Deadly Circuit (1983) Directed by Claude Miller Starring Michel Serrault and Isabelle Adjani
Synopsis: A private detective becomes obsessed with a serial killer who he thinks might be his daughter.
Rating: ***1/2
Thoughts: A very French take on the neo-noir. A private detective known as “The Eye” (Serrault) is hired to locate a rich couple’s son and find out more information about the woman he has been seeing. He finds the man and watches the woman, Catherine (Adjani) murder him. The detective doesn’t turn her in, but continues to follow her, where he finds that she regularly seduces rich men and then murders them. He becomes convinced she is his long-lost daughter and begins secretly helping her dispose of the bodies.
This is a weird little film that mostly follows the detective as he follows the girl. Serrault is great as the detective. He’s a guy who was once great at his job but has lost his way. As he’s gotten older, he’s feeling the weight of having never known his daughter (what exactly happened to her is only revealed late in the film). Adjani is lovely as well, but Catherine is someone we mostly just see through his eyes. The plot is strange and quirky and kind of wonderful.
I first learned of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire when the movie starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt came out in 1994. I remember there was great controversy over Cruise being cast as Lestat. Anne Rice herself came out against him. Cruise was a major star at the time, but wasn’t considered a great actor yet. My memories here are vague, but once the movie came out, everyone realized Cruise was wonderful.
I didn’t have an opinion. I’d not read the book. I did like Tom Cruise, but didn’t really care if he was in this movie or not. I was a freshman in college when the film finally came out. My girlfriend at the time was a big Anne Rice fan and was super excited about the film. She had opinions on Tom Cruise.
We watched the movie together, and I liked it. I must have liked it quite a bit because my mom bought me a boxed set of the Vampire Chronicles books. I read Interview with the Vampire over Christmas break and loved it. I think I started the next book, The Vampire Lestat, but couldn’t get into it. Partially, this was because that book focused on Lestat and not Louis, who was the protagonist of Interview, and partially it was because Lestat becomes a modern-day rock star, and that seemed ludicrous to me. Much of Interview is set at the turn of the century, so modernizing him felt wrong somehow.
I kept telling myself I should read it anyway, and I kept not doing it. Everyone says Queen of the Damned, the third book in the series, is terrific, and I very much wanted to read it, but I felt like I needed to read Lestat first, and that never did happen. Eventually, I moved completely away from Rice and vampires, and it all seems like a distant memory to me now.
I rewatched the movie a couple of years ago. It’s not great. It has some interesting stuff going on in it. Tom Cruise is quite good. As is Brad Pitt. And a young Kristin Dunst is terrific. But I find chunks of it rather dull, and I don’t find the way that it plays with vampire lore nearly as interesting as I once did.
When they announced AMC was making a TV series out of Interview with the Vampire, I wasn’t particularly interested. It was the sort of thing I thought I might check out at some point, but really, I knew I’d be too interested in other things to bother.
But then the same people adapted The Vampire Lestat, and I got a really good price on an annual subscription to AMC+. Suddenly, Lestat was being advertised to me all the time. Suddenly, I started noticing people in my social media feeds saying good things about it. And now here I am watching it and talking about it.
The original story has a vampire meet with a journalist whom he tells his story to. This adaptation is set in modern times, but it does a neat little trick. The vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Andersen) meets with a journalist, Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian). But the twist is that they previously met decades ago and had the original interview. But it ended badly, and nothing was ever published (I believe in the book Louis winds up killing Molloy). Now Louis wants to try it again. Molloy now has Parkinson’s, is a cynic, but is much tougher than he was the first time. He’s no longer scared and, as such, can push past some of the vampires’ BS.
It is a bit of brilliant casting to put Andersen as Malloy. He brilliantly portrayed a shock jock in Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio. He brings some of that cocky energy here.
