if you need convincing, and aren’t spoiler averse, just read the last line of the wikipedia plot summary.
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oh my god, now I’m looking forward to watching it instead of just filing it away for later
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I’m going to make a “DO NOT USE AS A URINAL” shirt.
I saw a chunk of Deadstream on Shudder’s Always On stream so I wound up watching the whole thing, and it was a lot better than I would’ve expected. A lot of goofy fun and does a good job of emulating the streamer archetype while still making him somewhat likeable at times. It was the scene where a ghost waterboards a guy with his own urine bucket that convinced me to watch the whole thing.
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Love this film. A true Trash Classic of Cinema
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So back in the day my dad had a multiple VCR set-up plus assorted gizmos so that he could make personal VHS copies of the movies he rented from the local rental place. For those too young for the VHS era you could select the record quality, but higher quality would leave you with less space on the VHS (think like best quality = 2 hours, middle = 4 hours, worst = 6 hours) and dad never cared about quality so there were always multiple things on any given VHS.
The thing is some years back when we went through them all to see if there were any worth saving and I went looking for any old wrestling shows I taped it blew my mind to see the following written on one of those VHS tapes in marker:
-Stone Cold
-Wrestlemania IX
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i went out to a thing tonight but when i got there i found out i didn’t want to talk to anyone, so instead i went home and watched The Mangler (1995), an extremely beery feeling film - everyone seems to spend the whole runtime careening around, crashing into things and each other, yelling the same exposition over and over while not listening, slamming doors, skidding cars around etc… ted levine’s voice for the main character sounds like it’s been artificially lowered or slowed down so everything he says has that silent hill 1 vibe of misplaced, baffled aggravation.
there’s some good stuff with the titular laundry mangler and all those trailing digits near to the machine, and some less good stuff with robert englund as a cartoonishly evil industrialist with one eye and metal legs who leers at people while they’re getting mangl’d, but even that sort of works with the tone eventually, this boozy sense of not being able to believe what you’re looking at, horrible happenings that all seem to slide dreamily out of reach, while people keep on going to work and losing more fingers and staggering around in shock and mopping up blood. i was finally sold on this character when yet another guy fell into the mangler and screamed “do something!!” and the owner says “do somethin?! i’ll dance!! that’s what i’ll do” and begins to veer around in a circle on his crutches. all the good moments have that same sweaty feeling of inexplicable escalation. like the policeman kicks an icebox that seems related to the killings and his friend says something about “transference” and we’re like yes, emotional transference, we get it. but then he further specifies “transference of evil!” and the laundry box turns out to be haunted from touching the mangler, and it attacks him, and the policeman goes berserk and starts beating the thing with a sledgehammer while screaming GOD DAMN YOU and then a ghostly vortex pops out and the friend starts yelling at it in latin. things of that nature. another great moment: at one point the cop gets the back of his coat stuck in the mangler (rookie mistake!!) and ends up drawing his gun and firing wildly into the machine in an effort to blow the coat to shreds.
there’s a photographer character the cop refers to dismissively as “pictureman” and you think it’s meant to be a nickname but then later he gets a letter that turns out to be signed by J J J Pictureman.
the end credits music sound like someone left a random keyboard preset piano loop over an unrelated dreampop song
i thought this movie was good!
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I recently watched
Crimes of the Future
Not nearly as extreme as I’d expected. Virtually all of the gore is just surgery. The world is interesting, where you see a crashed spaceship that looks futuristic but very little technology anywhere else, other than the weird devices patterned after biology.
The Vanishing
Pretty compelling. I like the way, while you know going in that someone is going to vanish, you’re teased by several scenes so you don’t know exactly when. The tension reminded me a little of Prisoners.
Lux Aeterna
Right after I canceled my Shudder subscription because I’d run out of things I wanted to see for now, I decided to try this one in the few days I had left. Mainly because it’s short and because I liked elements of Enter the Void and Climax. My favorite part was the ending, where instead of tying up any of the plot the movie just kind of evaporates into flashing lights. I like this type of pretentiousness, I guess.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
I’ve known the main theme from this movie since I was a toddler because of the Perrey and Kingsley version (below), but I didn’t get around to seeing the movie until last night. Not the type of story that I’d normally watch a movie about, but the look and of course the musical novelty of this one won me over. I don’t think I would have liked it nearly as well had they been singing in English.
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i rewatched dying of laughter which is a 1999 spanish movie about a comedy duo that hates eachother. i havent seen it since 2000
one guy has stage fright and the other is a big talker and they get lettuce thrown at them until they unlock the key to comedy: slapping the shy guy. it also has all these anti fascist bits inserted (a lot of the movie takes place in the 70s and 80s so theres all this anti franco stuff), AND THEY WORK REALLY WELL AND THE MOVIE STAYS FUNNY
the escalation to paranoid psychological sabotage is fantastic. there are like 700 times where you think OH THEY’RE GONNA MAKE UP ARENT THEY and then someone makes THIS FACE and you’re like wow you motherfucker
james said it reminded him of death to smoochy but ihavent seen it so i can say with confidence that dying of laughter is 100x better. its completely mean spirited and evil but it never makes you feel BAD. its great
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wow they re-invent Japanese standup?
