkins is the most interesting part of the film.  (Honestly, the acting all around is top notch.  There isn't one complaint there.  I just really like Sally Hawkins and I feel the need to secure this plot of digital real estate to put that down.)  But Laura's character doesn't make a lot of sense to me.  A lot of it is hinged on the fact that Laura has had a mental break following the death of her daughter Cathy.  She used to be this great social worker and the best that Australia has ever seen.  She still talks like she's this wholesome loving person, but from moment one, she's enacted a plan to make Andy seem like he's lost his faculties.  It makes sense.  After all, if Andy turns 18 with no red flags, he gets to take custody of Piper.  That clearly wasn't in Laura's plan, so everything she does is to make sure that Andy is out of the picture so she can put Cathy's soul in Laura through Ollie.  It's all very confusing.

But it also feels like Laura knows that she's the villain of a horror movie at times.  From her perspective, she has to be unimpeachable so that Andy can look bad and Laura can take custody of Piper.  Now, from meeting Andy, she seems to be torturing him.  She intentionally calls him by the wrong name. She steals his phone to see what he is thinking about her.  She makes him kiss his father, despite the fact that she shouldn't know that Andy's father was secretly abusive.  Now, we can all squint and pretend that these moments somehow align with her master plan to make Andy do something harsh. But the thing that I don't really understand is the concussion scene.

Andy is visited by the ghost / hallucination of his dead father.  I read this more as a hallucination sequence because Andy is so afraid of taking a shower ever since discovering his father's body splayed outside of a shower.  But his father tells him that Piper is going to die in the rain and warns Andy not to let Piper go out in the rain.  Okay, Andy retains the message and wakes up in the hospital, desperately trying to save Piper because it is raining out.  Little did we know that a sizable portion of the movie is going to have rain, so Andy could have taken a breather.  But he was in the dark as much as we were.  But this is where I'm frustrated.

Andy gets a visit from Laura.  That's fine.  She's messing with his head, which is her modus operandum.  But he begs her not to let Piper play out in the rain.  He, in a state of desperation, tells her that he got this secret message from his dad and begs her not to go out.  Laura agrees to keep Piper out of the rain.  Smash cut to Laura saying it would be whimsical to play out in a downpour. Now, Andy's not there.  He's still in hospital (I say "in hospital" because we're in Australia and maybe commonwealth rules still apply?).  Laura needs Piper healthy to bring back Cathy.  Why would she be tempting fate to mess with Andy in a way that he would never find out about?  She needs Piper in good shape.  If there was even a risk that the rain could hurt her, Laura would be keeping her safe inside.  The central conflict are these two parental figures duking it out for Piper's love and safety.  The idea that Laura would be risking Piper in any way doesn't make sense to me.

Can I be honest about something?  Intellectually, I understand the whole Ollie bit.  Horror nerds, by the way, aren't tuning in for the Laura / Piper / Andy hour.  Nope.  They want to see this demonic kid self-harm himself for the length of a film.  Anyway.  Ollie.  I understand that Ollie is a vessel for Cathy's spirit.  Laura watches these homemade Russian black market demon videos explaining what it takes to transfer the soul out of a person into another person by turning people into Golems / vessels for souls.  It's all very graphic, which I've already stressed at length.  And I get that Ollie is not Ollie.  He's a missing child named Connor.  If Ollie leaves the circle surrounding the home, Connor starts taking control and killing Ollie.  Fine.  It's just...I'm not sure what the rules of Ollie are.  I get the circle bit.  I also know that Connor is desperate to get out from the control of Ollie based on what he wrote on the notepad.  But that end?  Ollie hangs out in the swimming pool because that's where Cathy drowned?  The end has Piper being held underwater and she shouts "Mum", which Laura asked Piper to do earlier.  The thing that was frustrated was that the subtitles said, "[in Cathy's voice] Mum!"  Um...Ollie hadn't done anything yet.  Also, he's eating bodies.  Does Ollie need people to survive?  Also, what is the timeline it takes to transfer a soul from one body to another?  That entire thread, if you were trying to follow the rules, is confusing as heck.

But can I tell you one shot I liked that makes me feel like a sadist?  Wendy getting hit by a car was the most effective someone-dying-by-vehicular-homicide I've ever seen.  I've seen that bit a few times, but this one genuinely impressed me.

I really do want to stress that I didn't hate it. But gross out movies like this one are not for me.  If anything, the movie bummed me out more than scared me.  I don't like a world where everyone is just cruel to one another.

Rated R for a lot of cursing, sexual references, and gore that involves people getting mowed down by a killer car.  There's also a bit of sex stuff in it, but there is no nudity. I remember being kind of aghast at one thing that didn't age well, but for the life of me I can't remember it right now.  Still, it is a horror movie adapted from a Stephen King novel.  It's going to have inappropriate content in it.

DIRECTOR:  John Carpenter

Okay, this is going to be a secret book review along with being a movie blog.  You got it?  I'm not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes.  I just read the book and I went directly into the movie after that.  I think I might not be alone out there when I say that I had a healthy skepticism about the premise of Christine.  There's a Family Guy bit about Stephen King implying that he just looks at objects and makes them spooky.  In the case of the clip, it was a lamp.  But that criticism comes from the notion that you could write a novel about a killer car and somehow make it compelling.  Well, he did it.  Christine, as a novel, is a banger.  But the more insane thing is that John Carpenter adapted that novel at the peak of John Carpenter's work and made a banger out of that novel.  I don't know how it is possible, but both the book and the movie shouldn't work, yet they absolutely do.

I have a theory about it.  Actually, I have two theories and they both, somehow, may be true.  Let's go with the dumber theory first.  Christine almost works in the exact same way that Jaws does.  We know the shark is out there.  We know it's going to kill anyone that it is coming across.  But because the car is barely in the movie, it makes it so much scarier and more compelling to care about the people who aren't cars in the movie.  (The good news is that very few people in this movie are cars.) Because Christine in either medium barely shows up (not no-time, but sparingly), this is a story about character, which leads me to my second theory.

If Christine is scary because it barely shows its monster, much like Jaws, then the story works because of its allegory that Spider-Man also embraced.  I rarely read King novels looking for allegory or deeper meaning.  As an English teacher, that's a bit blasphemous, also considering that I believe that all art should be saying something.  I'm sure that many of the King novels have a ton to say that might be deeper than what I initially gleaned.  I oddly shut my brain off for King because I find him just so gosh-darned readable.   I know that King, to some extent or another, has been influenced by Marvel Comics.  If you read his Dark Tower novels, he straight up makes in-universe Doombots villains in one of the books.  Now, I don't know what is going on in Stephen King's head when he's writing Christine.  From what I can glean, this is one of those pillars of the King canon that was probably influenced heavily by enough drugs to make King potentially forget that he wrote this.  I don't know.  That's me speculating.  I doubt that he was reading Spider-Man and thinking that he was going to write the horror version of the same allegory.

This is me trying to dig myself out of being too abstact and cryptic.  Stan Lee infamously created his characters as allegories for what his readership was potentially going through.  With Peter Parker / Spider-Man, Peter's gaining of powers is allegory for puberty.  I know, right?  The guy is a huge nerd.  He's overlooked by everyone until one day everything changes.  He notices physical changes in himself.  He can't just be pushed around anymore.  He starts making weird moral choices until he makes a big enough mistake that he has to re-evaluate his life, eventually forcing him to take up his uncle's mantra, "With great power, there must also come great responsibility." (I really hope someone calls me on that mantra so I can cite page and line of Spider-Man's canonical origin story.) 

Christine is also a metaphor for puberty.  But because it is a horror where we can't have our central figure simply will himself out of a problem, we actually get a much more in-depth breakdown of what it means to go through puberty.  Arnie is Peter Parker.  Mind you, because Stan Lee was writing for children, Peter's nicknames weren't as vulgar as Arnie's were.  When Arnie decides to buy Christine off of LeBay, it's his first real form of independence.  But in that independence, there is the companion of rebellion.  Arnie's parents initially aren't angry at the car itself, but in the fact that Arnie made a unilateral decision without consulting them.  He's the baby bird leaving the nest and it is incredibly sudden.  Coupled with that is that Arnie, in a desperate attempt to grow up on his own and quickly, pays way too much for the car.  Everyone is aware that Christine, in the way that LeBay sells her, is not even worth $50.  But Arnie needs her.  He is sick of being Arnie the child.  A car represents a major step in the coming of age story.  

