The Movie Journal: 2023

decision to leave

I watched 53 movies in December. Thirty of them were made before I was born. I had seen fifteen of them at least once before. The theme for December was movies made in 2023 as I wanted to make a best-of list before the year was over. I watched 14 movies from that year, most of which were watched in the first couple of weeks. After that, I got bored and started watching old movies again.

Since it is now 2024 and we’ve seen the end of 2023 this will serve not only as a journal of December but for the entire year.

I watched 529 movies in 2023 which blows last year’s record of 452 movies out of the water. I really thought that after Covid settled down and I was getting out of the house more my movie watching would slow down, but in fact, it continues to increase.

I’ve really gotten my movie-watching down to a science. It has become an obsession. Every spare moment I slip upstairs and put on a movie. Maybe I should get a life. Until then, here are some more stats.

I averaged watching 44 movies per month, 10 per week. My most watched genres were Thrillers, Dramas, Horror, Crime and Mysteries. I mostly watched movies in English, but I did watch some movies in other languages, including 39 films from Italy, 36 from France, 20 from Hong Kong and 16 from Japan.

445 of the 529 movies I watched were new to me.

favorite actors

In the most watched actors category, Cary Grant snuck in this month to tie Ku Feng in first place with eleven films watched. The wife and I decided to make it a Merry Cary (Grant) Christmas this year and watched a bunch of his films over the last couple of weeks.

There wasn’t a lot of change in the directors category. I will admit I watched a Hitchcock film last night (The Lady Vanishes) because I knew it would push him into the lead for the year.

I continued my tradition of watching horror movies at the start of the weekend and writing about them in my Friday Night Horror Movie column. When I didn’t forget, I wrote a weekly column about the upcoming Blu-ray releases entitled My Pick of the Week. I once again wrote reviews for Noirvember, Foreign Film February, and 31 Days of Horror. But I also created new themes this year including Great British Cinema in September, The Awesome 80s in April, and Westerns in March. I really enjoyed doing those theme months so you can look forward to more themes in 2024.

Overall it was a very good year for me and the cinema. I watched a lot of great movies. Some of my favorite first-watches were The Story of Temple Drake (1933), Past Lives (2023), Oppenheimer (2023), Brighton Rock (1948), Man on the Run (1949), Night and the City (1950), Cottage to Let (1941), The Warriors (1979), Red River (1948), Hotel Du Nord (1938), Nostalgia (1983), Decision to Leave (2022), and many more.

You can see all the films I watched by looking at my film diary on Letterboxd.

I know movies aren’t the thing anyone comes to this site for. But I enjoy writing about them and I hope a few of you enjoy reading about them.

As always I will continue posting music too.

The Midnight Cafe’s Best Movies of 2023

oppenheimer still

I’ve been watching movies in theaters for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest memories is of watching The Return of the Jedi in my small-town cinema. Growing up my parents often took me to the movies, and I was always happy to go (even when I was completely embarrassed by being with them as I became a teenager).

We were early adapters to VHS. I got a DVD player before nearly anyone I knew. I love streaming movies. I watch more movies now because of streaming than I ever have before.

But there was always something magical about going to the movies. The big screen, the big buckets of popcorn. Drinking so much soda you thought you were going to burst before the credits rolled. Sitting in a dark theater with some story shimmering in light in front of you was immersive and special.

In college, and for years after, I went to the movies every weekend. I saw every movie that looked even remotely interesting, and when I had seen those I watched movies that weren’t interesting to me. Even then I couldn’t see every movie. I’ve almost always lived in small towns or smallish cities. They don’t get all the arthouse and foreign language films that wind up on critics’ lists at the end of the year.

But I always liked watching the Oscars. I always enjoyed the spectacle – all those rich famous people gathering to congratulate themselves. I always enjoyed hearing about great movies that I’d never heard of before, or that I hadn’t had the chance to see.

I don’t get to the movies nearly as often as I used to – almost never in fact. Over the last several years I’ve become a classic movie nerd. In my monthly movie-watching wrap-ups I always mention how many movies I watched that were made before I was born. Usually, it is the majority of them.

I still watch the Oscars, I still enjoy the spectacle, but rarely have I seen more than one of the nominees. I just don’t watch new movies when they come out.

