Demons (1985) & Demons 2 (1986)

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It occurs to me that having moved all my music posts to the other site, I’m going to need to figure out ways to post to this site on a regular basis. I was posting music every day and then occasionally talking about movies and such like. But without the music, this place is gonna look a little barren.

I’m hoping to step up my game a little. An easy way to do that is to keep going through my Cinema Sentries posts and linking to them here.

First up are a couple of “classic” Lamberto Bava horror flicks. I recently upgraded my Blu-ray player to a 4K UHD one and these were the first films I watched on it.

The films are ridiculous, and bonkers, and so, so much fun.

You can read my review here.

Animation in August: Song of the Sea (2014)

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Song of the Sea is the second part of an Irish Folklore Trilogy from director Tomm Moore (the first being The Secret of Kells, and the last Wolfwalkers). I’ve seen The Secret of Kells and like it I found the animation in Song of the Sea to be gorgeous, and the folklore fascinating, but the actual story somewhat lacking. There is just some part of these films that I cannot connect to. I don’t know why.

Set in the early 1980s Song of the Sea follows a young boy, Ben (David Rawle), and his younger sister Saoirse (Lucy O’Connell). They live in a lighthouse on a small island off the coast of Ireland. Their mother died while giving birth so Saoirse and their Dad (Brendan Gleeson) still mourns for her. Deeply. So much so that he struggles to be a parent for his two children.

One night, on her birthday, Saoirse runs into the sea and swims with some seals. Though the family doesn’t know it, she is a selkie (a mythological creature that can shapeshift between human and seal). Her Granny (Fionnula Flanagan) finds Saoirse in the sea and thinks she’s about to drown. She nags Dad into letting her take the children to her place on the mainland.

Naturally, the two kids decide they must return home and sneak away in the night. But Saoirse is fully turning into a selkie and as such she needs her coat to survive. Her coat that her father took from her and threw into the sea.

The two have a mighty adventure getting home, running into fairies, the Great Seanachaí (an ancient storyteller with hair as long as the world), and a mean old owl witch.

The story is fine. It is a classic adventure. It is told well, but again there is something about it I don’t connect to. I don’t know if it is these kids, or maybe I have trouble with the mythology here. It definitely isn’t explained thoroughly, you are just sort of left to understand who these creatures are. But I’ve enjoyed other fantasy stories with deep myths. So I don’t know.

The animation is spectacular. It uses a mix of hand-drawn and computer-generated art. The backgrounds are super detailed but also look like sets on a stage. Nothing is realistic looking but drawn in a unique and imaginative way. Each frame is astonishingly beautiful.

I absolutely recommend it. I know many will connect to the story in a way that I don’t. Even though I didn’t it is still a lovely bit of animation.

Animation in August: Batman: Year One (2011)

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Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Batman: Year One comic from 1987 is one of the greatest comic book stories of all time. It traces Bruce Wayne’s transformation into the vigilante known as Batman while simultaneously tracing Jim Gordon’s first year policing in Gotham.

It partially inspired Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005) and has influenced countless comics since it was published.

For well over a decade DC has been creating straight-to-video animated movies that are adapted from some of their best and well-known comics (or periodically are original creations). I’ve seen a few and I mostly like them. They often involve A-list actors and creators and exist somewhere between what you’d normally think of as a straight-to-video release and true made-for-the-theater cinematic experience.

It has been far too long since I read the comic, so I can’t say how closely this adaptation follows the story, but from what I’ve read online it does indeed follow it closely. Perhaps too closely. A good adaption needs to let go of the source material in some ways so that it can allow cinema’s strengths to shine through.

Bruce Wayne (Ben McKenzie) returns to Gotham City after a 12-year absence. He’s still mourning the loss of his parents and his one goal is to enact the type of justice the police force seems incapable of granting.

Police Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Bryan Cranston) has just transferred to Gotham. He left his last post because he dared to take down a corrupt cop and the rest of the police force shunned him for it. Gotham Police isn’t just a place with a few bad apples. It has a basket full of them. Hell, the entire tree is corrupt from top to bottom. Police Commissioner Loeb (Jon Polito) is openly corrupt.

