Noise and Toys

I resisted jumping to my keyboard during the ginned-up controversy surrounding the premiere of James Gunn’s Superman because a) I was extremely busy at the time and b) there was already more than enough digital ink being wasted over it. If you’ve been enjoying the Patrick the Starfish lifestyle and only just now crawled from under that rock, the kerfuffle was over the fact that Supes is, essentially, an immigrant, and the national zeitgeist revolved. we were told, around disparaging immigrants. (Well, and the fact that this Superman actually cares about people and Ma and Pa Kent hadn’t read Atlas Shrugged, but that’s a digression for another time.)

Aside from the understandable reaction of What the fuck Superman did you grow up with, anyway that caused most of the churn on the interwebs, the other major reaction should have been this is obviously manufactured outrage. To use the Internet against itself, I bring you some truth from that same fount:

The right wing profit machine must find something new to be angry about every day to keep their audience hopped up on adrenalin and willing to shell out money to help influencers fend off the latest barbarians at the gate, however they think that works. So a decent, caring Kal-El must have seemed like a godsend to them. Low-hanging fruit, as it were.

“Why would liberals do this?”

So if you got swept up in that one, I understand. They have since moved on to the next Two Minute Hate, but if this is the first time you got caught in the Outrage Machine, congratulations, Patrick! But I think you should remember this, how it felt, and store it away to compare against other such incursions. This time, at least, they were screaming about a fictional character. The usual target is LBTQ+, trans, or a just plain normal person who has an opinion counter to the dank, steaming worldview these people cling to.

They make me end sentences with prepositions, so fuck them, let’s move on.

Superman is a wonderful movie – it’s the one I wanted in 2013, and didn’t get. Tim Lucas called it overstuffed, which I will admit, is valid. But I’m the guy who orders the pizza with the cheese-stuffed crust, so I didn’t mind. It was fun, which is what a Superman movie should be. I loved the Easter Eggs. I always check out Ryan Arey’s Screen Crush videos for which ones I missed (mainly the street signs, damn my aging eyes), but just to prove that I have been poisoned by the Internet, I was convinced that I spotted one that nobody else had.

There is a mass evacuation in the third act of the movie, and at one point in the montage, we see a middle-aged lady carrying a terrarium with her pet turtle in it, and I immediately decided that this was a tribute to the Henry Boltinoff half-page Super Turtle comics that DC would tip in to fill space.

Like I said, poisoned by the Internet. And my early childhood.

And I would like a Mr. Terrific movie as soon as possible, please.

Fantastic Four: First Steps did a similar good job cleansing previous versions from my psyche; everything I was worried about got dismissed pretty quickly. They absolutely nailed Ben Grimm. Reed Richards is the most intelligent person in the room, and also the dumbest. Sue is still obviously the most powerful, and they even managed to not make Johnny a douche. And Galactus! Daaaaaaamn.

I have the weekend off, which is rare enough in my work, and when I get them I enjoy the feeling of just existing. I sit here, drinking coffee, and not feeling any pressure to do anyone’s bidding. It’s nice, and I’m imagining that retirement will feel a lot like this, though with a lot less money. Come on, 70!

Which is an awkward segue into my next rumination, which involves neither movies or comics. You are now either sighing with relief or clicking somewhere else. Either is valid.

In an unfortunate incident last week, I broke my coffee cup.

The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes, 1967

Now, again, there are likely two reactions: aw, that’s too bad and Shit! What did you do? i.e., normal people and coffee drinkers like myself.

I was the only coffee drinker in my house (until my wife discovered Caramel-flavored coffee), so there were the typical coffee cups in the cabinet for company, small and polite. And then, there was mine, big enough to hold a 12 ounce cup and still have enough room at the top to carry it from room to room without danger of spillage. Virtually perfect for me, except for the color. I had bought its mate at a local store, and it was gray -my favorite color – and when I broke that one I went back, found that model had been discontinued, but found one in the back clearance rack that was brown. I am not a fan of the color (although the rental house I moved into is exclusively that color, blech). But that cup was my boon companion for years.

