A Ghost Story

Year 17, Day 291 - 10/18/25 - Movie #5,175

BEFORE: The genre confusion continues tonight, because the IMDB classifies this film as both a mystery, a drama, a supernatural fantasy, and a romance. Notice that "horror" is absent from the list. So I've been debating for a while over where this one should go - according to my system, something needs to be either a romance OR a horror film, it just can't be both, because one thing would mean it gets watched in February, and the other thing suggests October. OK, umm, which list does this belong on? Essentially it's about ghosts, so therefore October, once the linking finally allows it, which is NOW. OK, so problem solved?

Jonny Mars carries over from "I Lost My Body". Well, whatever happens, I got where I wanted to go, this film was scheduled for tomorrow, and I worked hard to get ahead of the count so I can review and post TODAY, as we're leaving tomorrow for North Carolina, and I'm going to be away from my computer for a week. Now I've got a shot at finishing the horror chain once we get back - then I'll start the REAL countdown to Halloween.

THE PLOT: An exploration of legacy, love, loss, and the enormity of existence. A recently deceased, white-sheeted ghost returns to his suburban home to try to reconnect with his bereft wife. 

AFTER: Well, I guess this is as good a place as any to take a week's break, with a film that explores life, death, loss, regret, love and umm, whatever the opposite of love is, be it dissatisfaction or burgeoning dislike or plain old disappointment. Damn, if only we had a word for the opposite of love - I know that you might THINK we do, but we don't. It's not "hate", no, that would be too simple and also untrue, because you can both love and hate something, you can't stop and go at the same time, you can't work and play at the same time either, to be opposites one has to preclude the other, and love and hate just don't work that way. Love and hate are a bit more like eating and drinking, you're probably going to end up doing both at the same time, at least to some small degree. 

But I didn't really know what to do with this film because of the way it depicts ghosts, here they are seen as actors wearing sheets, with eye-holes cut out, and that calls to mind comic strips and cartoons, one example would be "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" where we see a couple of characters from the "Peanuts" gang in ghost costumes, which are just sheets with those eye-holes so they can walk around. It's a trope, an over-simplification, like when you see a stick of dynamite in a cartoon it's a red cylinder with a fuse and the letters TNT on the side - in real life not all explosives look like that. But when we see that in a cartoon, we know what it represents, just as if you picture a candy bar or a toy train in your head, it's likely to be a cartoony or comic-like image.  Can I really take a film seriously that depicts human souls as cartoonish ghosts, just people wearing big sheets? Is this aimed at an audience of ten-year-olds?

I think maybe this is just a convention, a means to an end, somebody needed a way to cause the dead characters to immediately register as "ghosts" in our minds, to separate them from the still-living characters, and not be gross like depicting them as rotting corpses. If I think about other movies with ghosts in them, like the movie "Ghost", Patrick Swayze's character died and they just kept depicting him as the way he looked when he was alive, isn't that just as ridiculous, if you stop and think about it? While in "The Haunted Mansion" some ghosts looked like they did when they were alive, only see-through, and others took on more demonic appearances - really, there are no right answers here, just different filmic conventions used for the sake of clarity, in trying to prove a larger point. How should a vampire look in a movie, how should a zombie or a werewolf look?  Really, it all comes down to art direction - "Dracula" set the standard for how a vampire should look, and everyone just fell in line, but other answers later became possible.

So this brings us back to the main question, and it's the million-dollar question: What happens to us when we die? If what's represented here isn't it, then...what is it? If we're a ghost or spirit and we're not just wearing a sheet, what would we look like, or would we even be visible? Is there a chance to move on to another plane that we can opt out of, because we have unfinished business? Or is the answer the simplest one of all, that we die and then - nothing happens, we just cease to exist? I was walking through Manhattan yesterday and I saw what used to be a bunch of weed stores, they all popped up around the same time two or three years ago, and now they're all going out of business around the same time, which is weird because pot seemed like really popular for a while, what happened? Or did the legit stores stay and the phony ones or the ones without licenses all fail? It doesn't matter, because I think people are a bit like weed stores or closed restaurants, the demise is a certainty, we just don't know when that store is going to close, but come on, we know it's going to close eventually. And so you walk by your former favorite restaurant or an old weed store and it's like seeing a dead body, you know what it once WAS, but it's not in business any more, you're just looking at the shell. But we don't say the business is in heaven, we just say it doesn't exist any more. So easy answer, if you see a dead body, you're just looking at the shell of who it once was, but the person is gone, they just no longer exist. See, is that so hard? We don't want to face the truth because it reminds us of our own inevitable demise, that one day we also won't exist, so we say they "passed on" or their spirit is "all around us", even if you don't follow a religion it can be hard to admit they're gone. 

The story here is that the husband's ghost sticks around, but he can't talk to his wife, he can't tell her he's a ghost, he just wants to be near her because of either love or maybe just habit. But clearly they argued a lot, we see a little bit of this at the start of the film and a lot more during the flashbacks at the end, so was it really the perfect relationship, or was he too controlling or not communicative enough, or a little bit of both? If he hadn't died in a car crash very close to their house, who's to say how long the relationship would have lasted beyond that point? His ghost rises up from the viewing slab in the morgue after they cover him with a sheet (very convenient, this becomes his ghost "costume"...) and he makes his way out of the hospital and walks back home, where he watches his wife grieve him, then get back into a routine, and at some point in the near future, she sells the house (which, it turns out, she was never really sold on in the first place, even though it came with a piano). But before she leaves to drive off following the U-Haul van with her belongings, she leaves a note inside a crack in a wall's molding. 

"C", the ghost, becomes obsessed with trying to get that note out of the wall, though as a ghost it's kind of hard for him to move objects. He watches as a new family buys the house, a single mother and two kids, and maybe the kids can see him? It's unclear. But he essentially haunts them, and it's a bit odd that he can't get that note out of the wall crack but he has no trouble throwing this family's plates around to convince them that their house is haunted. They flee, or move out slowly, it's tough to say, but "C" then moves forward in time to a new set of residents, it looks like a bunch of hipsters who throw wild parties and also discuss the secrets of the universe while they're high. Maybe somewhere in there we get the director's view on how the universe really works, but I've got to say, it's a downer, one guy likes to talk about how our sun is going to turn into a red giant someday and destroy the earth, but it doesn't matter because by then the human race will either be living on other planets (if we get our shit together) or dead from climate change or natural disasters. OK, this guy I like, but he totally forgot about the massive black hole at the center of our galaxy which is symbolically and literally the drain that our solar system is circling.  