This first episode follows Louis from just before the time he meets Lestat (Sam Reid) until he is turned into a vampire. From the start, this series isn’t afraid to mess with the story. For starters, Jacob Andersen is black, and in the book, he is white. The book sets his origin story in 1791. The series moves that up to 1910, so that slavery is a thing of the past. Louis is now a successful brothel owner. He’s rich, and that brings him a certain amount of power, but he’s still a black man living in the very racist South. The white people he hobnobs with never let him forget he is lesser than they are. He never forgets to call them “sir.”
Race becomes a central theme of the episode. When he meets Lestat, the vampire is appalled by how the whites treat him. Part of the appeal of Lestat and his call to become a vampire is how he is treated with respect.
Vampire stories are often laced with eroticism. There is a natural sensuality in the way a vampire bites the neck of their victims and sucks. There is an innate homoeroticism in Anne Rice’s story that was only hinted at in the 1994 adaptation. This series leans hard into that.
I watched the extended cut, which runs about an hour and ten minutes. Honestly, that was a little long. I don’t need my TV episodes to be nearly as long as a movie. It packs an awful lot into those minutes, and it is very well done. Reid and Andersen are both very good. It digs into Louis’ family situation. How they pretend to not know what he does for a living, how they pray he’ll earn enough to get him out of that lifestyle, and how they enjoy the fruits of his labor. There is a religious brother, a sister who is about to get married, and a mother who sees all and knows all.
I loved how the relationship with Lestat builds. It begins with a bit of jealousy as Lestat has better luck with Louis’s girl than he does. But there is also a sense of awe and desire. Louis admits that he both wanted to kill Lestat and be him. Then they become friends, and Lestat shows him some of his power. Lestat can talk to a group of people yet still communicate with Louis telepathically. He moves so fast that time almost seems to stop. This is all really well done.
All of that being said, there is something about the show I didn’t love. Part of it is that this story is too familiar to me. I don’t know that I need another telling of it. I think it feels a little too drawn out as well. There are seven episodes in the first season, eight in the second, and I don’t know that the book has enough in it to make it worth all of that. Obviously, the series is going to add to the story. Hopefully, that will be in interesting ways. There is nothing in this first episode that doesn’t make me think they will be successful. I know I will watch more of it, but I don’t think I’ll be binging this one.
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Hi, and welcome to my Interview with the Vampire recap. I’ve been thinking a lot about doing some of these. I watch a lot of TV, and it always seems like a good idea to talk about it. At the same time, I don’t know that I have the skills to do it. Or the time. Or patience. Doing recaps takes a lot of time. There is a skill to detail the plots of individual episodes, and I’m not sure that I have that. My idea is to maybe just give the most basic plot summation and then add in a few thoughts on what I liked or didn’t like. I meant to do that with this episode. I thought I’d write a couple of paragraphs and be done with it. But I have a hard time just writing a couple of paragraphs about anything. Which winds up making it exhausting. Which means I have a hard time doing this sort of thing.
So, I have no idea if I’ll write about episode two or three or the entire series. I don’t even know when or if I’ll watch them. But for now, I enjoyed the first episode, and now you know why.
Since I’m attempting to review all of the Grateful Dead’s Dick’s Picks series, I thought it would be fun to review some of the Jerry Garcia solo releases as well. Ultimately, I’d like to do reviews of officially released live albums from all my favorite artists (plus some unofficially released ones). I’m still trying to figure out how best to do that. I originally thought I needed to give each performance a good listen three different times to properly review them, but that is taking too long. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t listen to music like I used to. It is mostly done in the car, and I don’t spend that much time in the car to be able to listen to a show three times before I review it. Not if I’m going to do more than one review a month anyhow.
These reviews won’t necessarily be proper ones then. More like impressions. I’ll just tell you what songs I enjoyed, and maybe a few that I didn’t.
