Midweek Movie Free Talk

welp, another week where I was supposed to watch The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), but fuck that -- it sounds like a downer and its long. So instead, I decided to rewatch Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair. Its all as one movie, there's an animated sequence for O-Ren Ishii, the Crazy 88 fight is in color, and some other extras. It supposedly matches Tarantino's own cut he shows at the New Bev.

Anyway, its awesome and the only way to get it is piracy. Look for MiLKMAN in the rls name -- that's the right one.

Woke up to really good news that two Kira Muratova films are coming to the Criterion Collection in August: Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell, which is really good news because those were two films that were previously unavailable in the U.S. except maybe on a shitty Amazon DVD. She's a Ukrainian filmmaker and those are hard to come by in the west.

I've been exploring a lot of films from soviet satellite states in general lately, with one being the great film Revenge from Yermek Shinarbayev, which is about a boy that has to spend his life avenging a sister that was murdered before he was ever born. It's also really interesting as a historical fiction film because it explores the little known migration of Koreans to Russian territories for work. Also, The Needle directed by Rashid Nugmanov which is like a more action oriented Requiem for a Dream with Soviet Rock in place of the techno. Really good stuff!!

I watched Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes today! I actually enjoyed it more than I thought I was, going off the trailers at least. I don't think it reached the heights of the original trilogy, to be fair, but I think it sets up the sequel fairly well at least.

Just speaking as an ex Christian, I really liked the (kinda obvious) parallels to twisting religion to your own goals, and I did like that Noa was named what he was, especially when seeing the climax of the movie. The movie itself was kinda weirdly paced for sure, but honestly I don't mind too much. I'm also a fan of post-apocolypse stuff, and it's nice to finally see the series leaning into it.

One thing that didn't help was my face blindness though. I'm already face blind to humans basically, so telling apes apart was definitely a struggle sometimes.

I watched Totally Killer (2023) and really liked it. The elevator pitch would be "Scream meets Back to The Future", kinda, in that it's about a murderer and involves someone going back in time to the 1980s. I don't like horror / gore, so the stabbing scenes were pretty awful, but they are done in that over-the-top slasher film style - there's one in particular that looked really fake, you could pretty much see the squibs going off separate to the knife! I'm a huge fan of time travel movies so put up with that gruesomeness to enjoy the rest of the film.

The Strangers: Chapter One

This has gotten some of the worst reviews for any horror film this year so far. It also has the highest opening weekend for a horror film besting the January horror film Night Swim. I really liked the trailer for this (their use of Trouble by Cage the Elephant got me) and when the reviews initially came out I became hesitant to watch it. But then the RT score kept falling and is currently at around 15% so that sparked my curiosity.

I didn't care for the original Strangers and I think it's weird that people are acting like remaking it is heretical. I also don't get the utter disdain for this film. It's basically the first film but it trades in the indie handheld feeling of the original for more of a studio feel. So I guess people just really liked that handheld footage that they hate this so much.

I would say it's equal to the original in quality (as in not very good) and Prey at Night is the only good film in this franchise.

It's kind of a sad year for horror so far. Even the ones that have gotten positive reception like Abigail and The First Omen have bombed at the box office. Night Swim is still the highest grossing horror film of the year at 30M DOM and 80M WW. This time last year we had both critical and commercial hits in M3GAN and Scream VI. Hopefully MaXXXine picks up some of the slack as well as Terrifier 3.

off topic, but why do you post this instead of it being automated?