The film follows Bruce Wayne as he becomes Batman and fights crime in Gotham, while Gordon battles corruption on the police force.

It is pretty good. Again my memory of the book is too fuzzy to really compare, but I do know I loved the book and I didn’t love this. It is a fine story told well. Cranston especially is good as Gordon. The animation is fine. The action sequences are well-developed. But it never wowed me. I’d never recommend this over the comic.

Animation in August: Vampire Hunter D (1985)

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This is one of those films I thought I had seen. I remember hearing about in college or thereabouts. It generated some buzz because it was a very adult animated film with lots of sex and violence. That seemed very unusual to me at the time. I have a vague memory of renting it and watching it, but no actual memories of what the film was about. Watching it yesterday brought back no memories whatsoever.

Which is good as had I remembered any part of it I would not have watched it again. Vampire Hunter D is a bad film. It is poorly animated, the writing is awful. It takes what could be a cool concept and absolutely does nothing with it.

A young woman, Doris Lang, is attacked by Count Mangus Lee, a 10,000-year-old vampire while taking a walk . He lets her go but within a few days, she will turn into a vampire and be forced to marry the Count.

She hires our titular vampire hunter to help kill Count Lee and thus be freed from his spell. D is a human/vampire hybrid (or a Dhampir if you will), his mother having been seduced by a powerful vampire many years ago. He’s also got a symbiote living in his hand. It has a mouth and is quite chatty. It reminded me of the silly animal sidekicks in Disney movies.

He’s super powerful. He agrees to help Doris. He goes on a quest to defeat the Count, encountering a number of grotesque magical creatures along the way. This includes the three sisters – siren-like creatures who turn into snakes and suck the life force out of anyone. There’s also the Count’s son and daughter who are conniving, scheming, and totally at odds with one another. He wants to usurp the Count, she thinks his desire to marry a commoner is ill-advised.

I love a good quest story and there are some interesting ideas here. It is based upon a series of books by Hideyuki Kikuchi and it has that feeling of containing a deep mythology, but the movie botches pretty much all of it.

The biggest failure of the movie lies in the animation. It looks cheap. It looks like those cartoons I used to watch on television after school. Think GI Joe or He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Some of the character concepts are interesting – especially that of D who is fitted with a good hat and long cape – but the animation looks sloppy. During action scenes the characters strike a pose while the background turns into a generic set of constantly moving lines. It is meant to denote movement and action, but really it just looks like an easy way for the animators to save a little time and money. Any sense of location and actual movement is lost.

In 2000 they released a sort-of sequel, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. From the trailers, the animation looks much improved. I dig vampires and vampire hunters/slayers so I might give it a shot. It surely will be an improvement over this garbage.

Animation in August

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As a kid, like all kids, I suppose I loved animated movies, or cartoons as we called them back then. I grew up in the 1980s so my memories are filled with the films of Rankin Bass and Disney, though I was slightly too old to have enjoyed the Disney renaissance of the 1990s as they came into theaters. Later I fell in love with Pixar and then Studio Ghibli. I am a fan of animation, though not a superfan. So I thought it would be fun this month to watch a bunch of animated films.

One of the great things about animation is that it is a type of filmmaking, not a genre. It comes in all shapes, sizes, and genres. There are animated films for kids and adults, there are funny films and sad films, scary films and exciting films. They can be hand drawn or computer-generated, and they come in all kinds of styles.

While I will no doubt watch some Disney films and Ghibli movies, my goal is to dig a little deeper into the well and find some lesser-known movies. I want to watch the films animated geeks go on and on about but that the general crowds don’t know about.

With that in mind if you have any recommendations I’d love to hear them.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Wicked City (1987)

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Renzaburō Taki has been chatting up Makie at a Tokyo bar for months. Finally, she agrees to take him home with her. As soon as they arrive she strips off her clothes and they have passionate sex. As soon as he is finished she shows her true colors. She’s a demon. She morphs into a spider-like creature with long appendages and a mouth-like vagina that’s full of teeth. He manages to pull out before she chomps his member off and she flees out the window.

Outside, in the dark edges of the city live the creatures of the Black World. They are demons from an alternate dimension who can look like humans when they need to and live among us. Centuries ago a truce was made between the humans and the demons and they’ve lived peaceably together. Within a few days, a new pact must be signed, but there are rebel factions on both sides who want to stop that treaty from being signed.