"C" also makes friends (?) with the ghost that lives in the house next door, who is waiting for somebody, and always waiting and watching for that somebody. This jibes with the theory that ghosts are just dead spirits with unresolved issues, and they can't move on to the next plane of existence until that matter is settled. That person may never be coming back, but the ghost can't quite grasp that, because it's dead and has a very limited brain capacity, well no brain at all. More time passes and the houses all get torn down and somebody builds an industrial park, so "C" haunts some kind of corporate office for a while, but you know, it's just not the same, he really liked that house. 

But free of the constraint of wondering what was on that note in a house that got torn down, "C" is free to wander the earth, but instead decides to jump off of a tall building. This somehow sends him through the timestream, and he gets to watch as a group of pioneers settle on the land that would one day become his house (this is a lot like "Here" in some ways) and also he gets to see them killed by Native Americans. NITPICK POINT: If this is how ghosts work, why don't THEIR spirits haunt this land? Clearly they had unresolved issues, they moved across the country in a covered wagon to own a piece of a new state, and they never got to enjoy it!  

"C" then moves forward in time, somehow, and ends up being a ghost in his own house, while he and his wife were living there. This explains a few things that happened in the earlier parts of the film, pre-car crash, but there's no getting over how creepy this is that he's spying on his OWN relationship, and this time he knows it's doomed to fail, and he knows how and when he's going to die, and I don't know, is this supposed to be some weird take on life being some big awkward circle or something?  The good news is that he gets one more chance to get that note out of the crack in the molding...

And the other good news is that I have a new answer in case anyone asks me what happens when we die. My new answer is that when we die, friends and neighbors bring over pies and casseroles and somebody sells your collection of things. Can we all agree this is the case? There may or may not be an after-life, but let's at least make sure there's an after-party, even if we can't make it because we're dead.

Directed by David Lowery (director of "Peter Pan & Wendy" and "The Green Knight")

Also starring Casey Affleck (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Rooney Mara (last seen in "Women Talking"), Kenneisha Thompson (last seen in "The Old Man & the Gun"), Barlow Jacobs (ditto), Liz Cardenas Franke (last seen in "The Wolf of Snow Hollow"), Sonia Acevedo, Carlos Bermudez, Yasmina Violeta Gutierrez, Kesha Sebert, Jared Kopf, Will Oldham (last seen in "The Bikeriders"), Brea Grant (last seen in "Fanarchy"), Augustine Frizzell (last seen in "Ain't Them Bodies Saints"), Rob Zabrecky, Sara Tomerlin, McColm Cephas Jr. (last seen in "Ambulance"), Grover Coulson (last seen in "The Lone Ranger"), Richard Krause, Dagger Salazar, Kimberly Fiddes, Daniel Escudero, Afomia Hailemeskel, Rachel Ballard, Bryan Pitts, David Lowery, 

RATING: 5 out of 10 card tricks

I Lost My Body

Year 17, Day 290 - 10/17/25 - Movie #5,174 - VIEWED ON 9/20/25

BEFORE: Another film that I figured I could watch in advance, because it's short, to help avoid the time crunch that's coming in October, due to us taking a week off to go to North Carolina and also because I may be working two jobs again soon, so you know, less time for movies. 

Alia Shawkat carries over from "Blink Twice" (or maybe "Green Room") Nope, I was right the first time. This has been hanging around my list for way too long, it came out in 2019 - now I'm not saying it's been on the list for six years, but it's possible, since it's nearly impossible to link to it, based on this cast. This is why I tried to hide it between two films with Alia Shawkat, only to then discover that she wasn't really IN one of those films, but still was credited on IMDB for NOT being in the film. Geez, thanks. But just like with "The Butterfly Effect 2", they can make a film very, very difficult for me to program, but that just makes me more determined - sooner or later (probably later) I'm going to get there. 

Since I watched this in advance, I'm going to double-up and count this as a 2nd Friday movie to send a special birthday SHOUT-out to George Wendt, born on 10/17/48. Happy birthday in sit-com heaven I guess - he passed away in May of this year. 

THE PLOT: A story of Naoufel, a young man who is in love with Gabrielle. In another part of town, a severed hand escapes from a dissection lab, determined to find its body again. 

AFTER: This is another film that I wasn't SURE should be classified as "horror", but it is about a hand trying to find the body that it came from, and if that isn't at least creepy than we maybe have to have a serious little chat. The film presents two timelines mingled together, one in the present where the hand is moving around the Paris suburbs, trying to find the arm and body it belongs to, and in the past timeline, we follow an orphaned teen from Morocco, Naoufel, as he works part-time in, you guessed it, Paris. He wants to be a pianist and he records his day-to-day thoughts on cassette tapes. 

Naoufel delivers pizza, but he is often late, forcing the pizza company to give out refunds, or free pizza, to its clients. He tries to deliver a pizza to a young woman named Gabrielle, but the stuck security door won't allow him in, so he never sees her, and apparently she never gets her pizza, either. Naoufel is really bad at his job, I guess. 

He follows her to the library where she works and then to her uncle's apartment, where she drops off medicine. When confronted, he lies and says he is there to apply for the apprentice job, which is listed on the building's bulletin board. The carpenter, of course, is Gabrielle's uncle, and he takes Naoufel under his wing and shows him how to work with tools and repair things around his building. 

Not meanwhile, in the present, the hand has escaped from a laboratory refrigerator and is journeying across Paris. There's no indication how the hand knows where it is, because it can't see, or where to go, because it has no brain, so really there's no explanation for how the hand is making this journey, except that this is an animated film, and anything can happen in animation, as long as somebody can draw it. I suppose it's really more important here to think about what all this could mean rather than whether all this is possible, which it's not. 

Naoufel uses his new woodworking skills to build a wooden igloo on a rooftop, he and Gabrielle had a conversation before about living in the Arctic. There's kind of a burgeoning romance here, except Naoufel blows it by telling her the truth about how they met before, when he was trying in vain to deliver a pizza to her. Terrible idea, because now she thinks that he's been stalking her, also lying to her by not telling about that sooner, so that's two big strikes against him. So Gabrielle is upset and leaves, Naoufel goes to his cousin's party and gets into a drunken fight, then he's hung over the next morning in the carpenter's shop, and do I really need to draw you a picture here? 