And when he buys her, he loses his acne.  The character of Arnie becomes a far more confident version of himself.  In the novel, that physical transformation becomes literally LeBay, the old racist who sells him the car.  The movie just makes Arnie a handsomer, more confident version of himself, mostly from the removal of his glasses.  With the novel, that possession by LeBay is actually far more upsetting because --if we're treating this as an allegory --modeling adulthood after LeBay seems like an attempt to be anything that his parents aren't.  His parents are obsessed with education and liberal politics.  His mother wields that liberal arts education violently, causing Arnie to mirror the polar antithesis.  As much as the car scares all the people around it, it is more haunting that Arnie keeps defending the car sooner than defending the humans in his life.  If you take all the supernatural bits out of it, it is Arnie hurting the people around him because he turns his back on the things that made him innocent.  In the process of growing up to be a man, he has to destroy everything that was representative of his old life.

But now I should talk about the movie?  I mean, I got some pretty fun moments in there from an English teacher's perspective.  I don't know why John Carpenter was such a good match for this movie.  Honestly, I'm surprised that the two didn't work together more.  King infamously tends to hate adaptations of his works, especially the ones made by auteurs.  I kind of get that he doesn't like The Shining, but that's because Kubrick distanced himself from the novel quite a few times.  While Carpenter isn't bonded to the novel, a lot of the written word made its way to the screen.  The first half of the movie especially is oddly close to how the book played out.  There are moments that are rearranged for clarity, considering that two-thirds of the novel is told in first person, meaning that much of Dennis's inner thoughts would be lost when adapted to the screen.  But I really felt like I was watching a direct adaptation, which is weird considering that I feel like John Carpenter himself has such a powerful voice.

Maybe King is too close to his own work.  Carpenter did something pretty smart in his adaptation.  There are some things that I wouldn't have hated closer to the book, but I really like that the movie downplays Darnell's control over Arnie.  As much as that element works in the novel, showing Arnie's obsession with self-sabotage, it almost feels like a distraction from the relationship between Arnie and Dennis (who may be a bit cooler than I realized based on the movie).  

But the thing that would have frustrated me if I was Stephen King is the origins of Christine herself.  What I like about the book is that the silliest part of the whole mythos --a killer car --is actually more of a weapon in the hand of a ghost. Okay, that might be silly too...but I like it better.   I oddly find the notion that a car just kills people...like in the introduction to this movie.  It's coming off the assembly line and it injures one dude and kills another.  I like the notion that a real life racist bled off malice into the car.  That's a far more interesting dynamic, especially when we tie that notion that Arnie is just mirroring the adults he knows as he grows up.

Also, does Carpenter keep Dennis and Leigh apart as a couple because it makes Dennis unsympathetic?  From a film perspective, it keeps Dennis as the protagonist of the film and doesn't muddy the friendship between Arnie and Dennis.  But push-comes-to-shove, I actually really ship Dennis and Leigh as a couple.  Maybe the movie is a little rushed, but I also really get that some of these beats just don't work without an internal monologue to justify these actions.  Or you need to add another hour to the film and I don't think that would have helped it one bit.

As I close up, I do also want to stress something.  Christine works beyond its messaging. It's not scary-scary. It's scary-cool-scary.  Okay, there's barely any coherence in this, but I think that when John Carpenter is firing on all-cylanders (pun intended), he cooks.  This is additional evidence that John Carpenter had a streak going for a long time because Christine is way better than it has any right to be.

Rated R, sure, for a movie that is trying to out-gore the other one.  But, maybe we should consider this an R-rated movie for the most forced gratutous nudity for only a few seconds.  My goodness, this movie wanted to hit the Scream button by attaching death to vice.  There's all kinds of various drug use and language, to really get the edgy teen market going.  And, again, I cannot stress this is a movie about creating gnarly deaths.  It does that.  R.

DIRECTOR:  David R. Ellis

If I can knock this out, I will have had an incredibly productive day without actually having completed my To-Do List for the day.  And I'll admit, I'm a little scared about this blog.  I told you in my Final Destination blog that this franchise is going to be hard to write about because it is going to hit the same beats over and over again.  I can't help but think that this blog is going to sound similar to one's written by my students.  When I read their blogs, especially when they aren't feeling like writing, it tends to be a lot of "My favorite part was this.  It was cool."

Well, we all like the logging truck.  It was cool.  

The thing about the Final Destination movies is that, when people do think about them, they think about this one.  This is the one that I remember most vividly.  It might be the entry that I stopped at.  But we all remember the logging truck.  But even more than that, I tend to remember the pane of glass smooshing poor Tim (WHOSE REAL NAME IS JAMES KIRK?).  The immediate takeaway of Final Destination 2 is that the gauntlet was laid down in terms of movie making.  I'm not saying the movie is better.  The ending, I would argue, is significantly worse.  But someone, perhaps director David Ellis, discovered that the Final Destination movies are about bigger and badder magic tricks from the special effects department.  I have to imagine these movies have some kind of script going into shooting.  But my real theory is that the director and the producer sit down with a special effects team and say, "What cool set up can we create for this movie that would put the first one to shame?"  

Like, I almost refuse to believe that the apartment fire sequence was the complete creation of a scriptwriter.  It's just that so much of Final Destination, due to its Rube Goldbergian treatment of death, is fundamentally a visual story.  I can't imagine that it says, "Cut to rich kid's hand in disposal as frying pan catches fire."  Maybe it did.  I don't know.  But the stories in these things ultimately don't matter, which brings us to a conundrum.

Final Destination 2 looks better than the first Final Destination. That's the way that it seems to happen in a lot of horror franchises.  Not always.  Sometimes, studios and producers realize that you could have done a lot of the same bits on a fraction of the budget, which is what I expect coming pretty soon for the franchise.  No, I'm talking about the fact that people really responded to nature getting elaborate with her kills.  In the second one, the kills have to be even more elaborate and even more expensive.  None of this "backyard clothes line" gets caught by wind nonsense.  The most expensive looking deathtrap in the first one is the epilogue with the characters in France.   That had to be the standard for the deaths in the second one because every single setup was over the top.  When a movie has a pretty crummy story, at least there was something to be enjoyed in the showmanship of it all.  The logging truck scene was memorable for a reason. There's a reason that we all tense up behind logging trucks on the road today.  I mean, the sheer scope of those deaths was almost hilarious.  It just kept going and going.  And it felt like most of the deaths were mostly fakeouts until something seemingly mundane did a far gorier death than you imagined.  That rich kid with his hand in the disposal didn't get his hand blended off.  He didn't catch fire.  The microwave didn't explode.  The ladder fell on him once he thought he was safe.  Tim with the pigeons?  No choking to death.  No death by sleeping gas.  No drill ripping his face apart.  Random pane of glass.  It's all pretty fun.

But Final Destination 2 hits a lot of the same snags that cryptic origin movies do.  I like when the first movie doesn't tell us a lot.  I'm still always going to refer back to Predator.  We never know about the creature and we almost don't need to.  But sequels can't get away with that garbage.  They always need to give people a reason to keep coming back.  There's new information to be gleaned.  The problem is, especially with a movie like Final Destination 2, is that the movie is better without trying to wrap it up in a box.  I love Tony Todd.  I really do.  I'm bummed that he passed, but he also has an incredible body of work that his family should be proud of.  But I will say that his character doesn't make a lick of sense.

Tony Todd's mortician, named Mr. Bludworth apparently, is the most cryptic and intentionally obtuse character out there.  But what is worse is that he's entirely built on the notion of archetype --leaning almost heavily into stereotype.  He's the wise older Black man.  I don't know if I want to know more about this character.  If the future sequels continue using Tony Todd, I don't know if I want to know more about him.  Because a lot of my frustrations come from what Tony Todd contributes as a character.  

Mr. Bludworth has a weird relationship with Death.  Part of me really wants him to just be a dude who watches the news, explaining why he knows all of the characters' names. That would be very funny and would explain why all of his cryptic suggestions are fundamentally dumb.  I hope that the clue that he gives in Final Destination 2 doesn't carry through the series because it is incredibly frustrating.  Mr. Bludworth's advice in this one is, "Death can only be reset by new life" or something like that.  That makes no sense.  The problem in this story is that these characters have cheated death.  They all have new life.  Killing and being revived really feels like a technicality in the grand scheme of things.  And isn't the point of Death in these movies more along the line of Death being angry that she has been cheated?  Why would she be happy with being cheated again?  I mean, it is also a crime that I also know the plot of Final Destination: Bloodlines, so I know that the literal meaning couldn't work.  I was kind of hoping that Isabella's baby was going to live, but not save everyone.  I just hate how matter-of-fact that there was a clean and neat ending with Kimberly drowning herself and getting revived.  It seemed like Devon Sawa was revived a whole bunch of times.