I more or less randomly picked up After Midnight: Kean College, 2/28/80, a few weeks back, intending it to be the first Garcia review. I listened to it a couple of times – it is a great record – but then my sister came in from South Korea for a visit. I made her a playlist of songs I figured she’d enjoy because I knew I’d be driving her around a bit. To make things easier to play, I removed the Garcia album (and all other music) from my phone and added all her songs. When she left, I couldn’t remember which Garcia album I had been listening to. I wanted to give it one more listen before I wrote a review. I knew it was from a performance in 1980, saw that this GarciaLive disc was from that year, and I added it to my phone. Pretty quickly, I realized I had the wrong disc, but I just went for it.
Which is just another example of why I won’t be listening to these albums multiple times before I write my own thoughts.
I don’t know why the Garcia releases changed their name from Pure Jerry to GarciaLive (or why they are sometimes called something completely different). The first volume of the GarciaLive came after a four-year gap between official releases, one of the longest gaps since they started releasing them regularly.
Jerry Garcia’s main band, of course, was the Grateful Dead, but nearly from the beginning, he was doing side projects with lots of different people, under a variety of names. This more or less coalesced into the Jerry Garcia Band by the mid-1970s, though the band members regularly changed. 1980 is a really interesting period as it has Johnny d’Fonseca, who only lasted a few months on drums, and Ozzie Ahlers, who didn’t last much longer on keyboards.
One of the things I love about the Jerry Band shows is that they regularly played smaller venues than the Grateful Dead. While Jerry’s solo audiences did grow over time, they were routinely still smaller than what the Dead were playing to. In 1980, the Grateful Dead were playing coliseums and civic centers with capacities in the tens of thousands, while the Jerry Garcia Band was still gigging in small concert halls. On tour, he often played places with capacities of a couple of thousand, but in the San Francisco Bay area, he still often performed in places like The Stone or the Keystone in Berkeley that could only fit a few hundred. How amazing would it have been to see Jerry Garcia in a place like that?
I also love that the Jerry Band allowed Garcia to play lots of songs he wouldn’t necessarily be able to perform with the Dead. While they usually would play one or two Dead tunes in a set, and sometimes something from one of Garcia’s solo albums, they mostly did cover songs. They’d play old Motown tunes, reggae, jazz, early rock and roll, and so much more. Bassist John Kahn’s wife once noted that it was Kahn who often brought Garcia songs to play.
Which finally brings us to this show. This was the closing performance of a multi-week tour for the Jerry Garcia Band on the East Coast. It opens with an excellent version of the Grateful Dead classic “Sugaree.” Garcia takes a nice solo early on, then Ahlers gets his turn with some synth-heavy keys, and it closes out with another boisterous solo by Garcia.
That’s another thing I love about the Jerry Band – it is very much Garcia’s band. While Jerry was the biggest star of the Grateful Dead, the band was truly a cohesive whole. They played together. They listened to each other and had an uncanny ability to intertwine their individual notes into something singular. Garcia often soloed, but the band wasn’t just backing him up or playing behind him; they were making music together. From everything I’ve read, Garcia treated everyone in the JGB kindly – he paid them well and listened to their ideas – but there is no doubt this was his band. His name was on the marquee, and the audience was there to listen to him play. For the most part, the band is there to back him up. But Garcia also gives them time to shine. The keyboards often get a solo part, and sometimes even John Kahn will get a solo.
For the first few songs on the early show, Garcia’s guitar has a strange tone. I’m not a musician, I don’t have the technical knowledge to explain it, but it sounds a little high at times to me and screechy. By the time they are playing Bob Dylan’s “A Simple Twist of Fate,” it has gotten better, warmer somehow. The performance of that song is very emotional. You feel the sadness of the song in Garcia’s playing. He absolutely nails the final solo.
Ozzie Ahlers has a beautiful solo at the beginning of Jimmy Cliff’s “Sitting Here In Limbo,” and then the band really pulls together with a wonderful bit of cohesive jamming in the middle. When I was listening to After Midnight: Kean College, 2/28/80, I fell in love with that performance of “That’s What Love Will Make You Do.” It is a brilliant version. This one isn’t nearly as good, but it’s still pretty damn great. Kahn’s basslines really stand out. The keyboards get a little crazy with it. The cover of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” is super fun with some good funky riffs.
