The Saturday Morning Horror Movie: All That We Destroy (2018)

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Last night the family and I went to see the King Cabbage Brass Band in concert. I’ll probably have more to say about that later, but for now I’ll say we had a blast. It was a great show.  To get there we had to leave about 6:30, and we didn’t get home until almost midnight, at which point I was utterly exhausted, and was not capable of sitting down to watch a horror movie.

I had actually planned for this and watched a movie earlier in the afternoon.  I got about half of this post written before it was time to go. So, I’m finishing it now, and we’re calling it the Saturday Morning Horror Movie. I guess I could call it the Friday Afternoon Horror Movie since that’s when I watched it, but let’s not make things complicated.

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There is just too darn much stuff to watch. My daughter wanted to watch Hamilton a couple of weeks ago, and the only way to stream it is to get Disney+. Apparently, the only way to get Disney+ is to bundle it with Hulu. Being the good father that I am, I ordered both, and we all enjoyed Hamilton.

Then I started to enjoy Hulu. They’ve got some good movies, and some great shows, and I decided to keep it for another month. Tonight I figured I’d see how their horror selection was and came across this film. The trailer looked intriguing, and I gave it a go.

Turns out it is part of a horror anthology series from horror stalwarts Blumhouse Pictures. Into the Dark, as the series was called, ran for two seasons with roughly one movie coming out per month. Each movie was holiday themed, grabbing whatever big holiday happened during the month it aired.

Somehow, I’d never heard of this.  Like at all.  Which is weird because this sort of thing is right up my alley. Like I say, there is just too darn much stuff to watch.

But now that I’ve watched this, I’m kind of glad I’d not heard of it before. There are some intriguing ideas in All That We Destroy, but none of them are explored with any real gusto.

Dr. Harris (Samantha Mathis) is a geneticist who has found a way to make perfect human clones. In her house. It is perfect timing because, as it turns out, her son Spencer (Israel Broussard) is probably a serial killer. He’d shown all sorts of signs of that growing up, but when he actually kills a human – a drifter named Ashley (Aurora Perrineu)—she’s sure of it. Instead of turning him in or getting him some kind of therapy, she clones Ashley and lets him keep killing her. 

The idea is that if she observes his killings, then maybe she can figure out what makes him tick and change him. Or at the very least, killing a clone will get those instincts out of his system (for a time), enabling him to live a normal life. And whenever those instincts pop back up, he can come home and kill another clone. 

That’s an interesting idea, but again the film doesn’t do much with it. It doesn’t really explore what makes him tick. The mom could turn into a great villain. It makes a certain sense that any mom would protect their son, but she just keeps churning out clones for him to kill. Even when the clones start to have memories of themselves and increasingly seem human, she just keeps making them.

The trouble is Spencer knows he’s killing a clone. That makes her not human, and he can tell the difference. It just isn’t the same killing a clone.  Enter Marissa (Dora Madison), the cute, effervescent neighbor who takes a liking to Spencer even though he speaks in monotone and acts very strangely. She becomes the love interest but also a real human he might have to kill.

Spencer’s Dad (Frank Whaley) shows up at some point, but only through these very strange virtual reality phone calls with his mom. When he calls, the mom picks up these little dots she attaches to her head and gets transported to a virtual world where they both walk and talk together. There are some other odd technological moments in this film that seem to exist to show that we are living in the near future or something. 

The script does nobody any favors. Madison and Perrineau give it their best, and both are quite good with what they’re given. There really is something to this story, but it’s like the filmmakers didn’t quite believe in it enough and wound up falling back on some stupid tropes.

The Brewsters Are Not Going To China

We live in Shanghai back in 2007-2008. I wrote a separate blog called The Shanghai Cafe. It still exists as you can see. I want to import it to this blog just so that I won’t ever lose the posts I made back then (or forget about them.)

For one reason or another I can’t figure out how to import them to this blog, so I’m going to have to manually copy/past them here. I am able to set the date of the posts to match the dates of when I originally posted them. WordPress will accept that so they will exist in the correct timeline. But if you subscribe to my emails you will still get a new one.

I just posted one as a trial and it seems to have worked. But I then realized if you are getting my emails then you may be really confused. So we are not going to China again, but you are going to get a bunch of emails about those adventures many years ago.

Five Cool Things and Jo Nesbo’s Detective Hole

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I always seem to forget to post these things shortly after they go up at Cinema Sentries. I don’t know why other than that they don’t go up the moment I send them to that site. They go past an editor and then they decide when they want to actually publish it. By the time that happens I think I just forget all about it.

But here we are, a week after it did get published. This week I’m talking about Bob Weir, the excellent Australian series The Newsreader, the final season of Stranger Things, The Vast of the Night, Send Help, and the trailer for a new TV series based on Jo Nesbos’ popular crime novels. You can read all about it here.