I get it. He was only revived those times.  It's not like he died between.

But here's me trying to be positive about the movie.  Because I didn't want the baby to be the solution, the reveal that Isabella was never in the original car wreck was a fun revelation.  I also really like that Clear kind of forgot that she was being hunted by Death for a good chunk of the movie. The matter of factness of getting rid of Clear as a character made me giggle quite hard.  Like, those last few moments hit incredibly hard.  So it's not like it is all bad.

Here's my thought process about Final Destination as a whole though.  I kind of love poking holes through things, so bear with me.  Some of you might find this kind of speculation insufferable, but I am trying to document a thought process I had that I probably won't remember later.  Kimberly stops the car and blocks off the on-ramp, saving all of those people from the logging truck disaster.  (I still don't know why Death is giving certain people premonitions.  I also don't like how everyone has to be tied to the first one, because that made very little sense.)  But when Kimberly blocked the on-ramp, the logging truck disaster still happened.  (It actually seemed like it somehow happened earlier.) A bunch of people were in that accident.  But since the on-ramp hadn't merged with traffic, wouldn't new deaths be accounted for?  Like, Death is mad that there are people walking around that should not be alive.  But Death isn't weirded out that there are people who are dead that should not be dead.  The traffic should have adjusted for the lack of on-ramp traffic.

So my final (destination) takeaway from Final Destination 2?  I looks way prettier.  The deaths are more fun.  But the movie is way dumber.  Also, considering that the first entry had a baller cast, I didn't recognize many people outside of Michael Landes, who played the original Jimmy Olson on Lois & Clark.  It's fun, but it's not good.

Rated R for being a sequel to 28 Days Later.  If you've seen the Rage virus zombies in that one and how that movie is filmed in an incredibly graphic manner, you know what to expect with its sequel.  Boyle plays up the chaotic, covering the screen with gore and violence.  But add to that is the fact that, because so much time has passed since the original film, all of the zombies are now nude.  Clothes have rotted away, so there's just a lot of violent, gory nudity on screen.  This one perhaps has a slightly more forgiving view of humanity compared to the original film, but it is still upsetting.

DIRECTOR: Danny Boyle

At least I'll have a big gap in blogs between Final Destination and Final Destination 2.  I went on a tear this weekend, guys.  I originally was just going to watch 28 Years Later, but my wife was out of time so I decided to keep myself entertained while I got some chores done.  So while bagging-and-boarding comics and while folding laundry, I watched a bunch of more movies.  I never thought that horror films between horror films would be considered a palate cleanser, but it was nice to watch movies just for the sake of watching movies. 

I love Danny Boyle.  This review might get to a place that is less than flattering, so I want to put my appreciation for Danny Boyle first and foremost.  One thing that I heard is that Danny Boyle hates repeating himself.  If you look at the genres of movies that the man has made, there has been a conscious attempt to tread new ground every time.  Now, I'm pretty sure that 28 Years Later is Danny Boyle's first sequel.  I suppose there's a paradox there.  This is the first time that he's done a sequel to something he created, which is technically doing something new.  But it is also a repetition of 28 Days Later, a movie that still pretty much holds up on its own. It's not a perfect horror movie, but it is its own thing.  I would also like to stress that I saw 28 Weeks Later, a movie that I remember Boyle distancing himself from because he saw it as a bit of a cash grab.  A lot of this might be inaccurate.  I'm not basing this on the Internet.  I'm basing this on my memory which is probably inaccurate.  

You would think that if Danny Boyle, a guy who prides himself on doing new things, came back to a franchise, especially one that he swore not to do sequels to, there would have to be a special reason.  It's not that 28 Years Later is bad.  There are things that I don't like about it and I'm going to be talking about that.  But the bigger issue is that I don't really see the point of this movie.  Maybe I'm too much obsessed with the "Why is this movie made?" question as opposed to just accepting that some things are out there as entertainment.  It's just that, the first movie hit hard.  One of the things about zombie films is that, even more than the bulk of genre storytelling out there, they are perfect environments to make commentary on the human condition.  It's why The Walking Dead was such a success.  One of the things about zombies is that characters aren't really allowed to get comfortable.  When people are always looking for shelter and survival, their true natures come out.  (Look at the Hierarchy of Needs!)  With the first film, Boyle used the landscape that he created to talk about the patriarchy and rape culture, coupled with how racism and sexism were forever linked.  What does 28 Years Later say?  Honestly, not much.

Part of what weirds me out about this movie is that Alex Garland is usually the champ of writing movies with a purpose.  This is more of a story about "How would things look like if technology hadn't advanced and we just got used to zombies at the gate?"  That's fun, but it isn't really engaging.  Also, for Garland, this script feels real loosey-goosey.  Here's a problem I had with it.  About every twenty minutes in the movie, I kept saying, "Oh, this is the plot."  I mean, the plot eventually was that Spike needed to get his mom to a doctor and, in the process, learned what it meant to lose one's parents.  But it takes a long time for the movie to make that choice.  For a lot of the film, I was thinking that this was a movie about breaking the rules to find someone who ran away.  Then I thought it was about how kids learn that their parents are just adults who might suck more than we thought they did.  Then it ended up being about the value of isolation.  And none of these ideas are really well explored because the stupid setting kept taking control of the movie.  Every time we got to something deep, like the notion that a baby can be born of a zombie, the movie forgot to let us breathe in that idea.  

Yeah, 28 Days Later is an absolutely rad zombie movie.  That's probably what it is remembered for.  I don't want to take away from that.  Let cool stuff be cool.  But when watching 28 Days Later, I was struck by how aggressively political the movie was.  This movie touches on some politics, mostly with its juxtaposition of war images with the people trying to survive.  But I'll be honest with you, I don't know if that imagery ever says anything except that violence exists in everybody.  The movie has this attitude of "This next thing happened."  Sometimes, the zombies are really smart and it is hard to move a foot ahead.  But when the movie, for the sake of pacing, needs the film to progress beyond action horror set pieces, everything kind of gets to be just fine.  Like, Spike is still way out there with a baby.  Do you understand that if I pitched a story about how a young boy has to travel across miles of zombieland with a newborn baby who is hungry and zombies are attracted to sound, how insane that story would have been? That's a movie in itself and it's frustrating that the film never capitalized on that.

And here's the kicker!  That wasn't the part that bothered me.  There are a couple of things that bother me about 28 Years Later.  The first is the hierarchy of zombies.  One thing that always pulls me out of survival horror games is the fact that video games tend to categorize their zombies.  It's not bad enough that zombies are scary because they will overwhelm you with their numbers.  The game developers always feel the need to make "more challenging zombies."  With the case of 28 Years Later, we have the Alphas.  Apparently, there's something in the Rage Virus that affects some people differently, giving them enhanced intellect coupled with a steroid like effect of an Olympian athlete.  That's...dumb?  I'm really sorry.  Like, I know that Simon Pegg and Nick Frost don't like Rage zombies because they run, but this Alphas thing is beyond the pale.  It also doesn't make sense that Dr. Kelson doesn't just kill the Alphas when he has the chance.  I mean, there's a scene where Kelson is being attacked with the baby in a hole and it looks like he's done for.  Luckily, Spike is quick enough to sedate the Alpha again.  Maybe the movie doesn't want to push its luck saying that Alphas are dimes a dozen.  I don't know.

But that doesn't mean that the movie is all bad.  First and foremost, Danny Boyle has a way with atmosphere.  Golly, these movies are upsetting.  They are genuinely very scary to the point that I was nervous that anyone was going to walk in and see the most upsetting thing that they would have seen at any moment.  He makes good movies and 28 Years Later looks great.  But even more than all that, I love Jodie Comer.  Golly, that woman can act and I love her interaction with Alfie Williams, who plays Spike.  If there's one really great addition to this movie, that comes from the struggle of a mother who is losing her grasp on reality with a child who cares for her above all things. That stuff is great.  

It also kills me that this in no way feels like a standalone film.  Danny Boyle breaks his own rule to film a movie and that movie needs a sequel to explain a lot of the first film?  I honestly thought that the upcoming movie was actually a spin-off.  Then I discovered it was its own beast?  It's hard to critique a movie that feels incredibly incomplete.  We know that Spike is out there and there's all these Jimmy Saviles running around doing flips.  I'm not quite sure what that's all about.  But I'm trying to treat this as a film in itself and I don't know if that's really true.  