Robert Hunter was the opening act for this show. He opened most shows on this tour. Apparently, Rachel Sweet was scheduled to be the opening act for this tour. She did perform a couple of shows, but then disappeared, and Hunter replaced her. I wasn’t able to find any information on why she left. The Hunter set is not included in this release, but he did come out and play with Jerry on two songs, “Tiger Rose” and “Promontory Rider.” I love Robert Hunter. He wrote some of my favorite lyrics. But he is not a great singer or guitar player. I have some unofficially released recordings of his solo shows, and they aren’t great. I mean, they aren’t bad, and it is cool to hear him perform the songs that he wrote. Those shows are mostly him by himself on a guitar, and they do not blow my mind. But these two songs with the Jerry Band backing him are terrific.
It all concludes with a scorching cover of Peter Rowan’s “Midnight Moonlight’ and a soulful rendition of The Beatles’ “Dear Prudence.”
If I’m being honest, I think After Midnight: Kean College, 2/28/80 has the edge over this release. It has more fire in it. Maybe the band was just tired after a long tour. I don’t know. But this is a very good show. I’ve not spent a lot of time with the Jerry Garcia Band in the early 1980s, but these two releases are definitely going to change that.
Here’s the track listing
Jerry Garcia Band Capitol Theatre Passaic, NJ 03/01/90
Disc 1 Early show:
“Sugaree” (Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter) – 14:33
“Catfish John” (Bob McDill, Allen Reynolds) – 9:56
“How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)” (Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, Eddie Holland) – 9:05
“Simple Twist of Fate” (Bob Dylan) – 16:16
Disc 2 Early show continued:
“Sitting in Limbo” (Jimmy Cliff, Guillermo Bright-Plummer) – 12:40
“That’s All Right” (Arthur Crudup) – 8:09
“Deal” (Garcia, Hunter) – 8:22
Late show:
“Mission in the Rain” (Garcia, Hunter) – 12:50
“That’s What Love Will Make You Do” (Henderson Thigpen, James Banks, Eddy Marion) – 8:56
Over the last few months, I’ve been trying to up my review game over at Cinema Sentries. I seem to not be writing as much strictly for the blog, so this seems like a good way to keep me in the game. As part of that, I’ve been dipping my toes into other media. CS has a relationship with Fantagraphics, a comics company that puts out a lot of independent stuff. That mostly means books by folks I’ve never heard of, and lots of kind of weird stuff.
I’m not opposed to any of that, but in the past, I’ve been a little reluctant to dive right in because I don’t write a lot of book reviews, and writing about comics is a little bit different. I actually was aware of this one, as my wife is a French nerd and she knows a lot about French books, movies, and culture. They actually made a movie about Adèle Blanc-Sec a few years ago, and I’ve seen it. So grabbing this comic was a no-brainer.
And I quite liked it, and now you can read my review.
If you spend any time at all watching French cinema, then you will no doubt know the name Jean-Paul Belmondo. He was one of the great actors of the French New Wave and remained a popular favorite for decades.
In what seems like a very strange turn of events, he wound up starring as the same character in two different adaptations of the same book, some eleven years apart. Kino Lorber has just released them, and I watched them back to back. It is a fascinating glimpse into the adaptation process. I reviewed them both over at Cinema Sentries.
The great Sam Neill passed away this week, so I knew I wanted to pay tribute to him with tonight’s horror film. It was either this or the wonderfully weird Possession, and I decided to go with this as I’ve already written about most of John Carpenter’s films on this site. I may try to write about Possession later this weekend.
