Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

Year 16, Day 305 - 10/31/24 - Movie #4,886

BEFORE: All right, Happy Halloween, I hope you had a good one. Our doorbell didn't ring once, so I guess all the neighborhood kids had somewhere better to be, because they sure weren't coming to my house for candy.  Well, fine, that's more candy for me and my wife, I only bought one bag anyway. I'll show you ungrateful kids, I'll eat ALL the Almond Joys myself AND all the Reese's pumpkins AND all the Butterfingers.  See, when you're an adult you can just BUY your favorite candies, you don't have to go door-to-door begging for it. So take that. 

I worked an animation event most of the day, but I was home by 8 pm, we just ordered take-out and watched the finale of "Halloween Baking Championship" to celebrate the day. Then came some candy AND the last movie in my October horror chain - it's all been building to this one, really.  I sat on the previous "Ghostbusters" film a bit too long, I only watched it last year, two years after it was released, which meant that just six months later, there was another sequel.  Had I known I might have saved "Afterlife" for one more year and watched them together, but how was I to know?  The important thing is that I didn't wait as long to watch "Frozen Empire" and now I'm all caught up. 

I'm also all caught up on the "Purge" movies, the "Scream" movies, and the "Godzilla/Kong" franchise, plus I got to the "Beetlejuice" sequel super on time, and knocked off "The Ring" movies and the "Army of the Dead/Army of Thieves" duology.  I only started ONE franchise that I couldn't finish this year, and that was the "X" trilogy, the new sequel "MaXXXine" was left unwatched.  Oh well, you can't win 'em all.  Same goes for the Sony Spider-Verse, I crossed off "Madame Web" but I couldn't cram in the new "Venom" movie, plus "Kraven the Hunter" comes out in December. 

Celeste O'Connor carries over again from "Freaky".  And hey, I started the month with a ghost comedy and I'm going to end it with another one, I love the symmetry. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Ghostbusters: Afterlife" (Movie #4,572)

THE PLOT: When the discovery of an ancient artifact unleashes an evil force, Ghostbusters new and old must join forces to protect their home and save the world from a second ice age. 

AFTER: The younger Ghostbusters crew, aka Igon Spengler's family, move to New York City and run the new franchise out of the old Tribeca fire station, one of just many nods to the original film from 1984.  And there are almost no references to the universally-hated "Ghostbusters 2" sequel, so there's that.  They get the old ECTO-1 car back, but upgrade to some new uniforms, new proton packs, and new ways to contain ghosts, because the old containment facility for the ghosts hadn't been emptied in quite some time, so it must have been getting crowded in there.  Also, that firehouse was then technically the most haunted building in the world, with 40 years og ghosts inside. 

(NITPICK POINT: I don't really like the gunner seat on the car, it just takes too much time to deploy it, spin it around for no reason, and I suspect that once you discuss using the gunner seat, argue over using the gunner seat, deploy the gunner seat, and spin the gunner seat, that ghost is probably gone.  And most likely there's not enough room in Manhattan streets to have someone sticking out the side of the car without them smacking into a double-parked truck and getting seriously hurt.  I approve of the RC ghost trap and the drone ghost trap, but the gunner seat is just a time-waster.)

But really this is a return to form - the firehouse, the return of the car, appearances by all the old Ghostbusters crew that are still alive, and the guy from the original 1984 film who was the head of the EPA and shut down their containment unit is now the Mayor of NY - which makes perfect sense because we've learned that every NYC mayor is a corrupt asshole, except Bloomberg who was too rich to be corrupt, but still probably an asshole.  Mayor Peck wants to shut down the new Ghostbusters more than ever, and he's wanted to do that for 40 years.  Be careful what you wish for, though, because you never know when NYC will be attacked by a giant ghost-demon who wants to re-freeze the world.  I thought hell was supposed to be hot, but who knows, what if it's cold?  I know, there's no hell and no ghosts but let's have a little fun on Halloween and not get all upset about that.  

Dr. Ray Stantz is now hosting paranormal YouTube videos, where he tests everyday objects to see if they're haunted.  It's a bit like "Antique Roadshow" but for possessed possessions.  Wait, no, that's correct.  It's also a bit similar to the Lydia Deetz situation in "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" where she now hosts a show about visiting haunted houses. Well, even our beloved characters from 1980's movies have to change with the times.  (The "Beetlejuice" franchise went longer without a proper sequel, 36 years, whereas there was only 32 years between "Ghostbusters" movies if you don't count the female reboot attempt.). And Winston Zeddemore invested his money wisely, because he's the one funding the new Ghostbusters crew and the new paranormal research facility.  

But being a team of first responders in a big city means following the city's guidelines, and so the Mayor is correct, they can't have a 15-year old actively chasing ghosts, she's not old enough.  So Phoebe Spengler is sidelined from the team, and is forced to do her homework, but ends up playing chess in a park with a teenage ghost who died in a fire.  Meanwhile Dr. Stantz and his new assistant, Podcast (another character introduced in the previous film) actually find an object which gives off psychokinetic or "ghost" energy, and they determine it's a ghost trap from ancient times, and visit an expert at the NY Public Library to learn more about the legends of Mesopotamian culture from 4,000 years ago to try to determine what might be inside this orb.  

Meanwhile, other members of the team visit the man who sold Stantz the orb, and they learn that the man's grandmother got the orb from the Firemasters, who worked with an organization called the Manhattan Adventurers' Society, which coincidentally used to gather in the exact same firehouse, and they froze to death after conducting a mock ritual to release the phantom god Garraka from the orb.  The Firemasters apparently prevented the creature's escape, but for some reason they let the Adventurers freeze?  This kind of doesn't really compute, either they beat the demon ghost or they didn't, which is it?  The team enlists Peter Venkman, from the old days, to see if the guy who inherited the orb might have any psychic powers, because if he could control flame like his ancestors, that could come in really handy - you know, just in case a giant phantom god with freezing powers starts taking over the city or omething.  You just can't be too careful.  

The second half of this movie is kind of the same plot as the last half of the original movie, all the ghosts get let out from the containment field and the Ghostbusters have to hustle to catch them all again.  Same deal here, it happens in a different way and there are a few more bells and whistles, but I'm starting to suspect that the Ghostbusters ALLOW the containment field to fail, once in a while anyway, because well, that's job security.  If they caught ALL the ghosts, they'd be out of a job.  No, better to empty the trap one in a while, stay in business longer, right?  

Not for nothing, but maybe we need a new Ice Age - isn't global warming (climate change) a huge problem right now?  I mean, sure, the good guys should win and the bad demon/ghost should lose and be trapped forever somewhere else, but maybe?  Look, when it gets super hot next summer, like 120 degrees in the shade, you're going to WISH that you let the demon ghost win, I'm just saying.  Good luck making it through another sweltering NYC summer without him.  Let him turn half the world to ice, maybe, that's bound to make things cooler for the other half.  Just saying. 

Anyway, making it to Halloween means I'm shutting down the blog for three weeks or so, I'll re-open for Thanksgiving and the push to Christmas - just 14 films left in the year now, and I'll have to make them count.  I'll see you back here in about three and a half weeks for the final part of this year's chain. 

Also starring Paul Rudd (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Carrie Coon (last seen in "Ghostbusters; Afterlife"), Finn Wolfhard (ditto), Mckenna Grace (ditto), Annie Potts (ditto), Kumail Nanjiani (last heard in "Migration"), Patton Oswalt (last seen in "Balls of Fury"), Logan Kim (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 4"), Emily Alyn Lind (last seen in "Replicas"), James Acaster, Bill Murray (last seen in "Belushi"), Dan Aykroyd (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Ernie Hudson (last seen in "I Am Chris Farley"), William Atherton (last seen in "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge"), Shelley Williams, Chris Tummings, John Rothman (last seen in "Reservation Road"), Stephen Whitfield (last seen in "A Royal Night Out"), Natalie Cousteau, Allison McKay (last seen in "Matinee"), Adam Speers (last seen in "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice"), Claire Titelman (last seen in "Frank and Cindy"), Megan Robinson (last seen in "American Fiction"), Evelyn Anne Bulls, Damian Muziani (last seen in "Rustin"), Jesse Gallegos, A.J. Voliton, Adam Murray (last seen in "Hillbilly Elegy"), Pat Kiernan, and the voices of Shelby Young, Ryan Bartley.

RATING: 7 out of 10 miniature Stay-Puft marshmallow men (Do they ever say WHAT these are, exactly?  They can't be ghosts because there's no living marshmallow mascots, so what ARE they?)

Freaky

Year 16, Day 304 - 10/30/24 - Movie #4,885

BEFORE: OK, now we're getting down to it. After tonight there's just ONE horror movie left to watch this year, and what do you know, it's also ONE day until Halloween!  Why, it's almost like I had a plan or something, like I figured out my schedule and counted the days I needed to be at Comic-Con and allowed for that, and somehow deep down I knew 27 was the magic number this month, not 31 and arranged a chain of exactly that many movies.  But that's crazy talk, right, like who DOES that?  It would take an insane person with a sick mind to figure all of that out, or, you know, somebody with too much free time, that's also possible.  