At some point later, the hand finally finds its body, and of course that's Naoufel. The hand lies next to him while he sleeps but cannot re-attach itself to his arm. The arm hides under the bed while Naoufel listens to his tape recorder, which still has a recording of his parents made just before the fatal car crash. Gabrielle later finds his tape recorder in the igloo on the roof, after Naoufel had jumped from the roof to a nearby construction crane, which somehow proved that we're all capable of bold moves, ones that can change our fate.  

I guess that's what this really all comes down to, how we can't change our pasts, and we can't go back to the way things were, but we can take moves that will change our future. But figuring that out takes a LOT of reading between the lines here, it's a very subtle message, I think. The rest, all the stuff with the severed hand, I think I'll file under "body horror" and just move on. Again this is not outright scary, just very creepy and very French, or is that the same thing?

Directed by Jeremy Clapin

Also starring the voices of Dev Patel (last seen in "About Cherry"), George Wendt (last seen in "I Am Chris Farley"), Tucker Chandler, Anouar H. Smaine (last seen in "Extraction II"), Sarah Lynn Dawson, Jonny Mars (last seen in "Joe"), Barbara Goodson (last heard in "The Bad Guys"), Tara Sands, Brooke Burgstahler, Charles Fathy (last heard in "W."), Dennis Kleinman (last heard in "The Tomorrow Man"), Mark Lewis. (last seen in "Demolition"), Tipper Newton, Jarrod Pistilli, Wolfie Trausch

RATING: 4 out of 10 sugar cubes

Blink Twice

Year 17, Day 290 - 10/17/25 - Movie #5,173

BEFORE: This is the conundrum I often have in October - is this a horror movie, or is it NOT a horror movie? The IMDB lists it as a "thriller" and a "mystery" film - if I try to dive in any deeper than that, then I'll encounter spoilers and I don't want that, plus then the decision will kind of be taken out of my hands. So sometimes I just have to dive in and watch it, let the chips fall where they may. If this is NOT a horror movie in any way, shape or form, there's no real harm except to the integrity of the October horror chain, but, you know, it's survived worse. 

Saul Williams carries over from "Sinners". 

THE PLOT: When tech billionaire Slater King meets cocktail waitress Frida at his fundraising gala, he invites her to join him and his friends for a dream vacation on his private island. As strange things start to happen, Frida questions her reality. 

AFTER: Well, I probably shouldn't have worried, because this IS a horror movie, just a different sort of horror movie than the ones we're all used to. There are no vampires here, no witches or ghosts or demons (other than inner ones) because it's more about how horrible people can be to each other, especially men toward women. Jeez, I don't want to give it away but there's just no way to talk about this film without giving something away. SPOILER ALERT, I guess, if you don't want to know what happens in this film than stop reading now, then come back but only IF you watched this movie. All right, we good? 

This is a horror story in the way that the Harvey Weinstein story was a horror story, in the way that the Bill Cosby story was a horror story, in the way that the Diddy story was a horror story. OK, admittedly I didn't follow the details of the Diddy stories, but I heard people on TMZ talking about the freakout parties, and sure, what happens privately between people should remain private unless (and it's a pretty big unless) one person is exerting power or control over another person and making them do something they don't want to do. Which is what the Weinstein trials were about, the Cosby scandal and the Diddy trials were all about, people in power were using that power to get laid, one way or another.  And then people started prosecuting the worst offenders, the #Metoo movement was in full swing, and it took down people like Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, and Brett Ratner (well, he was living on borrowed time, I can assure you) and then Kevin Spacey and James Franco and Aziz Ansari and Louis C.K. I can't even parse out which allegations were bona fide and which were exaggerated, there were that many and anyway, it's not my place to do so. 

It got into politics, too, and New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo got in trouble for touching women without consent, and Pixar CEO John Lasseter lost his job for hugging too many employees - just hugging, he was a hugger and maybe that's the point where I started to wonder if things were going just a bit too far - I mean, do you want to live in a world where people are afraid to hug each other? But I get it, consent is important and nobody should be HUGGED without their consent, but then neither should they be given candy or bought lunch without their consent either, and really, you should never sing "Happy Birthday" to anyone unless you have explicit written consent to do so, and also you've made sure it is their birthday, because God forbid you trigger somebody by wishing them good tidings on the wrong day. Jee-SUS what is wrong with you post-millennials?

We live in a different world now, and though nobody took down Michael Jackson while he was (probably) touching young boys, cancel culture caught up with Diddy and R. Kelly and some record producers, along with that doctor for the U.S. gymnastics team, and a few mayors and congressmen around the U.S., but you know the big fish in politics got away, right? I don't even need to say the name but it rhymes with POTUS. Without Jeffrey Epstein to testify against him (awfully convenient what happened to him, just saying) and with Epstein's biggest helper now transferred to a day spa rather than a superMax prison, I'd lay odds we're never going to hear the truth about who's in those "files", if there are any files they're buried now with the Area 51 documents and the identity of the JFK assassin. Release the files? It's too late, they're already in the hands of the people who DON'T want them released, so they've been burned or buried or deleted by now, otherwise some newspaper would have printed them all.

Right, the movie, "Blink Twice" takes a bit of Diddy, a bit of Cosby and a whole lot of Epstein and mashes them all together, in the form of billionaire tech mogul Slater King, who recently resigned as CEO of his company for unspecified reasons. But he still hosts his annual gala event for his charitable foundation, and we follow a cocktail waitress named Frida who works at the event, along with her friend Jess. Once they're done serving the crowd, they change into evening gowns in the restroom and pretend to be guests - it works, Frida catches the eye of Slater King and they drink and dance and enjoy each other's company. 

Once it's over, he invites Frida and Jess, his friends and their newfound companions to travel with him by private jet to his own private island - come on, say it with me this time, "What could POSSIBLY go wrong?" How is that not a red flag for her? Who the hell has a private island, nothing good can happen on a private island, right? Well, it sure seems great at first, there's chef-designed food and custom cocktails a-plenty, plus weed and other drugs and they can all go swimming and fishing and sing and dance and be merry. It seems like all of Slater's business partners and personal friends all found dates at the gala, so this must be paradise, let's all enjoy it while it lasts - but the party keeps going, for days on end, and they all kind of lose track of time, as one does on a long vacation, or maybe it's the large amounts of alcohol and the drugs that's messing with everyone's brains. Yeah, that's probably it. 

Slater's maid seems to recognize Frida, and calls her "Red Rabbit". Frida stumbles upon a room with a large supply of red gift bags, you know, but that could be anything, it could just mean that Slater is a player. I remember stories about Derek Jeter when he was playing for the Yankees, and he was in the habit of sending gift baskets to all his one-night stands after their time together. It's fine. It's all fine, right?  At this point in the film I was kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop, because the film was giving off strong "Midsommer" vibes. (See also "The Menu".)