Found one on Amazon that was not the same design – the old one sorta looked like a potbelly stove – but it was large, and it was gray, so I ordered it. In the interim I was using our largest surviving cup, which Lisa had bought because it was decorated with Shakespearian insults, but I was walking very carefully from kitchen to office. The new cup arrived, huzzah!

I didn’t like it.

One of the new cups, with Ganesh for size. Note room for two fingers, below.

It was at this point I had to consider the matter of cup design, not just the size. I remember only doing that once, when I was looking for the tall coffee cups I had seen in the Double R Diner in Twin Peaks, good times, good times. I had already figured out that a thin handle was no good for my drinking style. It had to be broad, so I could comfortably hold it aloft in my right hand while I got distracted by social media in-between sips.  Then I had to analyze the way my fingers had become accustomed to gripping that handle: index and middle finger through the loop of the handle, ring and pinky fingers under the handle for support.

The Amazon cup’s handle went all the way down to the bottom of the cup, foiling that.

The Once and Future Cup, and I now realize Ganesh needs cleaning.

My usual approach to this sort of thing is adapt or die! but goddammit, this was my coffee we were talking about. So the Hermit had to actually leave his brown sanctuary and go out in the world to audition coffee cups. And luckily for me, the Halloween themed cups were out.

So now I have four large cups (including the unfortunate Amazon one). Absolutely none of them match, which is wonderful. Lisa claims my favorite will become the one festooned with Disney villains, which is quite likely – it’s the largest (almost too heavy when filled)(almost) – and has the legend “Absolutely Miserable” in red around the inner lip, so I can see it when drinking. It’s almost too perfect for me.

Things get busy again this week, hope to see you soon. Take care, and take care of each other. That will piss the bad guys off more than anything.

August 3, 2025
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck, Senile Ramblings . Tags: , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

The Movie Travails Continue

THE CONTINUING DRAMA OF THE NERD AND HIS MOVIE COLLECTION

or, How Our Narrator Discovered to His Horror A Discrepancy Most Injurious, and Then Proceeded to Solve It, Although Many Factors Weighed Against Him

Well, as collectors like myself are all too aware, the Barnes & Noble chain puts all Criterion discs at half-price during the month of July, a month when most people in Texas just sign over their paychecks to the power company so we can sit in cool little boxes until we overload the grid (Cue the chorus singing “Tradition!“). This year, however, I actually set aside enough to, I promised myself, buy four discs – that would be two for each paycheck.

The first two were items I genuinely lusted after, Godzilla vs Biollante (I had forgotten how odd that one was) and the set of Richard Lester’s Three and Four Musketeers, which were formative to the young me. We’ll get to the second paycheck’s purchase in a moment.

There are still many Criterions I want (and looking at this October’s releases, there will be even more), so I combed through the catalog to make my next choices. Most of my wish list I could back burner because “I’ve already seen that one” (and you can just shut up right now about already having seen the two movies I had already bought), and then I hit a snag. You see, I use the program DVD Profiler to track my collection. Used it for years and years, bought a lifetime license back in two thousand mumble mumble. It allows you to post an online version of your collection, which I use in the wild to make sure I don’t buy duplicates. That even works sometimes!

Honestly – I do not like this cover.

So scanning through B&N’s catalog, I came to Being There, and just to make sure, I alt-tabbed over to my collection, and holy shit, Being There was, ironically, not there. What the hell. I love that movie, and studied Peter Sellers’ brilliant blank slate for a play I once did. How could I not own a copy?

So I walked the fifteen feet to the Movie Room and checked. Yep, there it was. Now, as we’ve gone into tiresome detail, I had just re-catalogued the collection. A little more poking proved that somehow, the beginning of the Criterion section – the numbers and letters A through C – were not in the catalog. Strange. I chalked this up to the Criterion discs being stored and packed separately from those other hoi polloi discs, but cross-checking verified all the other letters were still accurately accounted for, which kind of runs counter to that theory.

Anyway. The then-current count on the collection was 1985, which was a pretty good movie year, but I knew that was going to change. But first, back to the B&N page! The more current release I felt I needed was the Todd Browning triple feature headlined by Freaks, and after some internal debate, probably the purest example of hubris since Brutus decided to assassinate Julius Caesar, I bought the Bondarchuk version of War and Peace, which is, you know, eight hours long, all told.