Well, this year was different (sort of). I watched a couple of movies in the theater (Barbie, and Killers of the Flower Moon) and a few more when they came out on digital services, and then I intentionally set out to watch as many movies from 2023 as I could in December (to tell the truth I started out strongly and after a couple of weeks I returned to my classic movie schedule).

As such I’ve seen 31 movies from 2023. That’s not really a lot, and certainly not enough to create a definitive Best Of list, but darn if I’m not making one anyway. Or let’s just say this is a list of movies that came out this year that I thought were really good.

the killer movie poster

10. The Killer

Michael Fassbender stars in this David Fincher directed thriller as a hired assassin who isn’t quite as skilled as he thinks he is. When a job gets botched things spiral out of control. Fincher employs his usual meticulously detailed style to what is essentially a trashy genre picture and we’re all the better for it.

09. Anatomy of a Fall

A man falls from his second-story window and dies. Wounds indicate he may have hit on the head and pushed first. Suspicions fall on his wife, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller). The only witness is their legally blind son (Milo Machado-Graner). Part mystery, part courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall doesn’t give us any definitive answers but lets the questions hang.

The cast is absolutely brilliant from top to bottom and Justine Triet’s direction while not flashy, is wonderful.

08. Asteroid City

Possibly the most Wes Anderson-y movie Wes Anderson has ever made. It is also, perhaps, his most difficult-to-understand film. It is actually a film within a film within a play. Or something like that. Honestly, it has been months since I’ve seen it and the details have all left my memory banks, but it does have a nesting doll structure with a lot of layers.

The production design is amazing, as per usual with Anderson, and it is crammed full of excellent actors doing excellent work (again as per usual). I really need to watch it again, but on first viewing I found it to be quite excellent.

07. You Hurt My Feelings

Julia Louise-Dreyfuss stars as a writer who accidentally overhears her husband (Tobias Menzies) discussing her latest book. He doesn’t like it and as the title indicates this hurts her feelings. Nicole Holofcener wrote and directed this lovely little dramedy that gets all the details of a relationship exactly perfect. The stakes are low but still meaningful. The comedy isn’t uproariously but it is clever and real.

across the spiderverse

06. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was such a breath of fresh superhero air when it came out in 2018. It was so original, so creative…so colorful. It felt like it was reinventing a genre that had grown stale.

Five years later that genre has started to grow moldy. Across the Spider-Verse doesn’t feel quite as new as Into the Spider-Verse, it is basically doing what it did, only more so. But it still feels so vibrant and refreshing as compared to all the other superhero movies and television shows that I hope they continue to make these for many more years.

05. Barbie

My wife has become a doll collector. She sews clothes for them and creates little stories. She’s quite good at it too. You can view them on her Instagram account. She buys all sorts of dolls, but Barbies are her favorite. She now has quite a collection of them.

We were destined to see the Barbie movie even if it wasn’t any good, but it turned out to be brilliant. It is very funny, there are lots of wonderful gags about how Barbie dolls would navigate the real world, but it is also quite clever and astute. It isn’t too deep, some folks have called it a Feminism 101 movie and that seems correct, and it sometimes got a bit too preachy for my tastes, but for a film based on a kid’s toy it’s pretty darn good.

04. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part I

Seven films in and this series hasn’t let up. The plot in this one is more spy-centric than the series has been in ages, but the plot isn’t the thing we watch these films for. That would be the stunts and while they aren’t quite as mind-blowing as they have been in previous installments, they are pretty spectacular.

Special mention goes to Hayley Atwell who is marvelous.

killers of the flower moon poster

03. Killers of the Flower Moon

I had been looking forward to this film from the moment Martin Scorsese was attached to it in 2017. I immediately read the book and was astonished this was a story I’d never heard of before, considering it happened not very far from where I lived.

It is the story of the Osage Indian Nation and how after being kicked around across the United States they were eventually forced onto a barren, desolate chunk of Oklahoma that was wanted by no one.

Then they discovered oil on the land. Amazingly, the Osage were able to keep the land and make huge amounts of money from the oil. For a time they were the richest people on Earth. Naturally, white people almost immediately began finding ways to cheat them out of it, even going so far as to murder a bunch of them.

