Reviews
Pater Noster and the Mission of Light (2024)
Gradual descent into a bugfuggen insane horror
I discovered my favorite movie of 2024 streaming on Night Flight. I love how record store culture is portrayed, with complete strangers bonding over obscure music and ending up sharing overnight listening parties. And the gradual descent into a bugfuggen crazy horror movie is masterful, especially given the microbudget and unknown cast. My jaw dropped open so often from watching this movie, I got cottonmouth!
Cult director Christopher Bickel also tosses in a mushroom-soaked soundtrack that tries as hard to make you trip as some of the movie characters, who seem to think nothing of dosing unsuspecting visitors with psychedelics. Highly recommended to fans of Master Of Horror and the original Evil Dead trilogy --
That Was Then (2002)
I have 8 episodes on tape and love this show!
Someone just sent me EIGHT episodes of this series on videotape, one per tape, with bars/slates/tone in place of where commercials would have gone. EIGHT episodes, all apparently duped from master broadcast reels. Six of them never broadcast. Four of them not even known to exist. Where the hell did someone GET stuff like this?!?! Did these come from someone who worked on the show, or what? These are pristine copies! I'm too scared of copyright strikes to upload, but what a great show! The network should have given it a better shot -
The premise isn't really science fiction, although there are elements similar to Back to the Future, Somewhere in Time, and other classic sci-fi projects. The production values are quite high, even cinematic. It baffles me that people only ever got to see two episodes. Seems like one of the great lost TV shows --
The Turn of the Screw (1974)
The weakest of Dan Curtis' five TV horror classics
The longhaired rich kid is actually a very good actor whose performance is much better than one would expect from a 70s child actor. The problem with this one is that lead actress Redgrave seemed to sleepwalk thru the whole production. It's also a lousy adaptation of a classic tale that completely fails to evoke the reality of mental illness which was central to the original "ghost" story. Many feel the Henry James story is more about the governess going mad than a case of possession, but the Curtis show goes right for the ghost --- his other four classic horror adaptations for TV were superior (Dracula, Jekyll/Hyde, Frankenstein, Dorian Gray).
John Carter (2012)
Disney narrowly avoids making Doc Savage On Mars
I was literally thrilled in the movie theater as it unspooled, I was in grade school when I read the books and it felt like I'd waited all my life to see Barsoom. I belong to the Edgar Rice Burroughs fan group ERBdom and have been a member since the 70s (I have hundreds of their magazines). Of course the hardcore ERBdom members find many faults with the movie, and I do have to agree that the film didn't have to repeatedly make Carter too self-centered to care about Helium or Dejah Thoris, refusing to help over and over. The "real" Carter was nearly instantly heroic, as soon as he realized what his muscles could accomplish on Barsoom.
ERBdom devotees really hate the film villain being mostly manufactured, when there are so many great villains from the books. But I liked the alternate take and the way it allowed us to go back to Earth for a cinematic finale (also wholly created for Disney).
If Disney had stuck too close to the (admittedly campy and pulpy) ERB source material, they might've made Doc Savage on Mars instead of John Carter.
The Shape of Water (2017)
Del Toro For Dummies
For films by Del Toro, Pan's Labyrinth and Devil's Backbone, plus Cronos and The Orphanage, are his four most nearly perfect works, for me anyway. I love the way his films usually pair very old people with the very young, with a lot of strange machinery and startling - even alarming - mythological images along the way.
It's nice that he got such recognition for Shape Of Water, his most famous film, since that seems to have given him the freedom to pursue his own visions. However, I only watched Shape once, and found it to be kind of "Del Toro For Dummies." Just the most simplistic, almost silly reduction of a story to a few base elements. I would have liked it better if he'd gone all the way and really made a 21st century Creature From The Black Lagoon. Instead, it was just Beauty and the Beast, in drag and underwater ----
Electric Apricot (2007)
You know what to expect from Les Claypool
Here's one of my patented One Sentence Movie Reviews that some will take as discouragement and others as endorsement - Electric Apricot: Quest For Festeroo offers exactly what one would expect from a film helmed by Les Claypool of Primus: Terrible music that gets stuck in your head, jokes that are rarely funny, men who are even uglier beneath all that hair, and a devotional audience seemingly unaware of any of this.....
Next of Kin (1982)
A long drive, but you'll love the arrival
Wow, to say that one "starts off slow" is to really undersell how gradually it makes that left turn into genuine wonkyness. Not boring tho, I was on board for the whole thing - the Klaus Schultz soundtrack kicks in more and more as the whole movie becomes just as not-quite-right as its cars with people driving on the wrong side. It isn't until very near the end that things go off the road entirely, with such engaging style that I was very glad I took the long, mostly leisurely drive. I absolutely ended up somewhere unexpected, and even said "Wow!" out loud a couple of times at the end.
And just when I thought they were gonna cheap out on the budget, they surprised me one more time, almost literally in the movie's rear view mirror. Add to that how the soundtrack completely sells it for me, and I found it a very good (if glacially paced) show ---
Tread (2019)
Not divinely guided, but supernaturally lucky!
Maybe the best documentary I've seen in years. "Tread" is the story of a handy guy named Marvin Heemeyer who got screwed over by a small town good old boy network that made it impossible to keep his muffler shop business, so he locked himself in a garage for a few months while he rebuilt a bulldozer into something like that TV movie Killdozer, a rolling tank that he used to take down the town hall and the buildings of several adversaries, without ever actually injuring anyone. He just rolled out one day and destroyed the property of everyone who destroyed his dream.
The film uses footage of the rampage, recreation footage, and the actual tapes Marvin made as he worked on the Killdozer, talking about why and how he felt it was up to him to dish out justice. I remember the news stories when it happened, so it was just fascinating to meet all the people Marvin talked about and see the inside story of what really happened --- easily the best thing I've seen on Netflix since the new seasons of Mystery Science Theater 3000!
Marvin clearly suffered from serious mental illness. One thing I liked about the documentary is that it gave equal time to everyone in town, which made it even more clear that things weren't as Marvin imagined. The neighboring business Marvin fought so hard against turned out to be good for the town. That's what's so fascinating, the inside look at how one guy got the picture so twisted in his head, and was just brilliant enough - and crazy enough - to try and go out with some kind of apocalyptic even-scale reckoning.
Like one interviewee says, a good friend of Marvin's - he probably just spent too much time alone in his hot tub. One guy with a twisted reality can impose that false reality on a big chunk of the real world, at least when he has the power to do so -- certainly seems applicable to the times we live in now!