Carpenter had an insane run of great films between 1976 (Assault on Precinct 13) and 1988 (They Live). But then things drop off sharply. He reminds me of Dario Argento in the way he went from making absolutely incredible genre films one moment to making largely crap for the rest of his career. Carpenter’s drop wasn’t quite as horrid as Argento’s (though Argento has recently made some decent movies, whereas Carpenter hasn’t done anything in years). I’d argue that In the Mouth of Madness was the beginning of the end. You could probably argue that Memoirs of an Invisible Man – made two years before this one was the real beginning, but I haven’t seen it since it came out, so I’ll remain silent on its quality.
This isn’t a bad film by any means, and in fact, it has some wonderful moments, but you can just start to see things falling apart. It is actually quite reminiscent of Prince of Darkness (1987) in the sense of how preposterous the plot is, but Carpenter can make that film into something utterly wonderful, whereas he can’t quite convince me on this one.
John Trent (Sam Neill) is an insurance investigator. He’s good at his job. He’s hired to find Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow), a horror writer who is a bit like a cross between Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft, but way more popular. He’s so popular that riots are starting to occur at bookstores because his promised upcoming book has yet to be released. He has always been a bit of a recluse. Only his agent knows where he lives (and his agent has gone crazy and nearly killed Trent with an axe when he was learning about the job in a cafe.) Cane went missing weeks ago, just after he sent part of his manuscript to the publishing house (ran by Charlton Heston in a small role). After reading all of Cane’s books, Trent realizes that there is a secret message in their covers – a map that indicates where Hob’s End is located (the fictional town where his books are set). Linda Styles (Julie Carmen) is assigned to go with him.
The book cover map doesn’t give them exact directions, so they drive around all night hoping to find it. They run into some weirdness, but just as dawn breaks, they find the town. It is exactly as described in the books. It seems like a picture postcard small town. But it is strange. It seems almost deserted at first. Then they see some strange kids wandering around. They are greeted kindly by the inn’s elderly shopkeeper, but there is a strange painting in the lobby. One that keeps changing. Then there is the church. In the books, it is described as an absolute evil. So, naturally, they go check it out.
They find Sutter Cane there, and he’s gone completely mad. So have the townspeople. They say his books have always had a weird effect on their readers, but this latest one is turning them into something evil. It is starting to affect Styles.
The plot is pure pulp. It doesn’t always make sense. It doesn’t always have to. Sam Neil is having so much fun. Trent is the skeptic. He’s not read Cane’s books before this assignment. He thinks the town is a put-on. Something the publishers did to sell more books. But we know how things will wind up because the film begins with Trent being institutionalized. He marks up his cell, his clothes, and his face with crosses. There is some indication that the world outside is on fire.
Carpenter handles the material well, but not amazingly well. He’s playing in the Lovecraft sandbox and loving it. I’m not super familiar with Lovecraft, but apparently, there are a lot of references to his books. He uses a lot of practical effects, which I love, and his monsters are all snake-like and Cthulhu-like in appearance.
It is a good movie. I liked it quite a bit. But I always expect more from John Carpenter, and looking at the films that were to come from him, it is difficult not to think of this as a turning point. As the beginning of the end. And that’s a little hard to take.
I am going to attempt to cross-post everything here to my Substack. If you would like to subscribe to my Substack, please click here. If you like the things I do, please share. I think sharing things is easier on Substack.
Before I went on vacation last week, I rushed to write my Five Cool Things article.I usually write them on Tuesday evening, and they are published on Wednesday. But we were leaving early Tuesday morning, so Monday evening, while I was packing, I quickly wrote that article plus a comics review. I was so proud of myself. We drove back home this Monday. Somewhere on the ride, I told myself to remember to write this week’s Pick of the Week.
Then we got home, and I discovered that my keyboard was no longer working. All of the lower keys no longer worked at all. I tried unplugging it and messing with the wires, but nothing. Luckily (or so I thought), I had a spare keyboard lying around. I picked it up to discover that the cat had puked on it at some point in the past. Cleaned it off as best I could and plugged it in. Alas, it also had keys that weren’t working, but they were different keys. Luckily (or so I stupidly thought once again), I had yet another keyboard lying around. It is a wireless one. I grabbed it. No cat vomit, but the lid to the battery casing was missing.