I have always wanted to see it. The fact that I’m probably going to have to wait until retirement to do so just means I now really have to live that long.

So! On to getting the collection current again. But wait! Invelos was offline? Thunderation!

This does happen more frequently than it should, but if you check into any internet DVD Profiler User group, you see a lot of “Here we go again” entries. DVD Profiler downloads a list of currently released discs to facilitate cataloging, and without that, the program is paralyzed, at least as fair as entering new discs is concerned. After several days it was back, and in the meantime my B&N discs had arrived (B&N’s shipments are really damn skippy, I must say!) and I could finally make my reckoning complete.

The count was now 2024, the year everything went to shit. Luckily I found two more discs at a Friends of the Library sale, so now it’s at 2026, and we have entered the unknown. (If you must know – and who doesn’t? I managed to replace discs of Mad Monster Party and The Boxtrolls. My puppet animation game is strong.)

I had fully intended to write more about other things, but I am called away. Afternoons like this only remind me how much I miss doing this, so I’m going to work harder at not working harder but making time to write more. The whole manufactured furor over Superman almost got me here, but why add more noise? And that’s what it was, noise.

Anyway, a bit more on that when I get back.

(I’m not as good at leading up to a cliffhanger as, say, Warren Ellis, but I’m working on it.)

July 27, 2025
Categories: Mindless Blather . Tags: , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

Well, That’s Over

I finished the first version of this post just past Memorial Day. Why, you might ask, has it taken so long to actually publish? Well, gestures at everything around.

Once again, I want to express my admiration for folks who do this on the regular, no matter what. I, however, am of a weaker bent. If the world is on fire, I’ve a mind to say, nobody needs to hear this. And all the polishing and re-writing gets pushed away. (It also didn’t help that I was actually polishing and re-writing it and a WordPress glitch erased everything I had done soooooo)

Then again, I once did a series of social media posts… was it on Twitter? I think it was, before that went to shit… where I was whining about going to my murder mystery dinner theatre gig because I’d had a bad week, but I eventually came around to the realization that the audience was there because they needed a laugh, and I was there to provide that. That whole thread ended with “But doctor, I am Pagliacci!”. Did the show (of course. I am – or was – a professional), and actually had a blast.

Lesson learned: do the shit.

So anyway. Pagliacci reporting for duty. Now, if everyone in my life would stop getting sick and requiring my time, I might get this to be an enterprise that updates a little more frequently than every three months. *rimshot* applause

 Back to the Past.

A tenterhook
This is what one looks like, incidentally.

Yes, I’m sure, as our country burns to the ground, that you are still on tenterhooks to hear about the continuing struggle betwixt myself and my movie collection. If you’re joining us late, I have recently moved and not all of my discs moved with me, for various reasons. DVD Profiler claimed I had somewhere around 3300 discs, but it was an unreliable narrator because I hadn’t been doing due diligence when I gave away discs and the like.

So I’ve been going through what is actually here with me in the residence, weeding out duplicates and finding out what remained behind. Some of it was expected, some heartbreaking. I once had two copies of Paranorman, now I have none. But somehow I wound up with three copies of Star Trek Beyond.

“Hey, my nephew knows Photoshop, I bet he’d do it for cheap!”

So now, after all this, I am currently at 1939 discs and/or sets, including a couple that DVD Profiler refuses to recognize (I acknowledge that the box art for Captain America: Brave New World is dreadfully ugly, but come ON). The first recount was like. 1954, which left me with the utterly bizarre urge to go out and buy three more, so it would total 1957, the year of my birth. That likely speaks to my quotient of what the kids refer to as “The ‘Tism”, but it got quelled when I remembered my son pined for the Doctor Who discs, which pared the number down to 1939, the year The Wizard of Oz was made. I realize that only means 18 discs for him, but I kept all the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker he hadn’t already made off with.

Now the middle of June and I have gotten it back up to 1955. Two more and I have to find another year to fixate upon.