Scorsese’s film is rich and long, beautiful and dark, and gives the audience a whole lot to think about. I very much want to watch it again, and again as I wasn’t able to take it all in the first time.

02. Past Lives

Past Lives is a film about choices and regret, about love and life and destiny. Greta Lee and Teo Yoo star as childhood sweethearts whose lives changed when her parents moved her from South Korea to Canada. Years later they reconnect via the Internet. But when things start to get serious she cuts the relationship short, wanting to forge her own life with her own career rather than running back to her homeland for him.

More years later she’s got her career, a husband, and a life. When he comes to the US to visit her all those questions of what might have been surface. Celine Yong, in her directorial debut, has created a film so filled with heart and beauty that I cannot wait to see what she does next. Both Greta Lee and Teo Yoo are magnificent.

oppenheimer

01. Oppenheimer

Going to the movies was a magical experience for me growing up. For a very long time, I adored that experience. But if I’m behind honest I don’t really miss it. When I do go to the movies now I’m usually disappointed. It is so expensive I feel like I have to dig into my savings in order for me and my family to go. The screens seem smaller than they used to, and the projectionists are lousy at their jobs. (if that even is a vocation anymore instead of just some teenager who punches a button on a computer screen). Nearly every time I’ve seen a movie in the theater over the last ten years there has been some problem, either the image is poorly framed, or the sound is off.

People are constantly talking or looking at their phones. Most theaters now have reclining seats that are more comfortable than the old fold-out variety but as they age they get worse. The last theater seat I saw in learned to the left uncomfortably, and they all screech and squeal as if in agony when you try to recline them.

I’m perfectly happy these days watching movies at home.

I really wish I’d seen Oppenheimer in the theaters. It is so big, so bold, so designed to be seen on the biggest screen possible I feel I missed something while watching it at home.

And still, it is my favorite movie of the year. Christoper Nolan’s biopic of the man who invented the atomic bomb is a stunning technical achievement, but it is also a fascinating dive into a complicated story. Nolan uses all his visual tricks to make the story huge, bombastic, and exciting. But it is the human story that is the most interesting.

Cillian Murphy is brilliant as Oppenheimer. I’m not sure that the film, or Nolan, or Murphy himself even like the guy. The film takes pains to show that he often isn’t the smartest guy in the room, but he was a very good organizer. He was able to get all the smartest guys and get them working toward the same goal.

There is a whole lot going on in the film, only a small part of which is whether or not they should have actually obtained that goal. That’s a bigger question than I have time for here, and the film deals with much more than I’m prepared to write about now. But I truly loved the movie and I’m happy to make it my number one film of the year.

And there you have it. My first foray into doing a Top 10 list of movies in a given year. Turns out it is rather difficult to write a couple of paragraphs on your favorite movies, but I hope I at least piqued your interest in a few films.

What were your favorite movies of 2023?

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Devil’s Honey (1986)

the devils honey

One of the things I miss about the old video rental stores is the ability to walk in and find something you’ve never heard of, that was completely obscure and weird. You’d take it home not knowing what to expect. Sometimes it was crap, but every now and then you’d find a real gem.

Sure, you can do that with streaming, but it just isn’t the same.

Growing up, we had this wonderful video store. It had previously been a Burger King, and when it closed down a place called Mega Movies moved in. They removed the kitchen providing a huge space for videos. I used to wander around that place for hours. I loved digging into the bowels of that place looking for something really weird.

As a virile teenage boy something really weird sometimes meant something with a scantily clad lady on the cover. I have this very distinct memory of a single scene from one of these movies. A beautiful woman was wearing nothing but a pair of pantyhose. A man stood nearby watching. She is repairing a run in her tights with some red nail polish which turns the man on, and soon enough she’s rubbing the polish in places nail polish should never go.

I couldn’t ever remember anything else about the movie. I’ve often wondered what that movie was, but I wasn’t about to go Googling “woman masturbates with nail polish” so it remained a mystery.

Until tonight. I have a list of unwatched horror movies and digging through it tonight for something to watch I landed on this movie, The Devil’s Honey by Lucio Fulci.

I’ve written about Fulcio before, he’s a guy who made a lot of movies – most of them low-budget, a lot of them full of blood and gore. They aren’t always great, but they are usually interesting.

