Every now and again my connections to Cinema Sentries will give me access to something fun beyond just getting Blu-rays to review. I’ll get tickets to a con or to some special event. Just before Inside Out was released, I got to go to an event with my family where they gave you a commemorative poster (I still have it; it hangs on my wall right behind me), and there was some fun behind the scenes stuff on the screen. We had a lot of fun, and the movie was great. You can read all about it here.
There is just too much TV to watch these days. I can’t keep up. I can’t even remember what I’m keeping up with. Ripper Street periodically pops up as a recommendation to me in my streaming feeds. Sometimes I think I ought to watch it. Apparently, I already have. At least the third season. Reading my review, I have the vaguest recollection of watching it. At least some of those plot points sound familiar. I don’t know if that means I should go back and watch the entire thing, or if I should just give up on it entirely. but I did like that third season, so that’s something.
I have this memory from my teenage years of walking through Mega Movies – the former Burger King turned massive video store rental place – looking for something to watch. We went there at least once a week (and in the summer multiple times a week). Going so often, I’d reach the point where I’d seen all the new releases and regularly dug into the regular shelves. But it was a big enough place I’d still stumble upon something that looked interesting.
I remember seeing an adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. The cover had a girl in a bikini or some scantily clad outfit, and she was standing by a great big hook of some kind. That cover and the fact that the title had “screw” in it made me think this was something titillating, not an adaptation of one of the great literary works of the last century.
I want to say I rented it and was greatly disappointed by it, but I really can’t remember. But the idea they were trying to reach dumb, horny teens like me with a scintillating cover for a Henry James adaptation makes me smile. I just tried to figure out which adaptation it was, but I had no luck.
This is not that movie, but a rather dull BBC adaptation starring Michelle Dockery and Dan Stevens. You can read my review at Cinema Sentries.
Originally posted on Cinema Sentries in 2015.
Akira Kurosawa is one of my favorite film directors. Shinobu Hashimoto is one of the great Japanese screenwriters. The two collaborated on some of the greatest films ever made, including The Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and Throne of Blood. This book, written by Hashimoto, details that collaboration, but dives into how he became a screenwriter and gives tips on how to write a script. It’s pretty darn cool. You can read all about it over at Cinema Sentries.
I’m once again going back through my old Cinema Sentry reviews and posting them here. I wrote this review back in April of 2016, so almost exactly 11 years ago. I haven’t seen the film since. Reading my review, I seem to have liked it so I may have to remedy that soon.
The Immigrant stars Marion Cotillard as an immigrant to the United States. Jeremy Renner and Joaquin Phoenix are two guys that make her life miserable. Yet it is a story of hope and grace. You can read my full review here.
My daughter is celebrating her birthday this weekend. We spent a large chunk of last night putting up decorations, cleaning the house, and otherwise preparing for her party. By the time we were done, I was whooped. I managed to watch this movie, but I was way too tired to write about it. So once again you get a Friday Night Horror Movie on Saturday morning.
When I think of movies from the 1980s, I naturally think of movies I loved as a kid. Movies I actually watched during the ’80s. Then there were also movies that I did not watch. Movies I knew about, but that wasn’t for me. Weren’t for kids. Movies for adults I had no interest in. There were other movies that I’d see in the video rental store but didn’t rent for one reason or another. And finally, there are movies like Q: The Winged Serpent. Movies I’d never heard of until much later. Way after the 1980s. I mean, I don’t think I saw this film in a video store; surely I would have remembered that crazy cover of a dragon-looking monster on top of the Chrysler Building.
But as an adult, this film kept popping up in my feeds. Someone would talk about it on social media, or it would come up in some list. It definitely kept rearing its head when I went searching for movies to watch from the 1980s.
I put off watching it for a long time because I kept getting it confused with another 1980s horror movie. One whose name I can’t remember now, but that apparently has some pretty nasty rape scenes, and I’m never in the mood for that.
Gillian and Dave are curretnly doing a small tour where they are playing Grateful Dead and Dead adjacent tunes. None of the shows were anywhere near me (though they are playing a free gig in Tulsa later this month, but it isn’t listed as part of this tour, and presumably will play their own songs). Man I wish I’d spent the money and caught one of these shows. This snippet is amazing.
The first sequel to Poltergeist did quite well, easily enough for the powers that be to want to make another film, but most of the cast had had enough. But when did a little thing like 80 percent of the cast refusing to return stop a studio from trying to cash in yet again on a successful franchise? They talked 12-year-old Heather O’Rourke into coming back as Carol Ann and sent her character off to live with some relatives in New York City. Naturally, the ghosts follow her. It’s actually not half bad, all things considered.
Carol Ann was sent to New York to attend a special school for kids who are both gifted and have emotional problems. She lives with her Aunt Patricia (Nancy Allen), her Uncle Bruce (Tom Skerritt), and their daughter Donna (Laura Flynn Boyle). Bruce is in charge of a fancy, new, very modern skyscraper, which they all live in.
Carol Ann is having a pretty rough time at it. Patricia is annoyed at her existence, and didn’t really want to take her in. Bruce is more sympathetic, but he’s very busy running the place and doesn’t have nice things to say about the rest of her family (he thinks they dumped her on them because of some bad real estate deals Carol Ann’s daddy got into, and doesn’t believe any of the haunting nonsense). Donna is very nice, but she’s also a teenager more interested in partying with her friends and dreaming about boys than dealing with a young girl’s problems. The dude that runs the school is a jerk, thinks Carol Ann made up all the paranormal stuff from her life, and is faking her newfound psychic abilities.
So yeah, her time in New York has been tough, and now the ghosts are coming back, especially the specter of Kane, who now is fully a ghost and can’t take on a physical form like he could in the last movie. He’s after Carol Ann because she can lead him to the next life or something.
Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein) comes back too, mostly to explain to the family that the ghosts are real and Carol Ann’s powers are true. Most of the story is utter nonsense, but the skyrise is a nice setting for this sort of thing. Most of it seems to be made of mirrors, and the ghosts now live inside mirrors, so there is a lot of fun with reflections and the like. I’m honestly not sure how the special effects team pulled some of the visuals off.
It isn’t a very good movie by any means, but I liked it more then the second one. The mirror work really is quite fun, and they also do some cool stuff with puddles of water.
In elementary school I can remember bragging about how many times I’d seen the original Star Wars. I’d even brag that my brother had seen it more than me, something like 27 different times. My mother says it played constantly on HBO, and we’d watch it every time it was on.
But then I also remember when I was a young teenager renting the original trilogy, and it felt like new. I knew I had seen the films before, but I only had vague memories of them. And I can remember excitedly talking to my friends about it like it was a new discovery.
Yet I also remember watching Return of the Jedi in the theater. I would have been seven years old.
I don’t know what to make of all that except that memory is a weird thing.
I don’t remember ever seeing Poltergeist II: The Other Side before. I’d never logged it on Letterboxd or IMDB. For the first two thirds of the film, nothing was familiar. And then the family ran into the garage to flee the ghosts. Suddenly I remembered that they were about to get attacked by power tools. Suddenly I remembered talking about that scene with my friends right after we watched the movie. We felt it was the best scene in the entire film. Clearly I had seen the film before; I just couldn’t remember it.
Like I say, memory is a weird thing.
Truth be told, other than that garage scene, most of the movie is rather forgettable.
Poltergeist was so popular a sequel was inevitable. The trouble was how do you make a sequel to a haunted house movie when the haunted house was completely destroyed at the end of the movie?
The reasoning for the haunting in Poltergeist was that they built the house on top of an old cemetery and only bothered to move the headstones and not the actual corpses.
For the sequel, they retcon some business about how underneath the Freelings house not only was there part of a cemetery but also a big cave where an insane preacher incarcerated his flock because he felt the end of the world was nigh. They all died there, and the preacher has now turned into a spectral beast that’s now hunting poor Carole Anne (Heather O’Rourke) because of her time spent in the netherworld, and maybe she can help get him out.
Or something. It is all a lot of silly hogwash.
The preacher (Julian Beck) can manifest into a physical form and looks a bit like a reject from Children of the Corn. He’s actually quite creepy and makes for the second-best part of the entire film.
The Freeling family has moved in with Diane’s (JoBeth Williams) mother. They are trying their best to forget about the past and move on with their lives. But Carole Ann keeps having psychic visions, and that darn preacher keeps showing up. Then the old psychic from the first movie, Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), shows up declaring all sorts of terrible things to come.
The thing I loved about the first film is that it slowly revealed what was happening. It allowed us to get to know the Freelings, and the scares were doled out a little at a time. That built the tension over the course of the movie.
It isn’t that things come too fast in this movie, for it too takes its time before the real scares come, but the buildup just isn’t interesting. Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg made those early scenes fun to watch. Here it’s just a lot of myth building that the first film didn’t need.
There are some good scares. The preacher is creepy, and that garage scene is great. There is another moment where Steve Freeling (Craig T. Nelson) eats the worm in a bottle of tequila, and things get really nasty.
But mostly this feels like a sequel that was rushed into production without much thought being given to why it should exist at all.
My church youth minister turned me on to Monty Python when I was in high school. He showed us Holy Grail first, and when we loved that, he showed us Life of Brian. By us I mean me and a few of my friends – older kids in the youth group who he thought could both enjoy the material and wouldn’t make a fuss (or, more likely, whose parents wouldn’t make a fuss if they found out.)
In typical youth minister fashion, he tried to tell us that Life of Brian was actually an incisive critique of certain sects of Judaism and could be applied to Christianity if you looked at it right. Or some such thing.
I also remember him standing in front of the television set during a brief nude scene.
I loved both films and later watched The Meaning of Life and lots of the TV series. I watched them a lot in college, and then they kind of vanished from my life. It wasn’t so much that I stopped liking them but that I’d had enough of them and moved on. Then I kind of forgot about them.
My wife randomly turned on Holy Grail the other day, and my goodness, that movie is funny. It was wild how much I could still quote even though I haven’t seen it in decades.
I still haven’t watched Life of Brian again, but I know it is still funny, and now that Criterion is giving it the UHD treatment, I’m totally on board for it being my pick of the week.
Also coming out this week that looks interesting:
The Phantom: The 1990s were a weird time for superhero movies. Tim Burton’s Batman made a splash in 1989, but the sequels were less than great. There were some good ones like The Crow and Blade, but there were a lot of films that just didn’t seem to know what they were doing.
The Phantom stars Billy Zane as a hero from Bengalla who must travel to New York to protect some magic skulls and fight bad guys. It bombed upon release, but like so many things from the 1990s, it has been reappreciated and is now getting a UHD release from Kino Lorber.
Trouble in Paradise: Ernst Lubitsch is one of those guys who many of my film loving friends absolutely adore. I’ve only seen a couple of his films, and while I’ve enjoyed them, I didn’t fall head over heels for them or him as a director. But I need to watch more. This one is about a love triangle between two jewel thieves and their intended victim. Criterion has the UHD release.
Becoming Led Zeppelin: Documentary about the band.
Remo Williams: Fred Ward stars in this silly attempt at creating a new action hero from some old stories. You can read my full review here.
Death Ship: Goofy horror film about a Nazi torture ship cruising the ocean looking for new victims. You can read my full review here.
Hearts of Darkness: The Making of The Final Friday: Documentary about the making of one of the more interesting Friday the 13th movies.
themidnightcafe.org 