So I am close to completing something I have desired for years: my very own movie room. I was so excited that the day I finished the re-cataloguing, I took a video, even though I wasn’t really finished:

I am a senior citizen and am allowed my eccentricities (see number of discs, above).

I will agree there is some neatening-up to be done. Those unattractive boxes set horizontally across each shelf will likely stand as a monument to my inability to pull every disc beginning with a certain letter out of multiple boxes until I have advanced to another letter further into the alphabet. Also. bookshelves have more vertical spacing than is needed for DVDs and especially blu-rays. But I had a bunch of bookshelves and those specialized media shelves are much pricier.

To continue bragging about my space (though honestly looking at these pictures from my desktop, it looks like a room hastily set up by a weirdo without the skills or resources to make it look professional) (imagine that):

You couldn’t get a good view in the video, but perched over the TV are a couple of gifts from my wife: the Horrified B-Movie Victims figures, and the Godzilla neon. The HORROR neon is a gift from our old friend Rodney, and it leads to the action figure of Vampira, which is a gift from me.

There are two of those pricy media shelves, which are for special parts of the collection. You see one under the Horror neon which holds the superhero movies (shut up, I still love them and will continue to love them) and some box sets. And, as you can see, the complete Monty Python and Emma Peel Avengers sets.

But the first media shelf I bought was specifically for the Criterion Collection (and Twin Peaks sets, which I’m going to bet join other David Lynch entries in the Collection, anyway). This was to replace an older and larger media shelf which did not survive the move, probably because I put it together twenty years ago. Hopefully, these two shelves will last another twenty years, at which point I will be dead and they will be my son’s problem.

So far, so good, just typical white man oooweee, Looka what I done! but then it starts getting weird.

I attempted to put the finishing touches on it Memorial Day weekend, which was the longest span of free time I’ve had in months. The space was practical at the time of the video, yet somehow, I’ve yet to watch a movie in its entirety. I started the new French Three Musketeers last night, and though it is undeniably a quality product, I was unable to get more than halfway.

After a moment of panic and thinking omigod I’ve forgotten how to watch movies, I settled down and have been thinking about that. I have been very busy with the move and all the bullshit that comes with it while still working 40 hours a week and caring for my wife, a brittle diabetic… so maybe it’s a bit of guilt that I’m not doing anything connected with those instead of entertaining myself.

But then, I would also have to cut my beard.

But now I realize that this feels like a stretch of time back five or six years ago, during the pandemic, during lockdown, and nobody had an attention span anymore. We were actively worried about survival, and what dreadful news the next day would bring. And we all remember who the President was then. And here we are again, only, I feel, in a much worse situation because it’s been proven my countrymen are venal, hateful idiots. If I’m feeling guilty about anything, it’s not donning a beret, smoking Galoises and plotting strikes against Nazi bases.

To attempt to turn myself back to the subject at hand: I got through the first Trump years with the help of Marvel movies, and I will doubtless again. Even if they outlaw them. Especially if they outlaw them.

And that’s where it’s been for a while. The world situation hasn’t gotten any better – and there’s my massive understatement for the day – my wife is currently in the hospital, and here I am with my fierce chiweenie dog and unit of a cat, waiting for news. So dammit, let’s finish this thing, shall we?

In a symptom of the Marvel backlash I had been predicting since Endgame, I read one article excoriating Captain America: Brave New World because “obviously Marvel was unprepared for Trump to be elected”. First of all, Who was? and second, How should it have reacted? These movies take years to get to the screen, but also if by some happenstance, Marvel had turned Thunderbolt Ross into a Trump analogue… yeah. I don’t think outlawing such things would be beyond the pale for him. As it is, I think a Chief Executive admitting his wrongdoing and accepting punishment for it is a perfect middle finger to Trump.

Thankfully, he now has his own little war to distract him, so my entertainment is safe until the nukes start flying. Sleep well, everybody, and I sincerely hope we all get to see Fantastic Four: First Steps.

Now press the damn Publish button, wouldya?

 

June 19, 2025
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant, Senile Ramblings . Tags: , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

Anyway.

Gott damn that was a packed three months since I’ve been here last. Let’s see how much I want to clutter your life with my travails.