So the takeaway is that I want to like this movie more than I do.  I don't dislike it, so maybe that's a win?

Not rated because it is a Shudder Original, but it has the trappings of most conventional horror.  I'm pretty sure that this would get an R for gore alone.  There is a decent amount of language, some of it more intense than others.  But this is a commentary on the normalization of violence.  While there are definitely elements that are exaggerated for the sake of making a horror movie scary, the more upsetting violence are the grounded elements.  Again, I'm going to be writing this warning for a lot of the movies that I watch during the month of October, so just be aware of gore and violence.  Not rated.

DIRECTOR: Bomani J. Story

Do you realize how dumb I'm being right now?  Every day, some time during that day, I will make a list of all the things that I want to get done. Sometimes that list is written on a chalkboard, making it almost a contract.  Today, I knew it was going to be crazy.  I've been with the kids all weekend.  I love them to death, but it's been fairly standard to hear someone shouting for "Dad" about every few mintues.  I don't know why I thought that I would get time to hit some of the passion projects that I want to get done.  But I've been watching horror movies at night because my wife is out of town and I wanted to get laundry done.  So I started stacking up these movies that need to get blogged before I enter a very stressful week at work.  Don't worry.  If I actually do get this uploaded on Sunday night, be aware that I still have 28 Years Later to write about.

I have wanted to watch this one for a while.  Yes, you people who want to put me in a box, I did want to watch it because of the title.  I don't think I've made it even remotely a secret that I think that all art should be political because all art is already political by default.  I think the best thing that has happened to genre storytelling in the last decade is Jordan Peele's Get Out reminding us that genre storytelling should almost be accusatory.  With the wealth of now challenging horror films out there, with a title like The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, it should have been right up my alley.  I'm not saying that it was bad.  This is an incredible functional horror movie that does some things very right.  I'm not attacking it from that front.  I'm just not sure that this movie is as cohesive and it almost needs to be.

Part of my frustration with the film is that it is applying the Frankenstein allegory for today.  If Victor Frankenstein lived in the projects during 2023, what would that look like?  Okay, I'm in for that.  For a guy who has taught Frankenstein for years (I should make it clear that I taught it when I taught sophomores, which I no longer do), I don't necessarily love every element of the story.  But the Frankenstein mythos has outgrown Mary Shelley's novel's roots.  It's actually become something of its own creation...pun intended.  But the one thing that all the many interpretations of Frankenstein have tried to at least make known is that the real monster of the story should be the doctor, not the creature. 

I'm not saying that The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster doesn't try to do that.  There's a line towards the end that really tried selling that more than the action of the piece does.  It's not that I don't feel sympathy for Chris for the majority of the movie.  I just don't think that there's much to damn Vicaria, who seems to be the heroic protagonist for the majority of the movie, despite the fact that everyone accuses her of desecrating graves...which is a valid accusation thrown her way.  

The thing about the novel is that, despite being an epistolary novel, we spend a lot of time with the creature.  That's what makes the story compelling.  As much as Victor is dictating the events that led him to go out onto that ice, the really interesting story is that the creature is self-defined.  He is reborn as tabula rasa, shunned by his creator and becoming his own moral compass.  So what if that moral compass is vengeful and violent.  He becomes this thing, divorced from his parent and angry as heck.  That's not Chris in this story.  We actually know too little about Chris because The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster is about Vicaria from start to finish.  If anything, Vicaria's tale is a better epistolary film because we can only know (for the most part) what is going on from Vicaria's perspective.  That's kind of annoying because it makes Vicaria almost flawless.  She's blackmailed by a drug dealer into doing morally grey things, but that is only because she is protecting the people around her.

And the problem lies in one thing that should seem pretty innocuous.  If Shelley's Frankenstein is an accusation of irresponsible science attempting to replace God, Vicaria's motive for trying to bring back life is incredibly sympathetic.  She keeps losing people in her life to gang and police violence.  She sees death as a disease and she chooses her brother Chris as her subject to reanimate.  Yes, she sees this as scientific conquest.  But the reason that she chose Chris is because she misses her brother.  Because she has an intimate relationship with Chris, it's not that she just raised anyone. She wants to see her brother again.  

That changes far too much of the story.  It's admirable what she's doing.  If anything, we're rooting for Vicaria to gain her freedom so she can take care of her brother.  When Chris starts murdering, it's not out of vengeance for a world that has rejected him.  It's because there's a monster inside of him.  Vicaria's speech at the end of the film says that Chris isn't Chris, but rather a monster defined by his environment.  I don't really see that.  Vicaria initially embraces Chris (an improvement over what Victor does upon the Creature's reanimation.  I never really knew why Victor Frankenstein feared his own creation upon its rising considering that's what he was working for that.  You'd think that he would be able to steel himself against that given that he was working on that project for ages).  It's actually really weird that she fears Chris as time progresses.  The second time she sees him, she's terrified of him, which doesn't really make a ton of sense considering both Vicaria's characterization coupled with the fact that she didn't see Chris as a monster.  Also, Chris's dad never saw him as a monster, and Chris just murders the heck out of him.

Maybe the movie had too much time to realize that it had to be scary and that the original Frankenstein isn't so much terrifying as it is fascinating.  There are a bunch of moments in the film that seem like Shudder put pressure on this movie to be scary.  Let's have the conversation about Jada.  Jada is the spookiest thing in the movie.  The things that Chris does is upsetting.  A man getting a machete to the clavicle is upsetting.  But Jada is straight up spooky.  She keeps saying these things mirroring the little girl from Poltergeist.  Like, it's cool and super spooky.  But do you know what else it is?  Absurd.  It's like Jada became aware that she was in a horror movie, so she starts acting all spooky.  I get it, kids can be scary in horror movies.  But she just does these things that have nothing to do with the fact that Chris is out there, ripping people up.

And let's get to the elephant in the room.  I wanted this movie to be a commentary for 2023...even thought it is 2025.  The movie gets political.  There are some phenomenal things said about police violence, the whitewashing of history, and the importance of education.  But none of those things really are important to the main story.  This movie took a story and decided to skin the present day in an inherently political climate.  It named the movie The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster.  But I'll be honest with you.  Vicaria isn't exactly that angry of a Black girl.  She has her moments.  I want to make a comparison between Vicaria and another angry Black girl, also in a streaming original: Riri Williams.  

I loved Ironheart.  I like the comics.  I like the show.  I don't want these stories in competition, but I can't help but make the comparison, mainly because they are both about teenage Black girls in STEM situations where they aren't really supported by the world while White characters are encouraged to advance.  What I liked about Ironheart is that it took the Tony Stark mythos, a story about White privilege, and showed what happens when a Black girl tries to do the same thing.  The entire show is about how she has to cut corners and challenge her own moral codes just so she can be an unrecognized genius.  Now, apply the same story to The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster and you kind of don't get a commentary about how a Black girl is any different from Victor Frankenstein, except that she gets more screen time and has a more sympathetic reason for doing this.  

I don't want the movie to justify its political existence by telling me its politics.  I want the movie to show me its politics.  It does it sometimes, in brief flashes. But the reality of the whole thing is that it felt like it wanted to blend Frankenstein and The Wire.  And I believe that there is a version of this story that could really turn heads.  I just don't think we are challenged enough because the movie seemed to write itself off as a Shudder Original. 

It's good...not great.

Rated R for the most immediate unnecessary nudity you've ever seen in a movie.  While the movie really gets the R for the death and dismemberment that comes with movies of this ilk, there are all these excuses to do some raunchy stuff.  Like, the movie is a fundamentally unsexy conceit.  But the movie decided to really try to shoehorn some horndog stuff in there, making it all the more uncomfortable as I hate-finished the movie.  There's also some language and kids with guns.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Don Coscarelli

I have half a memory stuck in the back of my brain.  I went to a very conservative college, but I still really dug horror movies.  I don't know how I got a copy of Phantasm, considering that streaming wasn't a thing yet.  Maybe there was some kind of "On Demand" option with our cable box.  Long story even longer, I remember trying to convince people to watch Phantasm at my conservative Catholic university, thinking that this movie couldn't be that offensive.  Start up the film?  Immediate sex scene that only focused on a topless woman.  Yeah, we shut that one off pretty quick.  I did manage to pull a fast one though and convinced the theatre department to do a public screening of Night of the Living Dead.  Yeah, I wonder why my wife questions my choices.