Red Dust (1932)

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Warner Archive and Kino Lorber both put out a lot of what you might call second-tier classic films. These are movies with big-name stars or directors that, for one reason or another, are not all that well known all these decades later. 

I quite enjoy watching and reviewing them because you never know what you are going to get. Sure, most of them are not the greatest films, but usually they aren’t bad, and once in a while you find a real gem.

Red Dust is a very enjoyable little film. It stars Clark Gable as a rubber plantation owner in Asia and Jean Harlow as the no-nonsense sex worker he falls in love with. Mary Astor also appears as the prim and proper lady Gable’s character initially falls for.  Anyways, I quite enjoyed it, and you can read my review here.

Foreign Film February: Pierrot le Fou (1962)

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I am an emotional cinephile, not an intellectual one.  What I mean by that is that when I watch a film, I respond to it with my gut, with my heart, not my mind. My favorite films are ones that move me in some way. As is probably painfully obvious from my reviews, I don’t spend a lot of time analyzing a film for its deeper meanings or its themes. I don’t necessarily spend hours digging into the filmmaker’s personal beliefs, what they’ve said in interviews, or the political climate the film was made in.

Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t use my intellect when watching a film. I am often stimulated by the filmmaking techniques, the director’s sense of style, and how they tell their story. I love reading intellectual critiques of films; I’m just not all that capable of writing one.  I’ll let you decide if that is a good or a bad thing.

What this means is that sometimes I come across a film and have no idea how to talk about it.  Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou  is a meta-movie, a crime thriller, a relationship drama, and so much more. 

The plot is fairly simple. Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is sick of his average, boring life. His wife drags him to a party where the men talk like commercials selling cars and the women sound like an ad for skin cream. He leaves early and discovers the babysitter, Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), sound asleep. He agrees to take her home, and they reminisce about how they used to be lovers. 

Those reminisces turn into something more, and they run away, turn to crime, and have a bit of a Bonnie and Clyde situation. It turns out she’s got a history; her brother has been a criminal for quite some time, and…well, now that I think about it, that simple plot gets a little complicated.

The thing is, Godard is taking a fairly standard crime plot, and he’s having all kinds of fun with it. The  title of the film literally translates to “Pierrot, the Fool.”  Marianne constantly calls Ferdinand “Pierrot,” to which he always replies, “My name is Ferdinand.”  The name Pierrot refers to the sad clown of Commedia dell’arte. 

The film makes various references to French literature (most of which went over my head, but my wife filled me in), and movies. At that party early in the film, the great American director Samuel Fuller shows up and discusses film by saying “Film is like a battleground. There’s love, hate, action, violence, death… in one word: emotion.”  Well known French actor Jean-Pierre Leaud shows up as an extra at one point. You can barely see him at the bottom of the frame while our heroes are at a movie.

The score often cuts out for a second only to come back as if Godard is trying to remind us we are watching a film and that real life doesn’t come with a soundtrack. At least a couple of times, characters look straight at the camera and speak to the audience.  Marianne catches Ferdinand doing it and asks, “Who are you talking to?” To which he replies, “The audience.”

This is where I come back to the part where I’m not intellectual enough to talk about this film. There is so much going on in every second of this film that I’ve barely covered it. I can’t cover it, because I know I missed most of it.  I’m just not qualified to give this a true review.

That isn’t to say I didn’t like the film. On the contrary, I loved it. I’ve seen enough films to understand that Godard is being playful, that he’s calling attention to the fact he’s making a film while also making a thoroughly enjoyable story.  

I don’t think you have to be a total film nerd or an intellectual to enjoy this film. I think it can be enjoyed at face value while providing many layers for smart people to sift through.  Highly recommended.

Foreign Film February: Elevator to the Gallows (1958)

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A woman whispers “I love you, I love you” over and over on the phone.

In an office, a businessman, Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), talks mindlessly to a telephone operator. They talk about the long upcoming weekend. Then he goes into his office and closes the door. In a desk drawer he takes out a grappling hook, a pair of gloves, and a gun. He puts on the gloves and takes the rest with him.

He climbs out a window onto a long balcony. He uses the grappling hook to climb up to the floor above. He enters through a window and then walks to his boss’s office. They discuss an upcoming deal, and then Julien shoots his boss in the head. 

The boss was a war profiteer, and Julien is an ex soldier so it is possible that that the killing is political. Later we’ll learn that the voice on the telephone belonged to Florence (Jeanne Moreau), the boss’ wife and Julien’s lover. So, probably they cooked up a scheme to kill him and run away together.