Jess gets bitten by a snake, and the venom has a weird effect on her brain chemistry, suddenly she's not sure what's real any more, or maybe things have gotten a little TOO real. Is she remembering something she's forgotten, or has everyone else forgotten something that they were supposed to remember. What day is it, anyway? How long have we been on this island, and has anyone seen Jess lately? Wait, who's Jess, again? 

I'm dancing all around it, of course, because I don't want to spoil it, but I'm really shocked that more people haven't been talking about this movie, because it seems as topical as today's headlines, and really, a lot of the headlines from the past eight years or so. This is the first film I've ever seen that had not just a parental advisory at the start, but also a trigger warning. No, really, I'm not kidding for once. For mature themes and sexual violence, like if you suffer from harassment PTSD or worse, perhaps this is not the film for you. 

One very big NITPICK POINT is that at the start of the film, we see Frida watching a video of Slater King issuing a very public apology, which suggest some kind of impropriety, admittedly they don't specify whether that's sexual, financial, or if he's just getting cancelled for being too woke or something. But it seems like he did something very bad, if he needs to give an interview just to apologize for it. Yet Frida seems intent on meeting him at the gala anyway, so this makes no sense at the start of the film, and then when we learn some more stuff near the end of the film, it makes even less sense. There are very few instances where people were lining up to date Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby or Diddy after the scandals broke - unless some misguided women out there just thought they could change them. Yeah, good luck with that. But I thought at first that maybe we were seeing a flash-forward to the end of the film at the start of the film, that would have maybe made a tiny bit more sense. 

Directed by Zoë Kravitz

Also starring Naomi Ackie (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker"), Channing Tatum (last seen in "10 Years"), Alia Shawkat (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Christian Slater (last seen in "I Am Chris Farley"), Simon Rex (last seen in "Superhero Movie"), Adria Arjona (last seen in "Hit Man"), Haley Joel Osment (last seen in "Happy Gilmore 2"), Liz Caribel Sierra, Levon Hawke, Trew Mullen, Geena Davis (last seen in "Music by John Williams"), Kyle MacLachlan (last heard in "Inside Out 2"), Cris Costa, Maria Elena Olivares, Tiffany Persons, Aaron Himelstein (last seen in "Avengers: Age of Ultron"), Ben Jacobson, Caroline Forsythe, Garret Levitz, Regina Guerrero, Kerry Ardra (last seen in "Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar"), Julian Sedgwick, Mika Kubo, Eduardo Lopez Morton, Emire Arellano, with cameos from Zoë Kravitz (last seen in "Furiosa: A Mad Max Story"), Lenny Kravitz (last seen in "American Symphony")

RATING: 5 out of 10 exfoliating masks

Sinners

Year 17, Day 289 - 10/16/25 - Movie #5,172

BEFORE: 15 down, 10 to go. Well, 9 after today. But just three more until I go on break, remember the blog will be DARK from October 20-25 and I hope to post something late on the 26th to stay on track, otherwise I'll be running late. I can still get it all done, everything is still possible. This is another film that screened at the theater where I work, just like "Nosferatu" and "The Pope's Exorcist" did, but I can't remember now which guilds they were screened for, a lot of these were probably for the visual effects society. Ah, yes, I found it on my calendar - May 5 was the screening for the V.E.S., so that's not bad, that I was able to watch it just 5 months later on cable. 

Gralen Bryant Banks carries over from "Haunted Mansion". I know that I've watched a LOT of movies set in New Orleans this year, because this is Mr. Banks' NINTH appearance this Movie Year. Pretty amazing, this ties him with Samuel L. Jackson, and he's not exactly an A-list actor.

THE PLOT: Trying to leave their troubled lives behind, twin brothers return to their hometown to start again, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back. 

AFTER: Well, there's a lot to like here, it's a very different take on vampire movies. The very fact that somebody re-made "Nosferatu", which was just a rip-off of "Dracula" with the names all changed, but otherwise identical, AGAIN, proves that the genre really needed, well, some new blood. New ideas, new plot-points, this is how you should update something, not just by making the same film somebody else did 100 years ago and just repeating everything THEY did. 

This is a vampire story set against the backdrop of Louisiana in the 1930's, so you've got Depression-era economics, racial problems involving Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan, and also the burgeoning black Blues music scene. That's a lot already, there was probably enough material for a whole drama before the vampires even got involved, and then that just kicked everything else into high gear when people at the juke joint started coming under attack. Well, I guess if Count Orlok can develop a taste for German food, other vampires might seek out Southern food, soul food if you follow me. As I mentioned last night, I'm not a big fan of Louisiana cuisine, but there are actual Louisianans on the vampires' menu, that's a whole different thing. 

It's a long film already before the vampires even show up, I'm guessing it's an hour of build-up as we watch twin brothers Smoke and Stack come back to their home-town from Chicago and purchase an old sawmill to turn it into a concert venue and bar just for colored people, and they enlist their cousin, Sammie, to play guitar there to entertain people, after learning that he's good at playing the blues.  They also hire harmonica player Delta Slim away from his regular Saturday gig by promising him all the beer he can drink (and he can drink a lot of beer) and they also get Cornbread to work the door as a bouncer. The local Chinese shopkeeper couple agrees to supply the food, and Smoke's ex-wife Annie enlists as a cook. They're all good to go, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?

What they don't know is that an Irish immigrant who is also a vampire has escaped from the Native American vampire hunters who were on his trail, and he hides out with a nice married white couple after offering them gold. But of course the gold is just to get himself in the door so he can turn them into vampires like himself, and they can start a little vampire folk band that sings in perfect three-part harmony.  I don't know what they'd call their band, but I'll think of something. Just as things are starting to get hopping at the juke joint, the three (Caucasian) vampires show up, and say they want to come in and enjoy the music. But vampires need to be INVITED into a building, there's a long-standing rule, so that's why they pretend to be charming and/or innocent, they can't just go everywhere, they have to resort to trickery. 

(Look, if there is a devil, do you think he's going to show up to seduce you and look like a cartoon devil, with horns and a forked tail and colored all red? That would be so obvious, wouldn't it? Nah, he's going to look like your best friend that you haven't met yet, or he's going to look like a Playboy model, or Playgirl model if that's your thing, no judgements. Or he's going to offer you a job, or some money, or a super-expensive car, or all of the above. End of aside.)