Taki is a member of an elite organization known as the Black Guard designed to keep the peace between humans and demons. He’s assigned to protect Giuseppe Mayart, a 200-year-old mystic who signed the last treaty and will be instrumental in ensuring the new one is signed as well.

Taki is teamed with Makie a Black Guard from the Black World. They go through a series of adventures battling an assortment of demons trying (and often failing) to protect Giuseppe.

Wicked City is an inventive, beautifully designed bit of animated horror. Taki acts like a gumshoe out of some old film noir. Makie is cool as a cucumber. She’s not exactly a femme fatale, but she has that ice-cold attitude. The look of the film is a mix between neo-noir and steampunk. The demons are pure Japanese tentacle monsters.

I loved most of it. The story is good, the characters interesting, and the filmmaking is mostly spot-on. I love a good mix of crime stories and fantastic monsters.

However, if I may issue my first-ever trigger warning in a movie review the film is quite misogynistic. Nearly every man oggles Makie and whenever she is sexually assaulted (and she is sexually assaulted more than twice) the film lingers on her naked body. It is obsessed with her breasts. Even while being gang raped they make her moan with pleasurable noises.

Now I’m not against sex in cinema, and I’ve enjoyed the male gaze in more than a few movies. I’m fine with characters who do evil things and there are times when sexual assault and rape can serve a purpose. It sometimes does serve a purpose here. But the way those scenes are filmed made it more than a little gross.

If you can get passed that though, it is quite a good film. The world-building is excellent and some of the demons are truly terrifying, and weird, and imaginative. The animation is beautiful (and weird, and imaginative). Definitely recommend it for those who think they can stomach it.

The Movie Journal: July 2024

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I am working diligently on getting the new site up and running. I’ve been able to import most of my favorite artists and have started importing all of the many artists who I don’t really collect but whom I have one or two or three shows from. There are a ton of them so that is going to be a slow process.

I suspect I’ll go ahead and start letting people in next week. But I’ll have more on that once I’m ready.

Clearly, I’ve not been posting to this site as I’ve been doing all that work on the new one. But The Midnight Cafe is important to me. I hope to continue writing about movies and other things even though I’m moving the music sharing elsewhere. As such I wanted to go ahead and do my regular movie breakdown for February.

I watched 41 movies in July. 35 of them were new to me. 15 of them were made before I was born. This month’s theme was Sci-Fi in July and I watched 21 movies in that genre (more or less, science fiction is hard to pin down). I watched two movies from 2024, one of which (Maxxxine) I actually watched in the theater.

I quite enjoyed watching science fiction films this month. That’s a genre I like, but don’t necessarily gravitate towards. So it was fun digging into it a little bit, although as usual, I didn’t do as much writing about it as I wanted to.

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The actor’s list stayed pretty much the same this month save for Christopher Lee jumping into that four-way tie for third place with six films watched. I caught a couple of his Hammer Horror films this month.

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The director’s field changed a bit with Terence Fisher entering the scene in first place with five films. He helmed a bunch of those Hammer Horror films and the wife and I have been watching a lot of them this year. George Cukor also entered the list with three films. There are at least 16 directors with two films on the list. At this point of the year, I start thinking about these contests, so I’ll probably start planning some viewings from a few of these directors.

Here’s the full list:

A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) ****
Demons 2 (1986) ***1/2
Demons (1985) ****
Your Name. (2016) ****
It Should Happen to You (1954) ****
The Gorgon (1964) ***1/2
Phase IV (1974) ****
Stolen Face (1952) **
Limbo (2023) ***1/2
Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989) ***1/2
The Return of Godzilla (1984) ****
Lady Terminator (1989) ***
Tchao Pantin (1983) ****
Ten Little Indians (1989) ***
The Evil (1978) ***1/2
Brightburn (2019) ***
The Quiet Earth (1985) ****
Doctor Who: The Romans (1965) ***1/2
The More the Merrier (1943) ****
Stargate (1994) ***
Sphere (1998) **
Lady Frankenstein (1971) ***1/2
Eyewitness (1981) ***1/2
The Horror of Frankenstein (1970) ***1/2
Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) ***1/2
The Canyons (2013) *1/2
MaXXXine (2024) ***1/2
The Good German (2006) ***1/2
Bandits of Orgosolo (1961) ****1/2
Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum (1940) ***
Poor Things (2023) ****
Virus (1980) ***
The City of the Dead (1960) ****
The Night Strangler (1973) ***
The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) ****
Barbarella (1968) ***1/2
Akira (1988) ****
I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) ***
Palm Springs (2020) ****
Paprika (2006) ****