He puts the gun into the boss’s hand, making it look like a suicide. Then he locks the doors, cleverly using a knife to block the lock until he closes the door from the outside, making it appear it was locked from the inside.

As he is climbing back down to his floor, his office phone rings. The operator is with the security guard, who is ready for them to leave so he can lock up. In a rush to answer, Julien forgets about the grappling hook. He tells them he’ll be ready in a minute, then walks out with them.

He walks across the street and starts his car only to look up and see the rope flapping in the wind.  He rushes back to the building and takes the elevator up. Before he can get there, the security guard turns off all the power, trapping Julian inside the elevator.

Outside, a young flower girl, Veronique (Yori Bertin) and her boyfriend, Louis (Georges Poujouly), stare at Julien’s car. It is fancy and fast and too much for Louis to resist. He jumps in and starts to drive away. Veronique protests, saying that Julien will kill him for the deed, as his body is full of medals and scars. 

They’ll spend the evening driving aimlessly around Paris. Eventually they will cross paths with an older German couple in a sports car. They’ll race each other and then find themselves at a motel. Veronique is excited to register as man and wife, but afraid to use their real names. So she chooses Mr. and Mrs. Julien Tavernier. The two couples will drink and tell stories. Louis pretends to have lived Julien’s life. But the old man calls him out.

An act of violence will send Veronique and Louis on the run.

Meanwhile, Florence will wander the streets of Paris looking for Julien, while Miles Davis plays on the soundtrack.

Julien tears the elevator apart trying to find a way to escape. He manages to open the door, but it is between floors, and there isn’t enough room to escape. 

These three stories will come together in wonderful ways.

Elevator to the Gallows was the first film directed by Louis Malle. It is a fascinating take on the film noir.  Most noirs would begin much earlier in the story. We’d see Julian and Florence first meet – perhaps at a party or while she was visiting her husband at the office. They’d have a torrid affair and fall in love. She’d talk about how horrible her husband was, how he made money from those terrible wars. And they’d hatch a plan to kill him. The murder would come much later in the movie.

But here it is at the beginning. We see none of the love love or lust these two have for each other. Other than that telephone call at the very beginning, they do not talk to each other on screen, and they spend the entire film apart. 

You can see the beginning of the French New Wave in that. Malle is taking an American film genre, and he’s playing with it a little bit. This isn’t quite the full deconstruction folks like Goddard would be doing within a few years, but he’s clearly putting his own spin on things.The plot comes together perfectly. I’d seen the film before, but the details had been lost. My memory said it came out one way, but in reality it came out another, and that way was even better.  This is a near-perfect film, and it comes highly recommended. 

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Vengeance of the Zombies (1973)

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As it is Foreign Film February, I wanted to do a non-English language film for my Friday Night Horror flick. It has also been a long day, so I grabbed the thing closest to me, which was my Paul Naschy boxed set. There are five films in that set, and I hope to watch and review them all over the next couple of months. I love the idea of reviewing all the DVDs I own, but that is a monumental task.

Vengeance of the Zombies is an absolutely bonkers film. In the booklet that came with this set, Naschy (who wrote the film) is quoted as having probably been on hashish when he sat down at his typewriter. That definitely checks out.

It also checks out that this was a chepie exploitation flick. Technically there is a plot, but it is so haphazardly put together it is impossible to make sense of.  

Someone is killing a bunch of women in London. Then someone else, a voodoo priest named Kantanka (Paul Naschy), is bringing them back to life as part of his zombie horde.  Naschy also plays Krisna an East Indian mystic.

Elvire Irving (Romy) thinks Krisna is one cool cat and follows him to his big mansion out in the country. The big mansion was once the home of an evil family who were eventually murdered and hung upon the trees in the yard.

There are a lot of dream sequences where Kantanka and some other foul faced fiends attack Elvire. In one particularly groovy dream sequence, Paul Naschy plays Satan, to whom various others make sacrifices.  Another sequence (which may or may not be a dream; it is difficult to tell), a lady wearing a big box painted like a man’s face dances around while Kantanka pours blood onto corpses to turn them alive.  Or something.

Scotland Yard gets involved but is mostly useless. 

Seriously, I just watched this film, and I’m having a hard time remembering anything about the actual plot.

There is lots of murdering. Plenty of ladies wearing sheer nightgowns. And loads of gratuitous sex.

I do love the sex scenes in these types of films. During one scene, the housekeeper is upset over something. Krisna tells her everything is going to be ok. Then he looks at her, the music starts up, and he then pulls down the covers, pulls down her top, and gropes her breasts three times. She then sits up and passionately kisses him.

In another scene, Elvire goes into a barn only to find a woman with her head nearly chopped off. Then she is attacked by a dude with a scythe. Krisna jumps in and saves the day. They then go to the house, where she tells him that he should call the cops. He brusquely says “no” to which she responds by making out with him.