But you can see the problem, right? Just do the math in that intro line above, I'll have just 15 slots left before the next century mark, and damn if there aren't 61 days left in this calendar year.  Look, we don't know what's coming, after the election will there be another insurrection or Civil War, the sequel or maybe if it goes the other way they're just going to start rounding everyone up, starting with the Latino Democrat transgender people with criminal records and working down the list from there.  If only there were some kind of historical precedent for that, what happens when a fascist takes over.  Oh, right, Hitler had people rounded up, too, starting with his political rivals and then the Jews and the gypsies and the homosexuals and, yes, the immigrants and anyone he perceived as "impure" which was something of a sliding scale that led to a slippery slope.  Since I won't be blogging on Election Day, I've got to speak now and remind everyone to vote with their hearts, but also maybe not for the person who's taking his campaign promises from 1938 Nazi Germany.  Because we know where that leads, why would we want to be back there again?  Until we get past Election Day, simply no horror movie could be scarier than the prospect of a fascist U.S. President, it's not a good look.  We're supposed to be setting the example for free countries around the world, so you know, let's do that and not elect a neo-Nazi.

Celeste O'Connor carries over from "Madame Web".  

THE PLOT: After swapping bodies with a deranged serial killer, a high-school senior discovers that she has fewer than 24 hours before the change becomes permanent. 

AFTER: I've tried very hard to avoid a lot of the films in the "body-swap" genre, I think one year I snuck in "13 Going on 30" and of course "Big" is a classic, but the rest of them, I tend to steer clear.  "18 Again", "Vice Versa", now there's a new one called "Family Switch", and I don't know, I just find them to be crass and vulgar, it's really low comedy to just say, "Hey, now Mom's in Dad's body, isn't that hilarious?"   Well, no, it's probably not.  But the only exception other than "Big" is probably the two (semi-)recent "Jumanji" movies, where four teens got stuck in a video-game and played as avatars that were nothing like them, like the football player ended up in the non-athletic sidekick body and the nerd ended up in the body of the big strong hero.  Then in the next movie they switched them around again, it was pretty entertaining.  

So I've been trying to get to "Freaky" for the last couple of Octobers, the film is now four years old and, well, it takes me as long as it takes me, I can only control so much of the linking, I can try to push it in the direction I want, but also I have to be willing to accept the directions that are available.  That's why it could take me 10 years or more to get to specific movies, I have to believe that if I just keep the faith and keep moving forward that eventually I'll get to see everything that I want to see, if the linking will allow it.  So yeah, finally the stars aligned and the cast lists worked together and now I'm here.  It's bad news for "The Babadook" and "The Slender Man", though, because I'm not going to be able to get to them this year, and probably not next year either, if I keep sticking to this format. Do you have any idea how long "Cube 2" and "Cube Zero" have been on my list?  Possibly right from the start, so that would mark 16 years of NOT getting to them.  

But let me work with what I do have. As bad as body-swap movies can be, it's a clever idea to swap the souls of a Jason-like serial killer and the young high-school girl he tried to kill, because comedy comes from contrast, and you can't possibly have more contrast than the predator and his prey, the killer and the cheerleader, the insane adult and the spoiled Gen Z teen who simply have nothing in common.  They wouldn't even encounter each other if he didn't have a thing for killing sexually active teens.  I mean, they probably wouldn't' shop at the same stores or go to the same lunch hangouts, him being a serial killer and her eating (or not eating) at the school cafeteria most days.  

In most of these body-swap films, like when the swap occurs between family members, they end up gaining more insight into the struggles of being a suburban mom, or the adult learns about the anxiety that comes with being a modern teenager, and then they figure out how to reverse the spell and they go on with their lives, each a little bit wiser for the experience.  That standard, of course, comes from "Freaky Friday", either the original recipe or Extra Crispy with Lindsay Lohan (damn, am I going to have to watch THAT one at some point?)

But here the serial killer, the Blissfield Butcher, gets a chance to hide in plain sight, once he's in the body of a teenage girl (no, not like THAT, get your mind out of the gutter) he can get close to her family members, walk into the high school and kill any students, teachers, janitors he wants.  He's got his pick, he can limit himself to people having sex, or just kill anyone without a hall pass - or not have any plan at all, and just see where the day takes him.  

All of which made me wonder, why isn't this called "Freaky Friday the 13th"?  That title was RIGHT THERE.  A little research on Wikipedia tells me that WAS the working title for this film at one point, now I need to find out why they changed it. Did they get a "cease and desist" letter from whatever company owns the rights to the "Friday the 13th" franchise?  Last I heard, nobody can copyright a movie title, so if you want to make your own film called "Nightmare on Elm St." or make a documentary about toys called "Child's Play", you can, I mean you could still get sued but the law says you can make a film with the same title as an existing film.  Go nuts, aim high and let me know how that goes.  

Meanwhile, Mille, the teenager who also plays the school's mascot at football games, finds she has a much tougher time, she wakes up in the serial killer's apartment and can't go home or get help from her friends, because she doesn't look like herself, and who would believe her?  So she goes to school (where she's sure to stand out, so odd choice) and takes a shower in the gym while the killer starts his murder spree.  It's probably a coincidence that the killer's first victims are the girl who's been bullying Millie and the teacher who's also been giving her a hard time.  But eventually (after a panic fight) Millie finds her two best friends, Nyla and Josh, and is able to convince them of the body-swap by doing a complex dance routine.  

The homecoming dance gets cancelled because of all the recent deaths, and the Butcher (as Millie) sets up a new location for the dance, at the Old Mill, you know, the spooky one down by the river that's all dark at night and has no dance floor or room for a band or any way to play music.  Yeah, nothing suspicious about that at all.  While the Butcher sets his sights on Millie's lab partner and crush target Booker, the three friends manage to knock the Butcher unconscious and bring him to Josh's house and tie him to a chair.  Oh, great, there's no getting out of THAT elaborate containment plan.  The friends then need to leave him there, guarded by Josh, while they go to the police station to try and get the magic knife (the one with body-swapping powers) out of the evidence locker, because with the help of the Spanish teacher, they've determined that if Millie (in the Butcher's body) can stab The Butcher (in Millie's body) with that knife, before 24 hours are up, then they can switch them back.  

Wouldn't you know it, shocker, the killer manages to get free from the chair, once Josh's mom comes home unexpectedly and wonders why her gay teen son has a teen girl tied to a chair.  Ha, ha, what an innovative twist on teens having complicated conversations with parents about being sexually active!  "Mom, I have to tell you something...I'm straight and I like to tie up girls?" About the only thing more awkwardly politically correct here is the Butcher killing three teen jocks who wanted to gang-rape him in Millie's body.  They deserved to die?  Maybe?

I will admit that I have not seen the "Friday the 13th" movies, there are a few franchises way down at the bottom of my list that I may get to someday, or who knows, maybe I won't.  The "Child's Play" series is a someday/maybe, same goes for the "Halloween" series, the "Nightmare on Elm Street" films, "Resident Evil", "Scary Movie" and "Paranormal Activity".  All things in good time, or maybe some things not at all.  It's more likely I'll try to watch the "Final Destination" films or the "Saw" movies before I get to those others, but really, who can predict it?  

What we need in the meantime are more mash-up movies, like "Fever Pitch Perfect" or maybe "Justice League of Extraordinary Gentlemen".  What about "Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray" or "Gone Baby Gone in 60 Seconds"?  Why not "Rosemary's Baby Driver" or "The Sixth Sense and Sensibility"?  "No Country for Old Men in Black" or "The Night of the Living Deadpool"? The possibilities are endless once you start playing with words, but if somebody came up with "Freaky Friday the 13th" and that ended up reinvigorating both slasher films AND body-swap films, why not play around with some new mash-up concepts?  

There's a restaurant that opened up in Brooklyn a year ago, it's fusion cuisine that combines Asian food with Jewish deli fare, and it's called "Shalom Japan".  I want to try it very badly, just to see what Ramen matzoh ball soup tastes like.  And they used to have an item on the menu that combined Japanese savory pancakes,okonomiyaki, with Jewish potato pancakes, and it was called, of course, okonomi-latkes.  This is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking and cuisine that I can get behind. 

Also starring Vince Vaughn (last seen in "Unfinished Business"), Kathryn Newton (last seen in "Blockers"), Misha Osherovich (last seen in "The Goldfinch"), Emily Holder, Nicholas Stargel (last seen in "Love, Simon"), Kelly Lamor Wilson (last seen in "A Man Called Otto"), Mitchell Hoog (last seen in "Harriet"), Dana Drori (last seen in "Rebel in the Rye"), Katie Finneran (last seen in "Movie 43"), Alonzo Ward (last seen in "Strays"), Dustin Lewis (last seen in "The Contractor"), Jennifer Pierce Mathus (last seen in "Dark Places"), Uriah Shelton, Melissa Collazo, Zack Shires (last seen in "Breaking News in Yuba County"), Alan Ruck (last seen in "Sierra Burgess Is a Loser"), Magnus Diehl, Dane Davenport (last seen in "Selma"), Nick Arapoglou (last seen in "They Cloned Tyrone"), Charles Green (last heard in "Poms"), Don Stallings (last seen in "Jerry and Marge Go Large"), Brooke Jaye Taylor (last seen in "Jungle Cruise"), Tim Johnson, Carter Glade, Ezra Sexton, Maria Sager, Deja Dee (last seen in "Allegiant"), Emma Jonnz (last seen in "Ready or Not")

RATING: 6 out of 10 wood shop projects

Madame Web

Year 16, Day 303 - 10/29/24 - Movie #4,884

BEFORE: I finally landed a day off at home, and what did I do?  I blew it by sleeping late (first time in a while) and then pulling the weeds out of the front planter.  I was going to save that for November, when I'm not watching movies for three weeks at least, but the rain held off and it was like 60 degrees out, and I figure there's only about another week before it gets too cold to do yard work, even though a week ago it was too HOT to do yard work, so I'd better take advantage.  Plus it's trash night, so I could put out two bags of vines I cut out plus any leaves in our lower driveway that I could sweep up, to keep them from clogging the drain.  (We haven't had a very rainy fall, unlike the last three, but it could still come...)

