I watched 5 movies last week:
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- It’s not hard to see the promise in Stereo, especially when you’ve already seen that promise realized in later Cronenberg movies. But taken on its own terms, as a feature, as a narrative, it’s exceedingly dull and disappointing—full of intriguing images and compositions, but none that are put to any real use, with its slow stretches of silence broken up only by underbaked ideas expressed in often near-incomprehensible voiceover.
- Despite its overly generic, and not terribly descriptive, title, Kansas City Confidential is a fun, occasionally inventive, certainly surprisingly twisty little noir.
- The Haunted Strangler is helped enormously by Boris Karloff’s…well, let’s be charitable and call this a performance, although it’s far from his best work and—minor spoiler warning, only if you fail to see the movie poster—mostly just involves him contorting his face. A “ludicrously improbable plot,” in the words of the Monthly Film Bulletin, “which peters out into a series of tediously repetitive chases…”
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- Monolith doesn’t resolve in a completely satisfying way, but that seems at least partly by design. What the movie is, is terrifically creepy, very effective given its small budget, limited space, and single on-screen actor.
- The Watchers isn’t what I would call an especially well directed movie, but it’s more than competent. It’s in the writing, however, where Ishana Shyamalan’s weaknesses as a filmmaker really emerge. Because the script is simply terrible. By turns both a rush and a slog, both under- and over-explained, it’s a deeply unscary, uninteresting, and unsatisfying mess.
I also enjoyed re-watching Five Easy Pieces.