There's something suspicious about these folk-singing, wide-smiling, fine and upstanding citizens who just want to party in a Negro establishment. There are plenty of white nightclubs in town, why do they want to come and dance and party at the edge of town, in a place that plays black music?  There's something quite interesting here about the comparison of "white" music to "black" music, we often hear about blues guitarists like Robert Johnson, who (allegedly) sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in order to be able to play guitar like he did. So there's a connotation perhaps that the blues (and by extension, rock and roll) is the "devil's music", but this movies spins that around, and here the evil creatures play Irish folk music while the fine upstanding and "innocent" local descendants of slaves play the Blues.  

However (and you just knew there would be a "however", right?) the twins realize that their new venue isn't going to be profitable, because there's a Depression on, and many people are trying to pay for their drinks using actual wooden nickels, they don't want to turn away any business, but all that food and all that alcohol cost money, and so Stack's ex-girlfriend Mary offers to go get those white folk musicians back, they figure that they'll bleed those white people dry, but ironically they're setting themselves up for the exact opposite to happen. So the vampires get Mary and Cornbread over to their side, and they keep trying to get into the juke joint - if they can't they'll just pick off the employees one by one as they step outside. 

This felt a lot like a Tarantino film to me, there are elements of "The Hateful Eight" (one location, with people trapped inside) and also "Inglourious Basterds" (wish fulfillment, defeating an evil power like Nazis or the Klan), and I realize Tarantino probably would never make a horror movie, but just maybe if he did, it might turn out something like this. Maybe throw in the futility of life exemplified by "Pulp Fiction" and you realize this film is a mash-up of so many different things at once. Wait, Tarantino wrote "From Dusk Till Dawn", didn't he? OK so that changes everything, this is VERY Tarantino-like - if you just re-made that film but put it back into the past of the American South instead of Mexico, and race-swapped everybody, you'd have something like this.  It's still "us" vs. "them" and the vampires are "them", that's the important thing.

The turn-around time here for vampirism is accelerated, it doesn't take long between a vampire drinking someone's blood and them becoming a vampire themselves, in some stories it takes like three days but here it's more like three minutes, which really keeps the story moving and allows for everything to fail horribly in a single night. Also brother eventually fights brother, which is kind of the whole point of having an actor play a dual role in the first place. I would like to know whether they filmed every scene twice or just used a double and deep-faked it, but it hardly matters. As long as Michael B. Jordan got paid twice according to SAG rules. 

The most controversial scene will probably end up being the musical number - and yes, there is a prominent musical number. Sammie's guitar playing is supposedly SO GOOD that it somehow crosses the barriers of time, and by listening to it you can hear echoes of both the past and the future. To illustrate this, seen dancing in the crowd at the juke joint are ancient tribal warriors, and also modern hip-hop dancers, a Bootsy Collins-like guitarist, a DJ and a few rappers, among others. This breaks the reality of the film being set in the 1930's, of course, and it's quite impossible, but then, so are vampires, so really, all bets are off.  You can choose for yourself whether this scene is meant to be symbolic or if Sammie's guitar skills somehow opened up a time portal and allowed people from other eras to visit the event space. 

Directed by Ryan Coogler (director of "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever")

Also starring Michael B. Jordan (last seen in "That Awkward Moment"), Hailee Steinfeld (last seen in "3 Days to Kill"), Miles Caton, Jack O'Connell (last seen in "Trial by Fire"), Wunmi Mosaku (last seen in "Alice, Darling"), Jayme Lawson (last seen in "Till"), Omar Benson Miller (last seen in "Things We Lost in the Fire"), Delroy Lindo (last seen in "Domino"), Peter Dreimanis, Lola Kirke (last seen in "American Made"), Li Jun Li (last seen in "Babylon"), Saul Williams, Yao, Dave Maldonado (last seen in "The Burial"), Helena Hu, Andrene Ward-Hammond (last seen in "The Lovebirds"), Nathaniel Arcand (last seen in 'Killers of the Flower Moon"), Emonie Ellison (last seen in "A Man Called Otto"), Tenaj L. Jackson (last seen in "Lay the Favorite"), Aadyn Encalarde (last seen in "Girls Trip"), Sam Malone (last seen in "Nickel Boys"), Ja'Quan Monroe-Henderson (last seen in "Kinds of Kindness"), Percy Bell, Mark L. Patrick, Nicoye Banks (last seen in "Focus"), Christian Robinson (last seen in "The First Purge"), Justin William Davis (last seen in "Quiz Lady"), Deneen Tyler (last seen in "Big George Foreman"), Buddy Guy (last seen in "Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away"), Michael A. Newcomer (last seen in "Where the Crawdads Sing"), Theodus Crane (last seen in "Five Nights at Freddy's"), Calvin Williams (last seen in "Queen & Slim")

RATING: 7 out of 10 cloves of pickled garlic (how convenient that they were there!)

Haunted Mansion (2023)

Year 17, Day 288 - 10/15/25 - Movie #5,171

BEFORE: Well, I was forced to cut the "Hocus Pocus" movies from the horror chain because the link I was using was no good, which caused some emergency transplant surgery - four films out and four other films in, two Disney "horror" films out, and one Disney film in as part of the transplant to re-connect the open ends of the chain. Unfortunately this means I'm stranding a fair number of films tonight, like "The Haunting" and one of the "Predator" movies, but those are the breaks. Today's film got stranded last year when I watched "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice", it happens. A few films just need to be moved back down to the "Someday/Maybe" portion of the list, but the important thing is that the chain continues. With just 30 films left in the year, there's no way I'm going to let that drop now. 

Christopher Winchester carries over from "Renfield", just to play a bartender in one scene of this movie, but it counts. That's not much of a link, but it keeps the chain alive. 

THE PLOT: A single mother hires a tour guide, a psychic, a priest and a historian to help exorcise her newly-bought mansion after discovering it is inhabited by ghosts. 

AFTER: Disney Studios is just going to keep making movies with this title every twenty years, from now until the end of time, because they think that's going to keep the "Haunted Mansion" ride at their theme parks relevant somehow. Most of the rides are based on Disney films, of course, but they had success reverse-engineering things with the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies BASED ON THE RIDE, so they keep thinking lightning's going to strike twice in the same place, and sorry, that's just not how these things work. 

It seems that Guillermo del Toro wanted to make a version of this movie back in 2010, which could have been a real coup for Disney to own his work, I mean to "work with him" but I think at some point he either got bored with the whole idea or perhaps he figured out that if you work for Disney, they own your work, and you don't. The film spent 10 years in development hell after that, but eventually came back to life, you know, like a thing, a dead thing that is still sort of alive, I know there's a word for it but it's just not coming to me right now. Like a zombie? No, that's not it. 