Look, I'm glad I did it, the ivy vines are relentless, if left unchecked they will kill every other bush or flowering thing in the planter, so they HAVE to be cut out.  Plus they hide under the rim so they can't be seen, while they triple and quadruple their way around the space allotted.  They were climbing up our small tree and the plan was, no doubt, to get to the top and keep all the sunlight for themselves, and/or kill the tree. I like the tree, but I hate the vines, they're pure evil and they must be stopped.  There are twice as many vines and weeds in the backyard, I'll bet, but their days are numbered, too.

But the problem is, now I'm tired, achy and in need of a shower, and I ruined my chances of getting anything else done today, I was going to go get some groceries, log in some comics, but now all I have time for is a quick dinner, blogging about today's movie and starting on tomorrow's. Here's to having a little more time after Halloween, I've got a lot to do. 

Kerry Bishé carries over from "How It Ends" (2018). 

THE PLOT: Forced to confront her past, Cassandra Webb, a Manhattan paramedic that may have clairvoyant abilities, forms a relationship with three young women destined for powerful futures, if they can survive their threatening present. 

AFTER: I know, this is not specifically a horror movie, but I have let in superhero films before, in order to make my connections.  "The New Mutants" was one of them, I think, "Birds of Prey" was another - while "Morbius" didn't quite fit in by linking, even though it was about a vampire of sorts and could have qualified. "Venom: Let There Be Carnage" could have been a great October movie, but the linking said otherwise.  The third "Venom" movie just came out, but I didn't have a clear path to it, so I'll have to catch it on streaming early next year.

This is NOT a Spider-Man movie either, not directly, anyway, but it does feature some of the more minor characters from the Spider-Man comic books.  There are references to Peter Parker near the end, but it's left unclear which universe or timeline it takes place in, is it one where Peter Parker never becomes Spider-Man, or is the timeline from the "Venom" movies or the "Morbius" film?  It's set back in 1973 and then 2003, so yeah, I'm just not sure.  Since the multiverse (Spider-Verse) became a thing it's very hard to keep track of, even after the big crossover between the Maguire, Garfield and Holland Spider-Man films.  (EDIT: Wikipedia seems to declare that "Madame Web" is set in the same universe as the "Venom" and "Morbius" films, called the "Sony Spider-Man Universe", along with the upcoming "Kraven the Hunter" film, however this is a rather odd name since none of the films center on Peter Parker)

Anyway, there is a Madame Web in the Spider-Man comics, but she was an older lady who I think died at some point.  But this ties in perfectly with the idea to set this film back in 2003, because she'd be another 15 to 20 years older by the time of the "Venom" films, so then almost an old lady.  But in the comic books the second woman to use the hero name "Spider-Woman" was Julia Carpenter, and then when they wanted to bring back the first "Spider-Woman", Jessica Drew, I think they turned Julia Carpenter into the new Madame Web.  I think the teen here named Julia Cornwall is supposed to be the Julia Carpenter character, but we only see short flash-forwards of her being Spider-Woman in the future.  The other girls are also knock-offs of various Spider-Girl or Spider-Woman characters, Anya Corazon also went by the code-name Araña, and Mattie Franklin was the third person to call herself Spider-Woman, though in the comic books she was Caucasian and the niece of J. Jonah Jameson.  

But maybe then these three girls are superheroes when they're adults, they work as a team and make up for the fact there's no Spider-Man in their timeline, it's tough to say unless they make a sequel to this film, and based on the box-office performance, that's not likely.  Anyway, the film is really about Madame Web, and her efforts to keep these three teens alive, as they're attacked by Ezekiel, who also got his enhanced strength from a spider-bite, only not a radio-active one like Peter Parker's, but a special spider found in the Amazon whose bite grants powers like strength, agility and the ability to stick to the ceiling.  He even wears a costume similar to the Spider-Man one we all know, only it's mostly black and looks very basic - he's the pre-Parker Spider-Man, only he's not a hero.  

But he's had a pre-cognitive vision of his own death, and every night he's haunted by the same dream, where three teen girls kill him, so his solution is to find these three girls before they get powers, and kill them before they can kill him.  You would think a better idea would be to find out who these girls are and then stay away from them, and you'd probably be right, but Ezekiel just doesn't think along those lines.  Instead he hires someone with facial-recognition software to hack into New York's traffic cams and all security cameras everywhere, constantly scanning the millions of New Yorkers looking for those three.  

At the same time, paramedic Cassandra Webb, drowns but is brought back to life by her partner, Ben (last name not important yet, but just wait) and this somehow activates her clairvoyant powers, which exist because her mother was bitten by the same rare spider while she was pregnant with Cassie, she died giving birth but the venom transferred to her baby, according to the cult of the Arañas, the spider-people from the Amazon who can swing through the trees and do other spider-stuff.  Cassandra gets the power to see what's happening in the near-future, but it takes her an enormously long time to figure out what her power is and what to do with it.  I mean, a paramedic needs to be a pretty smart person, she's not dumb so why make her act dumb?  Is this to make the audience feel smart, that we figured out her power before she can?  

At first, she doesn't even believe that she can change the future, but there really can only BE one reason for someone to have this power, to see the bad thing happen and then take the appropriate steps to make sure that it doesn't.  They kind of flip the script here on Spider-powers, because Spider-Man's mantra has always been "With great power comes great responsibility" but here the opposite applies, as Cassandra takes on great responsibilities, that gives her great power, the power to change the future by seeing the future.  

Ezekiel, on the other hand, thinks he's very smart, yet he goes to attack the girls that he believes will kill him in the future, and thus he comes into contact with them, again and again.  Does he NOT realize that any one of these encounters could lead to his death?  Maybe he thinks he can beat the system, but really, he's playing right into the scenario that he's trying to prevent.  Of course, the three girls have no powers, and for some reason his pre-cog abilities can't take Madame Web's into the equation, he's got some kind of "blind spot" for the other person who got bitten by the same spider?  Perhaps that's a result of bad karma since he's the person who killed Cassandra's mother.  

Cassandra, on the other hand, gradually gains control of her pre-cog abilities, and then anything she does based on them kind of looks like a magic trick, especially if we don't see every possible future that she ends up preventing.  This exact ability was also displayed in the movie "Next", where Nicolas Cage's character could see ten seconds into the future, and he could win any fight because he knew exactly what was coming.  To him it just seemed like something bad happened, and then he'd zip back ten seconds and be able to prevent that punch, or that gunshot or whatever.  It's a hard thing to portray on film, perhaps, without your movie looking like it 's constantly glitching back.  

But in order to really figure out her abilities, Cassandra needs to take a trip back to the Amazon jungle herself, which is very inconvenient because she JUST pledged that she would protect these three teenage girls from Ezekiel, no matter what.  Well, it's kind of hard to protect them while she's on her little side trip to Peru, isn't it?  Gee, what could possibly go wrong while you're five thousand miles away in the remote jungle, but no, go ahead, take some time, get your head straight and figure out your powers.  She leaves the three girls in the care of Ben Parker, who's got a pregnant sister-in-law, but the baby's not due for weeks, so thankfully they can all just stay hidden in the house.  Yeah, that baby has other ideas, so they all have to go to the hospital and that means their cover could be blown.  

In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea to make a movie about a character who's never even had her own comic book, like Scarlet Witch and She-Hulk and Captain Marvel and even female Hawkeye have.  There's no built-in audience for "Madame Web", while there might be for Spider-Woman or Black Cat or even Silver Sable.  Well, you live and learn, I guess.  There's also that "Kraven the Hunter" movie coming from the Sony Spider-Verse in December, so if that tanks, too, maybe this Spider-Manless Spider-Verse just wasn't meant to continue. 