I ordered one on Amazon (and then cancelled that order and purchased a different one – a story for another time). It arrived yesterday afternoon. I was swamped with catching up on everything I didn’t do while on vacation that I totally forgot to write my pick. Emailed the owner of Cinema Sentries about 11 last night, apologizing. We decided it would be okay to go ahead and write it today and be late with it.
So here we are. I intentionally try to not pick released from the Criterion Collection each week because that just feels like cheating. Or lazy. I like to highlight a variety of interesting releases from different companies. But this week, my favorite director, Martin Scorsese, is getting a new release, and I just had to pick it. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore isn’t my favorite Scorsese, but it’s still a very good film (you can read my review of it here.)
You can read all the details of the interesting new releases at Cinema Sentries.
I spent last week in Kentucky visiting my wife’s family. We had a very nice time, but whenever we go away for a few days, my mind keeps thinking about what I could be doing and how I might do it better. Inevitably, I ponder the blog. I’ve complained numerous times about not getting any visitors anymore. There are lots of reasons for this, but a big one is that WordPress and blogs in general just don’t get the traction they once did. When I started this site, blogs were popular; they were the cool thing. But that time has long since passed. People still run blogs, of course, and I suppose some of them are still popular, but the format has seen its day.
As far as I can tell, the cool new thing is newsletters. The kind of thing you get in your email inbox and read at your leisure. The most popular platform for this sort of thing seems to be Substack. Honestly, I don’t know a ton about it. I subscribe to several, and sometimes I read them. But mostly they just land in my inbox, where they sit for a while until I get tired of looking at them, and then I delete.
I do know that your posts also exist online in what really seems like a blog format. You can probably play around with those pages, but I haven’t messed with them. I know some of you receive an email whenever I post on this blog. All of which makes Substack sound not all that different than what I’m doing now. I actually started a Substack a while back just to kind of see how it worked a little. All I did was import this blog into it. It works very much like a blog.
I think the big difference is that you have better control over who sees what. Whereas WordPress allowed me to make the blog private or public, but that was for the entire site, not individual posts. With Substack, you can make one post public and another only available to subscribers. A lot of the ones I subscribe to have paid tiers. They offer certain posts for free, and others only give you a preview; then you have to be a paid subscriber to read. I don’t think I’d ever be popular enough to make anyone pay for what I’m doing, but I like that you can make certain posts private.
I’m, of course, thinking about the music. There is a possibility here that I could still write about movies and things in the free section and then share the music like I did in the old days in private mode. You might have to pay some kind of minimum subscriber fee, but I’d make that super small. But that’s a thought for much further down the road.
The reason I’m thinking about Substack now is that they do seem to be more popular now. And that could lead to more visitors. They also make it really easy to share posts. You can forward the emails to others or share them on social media, and the subscribe buttons are easy to find. In this day and age, that seems very important.
At the same time, I’ve had my old posts up on my Substack for a few months now, and I’ve gotten basically zero views. I don’t know if Substack can be found via Google searches or whatever. So this whole idea of mine may be trash.
So, here’s the thing. If I start posting to Substack, will you come? Will you subscribe? Would you prefer I move to that format, or would you rather I stay here? Do any of you have any thoughts on Substack in general?
The title of this film makes no sense to me. When you think of a movie titled The Mummy, you are most likely thinking of the old Universal pictures with Boris Karloff or the Brendan Fraser films from the 1990s (or if you are a terrible person, you might be thinking of the abomination that starred Tom Cruise a while back.) But those films were all essentially connected. The later films were more or less remakes of the original. They took different slants on the story, but they are all still essentially explorers and archeologists coming across an Egyptian mummy coming to life.
This film is not that. This film is about a little American girl who gets possessed by an Egyptian demon. She is sort of mummy-like. She does get wrapped in strips of gauze or whatever, but it is nothing like those previous films. So, why call it The Mummy? I kind of get why they added Lee Cronin to the front ot the title, that helps differentiate it from the other Mummy films. I have to admit, when I first saw it, I thought, who the heck is Lee Cronin?