Longtime readers (there are a least a couple) will recall that the fallout of the COVID years finally caused me to declare bankruptcy, and for a couple of years that was the norm. The garnishing of my paycheck and my wife’s were good practice for surviving on Social Security, which I in fact will likely never get to collect because my idiot countrymen could not bring themselves to vote for a black woman. (as a digression, there is a reason that whoever or whatever is in charge of the universe did not give me super powers, the reason being the death toll would have been quite extreme)

Things changed when a local power play caused me to unwillingly change employers, and at almost the same time, my wife (who had to shut down her school for autistic children) had to quit her new job because her health would not allow it.

In brief – the bankruptcy case was dismissed, at which time we found out that the trustee had not done much at all about the mortgage on our house. All that I can say for sure was my car note got paid off, so that’s something. Foreclosure was a very real possibility. We found someone who would buy the house, getting us out of that deep hock hole, but we had to pack and leave pretty precipitously.

We had been in that house for 24 years, and if you know me at all, that means the house was stacked with stuff that had caught my fancy throughout my life. The house we were moving into (it’s a rental) was smaller, so a lot of it had to go. In a philosophical sense, a lot of it required some labor to access, moving other crap out of the way. Lightening the load was utterly necessary, and doubtless a long time coming, but it still felt wrong.

I had been told several times that I was an episode of Hoarders waiting to happen, but I replied that was nonsense. I wasn’t hoarding, I was curating.

This is where some asshole would doubtless crop up to say, “Okay, then – Pop quiz! What’s important to you?” (Super-powered me would let him live, but only after thinking about it hard) A lot of my books got the chop – my eyesight is failing, anyway, right? I tried to limit myself to three boxes of books. That of course grew to six, and yeaaaaaaaaah, I’m still not sure I held to that, either.

(One thing that surprised the living hell out of me was when I decided to keep my Cerebus phonebooks. The first four of those are first-rate satire, and even though Dave Sim deteriorated into a loon, those were a big part of my life while I was still collecting floppies.)

(Don’t come after me about problematic creators. All my Neil Gaiman stuff made the trip, as well)

(also the Harry Potter film box set, because I’ve only seen the first)

(Anyway.)

Most of my figures are gone, too (I was a big Macfarlane collector in the 90s). A box of swords I had collected over the years, most of which were costume trash, anyway. My swordfighting days are long gone.

So I concentrated on movies.

DVD Profiler says I have almost 3300 discs in my collection. That number is dubious, because I wasn’t good about keeping the database current when I did get rid of discs. I know not all of these made the trip, too, as they were in the garage, and as said before, I couldn’t get to them easily, so what was the point? It was like not owning them at all.

The advantage to the new place is my son is married and no longer living with us, so I finally got my wish: the extra bedroom is mine to line with shelves and get those movies out of boxes and more readily accessible. There is that scurrilous database, though, so I am shelving them slowly, going through the boxes and so far, isolating A through E, and I will comb through the database and finally delete everything that’s not actually here. A slow process, but ultimately worth it, I think.

There are exceptions to that process. All my Marvel movies were together, and now they’re on their own, dedicated shelf. I am missing my copy of Quantumania, which is causing one of my eyes to twitch somewhat alarmingly.

Now I am back about a week later, and the eye-twitching has settled down. I’m pretty sure I know where my copy of Quantumania is located currently, and frankly, it was just easier to buy a new copy. I am pleased to say I have carved out enough time from unpacking other stuff and having my time wasted at City meetings to actually get through the letters A and B (and the movies with numbers for titles), and while my heart isn’t totally broken, there are some missing titles that I do regret, and some whose absence mystify me. The Best Years of Our Lives? I had that in a place of honor, where did it go?

How in the living hell did I wind up with two copies of Breakfast at Tiffany’s? One I know was a gift, but the other… I mean, the fact that I wound up with three copies of The Brainiac is understandable, but Breakfast at Tiffany’s?

Okay, enough of my trials and title tribulations – this could go on forever. At this point, I have finished letters A through E, and in attempting to continue with F and G, I have found no fewer than 30 titles starting with A through E that I missed in my first sorting run. To quote the famous philosopher Charlie Brown, “Good grief!”