Also starring Dakota Johnson (last seen in "The Lost Daughter"), Sydney Sweeney (last seen in "Under the Silver Lake"), Isabela Merced (last heard in "Migration"), Celeste O'Connor (last seen in "Ghostbusters: Afterlife"), Tahar Rahim (last seen in "Napoleon"), Mike Epps (last seen in "You People"), Emma Roberts (last seen in "Empire State"), Adam Scott (last seen in "Monster-in-Law"), Zosia Mamet (last heard in "Trolls Band Together"), Jose Maria Yazpik, Kathy-Ann Hart (last seen in "Patriots Day"), Josh Drennen, Yuma Feldman, Miranda Adekoje, Deirdre McCourt, Naheem Garcia (last seen in "The Purge: Election Year"), Jill Hennessy (last seen in "Dead Ringers"), Rosemary Crimp, Brian Faherty (last seen in "Unfinished Business"), Shaun Bedgood, Mike Bash (last seen in "The Social Network"), Cilda Shaur (last seen in "The Irishman"), Jennifer Ellis, Kris Sidberry (last seen in "The Forger"), Erica Souza, Rena Maliszewski (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Michael Malvesti (last seen in "American Fiction"), Gopal Lalwani, Shawnna Thibodeau, Dominique Washington, Michael Papajohn (last seen in "Domino").

RATING: 5 out of 10 explosions in the fireworks factory

How It Ends (2018)

Year 16, Day 302 - 10/28/24 - Movie #4,883

BEFORE: I'm hitting some deep cuts here at the end of October - nobody I know has even heard of "Infinity Pool", for example, and I work with a bunch of cinemaphiles.  Actually, two bunches. We sit around and talk about what horror movies we've seen in common, and we recommend them or trash them.  One co-worker's list only got as dark as "Hocus Pocus" and "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and I had to call her out - like COME ON, I just watched flesh-eating zombies take over all of Las Vegas, and you're going to hit me with Disney channel movies?  But I was forced to admit I have not even seen "Hocus Pocus", however it is on my list.  Now I have to seriously consider it for next year if I want to keep that conversation going.  

But I'm trying to make a statement here, serial killers are roaming the subways, and killing film crews down in Texas in 1979.  They're also wiping out whole dorms of female students on Christmas Eve, and playing ruthless games of Hide and Seek with innocent young brides!  What's worse, sea monsters are ruling the oceans and giant apes are living deep in the middle of the planet!  Killlers and suicide prophets are also interrupting people's vacations, we are drawing ever closer to the apocalypse, and you're going to suggest "Hocus Pocus" with Bette Midler?  Give me a break, I'm trying to get serious over here.  The end of everything could come at any time!

Mark O'Brien carries over from "Ready or Not".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Rover" (Movie #4,817)

THE PLOT: In the midst of an apocalypse, a man struggles to reach his pregnant fiancée, who is thousands of miles away.  

AFTER: There are (at least) two movies titled "How It Ends", both about the end of the world.  I watched the one that's more of a comedy back in April 2022 (just before "The Mitchells vs. the Machines"), that film came out in 2021. Tonight's film, which is much less of a comedy, actually was released first, in 2018, and I'm just getting to it now.  Hey, sometimes it takes me one year to link to a movie, and sometimes it takes six, that's just how these things go. 

You have to wonder, if this was someone's 2018 vision of how the world might end, whether those filmmakers felt a little disappointed when the pandemic hit, like maybe they felt a little cheated, or that they fell short by relying on the old tropes of earthquakes or nuclear blasts and just didn't see a worldwide health crisis coming.  Also, whoever directed "Contagion" in 2011 - and it was Steven Soderbergh - maybe felt very smart for predicting it, or maybe he wished that he hadn't, I don't know.  Soderbergh probably wins the prediction prize, and maybe he shares it with Mike Judge, who made "Idiocracy" years before we all realized how stupid and gullible most American voters are. I'm still hoping that they won't both get usurped by whoever directed "The Purge: Election Year" - it could still happen.

But let's focus on the apocalypse, again. In this film, it's never completely revealed what the initial destructive event is, the preliminary news reports say that it's some kind of seismic event off the West Coast, which could be an undersea earthquake, which could have then caused tsunamis, but it's all left a bit unclear, because the power grid then goes out in half of the country, leaving millions in the dark both literally and metaphorically.  This happens while Will Younger is visiting his fiancée's parents in Chicago, and his pregnant girlfriend is in Seattle, and after their call during the disaster, he's unable to contact her.  All planes are grounded, and Will's future father-in-law, Tom, who he's frequently at odds with, decides to drive west to find his daughter, and Tom naturally goes along too.  The two men have to learn to put their differences aside and work together to cross the country, fighting traffic, road closures, and military operations of some kind that suggest that perhaps there's more going on than a natural disaster, only what? 

American society is immediately transformed, within days the country has reverted to a cash-only system, gasoline is a valuable commodity and without regular deliveries food could soon be scarce, and logically guns and ammo are suddenly important, because they'll help people get those other things by force if needed.  Will and Tom are pulled over by a police car, but it's not the police at all, it's a maniac with a shotgun who just stole a police car.  They're forced to find a mechanic in a small town who wants to start over in California, and they have to pay her for her time, but she's willing to ride with them and repair their car again if necessary.  

It takes days for this unlikely trio to travel across the Rocky Mountain states, and another fight over their gasoline causes the young mechanic to seek her own path, then another fight with a motorcycle gang causes an injury to Tom, and they're very far from any medical services, so, well, the outlook's not good.  Eventually the car breaks down and it's just Will on foot, hitchhiking to Seattle.  A family does pick him up and he directs them to his estranged father's home in Idaho, where he makes a deal with the family, they can stay in his father's well-stocked house until they're ready to drive to Canada in the car that's in the garage, while Will takes THEIR car and finishes the drive to Seattle.  

He reaches his apartment building, but his fiancée isn't there, she was forced to evacuate with a male neighbor, but they left the address of the cabin they fled to, so Will heads there. It's not clear what the deal was with the neighbor, but it seems he was maybe trying to get into a relationship with Samantha, perhaps by convincing her that Will was dead or would never be able to find her again, so Will showing up probably threw a monkey wrench into his plans. It's clear that in the post-apocalypse U.S., nobody does anything without a reason, everyone thinks of their own interests first, and everything is in short supply, especially girlfriends. The neighbor, Jeremiah, is convinced that the ecological disasters around them are not natural, but part of a coordinated attack.  You know, Jewish space lasers controlling the weather and such. 

But Will is now capable of fighting for what's his, he's not the same guy who wouldn't stand up to his future father-in-law, and he's been through some things, making his way across the country in the middle of an apocalypse or whatever.  So, yeah, sorry, Jeremiah, better luck next time, thanks for saving Samantha and everything but you don't get to be with her any more, maybe next apocalypse.  You're just a paranoid nut-job anyway.  

Will and Samantha keep driving north, because things are apparently better in Canada - which makes me think this whole film was some kind of metaphor for the country under Trump's presidency, it was released in 2018 after all.  But then there's a massive volcanic eruption (Washington State and Canada DO have volcanoes, after all) and their fate at the end of the film is, you guessed it, quite unclear.  Really, it just feels like somebody couldn't come up with a good solid ending - perhaps appropriate since the world was literally falling apart, but still, downright disappointing.  

One theory is that since the film showed compasses spinning like crazy, the disaster depicted here is a shift in the earth's magnetic field, or the poles changing places, which apparently does happen every few thousand years or so.  This would explain some of the climate-change stuff but perhaps not the earthquakes and volcanoes, but who really knows?  Perhaps it was a giant meteorite that crashed into the Pacific, that could cause the earthquakes and tidal waves. and maybe even the ash falling from the sky.  The theory is that the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs maybe did so by creating debris that blocked out the sun.  The same thing could happen to us, and we could have very little time to prepare for it. 

Also starring Theo James (last seen in "Allegiant"), Forest Whitaker (last seen in "Species"), Kat Graham, Nicole Ari Parker (last seen in "Remember the Titans"), Grace Dove (last seen in "The Revenant"), Kerry Bishé (last seen in "Motherhood"), Eric Keenleyside (last seen in "Walking Tall"), Nancy Sorel, J.J. Ramberg, Ron Verwymeren, RJ Fetherstonhaugh (last seen in "The Predator"), Aaron Hughes, Lane McAuley, Josh Cruddas (last seen in "Moonfall"), Aidan Ritchie, Rick Skene (last seen in "Flag Day"), Storm Greyeyes, Pat Harris, Haig Sutherland (last seen in "The BFG"), Cory Chetyrbok, David James Lewis (last seen in "The Company You Keep"), Charis Ann Wiens, Juliette Hitchcock, Jeff Wahl (last seen in "Goon")

RATING: 4 out of 10 ham radio operators

Ready or Not

Year 16, Day 301 - 10/27/24 - Movie #4,882

BEFORE: Last night I came home on the subway and everyone else had been out partying and was dressed as Scooby-Doo characters or bloody Carrie from the prom, and I thought about that subway ride in "Scream VI".  Thankfully I didn't see any Ghostface killers, real or fake. I'm back out at the New Yorker Festival today, the afternoon and night shift, I'm not sure if I'll be able to post on time if I'm out very late.  My No-Movie November break is coming up, just four horror films left, and then I can focus more on work and getting some other things done around the house. 

John Ralston carries over from "Infinity Pool", and a lot of actors come back from earlier films seen this October, which is bound to happen at some point.  Today's film comes from the people who made the last two "Scream" movies so there's bound to be some crossover there.  But of course I didn't link here directly from "Scream" because I needed to fill up the month, and there were connections all over the place that I didn't need to use, that's just how it all shook down. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Hunt" (Movie #3,964)

THE PLOT: A bride's wedding night takes a sinister turn when her eccentric new in-laws force her to take part in a terrifying game. 