I went into this movie expecting some good old-fashioned violence. I was not expecting a half-naked woman with nail polish. Certainly not the half-naked woman with nail polish locked inside my memory banks for going on three decades.

That particular scene happens within fifteen minutes of the opening credits. Before that, there is a scene in which a man gets a woman off by placing the end of a saxophone on her crotch and playing her a song.

This isn’t the Lucio Fulci the Godfather of Gore, this is Fulci’s erotic thriller. Except, that it isn’t particularly erotic or thrilling, but it is amazingly weird and I’m always down for that.

The saxophonist is Johnny (Stefano Madia) and the girl is Jessica (Blanca Marsillach). They are tempestuous lovers. He’s obsessed with sex (as one might suspect from the display with the sax). She wants something more than that, usually protests at his fondling, but usually gives in.

There’s also a surgeon, Dr. Wendell Simpson (Brett Halsey), who is uninterested in sex with his wife but likes to go out with prostitutes (one of whom is the girl with the nail polish).

One day Johnny takes a tumble and bangs his head on a rock. At first, he seems fine, but later he collapses and is rushed to the hospital where Dr. Simpson tries to save him. Tries, but fails.

Awash in grief Jessica begins calling the Dr. on the regular, asking him why he let Johnny die. Eventually, she kidnaps the man and does a little sadomasochistic torture on him while periodically flashing back to more idyllic times with Johnny.

Though I’ve seen 16 of his films and written about him at least five times, I’ve never thought Fulci was that particularly great a director. He can create some interesting imagery, and he’s a wizard with low-budget gore effects, but his stories are usually a mess and his camerawork is nothing special. A film like this where the gore is minuscule and the violence, no matter how psycho-sexual, is mostly sidelined or at least restrained (for a Fulci film) finds itself with not much of interest to say.

There is enormous amounts of gratuitous nudity, loads of misogyny, and the whole thing is ridiculously dopey. Yet I kind of dug it. It is so wild and weird in a way that only Lucio Fulci can be that I had to sit back and marvel at it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

the masque of the read death

As I mentioned in my very first Friday Night Horror post I started watching horror movies on Friday night because my wife and daughter made a habit of watching silly Youtube videos upstairs in our bedroom. I’d go downstairs and put on a movie, and because it was late at night and because my wife wasn’t around to complain, I’d often put on a horror movie. Then it became a habit. Then I started writing about them each week.

My daughter is getting older. We still watch Doctor Who on most Friday nights, but it is often downstairs while eating our dinner. Then she wanders off to do her own thing and my wife winds up watching Youtube by herself while I find a horror movie to watch.

Lately, the daughter has often been invited over to a friend’s house for sleepovers on a Friday night leaving me and the wife home alone. This is not a problem as we enjoy spending time alone together.

But me being me I still want to get my Friday Night Horror movie in. I feel obligated to watch a movie and write about it no matter what (with few exceptions, including one that will likely happen in a couple of weeks). She doesn’t like horror movies so we compromise.

Vincent Price is a very nice compromise. (Also, as I write this I realize I’ve written some similar thoughts this past summer when my daughter was spending a Friday night at a friend’s).

I think I first came to know Vincent Price as that voice in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” although I think at that point he was just one of those celebrities that everybody knew about, even dumb little kids who had never seen one of his movies. I think he showed up pretty regularly on game shows or as a special guest in various dramas and mysteries. I also enjoyed him in Edward Scissorhands.

It has only been in the last decade or so that I’ve really dug into his body of work and come to love him. He was a wonderful dramatic actor for many years, but of course, he eventually became beloved as an icon of horror movies. He is always a delight.

He certainly is in tonight’s film, The Masque of the Red Death, the penultimate film in director Roger Corman’s cycle of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations.

Price plays Prospero an evil prince living in medieval Italy. When a bout of a plague known as the Red Death is discovered Prospero invites various rich and noble folk into his castle for safety while allowing the common folk (or those who have offended him in some way) to suffer a long and horrible death (when he’s not outright killing them himself for pleasure).

He does allow three peasants inside his castle walls. Two men (played by David Weston and Nigel Green) dared to call him out on his evil deeds, and are now prisoners to be tortured. Francesca (Jane Asher) the daughter and fiancee of the men, begs for their lives and is invited to the castle to be Prospero’s plaything.