Now back to the cataloging.

April 19, 2025
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . Tags: . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

Still Among the Living (so far)

Hey, how are you? Well, I hope. Looking out over the current landscape, I don’t know how, but I hope you’re okay. I’ve been meaning to get back here for some time, and given that I fully expect this administration to kill me, either directly or indirectly, I should probably do that sooner instead of later.

So when we last left our hero, he was embarking upon a new project (and therefore forgetting to schedule his last review for a partial Hubrisween, which still remains in limbo). He was enthusiastic in an almost youthful manner, and plunged ahead.

SPLAT!

Haven’t seen the results of that yet, have you? There’s a reason for that. A brick wall was hit, and it made a tremendous noise that only I heard.

I needed to learn some new stuff to keep my brain from ossifying. So I determined to finally learn the meanings of Tarot cards.

This had the advantage of playing into a lifelong fascination and riding on another longtime nebulous project, which we’ll get into in a bit.

Now, any Tarot practitioner would be able to foretell without cards the thorny path I’d set upon. First, what I was aiming to learn was what is known as the Rider-Waite deck, which to my surprise was not handed down from medieval times, but had only been created in 1909. The “Rider” in the name refers to the original publisher, the Waite to its author, Arthur E. Waite. This deck has long since entered the public domain, so screw Rider, it should be known as the Waite-Smith deck to honor the artist, Pamela Colman Smith. And even then, there’s an argument to be made for “the Smith-Waite deck”.

There’s also not just the Waite-Smith style deck, either. The older forms of the deck were more akin to a modern deck of playing cards (which, ahem, they were), with the portentous Major Arcana and fancy court cards, but most suits having mere depictions of two coins, three coins, four coins and so on, instead of the rich symbolist scenes of Pamela Smith. These are generally referred to as “Marseilles” style decks, it seems.

I covered this much better in one of the unpublished blog posts about the project, which might still see the light of day.

Ace of Swords, Waite-Smith deck

The nebulous project mentioned earlier was even more of an infrequent hobbyist pastime: I had long also been interested in the different artistic interpretations of the Waite-Smith deck imagery. That was just going to be posted to social media like Mastodon or Bluesky, each post with a random card from four different decks. The major stumbling block here for me was the prevalence of alt-text for images. Please don’t get me wrong, alt-text is a very good thing, overall; but for all the time I would spend describing the art on each card, I might as well have had the satisfaction of writing a blog post.

In the spirit of mystical adventure, I picked a card at random from the deck I’ve been carrying around for, damn, maybe 20, 30 years? It was the Ace of Swords, the beginning of a new idea! I was jazzed.

Ace of Swords, The Steampunk Tarot

Now here is where it gets complicated, as those practitioners mentioned earlier smiled. As I worked my way through the suit of Swords, I was also researching the history of Tarot and discovered more and more how it was linked – sometimes forcibly – to other mystic belief systems.

I was working with the Tarot because I had some luck in younger days using an oracle deck (another creature entirely) to guide me through some rocky times. It made me consider connections which were not obvious at first glance, and those connections helped me quite a bit. So I wanted to use the deck to once again consider possibilities I had missed, avenues not explored. A meditation aid.

What I was not expecting was an attempt to make a deck of cards a Swiss Army knife of mystical beliefs. Once I started trying to unpack the Qaballah – which I am still trying to do – things slowed down and Life with a capital L started demanding my attention.

This venture is far from over. I’ve put too much work into it to simply walk away. It will eventually see the light of day, though who knows in what form. It probably should have been a Tumblr, and it may yet be – but then I would have to learn how to make that platform do what I want, and blah blah blah. It’s likely going to have to wait until my retirement, if I live that long.

Which brings us back to that depressing opening. I had watched shockingly few movies in 2024, but towards the end of that year, a movie called Tarot crossed my path, which claims that a group of young friends “recklessly violates the sacred rule of Tarot readings”, which was something I had not run across in my research. And while watching that, I started getting the itch to return here, to my older hunting grounds, and here we are.

But this post is already long, and if it gets much longer, I will never finish it. So let’s leave that until next time. As was said in equally tendentious times, good night and good luck.