AFTER: Because I guess the title "Hide and Seek: The Movie" really might not have worked well.  This is a film about a recently-married woman who learns that her new husband's family has a bit of an odd tradition, since their fortune came from board games, they insist that Grace is not an official part of the family until they all play a game together.  It's a little odd that Alex couldn't tell her about this weird tradition BEFORE the wedding, that's the first tip-off that something just isn't right.  

Of course, it just couldn't be chess (not everyone knows how to play) or checkers (way too simple) or Monopoly (it's a large family, that would take way too long).  Instead they let the deck of cards decides, and the draw says the game should be hide and seek.  But this family seems to think that hide and seek is played with knives and guns and axes, so yeah, second indication that something's not right with this family.  

They really DRAG this one out - there's maybe five minutes of plot here (and I think I'm being generous) and that's stretched out over 90 minutes of screen time, so yeah, do the math and it's a lot of filler in this thriller. 

Like Grace has to draw a card from a deck, that should take all of three seconds, just hold out the deck and have her pick a card.  No, somebody has to make a show of selecting the card FOR her, and put it into a drawer in some weird box, then the box has to get passed around to table so everyone holds it, then SHE has to get it, and think about it, and then pop out the drawer to reveal the card?  All of this is very, very unnecessary, it's just a wastie of screen time, and come on, the WHOLE FILM is like that, every little thing takes five times longer than it should.  Is it worth it?  Nah, it just makes me feel like I wasted my time, which is worth money, BTW.  

Unless it's a card force, which means of course that the fix is in.  There are probably a dozen ways to force the "hide and seek" card on her, if that's the game they want to play.  It could be a deck of cards where EVERY card says "Hide and Seek" on it, or someone could swap out the card or they could put one card inside that little drawer in the box and pull a different card out of a different drawer.  Yeah, I watch a lot of magic shows and I figure out all the tricks and I'm a big fan of Penn & Teller, who tend to force the three of clubs on people. 

So instead of calling a NITPICK POINT here, I'm going to give this film the benefit of the doubt, and assume that no matter what, the game was always going to be Hide and Seek with weapons.  The family WANTS to kill this woman for some reason, let's concede this point and move forward from there, because it leads to a number of interesting plot possibilities. Why do they want to kill this woman?  Ah, we do find out eventually, I'm not going to promise that it makes any sense, but we do find out.  

Cartoon-level violence, like Elmer Fudd or Daffy Duck-level confusion and stupidity.  Grace is so very lucky that the members of Alex's family are all spoiled drunks and drug users, and act like, "Hey, I don't even know how to use a crossbow, but I'm going to pick one up for some reason and WHOOPS, I just fired it!" or "Let me just look down the barrel of this gun, maybe I can figure out why it's not working.." and BLAMMO!  Actually I think they take out a few servants first, but it's not long before the other family members start taking each other out. 

The there's probably the worst case ever of "Deus Ex Machina" as petty infighting and this mysterious family curse takes the rest of them out. Though I suppose it's really "Satan Ex Machina" if they worship the man downstairs instead, and maybe that's who's really pulling the strings here, this family maybe had a little help getting rich and the Dark Lord keeps demanding that they sacrifice their brides in exchange?  At least I think that's what's going on here, it's all just a bit unclear.  I don't want to give anything away here, but I think it would have been stronger if Grace had more to do with saving herself here, by taking action instead of just letting things happen to the family members.  Just a thought. 

Also starring Samara Weaving (last seen in "Scream VI"), Adam Brody, (last seen in "Scream" (2022)) Mark O'Brien (last seen in "Blue Bayou"), Henry Czerny (also last seen in "Scream VI"), Andie MacDowell (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Melanie Scrofano (last seen in "Robocop" (2014)), Kristian Bruun (last seen in "Life" (2015)), Elyse Levesque, Nicky Guadagni (last seen in "Lars and the Real Girl"), Liam McDonald (last seen in "It Chapter Two"), Ethan Tavares, Hanneke Talbot (last seen in "Stockholm"), Celine Tsai, Daniela Barbosa (last seen in "Flatliners" (2017)), Chase Churchill, Etienne Kellici, Andrew Anthony, Elana Dunkelman (last heard in "Leap!"), Kate Ziegler, James Eddy, Adam Winlove-Smith, Guy Busick, Emma Jonnz (last seen in "She's the Man"), R. Christopher Murphy, James Vanderbilt and the voice of Nat Faxon (last heard in "Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe"),   

RATING: 3 out of 10 dead goats in a pit

Infinity Pool

Year 16, Day 300 - 10/26/24 - Movie #4,881

BEFORE: Day 300?  Where the heck did most of 2024 go?  Oh, right, movies.  Movies and TV and work and comic books and rinse and repeat.  Also North Carolina and Atlantic City and day-trips to Long Island and New York Comic-Con and maybe a beer festival or two.  But I've got 66 days to wrap this Movie Year up and somehow simultaneously that's not enough time and also way too much time. 19 movies in 66 days sounds like a cake-walk, but the really hard part is holding back for 47 of those days.  I've got to clear the weeds out of the backyard, that should kill a weekend, and we're going to North Carolina again for a whole week, that will help. I can log in some. comic books and I've made a list of streaming TV series to catch up on, so it's going to be OK.  But first let me focus on these last 6 horror movies, get through this weekend's film festival and celebrate our wedding anniversary, then maybe I can make a plan. 

Mia Goth carries over one more time from "Pearl".  I did find a way to work "MaXXXine" in but I'm holding back there, too, in favor of clearing other films from my DVR.  I think my chances of circling back to it next October are pretty good. 

THE PLOT: James and Em Foster are enjoying an all-inclusive beach vacation on the island of La Tolqa, when a fatal accident exposes the resort's perverse subculture of hedonistic tourism, reckless violence and surreal horrors. 

AFTER: Don't worry, I'm keeping track of all the super-weird movies I've watched this year, and in my year-end wrap-up I'll try to figure out which one was the weirdest, and it's not going to be easy.  A movie about a woman who finds a genie in a bottle sure seemed a bit weird at the time, but then along comes a movie where a girl can see all the imaginary friends whose humans grew up and forgot about them, and that certainly seems weirder. Then there was a weird movie about sending convicted murderers into space to see what interstellar travel does to them, but then along comes a movie about an astronaut who talks to a giant spider-shaped alien, and then there's a new definition of how weird a movie can be.  In much the same way, I watched "They Cloned Tyrone" a few months ago, and sure, that was weird, but it just can't quite compare to tonight's film on a similar subject.  

To be fair, "infinity Pool" is more like "Triangle of Sadness" meets "Midsommer" meets "They Cloned Tyrone", but then again, it's all of those things but also it's trying to be its own thing, so I shouldn't just compare one movie to the next. 

This film shows a bunch of well-off Americans and Brits on vacation at a resort, but the resort is in a poorer, backwards country of sorts - the resort is on a fenced compound and the guests are told to not leave the resort for their own protection.  So naturally some of the guests want to go out and have some fun, just a picnic on the beach and maybe a few drinks, and breaking the rules always makes things a bit more fun, right?  Well, on the way back the struggling writer who was driving hit a local man with the car and killed him, naturally the first instinct of the two couples is to cover things up, hope against hope that nobody figures out how the man died or whose car ran him down.  Yeah, good luck with that.  

The writer, James Foster, is charged with murder, and on this island the punishment is death, in fact the son of the killed man has the legal right to execute the man who killed his father.  But fear not, the local police have a solution, all they have do is clone the man, for a large fee of course, and the boy can execute the clone, thus killing a copy of the murderer, and the author can still live - only he is forced to watch the execution of his double, perhaps this way he will learn his lesson.  Umm, sure, that works for everybody I guess, except for the clone.  But then the man meets a number of tourists who have all been through this process before, and all these rich people just basically view it as a way the locals raise money for their island.  Well, they did invent and perfect (?) cloning, so maybe they deserve it?  

One tourist, however, raises the fear that the original version of him was executed, and that he might BE the clone, one with all the memories of the original, plus the vision of watching himself die, but sure, what could possibly be bad about all that?  I remember in the movie "Multiplicity" that the cloning process wasn't perfect, each clone was like a photocopy that's never going to be as sharp as the original, and if you copy the copy, well, forget it, things are bound to get foggy or cloudy or ill-defined.  

Also, you'd think that these rich tourists would learn something from watching their own executions, and you would be completely wrong there.  Instead their take-away is that they can do pretty much whatever they want on this island, commit crimes like burglary, rape, you name it, and always the solution will be to create another clone and just stand and watch as the clone is executed for their sins.  So pretty much they don't ever learn anything, except that their money can keep getting them out of trouble, as long as their bank account can cover the cloning costs.  So I wonder if this is just some giant metaphor for how the rich people are treated differently by the legal system because they can pay for the best lawyers, or something to that effect.  There's another point to be made about what the lack of punishment would then do to those rich people who can afford to pay fines or make bail or bribe someone to always get out of trouble, over time they could essentially become psychopaths.  

There's more to the story, like it gets even weirder, but that's really all you need to know to get into it.  The film was a festival success at Sundance and the Berlin International Film Festival, but was then a box office failure.  You can watch it on Hulu and judge for yourself. 