I never did finish Phantasm.  But my wife was out of town and I wanted a movie that I knew that she wouldn't be all that interested in.  The same philosophy that went into wanting to show classmates this movie back in my old college days hit me today.  Phantasm was always one franchise that I felt like I never had an excuse to watch, despite the fact that it isn't a completely unknown horror franchise.  Even more so, I loved Bubba Ho Tep. Now, before I start lambasting Phantasm by stating that it is barely a movie, I really would like to stress that I am older and my tastes are very different from my college days. Those were the days that I swore that Moulin Rouge! was the greatest film ever made and I would watch shlock horror all the time.  

Yeah, old me doesn't like this.  Part of me really wanted to like this.  In my mind, there are mythical horror movies made on shoestring budgets filled with heart that made up for lack of budgets.  Maybe it's the Sam Raimi origin story applied to all of these horror movies that don't really earn those kinds of reputations.  Based on what I read on the Phantasm Wikipedia article (I needed to know both what I watched and what happens in the sequels so I can potentially spare myself the misery of hate watching an entire franchise), maybe Don Coscarelli and Sam Raimi share a lot of the same DNA.  From what I understand, there were a billion cuts of this movie that were attempted to be sold to distributors before the version that we ultimately got with this cut.  A lot of that makes sense.  The movie has a really hard time finding a unifying identity.

I need to put a hard break in what I am writing right now.  There's a bunch of stuff that needs to be said right here.  Let's imagine a world where Don Coscarelli is an auteur right out of the gate.  He knows the message he wants to tell and he knows that he's going to have to have his first movie break a lot of rules to say that message.  The Phantasm that I watched wanted me to believe that the events of this movie are Mike's dream, processing the death of his brother Jody.  I mean, I'm shorthanding what is ultimately meant to be an ambiguous ending considering that the Tall Man appears in Mike's mirror and captures him.  Okay, that's the best ending that can come out of a mess of a movie because it explains why the movie is so disjointed.  So much of the story can be written off as "Kid has weird dreams."  

But I absolutely refuse to believe that Coscarelli made a movie mimicking the chaos storytelling of dreamland.  One of the key things that I tell my student writers and is one of the most challenging pieces of advice that I have to force myself to listen to is that "writing is ultimately in rewriting."  First drafts are fundamental to the process.  But sometimes you need to throw the whole thing away and learn from your mistakes.  My students often don't listen to me when I tell them that they need to start from scratch, treating the rough draft as a learning experience.  A lot of their writing reads like Phantasm.  Phantasm has a lot of core stuff wrong about it.  It knows it wants to be spooky.  They got a really creepy dude.  They had a visual effects guy who is more than functional.  They have someone scoring the thing who knows how to make the whole thing creepy.  I love it. These are important.  What the movie doesn't have is an understanding of both plot and characterization.

Let's first break down the characterization in this movie because I cannot tell you why these characters are acting the way that they do.  The movie starts off almost in medias res.  A major character, to these people, has been murdered.  We don't really understand it.  We don't get to see the investigation into Tommy's death.  Instead, we're catapulted to the funeral, where Jody, one of our protagonists, seems put out by being at a funeral.  From the fact that Mike is always spying on Jody and always mad at Jody for leaving, we have to assume that Jody leaves a lot?  We don't really get a concrete dynamic between these people because a lot of Jody's character can be written as "cool guy archetype."  For the first time ever, the archetype isn't helping. 

It's also like the characters kind of just fell into a horror movie.  These evil monsters almost start the film as a version of the Munsters, but without the self-awareness.  The Tall Man is a mortician who can deadlift a coffin with a body inside of it one handed.  He's doing nothing to hide that behavior.  It's almost like he's welcoming people to investigate the cemetary because he has nothing better to do.  Usually, the supernatural have a purpose to their haunting.  But everything in Phantasm reads like these ghouls have nothing better to do than to simply mess with Mike and Jody.  There's an explanation later about why The Tall Man and the dwarves are attacking folks, but it doesn't make a lick of sense. There's a weird white room and an invisible door to another dimension.  As a guy who consumes a lot of media, my only response to all of that explanation what "What?"

Do you understand the amount of willpower it takes for me to not hate watch these other movies just so I can understand the lore of a movie I did not care for?  You may find that easy.  I am almost put off by it.  You'll know if I have succeeded in ignoring the sequels if you find no more Phantasm blogs.  (I mean, there are only five movies and they are made almost a decade apart.  I could do it, if only to see if Coscarelli becomes a better filmmaker.) 

I was talking about how I find Evil Dead guerilla filmmaking charming.  Phantasm isn't charming.  I know that Coscarelli has a handful of sets.  He's got the characters' house.  He's got the mausoleum. That's really about it.  Also, he likes to steal scenes from the novel Dune with the "Fear is the mindkiller" pain box.  So almost the entire movie is Mike and/or Jody have a bad feeling about the creatures at the cemetary.  They argue for a few minutes about whether or not Mike should go to the cemetary.  One or both of them go to the cemetary, fight off some kind of oogie-boogie and then they run home, question whether or not they saw what they clearly just fought off, and then repeat all of that over again.  Honestly, this movie had no real ending.  It ended because it told us that it was over.  But any one of the sequences at the cemetary could have been the final confrontation between Mike and the Tall Man.

Also, what is Reggie's relationship to these people?  One of the cuts of the movie had clearly had the plan to make the Tall Man and his minions vulnerable to sonic vibrations and, because Reggie played music, that music was going to take them down.  But that seemed really downplayed.  I kind of felt like Coscarelli had access to an old ice cream truck and a uniform, so they had Reggie show up for more scenes than what made any amount of sense.  (Also, all those people lived?  Why didn't the Tall Man kill all those people?) 

The movie is really bad, guys.  I wanted to like it.  That sphere was pretty cool, but this is a movie that depends on spooky imagery as opposed to any kind of actual storytelling.  It felt like a local haunted house that didn't have a narrative, but just wanted to scare you with scary looking things.  I really hope that I'm not bored enough to shotgun this franchise because I still haven't decided which horror movie I'm going to watch while folding laundry.

Rated R, because this franchise is all about finding the gnarliest ways to kill off characters.  Rather than necessarily scare, the goal is for "gross".  It's not quite body horror because often, the deaths are fairly quick.  It is, however, quite upsetting.  I would also like to add that this movie decides to have its protagonist look at an inapprpriate magazine, absolutely deflating the romance of a scene.  Couple that with drinking, swearing, and other things that horror movies aimed at teens get up to, this is a well-deserved R rating.

DIRECTOR:  James Wong

I'm so stupid for doing this.  Honestly, this might be the dumbest undertaking that I've had yet when it comes to this blog.  Usually, during October, I try to knock out an entire franchise of a horror movie.  When I saw that all the Final Destination movies were dropped on HBO Max, I thought, "That'd probably be a good time."  That's not the mistake I made.  I'm fairly convinced that I'm going to have a good time knocking these movies out, especially considering that I am not doing Saw again.  

But the big problem is...these movies are the same movie over and over again.  While there may be similarities between films in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise or the Friday the 13th movies, there at least are respective plots that are more heavily emphasized between films.  As far as I remember, the only difference between most of the Final Destination movies is the actual deaths.  Heck, I can get even more frustrated than simply the fact that these are six movies where I have to write six essays, all fundamentally about the same thing.  To make matters worse, these movies are barely movies.  

That sounds like I hate what I'm watching.  I haven't gotten there yet.  I'm sure a couple movies in, I'm going to get incredibly frustrated with the fact that I'm not being challenged in any meaningful way.  But the bigger issue is that this is almost a fictionalized version of Faces of Death.  For those who didn't grow up in the exact era that I did, Faces of Death was something that was whispered about in the more sketchy horror communities.  These were VHS tapes that were passed around that claimed (sometimes falsely; sometimes not) to be filmed and recorded moments of people being killed on camera.  It was always something that I found too barbaric and inhuman to ever land on my radar.  Instead, Final Destination offered a softer version of this.  Instead of watching real people die real deaths, they presented "what cool ways could we have our characters die that you know are fake.  Ultimately, what this did in my head was give special effects artists challenges to up the ante from what previous movies had offered.  After all, the thing that we all remember from Final Destination 2 is the logging truck. The fact that I see memes today saying that people won't drive behind one of these trucks is a testament to the challenge that these special effects artists ascribed to.

So the masochistic challenge that I'm responsible is attempting to write blog entries with the hope of finding some nugget to explore per blog.  I don't think I'm going to win.  Honestly, I won't feel bad for even the most devoted reader of the blog on bouncing somewhere later down the line.  This blog has always been something as a hobby for me more than something that would ever garner me readership.  (Although, if I gained readership, I wouldn't hate that either.) For all I know, I'm going to have this great epiphany movie-to-movie and have something new to say each time.  Heck, for all I realize, these movies might have something different to say between films, although I'm not exactly placing bets on that idea. 