Turns out Prospero is a Satanist and his evil deeds are in service to the Dark Lord. Francesca is a devout Christian and he figures if he can turn her away from her faith it will prove his own dedication to Satan.

Things get a little bit crazy before Prospero gets his comeuppance and realizes that no matter what you believe it is death that comes for us all in the end.

Like a lot of Hammer Horror films The Masque of the Red Death mostly bores me with its plotting. There is a lot of plotting and talking and while it isn’t bad, it isn’t all that exciting either. Price (and everybody else, really) mostly plays it straight. He’s still a delightful screen presence, but there’s just a lot of exposition to get through, and I find myself drifting away while watching.

But what I absolutely adore about the film are the sets, the costumes, and the overall production design. It looks absolutely amazing. While watching my wife and I decided if we were rich we’d buy us an old gothic mansion and I’d wear nothing but satin dressing gowns and she’d don only long, flowing dresses. It doesn’t hurt that it was shot by Nicola Roeg who would go on to make some wonderful films himself.

So not a great movie, but one I still loved looking at.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Hereditary (2018)

hereditary

This week I watched exactly one movie, Beau is Afraid the new horror film by Ari Aster. Honestly, I’m not sure what I think of it. It isn’t a bad film, exactly, but it did take me three days to complete it. There was just only so much of it I could take in one setting. It is a film with a particular point of view, and that POV is rather unsettling.

Joaquin Phoenix plays a man with intense anxiety. He is the sort of person who always imagines the absolute worst thing possible is going to happen. The film essentially stays in his point of view and so I was never sure what was real and what was just in his head. Critic Matt Singer has a very good review of the film and he explains it much better than I am.

I finished Beau is Afraid yesterday and so it is not the Friday Night Horror Movie, but watching that film made me want to return to Ari Aster’s first full-length feature film, Hereditary. And that is the FNHM.

Like Beau is Afraid, Hereditary is a strange, unsettling film and I’m not entirely sure what it all means, but I connected to it much more strongly than I did with Beau.

Like so many modern horror films Hereditary is about grief. It begins with the death of a matriarch, or rather the funeral of the matriarch. She was a complicated, sometimes difficult woman as we’ll learn by listening to her daughter, Annie (Toni Collette) give her eulogy. Mother and daughter had a strained relationship. The family has a long history of mental illness that ends in tragedy.

Later another terrible tragedy will strike sending the family spiraling. Annie begins having visions of the dead. Her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) tries to hold the family together but his own grief envelops him. The son, Peter (Alex Wolff) blames himself for the accident.

The film goes to unexpected and weird places, almost none of it is believable, and yet I was completely carried away by it. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot as to avoid spoilers but if you like horror that find a unique way to terrify then this is a movie worth checking out.

Collette gives an absolutely riveting performance. Ann Dowd shows up too as a, well, again I won’t spoil it, but she’s always worth watching.

Watch Glen Hansard and Lisa O’Neill Perform “Fairytale of New York” at Shane MacGowan’s Funeral

Cushing Curiosities is the Pick of the Week

cushing curiosities

Like probably most people my age from America I first discovered Peter Cushing playing Grand Moff Tarkin in the original Star Wars film. But he was so much more than that.

I’ve come to love him as the star of numerous Hammer Horror films, but he was more than that too.

Severin Films is releasing this week a collection of six rather obscure and slightly different films from the great actor and I am all for it. I love that more and more Blu-ray companies are putting together this type of set filled with films one might not usually buy or even know about. I’m happy to make it my pick of the week.

It is a very big week this week as we are ever so close to Christmas. So buckle up as we move our way through it all.

Bollywood Horror Collection: I know absolutely nothing about Bollywood movies. It is a huge gap in my cinematic knowledge. There are just so many of them that it is hard to know where to start. This package from Mondo Macabre, which features 6 movies from the Ramsey Brothers might be the place to start.

Blue Rita: Jesus Franco directs this movie about a nightclub owner who is actually a spy and who delights in torturing men for information.

Jailhouse Wardress: Another Jesus Franco flick. This one deals with Nazis who have escaped capture and are now living in South America. Being a Franco joint it also entails a laboratory that creates beautiful women for the Nazi’s pleasure.

