I watched 6 movies last week:

• The Buddy Holly Story is a very by-the-numbers musical biopic, almost a little boring—which is maybe inevitable given the unfortunate shortness of the man’s life, the full potential of his musical career never reached—but Gary Busey is terrific enough in the title role to forgive all of that.
• I’m not sure They Will Kill You successfully pulls off everything it’s trying to do, and sometimes just throws stylized shots on the screen for their own sake, but it’s energetic, often clever, and a lot of fun./li>
• I was maybe impressed with, more than engaged by, Forty Guns, but it’s hard to deny the strength of the performances and simple effectiveness of Samuel Fuller’s direction.

• Over Your Dead Body is sometimes very funny, but it never quite figures out its tone, or a reason to care about the two leads coming together.
• MGM made nine Dr. Kildare movies in five years, so despite their charms, it’s no wonder they feel by turn a little thin, a little padded, and a little repetitive. Dr. Kildare’s Strange Case is no exception, except here the medicine feels especially hokey and dated.
• Hagazussa is deeply weird and unsettling, slow to the point of ponderous, more mood than plot, never what you would call fun, and often genuinely disturbing, and yet it really got under its skin, and that mood worked on me.

• I think I can see the “sparks of talent and wit” that Roger Ebert recognized in Class of 1984, but there’s a lot more of the “raw, offensive, vulgar, and violent” that he also acknowledged in the film. I often couldn’t shake the feeling that might would better if it was worse, if it just embraced the camp that it keeps leaning towards, and yet its increasingly darker moments are the movie’s more effective ones. This isn’t a great movie, or even necessarily a good one, but it is a lot.
• Christmas in July feels effortless, which is good, because I’m not sure how much effort the movie could have sustained. It’s an endearing, well-directed and acted, if somewhat slight, comedy.
• Circus of Horrors could do with a lot less circus and a few more horrors, is all I’m saying.
• Cavalcade is a lovely (though very melancholic) Noel Coward trip through several decades of the early 20th century.

I also re-watched The Blood on Satan’s Claw. The movie’s pacing is more than a little chaotic, and it can’t help but feel a little pieced together from a movie that originally started as separate tales in an anthology film. But it’s a very creepy, well produced, and at times deeply upsetting, piece of folk horror.

I watched just 5 movies last week:

• The sudden and unexpected loss of his girlfriend Lynn Shelton understandably hangs heavy over the Marc Maron documentary Are We Good?, but I’m not sure that it brings any new insight to that loss that Maron hasn’t already discussed at length in his own comedy specials and interviews surrounding them, and it often crowds out other biographical details and moments for revelation. It’s difficult to tell if it’s the filmmakers or Maron keeping the other at a distance, but that distance is frequently felt, and while there are funny and touching moments throughout the documentary, it’s unlikely to tell you anything even the most casual fan of Maron doesn’t already know, and hasn’t seen him discuss better elsewhere.
• I had some fun watching Mausoleum—but not, I must stress, because it’s anything like a good movie. The entertainment comes purely from the ridiculous and unintentional comedy. As a horror movie, it makes some very bizarre choices, some no doubt due to limited budget, but nearly all extremely bad.
• Often more restrained than lurid, at least until the end, when everything goes fully off the rails, The House with Laughing Windows makes for an odd but often haunted giallo at times.
• I think I appreciated what Masters of the Universe was trying to do more than what it did. The movie looks great, and a lot of the humor lands—but not all of it, and enough doesn’t to leave the whole thing feeling a little flat.
• Disclosure Day does a lot of very interesting things, and it does them both very well and at breakneck speed, and yet it never fully came alive for me.

I watched 6 movies last week:

• The sadly departed Sam Neill is easily the best thing in The Final Conflict (subsequently known as The Omen III), but I’m afraid I can’t go as far as to say that his performance in it is good. There are brief moments in the movie, and in Neill’s performance, when it feels like maybe something interesting is going to happen, but nothing interesting ever does, and the movie just peters out at the end.
• The violence in Is God Is isn’t cathartic in the way you might expect a revenge thriller to be—indeed, as Cortlyn Kelly of Roger Ebert.com put it, “it looks so warm, playful, and inviting outside, but the air is chilled and urges us to retreat to where we came from.” And yet the movie is sharp and unflinching, and the performances are really great.
• I had a lot of fun watching Demons 2, but that’s not because it’s a good movie—because it is most decidedly not. It’s deeply silly, though I’m not sure how much anyone involved in making the movie understood that. I think I had more fun with it than the first movie, which I don’t remember liking much at all, but really only in the “so bad it’s good” kind of way.

• Forbidden Fruits has some genuinely clever and funny bits scattered throughout, and a terrific cast, but it does not come together as anything in the end. There’s some really great writing here, but also some really bad writing as well.
• Obsession does exactly what it says on the tin, but it does it in some really unexpected and often uncomfortable ways. By turns darkly funny and deeply disturbing, with a fantastically unsettling performance by relative newcomer Inde Navarrette.
• Penny Serenade takes some surprisingly depressing turns, and risks careening off into melodrama, but both Cary Grant and Irene Dunne are very good in it.

I also rewatched They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, which is a bleak but fantastic movie, and Mothra, which is fun but, honestly? Could use more Mothra.

Last week, I watched 9 movies:

• I’ll admit, I didn’t know MST3K had riffed The Deadly Mantis when I first sat down to watch it, but nothing has ever made more sense to me than that. If 1954’s Them! is everything you want a 1950s sci-fi monster movie to be, then The Deadly Mantis is everything you expect a lousy Them! knockoff to be.
• The Fastest Gun Alive takes a little too long to get properly started, with some scenes that don’t quite add to the whole, but it’s a decent morality play of a Western, with some nice performances, particularly a supporting turn by Jeanne Crain.
• You think you know the beats that Sugar is going to hit, then it slides past some with a curveball or two, and goes off in several unexpected directions. I’m not sure if it’s a home run, necessarily, but it’s a good day at the ballgame.

• The Long, Hot Summer feels like warmed-over Tennessee Williams. Most everyone involved circles around a good performance or two, but characters wash in and out, the film often doesn’t look very good, and none of it ever really comes together as much of anything.
• The Gospel According to St. Matthew tells its story very simply, with no pomp or circumstance—or even necessarily any belief—and that’s what makes it all the more powerfully told.
• You could look at It! The Terror from Beyond Space as a precursor, or even possibly an inspiration, to the later Alien. But that makes this overblown TV episode feel like less of a snoozefest than it is.

• Psycho IV: The Beginning is probably a better-made movie than Psycho III, but I liked it a lot less, and I didn’t even like Psycho III very much.
• Song Sung Blue is largely sweet and charming, with good performances by the two leads.
• Ebirah, Horror of the Deep was also apparently riffed by MST3K too—though under its American title, Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster. And, honestly, that makes a whole lot of sense too. The movie could use a whole lot more Godzilla and sea monster, a less complicated and cobbled-together script, and more fun.