I love that Final Destination was made in the year 2000.  I don't know if a year could ever encapsulate a specific feeling when it came to horror movies.  This is during the glory days of New Line Cinema.  New Line, from today's perspective, is just the house of Lord of the Rings.  That's not a bad place to be.  But in 2000, so many movies started with the New Line Cinema logo.  New Line was, in some ways, the alternative to Dimension Films and their very millennial-centric brand of horror.  I won't lie.  This is my favorite era of horror.  Part of that probably comes from nostalgia.  I discovered horror in this era and couldn't get enough of --what was then --contemporary horror.  Looking back on this movie 25 years later, I can't believe what a time capsule the first Final Destination was.  

I mean, this is a pre-9/11 movie about a plane explosion.  This is a timeline that doesn't really exist.  Most of our pre-9/11 narratives are people who dress up fancy, smoke on the plane, and experience almost nothing at the airport.  The closest other movie that I can find to this specific moment in time is Home Alone.  But this is a story about the fear of planes.  Alex's entire characterization hangs on the notion that he could be imagining all of this.  So we have this "See something, say something" attitude wired through the film and 9/11 hasn't happened yet.  It's odd to think that this story could exist before 9/11 and would actually work better post-9/11.  It's like all of these pieces were in place for America's narrative to be that airplanes are the most dangerous place you could possibly be. 

But even beyond the moment that shaped America for the 21st Century, the DNA of this film screams 2000.  When I saw those opening credits, it was both a Who's Who of my childhood coupled with a bit of "Whatever happened to them?"  The most shocking of these was Sean William Scott, who plays the most reserved part he might ever play.  I really like Sean William Scott.  I can't say that I'm a fan, but the dude brought a certain energy to a lot of the roles he performed.  Watching him play what might be characterized as cannon fodder for death is a weird moment.  My mind goes to the same place as seeing Christian Slater in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.  There's just something very startling about seeing that kind of role.  But between Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Tony Todd, and Daniel Roebuck, it's really weird knowing that this was the 2000s All Star Game.  The funny thing about it all is that there's also a very specific performance style that has aged poorly.  I don't think I could advertise Final Destination as a great movie, even if I had loved it, simply by the weak-energy performances that we get with this film.  My apologies to Devon Sawa.  As normal, I don't like crapping on performances because someone worked on that role hard.  Also, I Googled it and I'm the only person who thinks that Sawa is weak in that role.  But I think it might be the product of its day as opposed to anything that Sawa is doing fundamentally wrong.

The odd thing about Final Destination is that I'm almost confused about who Death is as a character.  I have to call Death an unseen character in these movies because Death has a personality.  But despite that personality, there are things that just don't make sense to me. Maybe future movies will enlighten me about who Death is.  The central conceit is that Death has a plan.  If you can see the plan, you can delay your own demise.  Okay, I can live with that.  For one, Death is incredibly petty.  Part of it comes from the fact that Death comes for us all and that plan is important to the framing of the universe.  Okay.  But these rules are a bit silly.  Death has to kill in the order that people would have died in the original timeline.  It seems like that is kind of arbitrary.  Like, if a survivor got incredibly reckless and died out of order, fearing that there would be a more painful death down the line, would that affect how things worked?  I mean, Carter almost teases that.  

But even beyond that, what about how Death is killing people?  The obvious question is "Why not let people die of natural causes?"  Like, why not just stop someone's heart?  An aneurysm would solve a lot of problems?  It feels like Death is mugging for the camera with these movies, forcing these elaborate Rube-Goldberg styled deathtraps.  That's why people start escaping is because these deaths have to be incredibly elaborate.  But that also spirals into some questions?  Tod's death straight up confuses me.  Besides the fact that the toilet leaks gel, not water (maybe a cleaning product in the basin?), Death cleans up after itself.  If Death is not someone to be messed with, why hide the crime?  I had a conversation with Henson about it.  The movie really wanted Alex to be on his back foot, running away from the FBI who are investigating Alex and his relationships to these new deaths.  But Death has no reason to really frame Alex.  I'm really trying, but the notion that Alex is always playing with a disadvantage.  But it wouldn't actually affect the movie because it would take a minute to figure out how Death worked.  Honestly, Alex isn't even privy to the notion of "Death has a design" until he meets Tony Todd's mortician.  That whole, "On the run from Johnny Law" is fun, but we don't really need a mistaken suicide from Tod to explain any of that.  It seems like a hat on a hat that is never really explained.

What's really weird about this franchise is that a lot of the hobbling that this franchise does comes from a fun tag at the end.  Why I never really got into these movies beyond either parts 2 or 3 comes from the fact that we know that Death is inescapable.  The fact that there's no hope for these characters is kind of defeatist.  I mean, it secures a universal theme about how Death gets us all in the end.  But if you are rooting for characters to make it out of the horror movie, that tag that it all circles back means that there really isn't any hope for the characters at all.  It kind of makes a movie...not a movie?  It's just survive for a few minutes long. The movie just ends when it ends.  There's no real structure because nothing they do really matters.  

But that might be something to discuss next time.

PG and what a weird world we live in that this is something that everyone can somehow watch.  Like, I don't think it is offensive in the least.  But if I had to pick it apart, the body count in this movie filled with quasi-scary demons is almost hilariously large.  One of the things that I thought going into the movie was that the demons were bad in concept only.  Nope.  Those demons are straight up evil.  Like, a lot of people go missing after their souls are taken.  Also, like, it's kind of violent.  Still, PG.

DIRECTORS:  Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans

Yeah, I finally got around to it.  The only reason that I didn't write about this before is because I intentionally fell asleep for it the first time.  One thing that I have to come completely clean about is the fact that sometimes, I bet on whether or not I want to watch a movie.  I get really sleepy and I love naps.  I didn't know that KPop Demon Hunters was going to be such a thing.  From  my perspective, I wasn't that into K-Pop.  This was a Netflix animated movie.  I thought, "Yeah, I do like sleep and people leaving me alone."  Then everyone started losing their minds over this movie and I realized that I needed to play some catch up.  The really good news is that my family wasn't going to let me off the hook and they said that I had to sit down and watch this movie.

Not surprisingly, it was pretty great.  If you were wondering what hot take I was going to have about this movie, that's as crazy as it gets.  I think I learned more about this movie going into my first viewing than I had about any other film.  Once again, Sony, as a corporation, did something really boneheaded and sold this movie to Netflix as a means to recoup what they thought were going to be overwhelming losses.  What Sony, as a film studio, didn't realized and never realize, is that their animation department is a heavy hitter now.  They make good product.  Someone watched this as shelved it as a industry loss.  Instead, Netflix is making all the money on KPop Demon Hunters and that makes me laugh.  Now, I don't know the ins and outs of Sony Animation.  I'm really basing a lot of this on the success of KPop Demon Hunters and the Spider-Verse movies.  But these are movies with style and substance.  These are fun movies.  And not only that, but I feel like someone at Sony Animation is giving these movies a vibe that I don't see at Disney or at Dreamworks.  There's a certain look to Sony Animation movies that I'm really liking.  So as much as I'm poo-pooing Sony as a film studio, someone at Sony Animation probably needs a promotion.  (See, I can deal in nuance.)  

The thing that mostly blew me away is how much Buffy the Vampire Slayer was in this movie.  Honestly, that should be a negative for a lot of people.  But I kept watching this and pointing to my wife while mouthing "Buffy."  That seems weird to write that.  Somehow more shady than what was actually going on.  But from moment one, I felt like I had a shorthand to what the movie was about.  I'll be honest with you.  I kept hearing the term "Honmoon" and I didn't know what that was.  But "sealing the honmoon" was just "securing the Hellmouth" and I was all on board.  Seriously, in every generation was born a slayer, a girl chosen to stop the evil.  In this case, we have three of them and they sing songs on top of just fighting with Buffy powers.  I loved it.  Ji-noo is just evil Angel.  I love all this.  I don't know why this feels so comfortable to me.  Sure, KPop Demon Hunters stands on its own two feet.  I don't want to diminish anything that I saw on screen as something other than the creative work of a bunch of people who wanted to create something.  But I also think that KPop Demon Hunters hit a very special nostalgia that I haven't gotten to enjoy for a while.