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violent comedy is as old as time. tom and jerry has remained in the collective conscious for 80 years for a reason
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yeah dying of laughter is the closest ive ever seen to live action tom and jerry. these mfs are devious, it really did feel like watching tom and jerry for the first time as a kid lol
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My friends tried to cheer me and my husband up by inviting us in the middle of the night to the giant house where Arnold Schwarzenegger used to live (it’s complicated, they had a reason to be there) and I just finished watching Total Recall in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s old living room I guess.
I always forget how much movie is in this movie. Relentless shit.
Anyway this has been the most Los Angeles thing I have ever done
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phantasm v: ravager was good, definitely a step back up from the fourth one (the only thing i can remember about which was a scene where a character’s breasts turn out to be metal spheres that then fly out and attack reggie). but THIS is the first phantasm of the 21st century and feels appropriately Decker-ish as a result. lotsa cgi balls and greenscreened backgrounds and shots of guys wandering around empty natural park pathways with a prop gun doing tactical crouches and stuff. for me it works because the appeal of these was always partly related to their amiable home movie quality, and partly to their wriggliness, the way they seem to get bored of moving in a straight line every few minutes and decide to abruptly change course, the way the whole structure of the movie feels warped by the desire to just keep throwing in little bits that the filmmakers and nobody else wanted to see. a scene of reggie jamming on guitar happens five minutes before a scene of a horse being murdered by a flying ball, for all the people wondering “what if a horse was murdered by a flying ball?”.
it’s the little things and it works well with the feeling that the movie has been further mutated by exposure to the conventions of the digital DTV format. there are scenes where reggie drives around in a muscle car firing a gigantic desert eagle one handed out the window at a bunch of cgi flying spheres and implausibly hitting them, there’s a sudden lurch into postapocalypse movie with characters running around dark buildings dressed in rags while outside we see scenes of gigantic, building-size spheres blowing up skyscrapers and attacking f-14s. (one of the anti-sphere freedom fighters is played by an actor with dwarfism, in what i can’t help but see as a late effort by the filmmakers at making up for having made a horror franchise substantially about evil dwarves). but there’s also a weird retread of coscarelli’s own bubba hotep with scenes of the characters wandering around a retirement home feeling lost and forgotten.
i think it’s very phantasm to let all this stuff coexist and then more or less drop the question of where each reality takes precedence over the rest, preferring to end on the weirdly sweet scene of all the returning part one characters hanging out in a car together, happy to be together. and then there’s a mid credits sequence where they stop the car and let in rocky the nunchucks lady from part 3. and THEN there’s an original rap song about the movie.
my best effort at transcribing the lyrics
i’ve been left your world
come into my dimension
cause i know you all been fishing
for my past and my present
things go missing
might need to call the mortician
ready or not, car taking one minute
i’m here, next minute i’m gone
some people call that a magician
did you know, know
reggie love the ladies, where’d they go
it’s like one minute they here
and then they turn to animals
if i slept with doggie zombies
that would make me hang a ball
why they looking in this room
i done been in here before
running from a tall man, mad scientist
trying add me to his client list
but if i walk through those gates
it’ll be me and him, i’m not trying this
telling my best friend i’m still me
but he don’t agree cause he ain’t he
but we both agree that we getting old
trying to kill dwarfs before they kill me
and i ain’t never try and hurt nobody
i’m in that 'cudanator hoping Mike can find me
trying to save the world with that tall man right behind me
with my best friend, my passenger
and we’ll kill em all, these ravagers, whoop
i wonder if the filmmakers were inspired by this earlier master p song, which would also be pretty fitting as an end to the series
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Oh, the In the Bedroom/Little Children director. Will have to see this.
stone cold is great but i kept getting distracted by how much the one biker who gets blown up with a grenade resembles bill griffith of zippy the pinhead fame
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I’ve been kinda casually watching movies bumped from the most recent s&s top 100 list, cause nothing’s better than whatever’s recently out of style, right?? I’d already seen The Seventh Seal, Chinatown, and Raging Bull, and now I’ve also seen Lawrence of Arabia, Pickpocket, and Nashville. Nashville especially made an impression, I think if I’d seen it like 5-8 years ago it would have been a really central thing for me. I kinda want to do a double feature w it and True Stories to sort out my thoughts and maybe write something, though I’ve never done that before, and cursory search doesn’t reveal anything putting those two in conversation w each other and I really think they should be. Pickpocket also great obv, the french really love them a criminal huh
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