I can't believe this movie was made AFTER Mia Goth's breakthrough roles in "X" and "Pearl" because that would mean that she's older in this than she was then, and she looks younger somehow.  Well, she looks like she's both 15 and 35 here, it's a bit tough to say which. (A little research tells me she was 28 when this was filmed, and it was filmed the same year as "Pearl", which I guess is possible?)

Also starring Alexander Skarsgard (last seen in "13"), Cleopatra Coleman (last seen in "Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver"), Jalil Lespert, Amanda Brugel (last seen in "The Calling"), John Ralston (ditto), Jeff Ricketts (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Caroline Boulton (last seen in "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent"), Thomas Kretschmann (last seen in "Dragged Across Concrete"), Dunja Sepcic, Adam Boncz, Zijad Gracic (last heard in "Cars 2"), Amar Bukvic, Alan Katic, Anita Major, Roderick Hill (last seen in "Colette"), Katalin Lábán, Kamilla Fátyol (last seen in "The Martian"), Lena Juka Stambuk, Kristóf Kovács, Romina Tonkovic, Gergely Trócsányi, Hajnalka Zsigar, Gáza Kovács, Oszkár Bócsik

RATING: 5 out of 10 buffalo sausages

Pearl

Year 16, Day 299 - 10/25/24 - Movie #4,880

BEFORE: Let's send a big Birthday SHOUT-out to Mia Goth, born October 25, 1993, who also seems to have the perfect last name for horror movies, right?  She carries over from "X" and she WILL make the year-end countdown, I've seen to that. But also I wonder how many birthday SHOUT-outs I've shouted out this year, I don't think there have been many. 

Now, regarding "Maxxxine", the new sequel to "X", I've looked for a way to shoehorn this film in at the last minute - I had no idea this film would be streaming so soon, it's already on HBO Max and it caught me off guard.  I've checked with the ruling committee, and their hands are tied, I'd already filed the paperwork certifying my movie path to Christmas, so really, at this point, my hands are tied.  I'll file an appeal, sure there's a process, but this film just came on the scene far too late.  I can't drop anything from the remaining twenty films of the year  - well, I could, but that would mean that something I was going to clear off my DVR is not going to get cleared, like I could delay "Speed Racer" again but I've already pushed it back twice, maybe three times.  It's either "Maxxxine" or "Speed Racer", really.  Most everything else will cause a break in the linking if I delete it.  

Or "How It Ends" - if the committee were to approve the addition of "Maxxxine" at the last second, I could shift some things around in these last days of October, and cut from "Ready or Not" to "Freaky" in a switcheroo and drop "How It Ends", but again, that's a desperate play, and then THAT movie may never get watched.  Bottom line, "Maxxine" links to a number of other horror films on the list, and I've got a good chance of circling back to it next October, because it's got some name actors in it, like Kevin Bacon and Giancarlo Esposito, who appear in other horror films too.  So that's that, "Pearl" is in and "Maxxxine" is out, at least for not.  The third film in this weird little trilogy just arrived too late for me to work it in.  

Well, I could do it but then I'd be unhappy about what I'd have to cut to make that possible.  Sorry, Ti West. Sorry, Mia Goth.  If this were March or April I'd add another film and stay up late watching a double feature, but it's not, it's late October and both Halloween and Christmas are coming, I have a schedule to maintain.  "Maxxxine" is going to be fine, fingers crossed that this choice may end up helping me connect a full month of horror films in 2025.  Or 2026.

Meanwhile, this Halloween is UNDER a week away. It's time to start separating out the Reese's peanut butter cups from the Almond Joys, if you know what I mean. Nobody better lay a finger on my Butterfingers, either. 

THE PLOT: In 1918, a young woman on the brink of madness pursues stardom in a desperate attempt to escape the drudgery, isolation and lovelessness of life on her parents' farm. 

AFTER: Well, sure, I got what I wanted, this movie dug deeper into the back-story of Pearl, aka the farmer's wife, and she was pretty messed up in "X".  But how did she get that way?  And where did the car in the pond come from?  And are there really alligators in Texas?  More to the point, WTF?  I mean, WT-actual-F was up with Pearl?  It's worth pointing out that every old person you see was young once, and probably made a few mistakes, and those mistakes over the years made them who they are.

Well, this film comes very close to explaining that nothing was really Pearl's fault.  Life was not kind to Pearl, the film starts out in 1918 when she just couldn't get a break.  Her husband was off fighting in World War I and she had no idea if was going to come home or not.  At some point he stopped writing letters home, and well, that's not a good sign.  Also there was some kind of pandemic going on, that would be the Spanish flu - so people were dying both at home and abroad, about 50 million people worldwide died from the flu.  Pearl was told repeatedly to cover her face, but she was young, carefree, and she just wanted to ride her bike and feel the wind.  Relatable to today's audiences, some of whom refused to wear a mask during the COVID years despite all the medical evidence saying it was the proper thing to do.  To be fair, even Dr. Fauci and W.H.O. got the mask thing wrong for a while, because in 2020 they were telling us to not go outside without a mask on, but once we were home, it was OK to take the mask off if we were home with our family.  This was almost 100% backwards, because a year later people were dining outside without masks and being encouraged to go outside where they were LESS likely to get COVID, however it was possible for someone in your family to go to work or school, catch COVID and bring it home to infect their whole family.  So the mask policy got reversed upon further reflection, or maybe it should have been like that all along.  I guess maybe the rules had to change once people started going back to work, and the bottom line is, kids are nothing but germ factories that will infect you, so my advice is to stay away from your own kids, or better yet, don't have any in the first place. 

Oh, right, back to Pearl.  She lived on her parents' farm while her husband was off at war, and her father was paralyzed or brain-dead or something, perhaps from the flu or maybe it was polio or something else, there was a lot of bad diseases back then.  And her mother was a mean taskmaster who made Pearl do chores on the farm AND also take care of her father, feeding him and bathing him and you know, changing his dirty drawers.  The family was of German descent, and man, I found this all too familiar, having been raised by a German grandmother. I used to think my grandmother was demanding and negative and frugal because she'd lived through the Depression, but yeah, also part of that was because she was German. I feel your pain, Pearl, you just want to go out to the movies and have fun with your friends, and someday you're going to be working in the theater or making movies, but not if your German mother has anything to say about it.  Been there. 

Pearl finds comfort in the arms of the movie theater's projectionist, who lets her in for free so she won't get in trouble by spending her mother's change, and also wants to show her movies of nekkid people dancing around after the crowd goes home.  Damn, Pearl was right there when porn got invented, only nobody back then was able to charge money for it. Don't worry, one day they'll figure it out.  Pearl gets so worked up she has sex with a scarecrow on the way home, but then realizes having sex with the projectionist is a much better idea.  

It's good that Pearl has an outlet for her hostility, it's just a little odd, though, that the outlet is killing farm animals and feeding them to her pet alligator Theda, named after Theda Bara. Normally farm life does involve slaughtering animals, but you kind of get the feeling that Pearl does it just for fun.  Hollywood movies kind of glorified farm life, with little mention of the down-sides, namely the hard labor and all the killing.  Don't get too attached to those animals, OK?  Even in "The Wizard of Oz" there's not much about farm life, maybe a few minutes before Dorothy gets whisked off to the land of fairies and munchkins by a tornado, and so I doubt that she ever had to kill a pig or a cow.  But what do you suppose the effect of farm life might be on a teenage girl?  Maybe it's not such a large leap from killing chickens and geese to killing people. 

Pearl gets the chance to audition for a dance troupe that's going to tour the state, and she sees this as her ticket off the boring family farm.  But her mother refuses to allow her to attend the audition, so they argue about it, and meanwhile her mother's dress catches fire and well, let's just say that clothes were more flammable back then, and also nobody had invented "Stop, drop and roll" just yet.  Sure, it's an accident but Pearl starts to realize that she'll be free to do whatever she wants with her life if she could just kill all of the people who are standing in her way - including her sister-in-law, Mitsy, who was selected for the dance troupe over Pearl just because she was blonde and the type they were looking for.  No, it couldn't POSSIBLY be that Pearl was only an average dancer, could it?  But you can see the reasoning here, if Pearl just kills Mitsy, well then there'll be an open spot on the dance troupe again, right? 

Well, the good news is that Pearl's husband, Howard, eventually does come home from the War.  Only he comes home to a very different Pearl from the one he left behind.  She's been through some stuff, she's killed some animals and perhaps a few people, creating something of a dilemma, perhaps.  I guess there's a lesson there, you let your daughter go to the movies by herself ONE TIME and before you know it, she's an unhinged serial killer.  Sure, it could happen, films came along and changed everybody, suddenly boring old reality wasn't good enough for people who all wanted to be rich and famous, like the actors and the characters they portrayed.  