I don’t think he’s an incredibly well-known name. He’s probably best known for directing The Evil Dead Rise. That makes sense because this Mummy film has more in common with those new Evil Dead movies than any of the other Mummy films. Which brings me back to why they named it The Mummy in the first place. According to Wikipedia, Jason Blumhouse approached Lee Cronin with the idea of remaking The Mummy. He wasn’t too keen on it, but then sat down and wrote a much more horror-inflected film. They call that a re-imagining, but really, I’d still say this has little in common with the other films. My guess is that this is more of a marketing scheme than anything else. People have heard of The Mummy and everything, it seems, has to be connected to some earlier IP anymore.
None of this really matters, of course. What matters is whether this film is any good. My answer, sadly, is not really. It works best as a mystery and family drama, but when it moves into gore-filled horror (which is large chunks of the film, especially towards the end), I lost interest.
Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) is an American TV journalist living in Cairo with his pregnant wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), and their two children, Katie (Natalie Grace) and Sebastian (Shylo Molina). On the day he learns that he has been offered a job he very much wants in New York, Katie gets kidnapped. The police are no help. Despite evidence that she might have been groomed (someone was secretly giving her candy), they point the suspicion back at the family.
Fast forward eight years, and the family is living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with Larissa’s mother, Carmen Santiago (Verónica Falcón). Katie is still missing, but Larissa did have her baby, now a young girl, Maud (Billie Roy).
A plane crashes in Aswan, Egypt. Inside is a giant sarcophagus. Inside that, they find Katie wrapped in the stuff they wrap mummies in. She’s alive and has been taken to the hospital. Despite the fact that she is either unable or refuses to speak, has clear signs of abuse and self-harm, and has had to be sedated, the doctors clear her to fly home, and there the Cannons decide to just keep her at home. They refuse to take her to a local hospital or get her any sort of mental help, even when she begins acting even more erratically and terrifyingly.
Honestly, I had a hard time getting past this stupidity. The poor girl clearly needed help, and the family continually refused to give her any. They were all a bit in shock, and certainly the parents felt guilty for losing her that day. The mom is also a nurse, so she has some medical training, but that should have made her even more aware that Katie needed help.
But this is a horror movie, and we need our jump scares. When I could push that complaint away, I was able to enjoy parts of the film. The dad starts talking to one of the Cairo detectives (May Calamawy), and they slowly piece together what happened to Katie. This part of the film was the most interesting. I mean, the actual answers are horror movie nonsense, but it kept me tuned in.
But the film is more interested in gross-out violence. There are strong hints of The Exorcist and The Evil Dead throughout the film. Katie is possessed by evil. She talks in a satanic voice. She does crazy stuff. She possesses the other kids. There is vomiting and blood, and all sorts of goo. It is all done in a way that I found uninteresting. Maybe I’m just getting too old for that stuff, or maybe it just wasn’t done all that well. I dunno.
But hey, it was still better than that Tom Cruise film.
I watched 36 movies in June. 16 of them were made before I was born. 30 of them were new to me. There was no theme this month.
As I’m writing this and adding links to all the reviews I’ve written, I realize I haven’t written as much as I used to. A couple of months back, I made a decision that I wanted to write more about music on this site since this was a music-only site for many years, and some of you have told me you don’t have much interest in movies. Once that decision was made, it was like a little button was pushed in my brain, turning off that demand to write about movies.
Before that decision was made, I always felt like I needed to write something nearly every day. Movies were the easiest thing to write about since I watch a lot of them. Having a theme each month also demanded a certain amount of writing. But I clicked that switch, and that feeling of “needing” to write about movies died. I actually do want to write more than I have, but once that button was switched, I immediately found other things to distract me with. It’s weird.