There was a period of television that KPop Demon Hunters tapped into. It was the world of a mythology where archetypes battled against expectations.  When I evoke Buffy, I suppose that I'm touching on Smallville and Supernatural as well.  I'm not particularly proud to be a superfan of these things, but I am proud to say that they were shows that tickled my brain a little bit.  They were entrenched in genre, but weren't afraid to mess with genre.  I really stick with Buffy because of the notion that there's something cool about women, without commenting on it, fighting monsters and saving the day.  I'm trying to tap into my flabby knowledge of feminism here to talk a bit, especially considering that Buffy has been tainted by the hypocrisy of Joss Whedon, its creator.  But one of the things that both KPop Demon Hunters and Buffy the Vampire Slayer did right was the notion that there's nothing inherently unfeminine about girls fighting demons.  This is a film that embraces femininity and never feels the need to vocalize its own "badass" trope.  It simply is.  Part of what makes it easy is that the world --for some reasons --is completely unaware of demons.  The fans of HUNTR/X, despite having seen every single thing that they've created live, don't understand that what they're seeing is the battle between good and evil in every song.  But rather than being a copy of male machismo, HUNTR/X simply puts on an amazing show while brandishing day-glo weaponry.  I kind of am all about it.

This might be my shortest paragraph ever, but I wish that I could comment on the K-Pop elements of the movie.  I've watched a lot of Korean film, but the only Korean dramas that I've watched have been the three seasons of Squid Game.  I know my in-laws are into everything Korean.  I can't really attest to the vibes that the movie gives off as a celebration of Korean culture.  My wife says that it does an incredible job with the small stuff and I'll have to just believe her when she tells me that.

I can't stress this enough.  I did love the movie.  But there is something that kind of bothers me.  It is such a small beat, but it is one that I kind of feel is necessary.  I can't believe I'm advocating for a kids action musical to be a little bit longer, considering that I love a short runtime.  But the third act is throwing a lot at us and it misses a character beat.  There are things in this movie that are underdevoloped.  It's possible that subsequent movies will answer these questions.  Celeste confuses me. I get that she's the Giles of this movie, but I know nothing about her.  That's not even a big deal. I'm sure that other movies will touch on that.  I'm more concerned with Rumi's secret kind of getting glossed over.  Okay, I said that this was a movie that embraced some tropes that I really enjoyed.  All the Buffy stuff is great.  But the trope that I thought was a bit lazy was the "I'm keeping a secret" trope.  "I can't tell my closest friends my secret because they'll look at me differently."  I don't hate that.  It's something that we've seen in film before. That reveal has to have a certain look to it.  When Rumi is exposed as part-demon (a story beat that isn't really ever explained), there's a separation between the girls.  But there isn't really a coming to grips about how people behaved in that moment.

So much internal conflict is hinged on Rumi coming to grips with who she is.  When she is exposed, she is abandoned by the other two hunters, who would --if I'm reading the scene right --abandon the world rather than chat about what they are seeing.  I suppose I do have to give them a little bit of leeway, considering that this is a major revelation and changes their entire worldview.  But ultimately, aren't Mira and Zoey a little bit racist?  From their perspective, they saw these demons as completely soulless.  And from all the demons that they fought, they saw that they were eating souls.  (Soulless and eating souls wasn't my favorite grouping of words, but I've come too far!) But they know Rumi.  Rumi has always been a bit secretive, but has also put her life on the line to maintain the Honmoon.  I hate to be this guy, but there's a little bit of the "coming out" of Rumi that happens and Mira and Zoe fail the test.  Not only do they fail the test, but they're cool with the fallout so much that they are hypnotized by Gwi-ma.  Up to this point, they are free from Gwi-ma's influence.  Instead, they are so self-involved that they can only view themselves as victims.  That's why I don't love that there's a real chat about what happened in those moments.  Instead, all it takes is Rumi singing. She has to be the bigger person when the other two should be the ones taking the lead, especially after Zoey points her blade at Rumi.  It's just an odd brushing over what should be a major part.

But the movie is pretty darned great.  I'm sure that there's going to be more lore with subsequent movies.  As long as the film pays attention to the heart of the piece while maintaining a quirky and oddball aesthetic, I'm all here for it.

Not rated, but apparently Disc 17 in the Ingmar Bergman collection is the sex comedy disc.  I applaud this movie so much.  It's all about sex, but the meta-narrative won't allow for anything visually scandalous.  One of the bits in the film is from the shot above, which uses a mild tango to represent the act of lovemaking.  There is one hard-to-see instance of rear nudity.  But we should all realize that the movie is non-stop talking about adultery, so that should be taken into consideration.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

Do you know what?  Thank you, Ingmar Bergman, for making All These Women.  I was starting to think that I was being a bit of a prude for constantly pointing out your obsession with infidelity.  And yet, here we are, another movie about infidelity and I like it.  For once, I'm not going to call myself a hypocrite.  If anything, All These Women justifies what makes a movie about infidelity work versus films that don't really play the motifs as well.

I always thought that Bergman couldn't do comedy.  I've now seen a good amount of Bergman comedies and most of them I consider pretty quaint.  They are tonally comedies, but the executions of them leave something to be desired.  Now, I will be the first to admit that comedy is incredibly subjective.  It totally is. Maybe I'm just wired for the zany absurdist sex comedy over something that is meant to be a wholesome family story about cheating on each other.  (I stand by that statement for a lot of Bergman's comedies.) 

I think it is the zaniness that makes All These Women work as a film.  I get the vibe that I might be the only person on the planet who liked this  movie more than some of the other Bergman standards.  I know.  There's something very appealing about the naysayer.  But let me cook a little bit.  (It should be noted that there is almost no chance that I'm going cook with the following words and you should ignore my valiant efforts to explain why I think this movie works.) All These Women, shy of the music cues and the fast-motion sequences (which I stand by my belief that fast motion jokes are never funny) read more like absurdist theatre.  I could honestly see a lot of this movie being performed on a stage.  I respect the fact that Bergman hasn't really abused his fourth wall all that much in his cinematic canon.  I'm going to give him a little bit of leeway when it comes to All These Women because he establishes the rules for this movie early on.  The only way that All These Women really works is if we abandon all pretence of reality.  From moment one, Bergman shows the widows of the maestro weeping over the unseen corpse.  They all say the same thing.  Part of the joke is that death has become a cliche, both in the world of All These Women and in our own reality.  We all come to the same epiphanies and that's something to be sent up to the gods of satire. 

But at the same time, the over-stressing of the same beats.  Even in its variety, it only highlights the sameness of it all.  As much as it is a commentary on death, the rules of All These Women play up the fact that none of this is based in reality.  With Bergman's use of intertitles to explain the passage of time, we realize that he's swinging with a sledgehammer, not performing surgery.  Bergman wants to say something and he wants to have fun while he's doing it.  I don't think I've really seen Bergman have fun before.  His other films are good and probably intellectually stimulating. But All These Women is a temper tantrum that results in hysterical, cathartic tears.  Now, part of it comes from the fact that this is a parody of Fellini's 8 1/2.  I really wish that I didn't look that part up because I like it better when the movie was just this absurdist romp.  Gosh darn it.  Can I still write this blog with my initial read?  

Okay, let's course correct.  If this is just a parody of Fellini, I have to take everything back.  I can see how this movie kind of sucks if that is the case.  All of the points that I gave Bergman are accidents.  The very thing that Bergman is mocking, if taken seriously, would be fascinating.  Let's pretend that it didn't exist and why making this a parody of something else only hurts the film.  From my perspective, who watched this ignorant of parody, saw this as a movie about the absurdity of the artist.  In my head, I couldn't help but put Bergman as the maestro.  The entire film, Cornelius is depserate to understand the Maestro, who never makes himself available to his own biographer.  Cornelius, himself, isn't all that obsessed with integrity.  He's there almost by commission.  Upon entering the estate, he confuses the butler for the Maestro himself.  (Canonically, the butler has a passing resemblance to the Maestro, whom we never see.)  He can't be that much of a fan.  Similarly, he's quickly distracted by the women that can probably only be described as a harem of muses.  As frustrated as Cornelius gets with the Maestro's isolation, he's more confused by the dynamic that these women have in the household.  It ultimately becomes a story about fandom with an artist versus the actual art itself.  When Cornelius is finally given the opportunity to interact with the Maestro's bizarre art, his death becomes the performance piece itself.  That's great.