Also starring David Corenswet, Tandi Wright (last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Matthew Sunderland (last seen in "The Lost City of Z"), Emma Jenkins-Purro, Alistair Sewell (last seen in "The Power of the Dog"), Amelia Reid, Lauren Stewart, Todd Rippon, Grace Acheson, Gabe McDonnell, Shaman Theron

RATING: 6 out of 10 bales of hay

X

Year 16, Day 298 - 10/24/24 - Movie #4,879

BEFORE: Well, it looks like I'm going to wrap up this Movie Year with only three trips out to movie theaters, having seen "Deadpool & Wolverine", "Hangdog" and "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" the way nature intended.  I'm fine with that, really what choice do I have?  I won't be able to get to the third "Venom" movie, or "Kraven the Hunter" or "Moana 2" or - you know what, there's a bunch of 2024 movies I'm just not going to be able to fit in, but that's OK.  Everything ends up streaming after a month now, so I'll just deal with it all then.  I put the rest of the 2024 chain together with some movies that have been on the list for a long time, and right now that's got to take priority. 

Jenna Ortega carries over one more time from "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice", which was partially set on Halloween, with trick-or-treaters and everything.  It's too bad I couldn't put that film on October 31, but I was just a week off. 

THE PLOT: In 1979 a group of filmmakers set out to make an adult film in a rural Texas town, but when their reclusive elderly hosts catch them in the act, the crew find themselves fighting for their lives. 

AFTER: I put this on the list about six months ago, maybe, when it was running on premium cable along with its sequel (prequel?) which I'll get to tomorrow.  I'm always on the lookout for films that can pair together on DVDs that run on the premium channels that allow me to dub movies to DVD (not all of them do, thanks for nothing HBO/Cinemax).  I honestly did not know at the time whether I'd be able to get to them this October, or next October or possibly never.  It wasn't until mid-August that I had to start thinking about the October chain, and that's when I realized the chain I had planned wasn't going to work, thanks to a non-link halfway through.  OK, clear the dry erase board and start again, see if we can salvage maybe half of the chain that's still legit and link a couple of mini-chains together to make it through the month. 

I don't recall ever watching so many slasher films before, the kind where there's not much logic or sense to it all, it's just killing after killing as if the higher the body count, the greater the thrill.  But these are empty calories, people, it's like eating cotton candy, sure there's a dopamine release in your brain and maybe an insulin release in your pancreas, but at what cost?  No slasher film has ever really elevated the genre, and maybe "Scream" was the first series that even considered there might be a "why" to it all, or at least a set of rules that dictated what the appropriate actions and re-actions to mass slaughter might be. 

So I have been subjecting myself to repeated trauma and jump-scares, and so far I can't pinpoint any adverse reactions, so it's possible I may have become somewhat inured to all the killings, because no nightmares (so far) this year that involve the Ghostface or giant sea monsters or zombies or Forever Purgers or even Godzilla fighting King Kong.  I wonder why that is, but if you could peek inside my brain you might understand that my nightmares these days involve either event planning and having things go horribly wrong or bumping into my ex-wife at a film festival. Just me?  With just 11 days to go until the Presidential Election, I would also wonder right now whether it's even possible to come up with anything scarier than THAT for most Americans.  The most common nightmare right now probably concerns oversleeping on November 5 or someone going to the polls and suddenly realizing that they forgot their pants. 

But this film concerns an adult film crew going on location in Texas to shoot a porno titled "The Farmer's Daughter", which is a great title for a liltle film-within-the-film, and there was at least one similarly-title R-rated film in the real world, "The Farmer's Daughters" from 1976, and also an X-rated film with the same title from 1986 - and of course Ron Jeremy was in it. But back to the fictional film made in 1979, and from the opening scene of "X" with a Texas sheriff and deputy investigating a crime scene with several bodies, maybe there's a reason why that porn film never got finished.  Somebody went on a rampage or killing spree - damn, isn't that always the way during horror month? 

The makers of this little indie x-rated film made a few mistakes, perhaps, including renting the boarding house on this out-of-the-way farm without telling the owner of the farm what would be taking place there.  Filming permit?  Who needs one out in the middle of nowhere?  Even though Wayne slips old Howard a few extra bucks, Howard decides he doesn't like these city folk very much, they're dishonest and probably up to no good.  But Howard's wife Pearl is fascinated by the film crew, especially Maxine, who is somehow a dead ringer for her younger self.  It's a neat trick here, just get the modern-day young actress to pose in costumes to make the old-timey photographs, and then there's just the matter of making her look really old, so she can play both Maxine and Pearl.  Filming the scenes with both characters must have been a challenge, but you can do a lot with stand-ins to make it appear that one character played by Mia Goth is interacting with the other one. 

The director of "The Farmer's Daughter" wants to make a porno that's, you know, classy, a cut above that's still x-rated but with great cinematography, and really, back then people didn't put too much into the production design or the narrative of x-rated films, story-wise if you had one or two good ideas, or anything beyond "now THESE two people have sex" you were maybe ahead of the game. "Deep Throat" was a mega-hit in the early 1970's and the story literally made no sense, the lead female had a clitoris in her throat, which, umm, is not a thing that happens.  I remember also there was a series called "Taboo" where the only plot was that everybody was having sex with somebody they weren't supposed to have sex with, like family members. I think that started the "incest" or "step-" genre of porn.  Then I think there was one about female swimmers who needed to get a boost of protein right before every swim meet - really, they were all over-thinking things, if you just want to show people giving BJ's, just do that, you don't need to create this whole back-story as a motivation.  

But the mistake that RJ, the director, makes - other than trusting Wayne to rent the location - is to bring along his own girlfriend, Lorraine, to work the boom mic and the slate.  Lorraine listens to the cast of "The Farmer's Daughter" talk about how porn empowers women, and now that the sexual revolution has come, women should be free to love whomever they want, and have multiple partners and not be controlled by any one man, so Lorraine decides she wants to be in the movie, too, and have a sex scene with the professional actor, Jackson.  RJ is against it, but he just can't have it both ways, preaching about sexual freedom for every woman EXCEPT his own girlfriend.  So now there's a pissed-off director who wants to quit the project and drive off in the truck, leaving the rest of the crew behind.

Before RJ can drive off, he's confronted by a very horny Pearl, the very old farmer's wife.  RJ just isn't into sex with older women, so he rebuffs her, and that became his last mistake. Pearl has all this sexual energy built up because her husband has a weak heart, so she maybe hasn't had sex for years.  All that energy has to go somewhere, so she turns into a killing machine, jealous of all the youngsters who are able to have sex - what a weird twist on the "Friday the 13th" trope of the killer who hates promiscuous teens.  Or maybe she just has dementia, or there's another reason for her killing spree, it's not all that clear.  But one by one, the film cast and crew are taken down by pitchforks or shotguns, and the kindly old farming couple turns out to have a very dark agenda. 

There are a lot of unexplained things here, but perhaps tomorrow's prequel film will shed some light on those details - or they're just red herrings.  But clearly there's more story to be told, and now there's even a THIRD film in this series that just popped up on HBO Max, I'll have to either postpone it because I don't have a slot for it OR try to work it in, but that would mean I'll have to drop another film somewhere, which I'm not sure I want to do.  The problem is that if I don't work it in now, I don't know if I'll be able to circle back to it next year or the year after that.  So it's decision time again - what else can I drop, if anything?  Maybe I just can't. 

Also starring Mia Goth (last seen in "High Life"), Brittany Snow (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 3"), Scott Mescudi (Kid Cudi) (last heard in "Trolls Band Together"), Martin Henderson (last seen in "The Ring"), Owen Campbell (last seen in "The Perks of Being a Wallflower"), Stephen Ure (last seen in "Mortal Engines"), James Gaylyn (last seen in "The Meg"), Simon Prast, Matthew J. Saville, Geoff Dolan, Bryony Skillington (last seen in "The Power of the Dog"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 broken fingers

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Year 16, Day 297 - 10/23/24 - Movie #4,878 - VIEWED ON 9/14/24

BEFORE: The movie theater where I work part-time screened this film back in September, and I wasn't working the shift, so I had the opportunity to come in on my day off and watch the film for free.  I really had to think about it, because even though it fit RIGHT into my programming this year, there was also the opportunity to NOT watch it,  and save it for next October, when it could help me make connections to films like "Daybreakers" and Disney's recent remake of "The Haunted Mansion".  It was a difficult decision, because I haven't blocked out next year's chain, obviously, and sure, I could do whatever I can now to make connections easier next time around BUT also the flip-side of that is, I can't see the big picture, so there's a possibility that I could save it for 2025 and then NOT be able to link to it, for any number of random reasons. You can't eat your cake and have it too, so I opted to watch the film THIS year and review it THIS year because that would be a definite for-sure slam dunk, and the future, despite our best efforts, is always uncertain.  So Jenna Ortega carries over again from "Scream VI". 

I asked my wife if she wanted to join me, because nobody I work with has ever met my wife, so probably half of them are convinced that she might be fictional. But it turns out she has NEVER seen the original "Beetlejuice" film, so I guess there would be little point in taking her to see the sequel. Well, she could just WATCH the original, it must be streaming on one of the services we subscribe to.  But whatever, I invited my friend Victoria, who dressed up as Beetlejuice for the occasion. I appreciate the extra effort. 