Del Toro's script was ultimately deemed to be too scary, nobody gave him the memo that states that Disney films need to be family-friendly, so I guess ghosts are fine because they can scare you but they can't actually hurt you, still there are plot points here about characters like Madame Leota chopping up her five husbands, so, umm, WTF, Disney?  Other parts of the story had to bend themselves over backwards so that the ghosts seen here would match the ones seen in the amusement park ride, because they didn't want to spend more money to change the RIDE to match the MOVIE. Yeah, this is kind of why "Jungle Cruise" tanked, because instead of making a great movie, they were more concerned with making a movie that would remind you of the ride. 

Also, in addition to ghosts there are a TON of product placement mentions in "Haunted Mansion", from Amazon to Zillow and everything in-between. That's not just a seance candle, it's a Yankee Candle, even if the medium complains about that, she still mentioned it, ka-CHING! Burger King, CVS, Benihana, Baskin-Robbins, the list goes on and on and is pretty shameless. The kicker comes, though, when you learn that the film was scheduled to open just days after the SAG-AFTRA strike, so none of the film's stars were able to make promotional appearances. Also, who the hell opens a Halloween-like film in JULY? Bad timing, really - in addition the "Barbie/Oppenheimer" dual screenings were catching on, so really, that month for just about everyone, seeing "Haunted Mansion" was third priority on their to-do list, at best.

The story is WAY more complicated than it needed to be. People die, they become ghosts, they haunt you because they died incomplete, there was something they didn't do or say, so their spirits can't move on to the next world. That should be fairly simple, but everything here is at least ten times more complex than that.  The ghosts haunt the mansion, but then anyone who visits the mansion gets haunted at home, too, which makes no sense, ghosts, if they exist, are usually thought of as location-specific.  They haunt the place they died, or maybe they track down the person who killed them and haunt THAT person's house, but they usually don't just continue leading their lives as if they don't understand that they're not dead. Maybe once in a while they'll go haunt a miserly moneylender on Christmas Eve, but that's probably an extreme circumstance. 

So the mother who bought the haunted mansion tried to leave, but the ghosts followed her everywhere. So illogically she decided to return to the mansion with her son and try to make the best of it. Guys, that makes NO sense. This is like saying, "Hey, the forest is on fire, so let's go camping!" But she contacts a priest to arrange an exorcism, and he tracks down widower Ben Matthias, who at some point developed a camera that could detect dark matter, and accidently instead (or in addition to) it can also photograph ghosts. Umm, he thinks. Since Ben doesn't believe in ghosts, he really had no interest in testing it, not until somebody paid him $2,000 to do just that. Ben and Father Kent also hire a psychic and a local historian to help them figure out why this place in particular is haunted. 

It seems the owner of the Mansion, Mr. Gracey, was convinced by a ghost to commit suicide - same goes for Madame Leota, who fell into the same trap and now is forced to inhabit a crystal ball for all eternity, answering stupid questions from modern-day first-time homeowners. It seems that the house contains these spirits and 997 other souls like them, if they can only get ONE more the house will have 1,000 and then, I don't know, they can all get free delivery from GrubHub or something, or share one Disney+ account and save a ton of money. 

What the main characters have to do to FIX everything is the most complicated of all, it's not as easy as the Venn diagram that one character makes where one circle is "the real world" and the other circle is "the great beyond" and the space where the two circles overlap is, well, the "Haunted Mansion". See, that was easy to explain, why couldn't the whole movie be a bunch of easy, junk science like that? Instead they have to convince the ghosts to rebel against their master, climb up an eternally-expanding wall, fight some Louisiana alligators, hold a seance in a room that doesn't exist and run through the mansions hallways that keep getting longer and longer and don't ever end. Then they have to go to a completely DIFFERENT mansion that's an hour's drive away to find a missing top hat and keep it from burning up in a fireplace, because it's somehow the thing they need to use to cast the banishment ritual, who made up all these dumb, overly complicated rules anyway? Ugh, I'm just exhausted after all that, if fighting ghosts is this complicated it's probably easier just to give up and learn to live with them in your house! Which they still kind of end up doing, so what is the damn point of all of this?

I've been to New Orleans, I've been on that walking ghost tour, and, well, we didn't see any ghosts, it's just not possible. instead we heard stories about some of the supposedly-haunted buildings around the city, mostly though it was about a lot of murders where the bodies weren't found until 100 or so years later. You know, happy stories, others involved voodoo but mostly it was all about murders, so maybe leave the kiddoes at the hotel, just saying. But it is a great city to visit in October, what with their above-ground graveyards and their Bourbon Street drink specials. Beignets, too, don't forget the beignets - but I tried the most famous foods of New Orleans like gumbo, etouffé and muffaletta sandwiches, and I wasn't all that impressed. I had a great shrimp po'boy but that was about it. 

Directed by Justin Simien

Also starring LaKeith Stanfield (last seen in "Dope"), Rosario Dawson (last seen in "10 Years"), Owen Wilson (last seen in "The Minus Man"), Tiffany Haddish (last seen in "Easter Sunday"), Danny DeVito (last seen in "Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print"), Jamie Lee Curtis (last seen in "The Fog" (1980)), Chase W. Dillon (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Jared Leto (last seen in "Mr. Nobody"), J.R. Adduci, Creek Wilson (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Ben Bladon (last seen in "Zola"), Lindsay Lamb, Charity Jordan (last seen in "The Piano Lesson"), Fedor Steer (last seen in "Doctor Sleep"), Terence Rosemore (last seen in "Nickel Boys"), Gralen Bryant Banks (ditto), Mike Benitez (last seen in "Omni Loop"), Erika Coleman, Antonino Paone (last seen in "Are You Here"), Julie Nalibov, Kathi Callahan, Hector Machado, Steve Zissis (last seen in "The Do-Deca-Pentathlon"), Andrew Morgado (last seen in "Unhinged"), William Calvert, Glendon Hobgood (last seen in "The Campaign"), Lorenzo Beronilla (last seen in "Then Came You"), Amy Parrish (last seen in "Reptile"), Kurt Yue (ditto), Hasan Minhaj (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Charles Black (last seen in "The Best of Enemies"), Chad Crumley, Sebastien Soudais (last seen in "Jackpot!"), John Curran (last seen in "One Night in Miami..."), Tracy Goode, Bryan McClure, Don Stallings (last seen in "Brothers"), Ashley John, Rick Andosca (last seen in "Shazam! Fury of the Gods"), Kat Montes, Kamra Kam Shaikh, Jared Simon, Joseph Frew-Miller, Kay Galvin, and the voice of Terence Mathews, 

with cameos from Marilu Henner (last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Jo Koy (last heard in "The Monkey King"), Dan Levy (last seen in "Good Grief"), Winona Ryder (last seen in "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story")