I’ve been doing my seduction techniques all wrong, I guess.

The music is a wild mix of popular rock and funk. It is so crazily inappropriate for most of what’s happening on screen.

This is a ridiculously bad film in every imaginable way. But it’s also a lot of fun to watch. It is the kind of film you want to watch late at night with a group of friends while getting loaded. Check your brain at the door and get ready for ridiculousness.

Foreign Film February: Five Deadly Venoms (1978)

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Welcome back to Foreign Film February. This is one of my longest-running movie themes. I think it is second only to 31 Days of Horror,in terms of longevity. I’ve been doing it since February 2022.

It is the 6th of February, and this is my first post to Foreign Film February, which feels a little late, but also reminds me of how much I’ve been stepping back from my movie themes.  My original theme month was 31 Days of Horror, and I initially tried to write about one movie per day. But that is difficult, and all my other themes quickly became less than that. 

Still, I always tried to write as many posts as I could with each theme.  Some did better than others. But now I write a Friday Night Horror column, and a Pick of the Week, plus I do Five Cool Things every other week, and I’ve been writing a lot of reviews for Cinema Sentries. None of that is going to stop, and so there is a realization that I won’t be writing as many posts about each month’s theme. I’ll still try to do a theme each month; just don’t expect so many posts.

I thought I’d start this month’s FFF with something fun. I’ve written about the Shaw Brothers films numerous times, and I am a big fan of the studio’s kung fu output. This film comes from Arrow Video’s first big boxed set of Shaw Brothers films and is one of their most popular films.

Five Deadly Venoms is a clear favorite of Quentin Tarantino’s. It likely influenced the fictional TV show that Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction starred in, The Deadly Viper Squad, and certainly influenced the Kill Bill films (there is a fan theory that the events of Kill Bill are actually part of that series, which makes it all a fictional TV series within the real Pulp Fiction universe, but I digress.)

It is a strange film within the Shaw Brothers filmography, as it relies more on story than most, with the action sequences taking a bit of a back seat. At the heart of the film is a mystery, or rather multiple mysteries, as we’ll see.

It begins with the dying master of the Five Deadly Vipers clan sending his last pupil, Yang Tieh (Chiang Sheng), on a mission to stop the other clan members dead in their tracks. The Vipers, it seems, have been up to no good; they have become an evil clan. It is unclear whether the master set them up this way (probably) and now that he’s dying he wants to set things right, or if they went wrong somewhere along the way.

Either way, Yang Tieg is now charged with finding them and stopping them from getting some mysterious treasure. Finding that treasure and giving it to charity will put karma on his side.

The trouble is each of the five clan members (and the dude who has the treasure) is a mystery. When they left the master’s teachings, they took on new identities. 

They are all likely in one village where the treasure should also be. When Yang Tieg arrives in that village, he finds a family has been brutally murdered. The treasure may have been stolen from them.

So, Yang Tieg must find the treasure and figure out who each of the five clan members are. The five clan members are all trying to find the treasure. And now the police have a murder to solve. 

I’m not against convoluted mysteries, but this one stays confusing and not all that interesting. The script never leans into one of them. Instead we wander from one clan member to the next, and then hang out with the governor and the police trying to solve the murder.

What is cool about this movie is those five clan members – the Five Deadly Venoms—follow a specific style of fighting:  Centipede, Snake, Scorpion, Lizard, and Toad. The clan master introduces them early in the film.  Each of them wears totally rad masks and demonstrates their fighting style (Centipede is so fast with his arms it looks like 1,000 punches come at you at once – Snake crawls on the ground, etc.). Each fighter fights like his namesake. 

That stuff is so much fun. Unfortunately, because each clan member is hiding from the other, they hardly wear their masks, and they rarely use their special techniques. This film would be 1,000 times cooler if it was just Yang Tieh discovering each of the Vipers one by one and fighting them in their full regalia.

There are moments of interest throughout. At one point the evil governor puts one of the Vipers into an Iron Maiden like device with a thousand nails that is suppossed to find his one weak spot. Another guy gets a thin knife stuck into his brain through his nose.

But mostly we get a convoluted mystery. The finale does give us some cool fighting, and that is worth the price of admission. But it sure is a slog getting there.

The Sin of Nora Moran (1933)

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I love it when a low-budget film that should have been forgotten about weeks after its release and completely forgotten by time manages to do something completely different and become a classic. Remembered nearly one hundred years after it was released.

The Sin of Nora Moran was a poverty row drama whose story was a dime-a-dozen, but they did something in the editing room that made it interesting and different, and here we are with a new Blu-ray release of it in 2026. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.