 

January 25, 2025
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

N: Nightshot (2018)

About a third of the way through Nightshot, my son looked into my office and commented, “That looks terrifying.” My response was “Does, doesn’t it?” and the rest was…

Hm.

Nightshot purports to be an urbex video (that’s urban exploration for all us oldsters), where our host (Nathalie Couturier) leads her cameraman through an expansive, abandoned hospital while talking about the history of the horrors that took place there. It seems your typical mad doctor was doing obscene experiments involving pregnant women. At some point Nathalie cheerily announces to her cameraman (and therefore, her audience) that she herself is pregnant, so go ahead and write the rest of the movie yourself. Pretty sure Dr. Freudstein is involved.

My major issue here is that Nightshot is advertised as a one-take movie, and I have some doubts. Once again, whenever we are near something spoooooooky the camera glitches out and the audio goes wild, a major difference being these things also affect our urban explorers (and nice work on the audio effects). These are ready-made opportunities for a cut, so pull the other one. Those are still some extended takes, though, so mad props to Nathalie, who literally carries the movie. If I’m wrong, her achievement is all the more laudable.

Secondly, Nightshot did find itself a hell of a location, to be sure, but as we get deeper into the story, the Blair Witch curse sinks in and we seem to just be wandering endlessly through it. There are rooms that are tricked out for maximum creepiness and story advancement, but man I got tired of that one hall.

One of the tricked-out rooms has a Ouija board in it. Nathalie starts spinning out some bullshit about the spirit board for her audiences, and the Ouija gets so offended it flies across the room. That part I liked.

Never a good sign.

Third, as the story progresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that Nathalie is suffering a miscarriage. My wife and I survived two of those, so I am not appreciative of its use as a plot device.

There is some genuine horror there at the end, but that just seems to play out the Evilspeak model of “get through the bulk of the movie so things can go nuts in the final ten minutes”. I’m not a fan. Nathalie Couturier, though – you can stay.

 

 

October 19, 2023
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

M: Maybe Next Year (2023)

I’m actually surprised I managed to get this far. I’m still the only guy doing what I do at work (I have announced I am no longer interested in auditioning for the role of Superman, with my supervisor’s full support), I’ve been freed from the onus of most of the City meetings this month, and it still hasn’t been enough. As a brief interruption several hours later, the various paperwork snafus have been cleared up. One guy starts tomorrow, one on Monday. Hooray. Now to get back on my bullshit: I’ve got a few reviews lined up for down the line – one goes live tomorrow, in fact – so keep checking.

Surprise!

It’s been good to be reviewing movies again, even in the rough, first draft form I’ve been using. That other project I was working on has gotten ungainly big, and I need to do some pruning there, in my copious free time. But I made a crappy header and bought a domain name, so now I have to do it. In theory.

So now, let us prepare for the terror of SURPRISE HUBRISWEEN REVIEWS!!!!!

October 18, 2023
Categories: Mindless Blather . Tags: . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

L: Last Radio Call (2022)

Sarah Serling (Sarah Froelich) is on a mission: in 2018, her husband, police officer David Serling answered a call to an abandoend hospital, and disappeared. Only his damaged body camera was recovered, and ever since, no one has been able to help her, especially the police.

Sarah’s hired a filmmaker to document her search, so there’s your found footage explanation right there. After she has nearly given up, she gets a surprise phone call from someone who is angrily leaving the force; he was in charge of tracking and archiving the department’s body camera footage. When he was ordered to delete everything, he instead made a copy of everything, and then deleted it. He gives Sarah the copies and announces he’s getting the hell out of Dodge.

What Sarah finds in the memory cards is an incident a few days before Serling’s disappearance, in which Serling was forced to shoot a man who was committing ritual murder in his backyard. There is no offical report of an officer-involved shooting, the death is reported as a standard homicide. Luckily (or not), Sarah sees an ad with the ritual murderer’s twin brother.

This whole thing, we find, involves the Red Sister, a nasty spirit who hangs out on the piece of land the hospital was built on – and it is becoming possible that her husband is actually still alive in there, held prisoner by the Red Sister.