RATING: 5 out of 10 discount-store action figures

Renfield

Year 17, Day 287 - 10/14/25 - Movie #5,170

BEFORE: Man, I'm so glad I got ahead in the count when I could, because it's a new week and I'm working four out of five weekdays at the theater, which is hosting NewFest. It's all hands on deck and I had requested time off to work at NY Comic-Con, so instead they booked me solid in the days before AND after Comic-Con. I was so booked that then I did NOT even go to NYCC, instead I took a three day break to rest up, which was a smart idea. This week could wear me down, but then I've got a week off and we're driving to see my parents in N. Carolina, so my blog will be dark. I'll still make it to 25 horror movies, but I calculated that I would need a head start, so I watched three movies in advance (one was "Fantastic Four: First Steps", obviously, which turned out to be very smart because it's no longer in theaters, and not yet on streaming. Sometimes I do seem to know what I'm doing.)

Nicholas Hoult carries over from "Nosferatu". 

THE PLOT: Renfield, Dracula's tortured henchman, is forced to capture prey for his master and do his bidding. But now, after centuries of servitude, Renfield is ready to see if there is a life outside his boss's shadow. 

AFTER: We've reached the vampire portion of the horror chain, there will be one more vampire-based film this week, see if you can guess which one it will be. HINT: It's not "Daybreakers", although that would have been a good choice to link to from "Nosferatu". And it's not "From Dusk Till Dawn 2" or "The Last Voyage of the Demeter". Eh, you'll know it in a couple of days. 

This vampire double-feature kind of turned out opposite from how I thought it would go down, "Nosferatu" seemed like it was going to be a disturbing, dark film but it's so over-the-top solemn that it looped around to silly again. Tonight's film seemed much more comic, but had a better narrative and one that threw in a lot of action, so in addition to madcap fun it was quite exciting, or at least by comparison to yesterday's movie. 

Renfield here becomes a self-aware familiar, he goes to group therapy and realizes that he's been Dracula's doormat for hundreds of years now, and he vows to change. Dracula is portrayed not just as a Prince of Evil, but also essentially a very toxic boss, he demands that Renfield attends to his every needs but offers him little in return except for all the insects he can eat. There's no bonuses for bringing him multiple fresh corpses, no OT if he works more than 40 hours a week, no retirement plan, no health insurance, and he's always pulling the power moves and belittling Renfield's efforts, constantly pointing out that Renfield would be nobody and nowhere without him. Jeez, I think maybe we've all had a boss like that, especially if you've worked in the art or filmmaking field. I nearly got PTSD flashbacks from watching Renfield re-assess his career in the vampire service industry. 

Once he realizes the relationship is toxic, how does he get out of it? Is there any life for him outside of being a familiar, can he even have a different career, or, worst case scenario, perhaps the vampire's powers have kept him alive for too long, and perhaps he'll die without this job. Or,  you know, probably it just feels that way, I can confirm this. Renfield, I feel you, your boss is NEVER going to change, he's not just been drinking the blood from his victims, he's been draining your soul and your self-worth at the same time. Get out of there, even if you have to go find a menial job in a movie theater or walk dogs for a living, anything is better than the job you have now. 

Dracula's been on a long journey around the world, with Renfield moving his coffin from city to city, and since the latest stop is New Orleans, that means that the city is full of drug dealing gangs, and also plenty of corrupt cops. There's like ONE female cop who's still honest, and she's got a vendetta against the drug gangs because they killed her father, who was also a cop. Say, you don't suppose she's going to team up with a vampire's familiar who has lost his way and looking for an army of criminals that both deserves to die and also could provide fresh blood for his master, do you?  There's both comedy and potential romance in their team-up, but they've got their work cut out for them if, say, Dracula should happen to team up with the drug gangs. It seems like an odd pairing because with his appetite for blood, Dracula seems more a like an addicted drug user than a supplier. Just a thought. 

I have to mention how over-the-top Nicolas Cage is as Dracula - that seems like a bit of casting that couldn't possibly work, only he starts acting like the big, over-dramatic, over-emoting Nic Cage that not every director lets him be, and it starts to work, for a time, anyway. But he keeps going and takes it way too far, and then you're constantly reminded that this is Nicolas Cage, and there are no small roles for him, and he's maybe too big to play Dracula, even if you let Dracula off the chain and let him go wild. Maybe you'll find it funny, but Dracula isn't supposed to be funny, we learned that in "Love at First Bite" and "Dracula: Dead and Loving It", the character can't be both scary and funny, it's just not possible. There should have been a time where the director could be able to say, "Nic, baby honey sweetie, you're acting at like a Vampire 10, and we need you to dial it back to like a Vampire 8, OK?"

The original Renfield, in the "Dracula" novel, was an inmate in an asylum, who suffered from delusions that compelled him to eat small living creatures to obtain their life-force. He said that Dracula sent him the insects, then he got the idea to feed those flies to spiders, the spiders got fed to birds, and then he would eat the live birds and gain all of that essence. Renfield then attempts to escape from the asylum to meet up with his master, finally Dracula approaches him with a deal, if Renfield worships him, he would make him immortal by providing him with all the insects he can eat. And also, he'd get every other Sunday off, but NO two-week vacation, because that's too long for Dracula to go without a victim. 

In the classic 1931 "Dracula" film, Renfield is the real-estate agent who goes to Transylvania to meet with the Count and sell him property in England (Jonathan Harker's role in the novel) and then he falls under Dracula's power and into his service. Because I guess if you're immortal you don't really need a retirement plan, do you?  This film maintains the back-story created for that 1931 Bela Lugosi film, Renfield gave up his career in real-estate (and his wife and kids, apparently) to serve the Dark Lord indefinitely. Tell me there are fringe benefits beside the insects, or else this job does NOT make sense. 