Goodbye Dragon Inn: This Taiwanese film is an ode to going to the movies, to the simple pleasures of sitting in a movie theater watching cinema on the big screen. It is a beautiful, strangely hilarious film. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

Passages: Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos star in this drama about two gay men who have been together for fifteen years and what happens when one of them has an affair with a woman.

The Quatermass Xperiment: Hammer Studios existed for nearly two decades before making this film. For those years they mostly made super cheap, forgettable little films. But with this, they were put on the map. Its popularity allowed them to make more science fiction and horror films and within a few years they were a powerhouse. I’ll have my full review up at Cinema Sentries in a day or two.

House of the Long Shadows: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Vincent Price star in this film about a writer who goes to a remote Welch cottage on a bet – can he write an entire novel in 24 hours? But when he arrives he finds it full of quirky oddballs.

The Red Balloon and Other Stories: Five Films by Albert Lamorisse: The Red Balloon is a delightful little film about a boy chasing a red balloon through the city streets. It had been decades since I watched it and yet it remains a pleasant memory in my mind. The Criterion Collection presents it and four other films from the same director in this set.

Anna Christie: Greta Garbo stars as a prostitute who returns home to her father and tries to make a new life. Garbo is terrific in this.

Madame Bovary: Vincent Minnelli directs Jennifer Jones, James Mason, and Van Heflin in this adaptation of the Flaubert classic novel.

Long Arm of the Law Parts 1 & II: 88 Films present this double feature of these Hong Kong action flicks. I don’t know anything about them, but I love me some HK action.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio: I gotta admit I’m not a huge fan of del Toro’s films and I can’t think of a reason we need another adaptation of Pinocchio, and yet this looks pretty cool. And since it is the Criterion Collection putting it out it is definitely worth a mention.

Weird: The Al Yankovich Story: Danielle Radcliffe stars as the brilliant song parody writer that nearly every juvenile discovers and loves at some point. Apparently, the film is entirely fictitious which is exactly what you want from an Al Yankovich biopic.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem: How are these things still popular. They were huge when I was a kid some twenty years ago.

The Mandalorian: The Complete First Season: I’ve not loved this Star Wars series, but I do appreciate that it is mostly telling a story outside of the Skywalker Saga (yes I know it isn’t completely outside, but it is mostly its own thing) and I’m always happy to see streaming shows get a physical release.

The Creator: Science fiction film about the war between humans and AI. The reviews have not been great, but I’ll eventually give it a try.

Five Nights at Freddy’s: My daughter loved this movie about a night at a Chuck-E-Cheese-style pizza place where the animatronics turn evil.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Royal Hotel (2023)

the royal hotel

Hannah (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) are backpacking in Australia. When they run out of money they go to an employment agency that specializes in finding gigs for travellers. They are sent to a remote mining town where they are employed as bartenders at a dirty, rundown pub/hotel.

It is run by a drunken bastard of a man who has clearly seen better days (a glorious Hugo Weaving), and it is patronized by a motley crew of miners who are as rowdy as they are misogynistic. They constantly harass with come-ons and sexist jokes.

Writer/director Kitty Green (along with co-writer Oscar Redding) fills The Royal Hotel with an unending sense of dread. From the moment Hannah and Liv arrive in town there is a feeling that something terrible is going to happen to them.

But this isn’t a movie filled with knife-wilding maniacs or skeezy rapists, or cannibals. It is more realistic than that. The men, for the most part, seem like decent blokes – hard-working, blue-collar, rough-around-the-edges blokes for sure, but not necessarily evil men.

But that’s the thing, that’s the point the film is trying to make. A couple of young women, out-of-towers, like these girls are, will inevitably face a litany of potential dangers in a place like this. And there is no way for them to tell who is essentially harmless, and who might cause them real horror.

Hannah is the one who recognizes the potential danger they face every night, while Liv seems more oblivious. She’s willing to accept the overt sexism as a cultural difference. It is up to Hannah then, to constantly steer Liv away from danger.

One of the locals, Matty (Toby Wallace) takes a shine to Hannah. He seems nice so the girls allow him to take them to a watering hole for a swim. They have a good time and get a little drunk. That night he puts a few moves on Matty. She rebuffs. Gently at first, but he persists. She tells him straight up “no” but he pushes back. Eventually, she has to get tough and yell at him. But at that moment it isn’t clear if he will leave.