As I’ve said before, I really like found footage movies when they work, and I do think Last Radio Call fits into that category. Sara Froelich has a good, naturalistic delivery that grabbed me at once. Alas, her co-stars aren’t quite up to her quality, but then again, Keekee Suki as the twin brother has a lot of Expository Stuff to get through that no human tongue could make sound natural.

I’m ultimately able to give Last Radio Call a better than passing grade because of the novel nature of its bad guy and dammit, I love a supernatural detective story.

October 17, 2023
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . Tags: , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments

K: Kadaicha (1988)

A group of Australian teens have a problem; they are each having the same dream about a tunnel leading to a torchlit chamber covered in aboriginal markings, where a tall figure is chanting. The figure turns, revealing it is a rotting corpse, and it forces something into their hand before they wake in fright. Upon awakening, they find a kadaicha, a crystal inscribed with, again, aboriginal markings. And whoever finds a kadaicha will die within 24 hours.

There’s a whole lot of familiar tropes in this movie, made four years after Nightmare on Elm Street, and possessing many of the markings of it and its imitators. Our main character, Gail (Zoe Carides) is the daughter of the real estate hustler who masterminded this plagued locale, and as she researches the cause of her friends’ death (and eventually her own imminent doom), she finds the development is built over, basically, an Indian graveyard.

To its credit, the movie makes it a little more than that, with an eye towards Australia’s troubled history. There was a massacre and then a counter-massacre, then a counter-counter massacre, and there are some very angry bones in that chamber. Gail finds there were many indigenous protests about the development, but dear old dad basically just bricked up the hole to the chamber and built over it.

So the neat twist is that the aboriginals weren’t threatening the development with ghostly retribution – they were trying to warn whitey not to do it, because they knew the place was cursed with a capital K.

Kadaicha – eventually re-titled Stones of Death – keeps its political outrage simmering just under the surface, a vital difference making it watchable as more than a Nightmare  wannabe. Director James Bogle manages, in between the typical teen cut-ups, to craft some some nicely weird sequences – the spider POV is especially nice – and turned out an effective little thriller.

October 16, 2023
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , , , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

J: Jack the Ripper (1976)

Klaus Kinski is a deviant weirdo who is a caring doctor by day and a murdering psycho rapist at night. No, that’s the character he plays, but I can see where the confusion lies.

Jack the Ripper is a Swiss/German film directed and partially written by Jess Franco. The poster proclaims “Only NOW Can It Be Shown Like THIS!“, meaning that Kinksi can now rip off all an actress’ clothes before raping and murdering them, often at the same time.

Kinksi is Dr. Dennis Orloff (yeah, Franco wrote this part), tending to his impoverished patients by day, and then being tormented by visions of his mother, who was a prostitute that also wanted him in on the trade. After these nipple-filled nightmares, there’s nothing left for him but to go out and kill. One of his victims is Franco standard Lina Romay, who lasts the longest of his victims, even getting a production number in what looks like the worst cabaret possible on the budget.

As a Franco film, it follows the template of The Awful Dr. Orloff, except without the mad science angle. No, this Orloff is just in it for vengeance against his dead mother. The police are also notably useless as in the original flick, and Inspector Worthless’s girlfriend (Josephine Chaplin) strikes out on her own to find the killer, without telling the Inspector. Nudity will ensue.

Everybody in the movie is a better detective than the Inspector. There’s a blind man character that would give Sherlock Holmes a run for his money. Even the itinerant fisherman played by the musically-named Howard Fux is better at the game than the Inspector.

Reportedly shot in a week, Franco has no time for his usual zoom lens fetish, so the movie feels more like an actual gothic thriller, sort of a boring Hammer flick. A lot of time is spent on the police work and supposedly risible dealings with witnesses, while we wait for Kinski to whack out again. Despite his off-screen infamy, Kinski was a very good, serious actor, and he brings the appropriate level of intensity to his role. There’s some good stuff in here, especially Kinski’s cat-and-mouse game with Romay in a foggy wood, but if you’re familiar at all with the actual Ripper case, man, are you going to be pissed…

October 15, 2023
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

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