And yet, the switch to write about music hasn’t quite been turned on either. I do my main music listening in my car, mostly when driving to and from work. I’ve been trying to write about concerts, but they last a couple of hours. My ride to work is about twenty minutes, so it takes me a couple of three days to get a full concert listened to. Then I want to listen to it a few times before I write anything. But also, I feel like I need to really listen, and sometimes I’ve got something on my mind. If I find I’m not really listening, I turn it off. Or sometimes I get a phone call while driving, or something else comes up. So, my music writing takes a lot longer than my movie writing. I’m working on a better system.
I am still writing about movies, just for Cinema Sentries. So that’s good.
I subscribe to a few different movie streaming services. We have Prime pretty much always, but we switch back and forth between various others. I usually subscribe to the Criterion Channel, and my wife loves BritBox. My daughter has recently gotten into anime, so now we have Crunchyroll. But sometimes we’ll cancel one service and get another one for a month or two. Earlier this year, my daughter really wanted to watch Hamilton, so we subscribed to Disney+ for a month.
Most streaming services offer up pretty good deals on the regular, and I’ve always got my eye out. This month, I got a good deal on the Kino channel and something called Midnight Pulp. Kino is connected to Kino Lorber, a company I get a lot of review Blu-rays from. They have a very nice selection of old movies, and a lot of foreign films. They are similar to Criterion, but whereas Criterion aims for the greatest films ever made, Kino tends to get slightly more obscure films. So I got to watch films like Picpus – a pretty good Maigret film – and A Pain in the Ass – a very funny French film.
Midnight Pulp is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. They offer up genre films. The time of movies you’d catch at some old midnight movie place, or at the back of your local video store (when there used to be video stores.) They have some terrible films, and a lot of goofy-looking erotica, but I managed to see a terrific Japanese film called Samurai Wolf and Night of the Juggler, which was just wonderful.
We are at the halfway point of 2026, so I’ll offer up some more statistics. I’ve watched 241 movies this year. I’ve seen 13 films from this year. Dramas are my biggest watched genre, followed by Thrillers, Crime, Action, and Horror. Movies made in the USA got the most views by me followed by the UK, France, Italy, and Japan. 187 or 77 percent of the films I watched were new to me.
The big news in the most-watched actors field is that Lino Ventura bounced up to a tie in first place with Tom Baker, Spencer Tracy, and James Stewart (who also moved up one film). Marcel Bozuffie also moved up one film to five. But pretty much everyone else stayed the same.
As for directors, Guy Hamilton bumped up a film to three watched, making him tied with a bunch of others for second place. Chloe Zhao is now on the leaderboard, making her the only woman director to place. I should do better about that.
It has been a good year so far. I’ve watched some great movies. Here’s to another six months.
Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) ****1/2 Back to the Wall (1958) **** Speaking of Murder (1957) ***1/2 Obsession (2025) ***1/2 Dead Heat (1988) ***1/2 Supergirl (1984) *** Rings of Fear (1978) *** Fright Night Part 2 (1988) ***1/2 Head Against the Wall (1959) *** Suicide Club (2001) *** A Pain in the Ass (1973) **** Samurai Wolf (1966) ****1/2 Night of the Juggler (1980) ****1/2 Picpus (1943) ***1/2 Virtuosity (1995) *** Doctor Who: The Awakening (1984) ***1/2 The Toxic Avenger (2023) *** The Narrow Margin (1952) **** The Mastermind (2025) **** Deathstalker II: Duel of the Titans (1987) ** Solo (1970) **** Waves of Lust (1975) ** Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) ***** The Long Arm (1956) **** The Intruder (1953) ***1/2 Home at Seven (1952) *** Fright Night (1985) ***1/2 Aesthetics of a Bullet (1973) ** Deathstalker (1983) ** The Roaring Twenties (1939) **** A View to a Kill (1985) ***1/2 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) ****1/2 Project Hail Mary (2026) **** Beyond the Door III (1989) **** Witchboard (1986) * Backrooms (2026) **1/2
themidnightcafe.org 