Another customer, Dolly (Daniel Henshall) is seen lingering upstairs in the hall near their room. On another night he gets aggressively rude with Matty. But he’s sweet to Liv, especially when she’s drunk. On at least a couple of times, he steers her towards his car when she’s completely loaded.

It is a slow burn of a film. There isn’t a lot of incident. Not a lot happens. For most of the film’s run time, I felt myself waiting for something to happen. Something horrible. That’s not a knock on the film at all, I found it rather exhilarating. So many horror films go running straight to the jump scares and the violence, that it was rather pleasing to watch a film so willing to take its time.

I hesitated to make this my Friday Night Horror film because, well, to be honest, the horror never really comes. It doesn’t end in a bloodbath. Not to spoil things but it does end with a bit of violence, but not in the traditional horror movie sense. There are some tonal shifts moving the film between horror, thriller, and something like a workplace-from-hell drama that the film doesn’t quite pull off. But mostly it really worked for me.

Indiana Jones & The Dial of Destiny is the Pick of the Week

dial of destiny bluray

I love me some Indiana Jones. Not all of the films are great, but Raiders of the Lost Ark is a masterpiece and the rest of them are quite enjoyable to watch. I’ve even (more or less) come around to the one with the aliens.

I wasn’t able to see the new one, Dial of Destiny in the theater so I’m excited to finally get to see it at home. You can read about that and the other Blu-rays coming out this week over at Cinema Sentries.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Knock at the Cabin (2023)

knock at the cabin

A young family is vacationing at a remote cabin in the woods. Seven-year-old Wen (Kristen Cui) is outside catching grasshoppers. A huge, hulking man slowly approaches. He says his name is Leonard (Dave Bautista) and despite his size, he’s gentle and kind. We’ll later learn he is an elementary teacher and we can believe that in his demeanor and actions.

But while he is being nice to Wen, engaging in her grasshopper collecting, he keeps looking over his shoulder as if something menacing is going to approach.

Moments later three people do appear. Leonard tells Wen that they are going to have to come into the cabin and that she should tell her dads.

Wen panics at this and then rushes to the cabin, and screams at her Dads – Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) to come inside and lock the door. They try to calm her down but when they see Leonard, and all his girth, standing at the door they get worried. When they see the other three carrying what appear to be makeshift weapons, they panic.

Leonard tries to explain that they need to come inside. He does so in his school teacher’s voice. The film makes great use of Bautista’s size juxtaposed against his kindly demeanor. But he also says they will force themselves in if the men don’t unlock the doors.

The doors remain locked and these strangers do force themselves in. After a brief fight, where Eric sustains a concussion, Eric and Andrew are tied up.

The strangers, which also include a nurse, Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), a cook Adriane (Abby Quinn), and a violent redneck Redmond (Rupert Grint) tell a strange tale about how each of them has been having visions about the end of the world. About how Eric and Andrew must make a decision – a grave decision to stop it. They must choose one member of their family to sacrifice – to kill, to murder – to stop the oncoming apocalypse.

That’s completely mad. No one would believe a few nutters barging into their house spouting that nonsense. And our heroes don’t believe it. But then the film starts to make us, and them believe.

I won’t spoil the details but the film uses the isolated setting and a few other tricks to make this scenario plausible. Director M. Night Shyamalan is an expert in creating tension out of fantastical settings and stories.

Still, I never quite bought into the premise. The thing about a film like this is that you spend all your time wondering what the film is going to do in the end. Will the apocalypse come? Or will it be averted by someone being sacrificed? Or will they sacrifice someone only to realize that the strangers were in fact crazy and nothing actually happened on the outside? Or will it have an oblique ending, will we never know if the apocalypse was real or not?

Apparently, the movie ends differently than the book, and most people seem pretty upset with the changes they made. I’ve not read the book, but the ending definitely was not satisfying. But I’m not sure it could have done anything to really satisfy. As I said, I never quite bought into what the story was selling.

Still, I quite liked the film. Shyalaman is a very good director and a master of camera placement and movement. I was enthralled with the filmmaking even when the story let me down.