But I can remember a time when movie studios put out their scariest movies in October, because of the Halloween hype, and then those films would disappear for a while and maybe get released one year later on DVD (then BluRay) to tie in with Halloween a second time.  Or maybe the film would premiere on premium cable or On Demand the next time that pumpkins were being carved and kids were trick-or-treating, right?  Now it's a whole new world thanks to streaming, and so movies like this are now released in theatres in September so they can be On Demand or streaming in October of the SAME YEAR.  Man, you kids today don't know how lucky you have things, when I was a teenager if you wanted to see a new movie you had to drive somewhere, either the theater or the Blockbuster Video, but you just get every movie you want on your phones, don't you?  Or you download them from a web torrent like it's not even a thing.  Even with a VHS rental, though, I was still too scared to rent most horror movies.  But I'm sure I have "Beetlejuice" somewhere on VHS or DVD, or both. 

THE PLOT: After a family tragedy, three generations of the Deetz family return home to Winter River. Still haunted by Beetlejuice, Lydia's life is turned upside-down when her teenage daughter, Astrid, accidentally opens the portal to the Afterlife. 

AFTER: Tim Burton is one of those directors who gets a free pass from me, in the same vein as George Lucas or Wes Anderson, and while I may not love everything these filmmakers put out, I WILL watch them and also champion their right to create whatever they want however they want to do it.  There's a history there, and it gets amplified when I realize that I have, either by accident or design, seen every Tim Burton-directed feature. "Big Eyes", "Dark Shadows", "Sleepy Hollow", "Ed Wood" and "Mars Attacks!"  My personal favorite at one time was "Big Fish" and I may have had some issues with him digressing from the source material when he made "Alice in Wonderland".  So there's one more reason to watch "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" now and not break the streak by leaving it unwatched. 

So if he decides that 36 is the right number of years to pass before putting out a sequel, then I'm not inclined to disagree.  It's his baby, he can do whatever he wants with it. And I think it's genius that the film is not called "Beetlejuice 2", because how boring is that?  Why not force everyone to say the name twice, and then they're all 2/3 of the way towards summoning the demon himself.  Is he a demon, though?  Or just a ghost?  Are there ghost/demons, as we kind of saw in "The Ring" and "Night House", or is this all just a case of screenwriters realizing that ghosts by themselves are not scary enough, being intangible and just trapped souls after all.  OK, none of it is for reals so we might as well say there are ghost/demons, and OK maybe there are vampire/werewolves or mummy/witches while we're at it.  Who cares? 

Lydia Deetz of course is an adult now, and the host of a supernatural talk show called "Ghost House", where she pretends to visit haunted houses and see ghosts.  (Really?  Not "Ghost of the Town" or "Ghost to Ghost" or "Talk Show Ghost"?  I got a million of 'em. "Saturday Evening Ghost"?).  But then she sees a hallucination of Beetlejuice, the ghost/demon who haunted her parents' house when she was a teen, who tried to make her his child bride.

Lydia and her daughter, Astrid, travel back to the old family home in Connecticut after the death of Lydia's father, Charles.  Charles was played by an actor in the original film who got cancelled years ago for sex offender charges, so killing off his character was necessary, and here in the sequel his character either appears in animated form, or without his head and part of his torso after death by shark attack.  Lydia's boyfriend/producer makes the bold move of proposing to her while on this funeral trip, for a Halloween wedding, and Astrid also meets a local boy who seems to have a similar disdain for the holiday, so they decide to spend it together. 

Charles (minus his head) turns up in an afterlife waiting room, as seen in the first film, and also in the afterlife we see that Beetlejuice has worked his way up to middle management, supervising a whole office of those shrunken-head ghosts who are all named Bob for some reason.  An dead actor and now ghost-detective, Wolf Jackson, informs Beetlejuice that his former wife has escaped her captivity (several separated boxes each containing a body part) and is now draining souls of the dead while searching for Beetlejuice himself.  So at some point we do get an origin story for Mr. Juice, who learned after marrying a very beautiful woman at the time of the Black Plague that she was a cult leader who poisoned him on their wedding night as part of her immortality ritual. However, when he realized he was dying he managed to cut her up into pieces as his final act. Well, that's romance for you. 

Astrid manages to figure out that her new boyfriend Jeremy is also a ghost, the big clue was that he never leaves that house or yard.  Jeremy says he needs her to travel with him to the afterlife to help him regain his life, and as a bonus she will be able to see her father's spirit.  Sure, what could POSSIBLY go wrong there?  But Lydia appears on the scene after they depart and figures out that Jeremy should not be trusted, and also by the way he may have killed his parents years ago, perhaps that's why he can't move on to the afterlife.  Lydia makes a deal to marry Beetlejuice if he'll bring her to the afterlife to save Astrid.  Meanwhile ghost detective Wolf Jackson learns that real people have somehow entered the afterlife, and he vows to put a stop to it.  

Jeremy's plan was to trade Astrid's life for his soul, so he could get a second chance at life.  He takes Astrid to the "Soul Train" which will take her to the Great Beyond, but her dead father's spirit sees her and knows she doesn't belong there, so he takes them to Saturn's moon, which is where those sandworms from the first film apparently live. And after condemning Jeremy to Hell, Astrid's father shows his wife and daughter how to get back from the Upside-Down.  Also meanwhile, Lydia's mother, Delia gets bitten by the snakes she rented for her husband's funeral, so she ends up down in the afterlife too.  Well, we're really killing off the legacy characters this week, aren't we?  

Finally there's a big showdown in the church during the planned Halloween wedding, but of course Beetlejuice shows up to claim Lydia for himself.  Well, she did sign a contract, and marriage is a contract.  But Beetlejuice's ex also finally catches up with him at the church, and so does Wolf Jackson. And who knew that the cake mentioned in the song "MacArthur Park" with its great green icing melting down was, in fact, a wedding cake?  I sure didn't.  The bad characters get eaten by a sandworm, the good characters move on with their lives, and Beetlejuice is returned to the diorama in the attic for another 36 years, when the next sequel gets released, and I can imagine what the title of that film is going to be.  

There's just a lot of scurrying around frantically in this film, and it seems like everyone who's in the afterlife is trying to get back to the living world, and then everyone in the living world either dies or is trying to get to the afterlife some other way.  So the plot is always firing in six directions at a time, and I wonder why nobody can learn to just be happy where they ARE, would that be too much to ask.  No, god damn it, I just HAVE to get to the afterlife somehow.  OK, now I desperately need to get back!  Make up your damn minds, please. 

Look, it makes some kind of sense, during our lives we keep wanting new things, we get bored with eating the same things over and over so we're always looking for better restaurants that serve new things.  You can't just watch the same 10 movies over and over again, even if they are your favorites, you end up always trying to find something better, and come on, the only real way to find stuff is volume, volume, volume.  New jobs, new friends, new experiences, we're all on a quest for more, and what if that doesn't end when we die?  

Honestly, we've been told for thousands of years what heaven is like, you get your wings and your white robe and you somehow know how to play the harp, and you get to see your dead relatives again, and, umm, that's it?  Man, that sounds like a very boring way to spend eternity.  Or you get thrown into the lake of hellfire and get punished for your sins and I suppose that's even worse.  But absolutely ZERO of the people who told you what the afterlife is like had ANY first-hand experience, think about that for a second, somebody just made a bunch of stuff up and everybody else believed it, which is just stupid. 

Perhaps there's nothing after we die, but according to this film, there is an afterlife, and you go to a giant administration building with never-ending corridors and incompetent staff and you spend a couple eons in a waiting room that never calls your number. Believable.  Then if you're lucky and you can work something out, maybe you get a job working in the building and become part of the incompetent staff, but at least you get a lot of breaks.  And then once you put in your 3,000 years or so processing the newbies you can retire and board the Soul Train and finally move on to some kind of more positive restful experience. I'm surprisingly OK with this scenario. 

The film is still a lot of fun, and when you consider that I just watched four slasher films, fun is really what I'm missing right now - essentially this is like a live-action cartoon, and it doesn't take itself too serioulsy.  Unfortunately I think I'm back to form on scary movies full of gore tomorrow. 

Also starring Michael Keaton (last seen in "The Flash"), Winona Ryder (last seen in "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee"), Catherine O'Hara (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), Justin Theroux (last heard in "Lady and the Tramp" (2019)), Willem Dafoe (last seen in "Asteroid City"), Monica Bellucci (last seen in "Mafia Mamma"), Arthur Conti, Nick Kellington (last seen in "First Kill"), Santiago Cabrera (last seen in "What Happened to Monday"), Burn Gorman (last seen in "Lift"), Danny DeVito (last heard in "Migration"), Sami Slimane, Amy Nuttall, Mark Heenehan, Liv Spencer, Skylar Park, Matt Lyons, Jane Leaney (last seen in "Dolittle"), David Ayres, Sophie Holland (last seen in "Tom & Jerry"), Walles Hamonde (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"), Rebecca O'Mara, Adam Speers, Daryl Kwan, Caroline Lawrie, Philip Philmar (last seen in "No Time to Die"), Stephen K. Amos, Sean Verre, Noah Mendes, Juliana Yazbeck (last seen in "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit"), Bea Svistunenko, Filipe Cates, Alex Michael Stoll, Rupi Lai, Georgina Beedle, Stefano Marchetti, James Fisher, Olivia Valentine, Gianni Calchetti, Chloe Driver and the voice of Charlie Hopkinton.

RATING: 7 out of 10 tiny houses in the attic diorama