10,000 Maniacs – Shows by Date

1984.xx.xx – Atlanta, GA
1984.09.07 – London, England
1985.05.16 – Amsterdam, The Netherlands
1986.03.xx – Lost Songs – March 1986 Demos
1986.03.08 – Rochester, NY
1986.03.28 – Daytona Beach, FL
1986.04.14 – San Francisco, CA
1986.04.19 – Portland, OR
1986.06.03 – Jamestown, NY
1986.07.08 – Hoboken, NJ
1986.10.11 – New York, NY
1987.xx.xx – In My Tribe Demos
1987.09.01 – London, England
1987.09.15 – Milan, Italy
1987.11.09 – Leicester, England
1987.11.11 – Portsmouth, England
1987.12.17 – Philadelphia, PA
1988.02.23 – San Francisco, CA
1988.03.25 – London, England
1988.04.14 – Chicago, IL
1988.04.19 – Minneapolis, MN
1988.07.01 – London, England
1988.07.22 – New York, NY
1988.07.31 – London, England
1989.03.13 – Geneseo, NY
1989.03.19 – Geneseo, NY
1989.05.19 – Richard Skinner Sessions
1989.07.04 – Buffalo, NY
1990.10.23 – New York, NY
1990.11.02 – Ann Arbor, MI
1992.03.30 – Our Time In Eden Rehearsals
1992.11.10 – Miami, FL
1993.06.03 – Los Angeles, CA
1999.03.28 – Anchorage, AK – Natalie Merchant
2010-2014 – Natalie Merchant Live at the BBC
2010.05.10 – Brussels, Belgium
2010.05.14 – Hamburg, Germany
2016.03.18 – San Francisco, CA – Natalie Merchant

The Decision

As I mentioned in the last post one of the ways I had thought of to make this whole thing work was to create a brand new movie site – call it The Midnight Movie Cafe – and keep the old site private where I would still share music links.

As I also mentioned the trouble with this is that The Midnight Cafe has a certain amount of cache. It is a known site. It has been indexed by search engines. Every day people discover the site through Google Searches or because some other site has linked to me.

A movie site needs that Google juice. I want people to discover those writings. Now I know I’ll never get rich talking about movies, I’ll never make any kind of real money through it at all. But I hope I can continue to grow it a little bit and get a small following.

But the music site doesn’t need any sort of cache. I don’t want people discovering it through search. It should be anonymous.

So, I’ve decided to switch it around – the new site, call it The Midnight Music Cafe, will be dedicated to ROIO sharing and it will remain private. The old site will be all about movies and pop culture and everything else that floats my boat besides ROIOs.

Unfortunately, this does mean a lot of extra work for me. There is a large collection of music posts that I need to transfer to the new site. Luckily I discovered that I can export posts from the old blog and import them to the new blog fairly easily. The site is too big to do that all at once, but I can do it by artist.

Even so, when I import them I need to go through them to make sure everything came out alright. And then on the old site, I need to make each post private so that when I make the entire site public those posts will not be viewable to anybody.

It also means that you all will have to register to view my new site and sign up for the e-mails. You’ll need your WordPress login to do that. So if you have not registered for a free WordPress account I recommend doing so now. If you do not I think you can still sign up for the e-mails, but I’ll have to figure out how that works.

It also means that if you are already subscribed to The Midnight Cafe and you do not like my movie reviews, you’ll have to figure out how to unsubcribe.

I am not ready to open the new site up just yet. I don’t know that I’ll get everything moved over before I open it up, but it still needs quite a bit of work before I let you all in.

Naturally, while I do all of this I will not be uploading new shows. So please be patient and I hope you look forward to the new site.