I watched 7 movies last week:
- Sole Survivor is creepy but very dull. Wnile it’s well shot, the movie never entirely makes sense, with side-plots and characters that do little but pad out the runtime.
- Dust Devil is a nightmarish fever dream. Which means it doesn’t always make complete sense, but it is full of unsettling and striking imagery.
- Blue Sunshine isn’t very good. Some of that’s down to the acting and obviously limited budget, but the movie also touches on themes that were handled a lot better by other directors before it—like Romero in The Crazies, Cronenberg in Shivers, or in just about any ’70s paranoid thriller, to be honest. By the end, the stakes start to feel increasingly low, and the characters woefully undeveloped.
- Some pre-Code films are less interesting for anything they have to say than for what they seem to be getting away with, subject matter that seem slightly more risqué than films made only a few short years later. Thirteen Women is such a movie: I’m guessing you didn’t see as many film plots so cavalier about poisoning young children post-Hayes, but the movie itself is fairly dated and boring.
- I’m just going to come right out and say it: I don’t think The Craft is a particularly well written movie. I think the cast is good, and I suppose there’s a lot to be said for its theme of female empowerment. But I also don’t think Roger Ebert was too far from the mark when he wrote that “Many of the scenes in this movie have no attention span—do not remember any of the other scenes—and exist only on their own terms.”
- Talk to Me has its share of violent jolts and jump scares, but it’s the smaller things, like the characters and the performances, that I found most surprising. Sophie Wilde is particularly good at creating a character with whom we immediately sympathize, even as we begin to like increasingly less.
- The Blackening is funnier than it is scary, but it’s usually pretty funny.
I also re-watched 1963’s The Haunting—which, for a movie that’s so much simply about watching characters act frightened, is incredibly frightening. It remains one of the best haunted house movies ever made.