And had this not been a parody of Fellini, I would have said that Bergman is taking the mickey out of himself.  We learn, when the artist is dead, that the artist himself didn't really matter.  Their grief is a kind of performance piece in and of itself.  They instantly adopt a new Maestro, whose face is visible immediately.  He's a child and we find out that the Maestro himself didn't matter, it's the community based around the maestro that matters.  It was the women in his life who made him who he is.  I can't help but see Bergman as that invisible Maestro.  This fandom around him becomes artificial and self-depricating.  Tying back to my initial statement, it makes the affairs quite silly.  The other films have always treated infidelity as a way of life. But if the Maestro is a stand in for a strawman, we realize that all this attention for someone who didn't matter, even sexual attention, is silly.  These are people who should be out there living full lives.  

But it's not Bergman, now is it?  It's Fellini.  And that's kind of spiteful.  Because what I read to be a commentary on the role of the artist isn't really a commentary.  It's a commentary on how someone else, someone specific, makes art.  Since 8 1/2 is the template of the movie, we can't slot the Beatles into the role of the Maestro as much as we can't really say that Bergman is just a guy making movies and he's been raised up on this golden pedestal.  That is so much more of a fun movie than "I'm just parroting something else."  I'm going to be critical of myself because who else would be critical of me.  I feel like I'm treating the entire concept of "parody" as less than BLANK.  Parody has its role and for all I know, that's what Bergman was shooting for.  But I think that All These Women just works better as satire than it does as parody.  It's silly.  It's fun.  It's self-depricating.  That's the kind of stuff I like.  But I have a feeling that I wasn't supposed to like this movie.  That makes me sad.  

Should I be sad for liking something that I wasn't supposed to like?  I don't know, man.  But I'm going to be picking this apart for a while.

Not rated, but this is supposed to be a bit of a sex comedy without any of the nudity or actual on-screen sexuality.  There's a Patton Oswalt bit where he notes that euphanisms for vulgarity -with the intent of being for all audiences -often gets way grosser.  That's what's going on here.  There are so many moments where the words they say are technically clean, but the intent behind them is wild.  This isn't exactly a family friendly film.  

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

OH MY GOSH, INGMAR BERGMAN!  I get it!  Move on.

It will be a miracle if I get this done.  I have been on a roll today and have been catching up on all of the blogs that have been creeping up on me.  I'm happy to say that I finished The Devil's Eye in the last hour.  However, if I can knock this bad boy out pretty quickly, I am going to be in a good place productivity wise for the long weekend.  It's really weird being me.

I get so frustrated with Bergman.  Maybe Bergman never thought that all of his collected works would be in one massive box set.  But watching every single Bergman movie shows a lot of the cracks and breaks in this master's ouevre.  Part of what frustrates me about Bergman is the same thing that bothers me about Woody Allen.  (There's an irony here.  As I write about how easy it is to note Bergman's faults when binging all of them, you can probably say the same thing about my commentary on Bergman.  I tend to write the same things.)  As much as I find both Bergman and Allen's works incredibly impressive and genius, I often criticize both of them for being so invested in their comfort zones.  Both men were prolific in making movies about infidelity and that's just disappointing.  Mostly, I find Bergman disappointing because he treats what must be a subjective lifestyle as a universal truth.  Now, I just experienced The Devil's Eye for the first time.  I know very little about it. I didn't read any essays on it.  I didn't do any research.  So anything that I'm saying is simply an emotional and critical response from an individual's perspective.  If my guesses are accurate, good for me.  If not, please understand that I'm trying to unpack someone who is significantly smarter than I am.

As much as this might be an original work by Ingmar Bergman, there is an element of fairy tale here.  I can't help but think that Bergman is adapting a morality play probably from the era of strict religious restrictions.  After all, this is a story about the importance of keeping chaste.  It follows a lot of the same beats that we'd see in classic theatre, having the literal devil send up his servants to tempt good people into sin.  With the case of The Devil's Eye, it plays up what must be a culturally relevant adage saying something along the lines of "A woman's chastity is a sty in the devil's eye."  I don't know if it really matters whether or not the story is wholly original or simply an adaptation of a cultural standard.  But what the real point is that Bergman is settling into something that has been beaten to death when it comes to storytelling: marriage is a bit of a sham and that cheating is a part of love.

Now, I will say that Bergman does some clever things with this thing.  There are two women from two different perspectives when it comes to marriage.  The virginal Britt-Marie represents the affianced.  Renata represents the comfortably married wife.  Both women end up breaking their vows to certain extents.  Bergman paints Renata as the character who seems more stalwart in her beliefs about marriage.  The fact that she cheats on her husband is meant to be a little bit of a surprise, especially considering that her pastor spouse seems to be the moral grounding of the movie.  But Britt-Marie comes across as the one who is willing to sacrifice her maidenhood.  It's actually odd that she doesn't because she kisses the demonic Don Juan without much arm twisting.  Now, to Bergman's credit, he comments on this for the first time.  I'm so overwhelmed with Bergman movies treating this kind of kiss as a non-issue.  It is the epilogue of the film, condeming Britt-Marie for this kiss despite the fact that she spurns Don Juan until her returns to perdition.  I kind of applaud Bergman for allowing his narrow world view to open to some criticism.  

But the thing that really bugs me about Britt-Marie's kiss with Don Juan is how casually she allows it.  That initial kiss is frustrating because a lot of Bergman's movies have such an important moment as a matter-of-fact thing.  If anything, it is not only a criticism of women, but on humanity itself.  Britt-Marie, from moment one, declares her undying love for Jonas, who is shown to be imperfect by the second act of the film.  However, when Don Juan, who has barely started his crusade to steal her virginity, asks her for a kiss, she not only obliges, but becomes the dominant kisser in that scenario.  It's frustrating.  The rest of the movie is a nonchalant shrugging off Don Juan.

Now, the joke apparently lies in the tragedy of Don Juan.  I say "joke" because Bergman tells us that this is a comedy.  I'm kind of thinking that this is a comedy much like some of Shakespeare's works are comedies instead of tragedies: evil is overcome and it ends in a marriage.  But Bergman attempts to build Don Juan into a sympathetic character.  I mean, I applaud that. But it also is a weird take considering that Don Juan does little soul searching in the film.  What Bergman is shooting for is that love has made a slave out of Don Juan.  He has finally met his match and that love that he has is torture for the lethario who has made a name for himself based exclusively on lust.  I can see how this is trying to be a comedy, but I'm not having it. 

Instead, what I see is Don Juan not wanting to be a better man, but instead feeling spurned.  It's meant to be wildly romantic.  I don't get any of that.  I get a sad man who has always gotten what he wanted out of life and the afterlife, only to be rejected for the first time.  We're supposed to feel bad, but rejection is part of life.  Britt-Marie is not meant to be a prize to be won and the movie kind of forgets that.  I know that she is unobtainable because she is with Jonas, but that's kind of missing the point.  It shouldn't matter that she is with Jonas.  Britt-Marie shouldn't be a prize in any scenario.  I kind of wish that Jonas ended being as much of a butthead as he started off being through the entire movie and she still rejected him.  That's a far more interesting movie for me.

What I am struggling to unpack is the entire story of the pastor.  See, the pastor, who is the father of Britt-Marie, is a self-proclaimed simpleton for the Lord.  He may not be the smartest apple in the bunch, but he is devoted to the Lord and his family.  Now, the closest thing to a hero that this movie has to offer because he traps a demon in his wardrobe.  It's great.  It's the stuff of old timey folklore.  As much as everyone views him as too naive to do anything great, he's the only one who gets an upper hand over the devil.  That's cool.  And in typical devil form, he tempts the pastor with forbidden knowledge.  The devil knows that the pastor's wife is cheating on him with another devil and offers him a key so that he can be broken by her infidelity.  But because the pastor has a simple faith, he resists the devil.

But even once he's resisted, he is still basically forced into the same outcome.  This is the part that frustrates me.  Part of what I give Bergman credit for, which is different from a lot of his other films, is his gracious attitude towards the symbol of faith.  As bumbling as the pastor is, he has the faith of a child.  Yet, he still has to eat from the tree of knowledge by having confirmation that his wife, indeed, was unfaithful with a demon.  That almost seems like it's cruelty for cruelty's sake.  Like, the point of that moment is that the pastor is so secure in his faith that he forgives his wife for her indiscretion.  But why bother put him through his first trial if he doesn't reap the rewards of his good behavior.

I so wanted to love this.  Parts of it, I'll even concede, are pretty good. But honestly, it felt like something that I would put on in youth group --minus the raunchy bits.  Considering that we've gone over this a bunch of times in better forms, The Devil's Eye doesn't do a lot for me.