Fortunately, all the years as Dracula's familiar mean that Renfield knows all the ways that vampire hunters over the years have TRIED to kill Dracula, and so he knows what might work and also what definitely would not. Sure, you can try to pull the old "behind the curtain is THE SUN" trick, but many others have tried that before, he should be aware of it, you're just not going to surprise him with that. Anyway the sunlight here would only weaken him, not kill him. Renfield gets the idea to try the second oldest trick, the magical circle of containment, but then once you've got him trapped, what can you do? The classic is the old stake through the heart, but for some reason that's not an option here. What they do instead takes a lot longer and basically pulverizes him, but even then there's a chance he could come back from it. Meanwhile his blood is magical enough to restore a lot of the damage he's done in New Orleans, somehow. But I'm not sure there should be such a happy ending here, I mean it seems pretty far-fetched after everything we've been through up to that point. Also, how exactly did all that WORK?

Directed by Chris McKay (director of "The Tomorrow War")

Also starring Nicolas Cage (last seen in "Dream Scenario"), Awkwafina (last seen in "Biggest Heist Ever"), Ben Schwartz (last seen in "Better Living Through Chemistry"), Shohreh Aghdashloo (last heard in "Damsel"), Brandon Scott Jones (last seen in "Senior Year"), Adrian Martinez (last seen in "Will & Harper"), Camille Chen (last seen in "Yesterday"), Bess Rous (last seen in "Ghostbusters" (2016)), Jenna Kanell (last seen in "Bad Boys: Ride or Die"), Danya LaBelle (last seen in "Charlie Says"), Rhonda Johnson Dents (last seen in "Blue Bayou"), Susan McPhail (ditto), Christopher Matthew Cook (last seen in "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F"), Michael P. Sullivan (last seen in "Five Nights at Freddy's"), Rosha Washington (last seen in "Carry-On"), Sarah Durn (ditto), James Moses Black (last seen in "Queenpins"), T.C. Matherne (last seen in "Big George Foreman"), Caroline Williams (last seen in "Days of Thunder"), Marcus Lewis, Derek Russo (also last seen in "Bad Boys: Ride or Die"), Marvin Ross, Gabriel Rodriguez (last seen in "True Memoirs of an International Assassin"), Dave Davis (last seen in "Stolen"), Keith Brooks (last seen in "Strays"), Joshua Mikel (last seen in "Thunderbolts"), Chloe Adona, Stephen Louis Grush (last seen in "Unhinged"), Lucy Faust (ditto), Christopher Winchester (last seen in "The Burial"), John Cihangir (last seen in "Captain America: Brave New World"), Brian Egland, Christopher Clarke, Lena Clark, Brianna Quinn Lewis (last seen in "Blue Beetle"), Lacey Dover, Stefany Almendinger, Krystal Tomlin, Camden McKinnon, William Ragsdale (last seen in "Knock at the Cabin"), Miles Doleac (last seen in "Big George Foreman"), Mike Harkins (last seen in "Nickel Boys"), Betsy Borrego (last seen in "The Lovebirds"), Anil Bajaj, with archive footage of Helen Chandler, Edward Van Sloan (last seen in "Dracula's Daughter". 

RATING: 6 out of 10 rags soaked with chloroform

Nosferatu (2024)

Year 17, Day 286 - 10/13/25 - Movie #5,169

BEFORE: Another film we had at the theater for a guild screening, I think it was back in February and the director showed up for a Q&A panel, along with the production designer and I think the costume & make-up people, probably all vying for those lesser nominations. It's notable that cast members did NOT show up, it could mean that they knew at that point they didn't have much chance at Best Actor or Best Actress. Of course I didn't get a chance to talk to Robert Eggers and tell him that I've seen ALL of his movies, well, the important ones anyway - but I'm not allowed to bother the talent. 

Ralph Ineson carries over from "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" and he's really been the link that made this whole mid-section of the horror chain possible, he should do well in the year-end wrap-up because he's been a presence in a fair number of horror films. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Nosferatu" (1922) (Movie #2,745)

THE PLOT: A gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her. 

AFTER: I just re-read my review of the original "Nosferatu" film, which is now more than a hundred years old, but I watched it back in 2017, so not that long ago. At the time we were just a year into the first Trump presidency, so I drew a bunch of connections between Count Orlok and Donald Trump. I could do the same thing tonight, but, well, it's been done. It's not as funny the second time around, but then, neither is Trump as President. But you see the connections, right? They're both gross, very old creatures who live in castles, and drain people of their resources while seducing young, beautiful women. Plus they both want to buy real estate in other countries, so they can put up hotels and casinos (I assume that's what Orlok has in mind...)

At this point, I don't know if we even NEEDED another filmed version of "Nosferatu", because the original film was just "Dracula" with all of the names changed, and filmed in Germany instead of Hollywood. Somebody back in 1922 just changed Mina Harker to Ellen Hutter, Jonathan Harker to Thomas Hutter, and Abraham van Helsing to Albin von Franz. The stories are otherwise (mostly) the same, including the vampire buying land in another country so he can relocate there, in "Dracula" that's the U.K. and in "Nosferatu" that's Germany, because in this case the vampire wanted to try some German food, and I mean actual Germans. I get it, the food in the U.K. really sucks, so their citizens' blood probably doesn't taste much better. 

In "Dracula" the vampire has his familiar, Renfield, charter a ship called the Demeter to take his coffin to Whitsby in the U.K. and in "Nosferatu" the vampire has his agent, Knock, charter a ship to take his coffin to Wisburg in Germany. Same, same, same. Then in each case the vampire sets his sights on the wife of the solicitor who visited him in Transylvania (or Carpathia, whichever) and really, didn't they have copyright protection back in the 1920's? Tell me there were at least a few lawsuits filed against the film "Nosferatu" - but I think by now Bram Stoker's novel has fallen out of copyright protection, so perhaps that's the real reason for this new version of "Nosferatu", they didn't have to pay for the original rights. Anybody can make a Mickey Mouse cartoon now (if they use the "Steamboat Willie" version) and anybody can make a Dracula movie now, so again, why remake "Nosferatu" when you can just remake "Dracula"?

NITPICK POINT: How did Orlok get a ship to pick up his coffin and take it to Germany, when there's no ocean that borders Transylvania? Did he travel a fair distance to the Black Sea, pass through the Mediterranean and circle around Spain, then through the English Channel to the North Sea? That's a LONG way to go, maybe it would have been faster to take a boat on a river and connect to the Danube, which flows out of Germany INTO Romania, so that would have meant going against the current, more difficult prior to the invention of steamboats. 

The first real difference I could see in the story came at the ending, because in the Stoker novel, Count Dracula flees back to Transylvania and Van Helsing, and the Harkers follow, they gain control of Dracula's coffin, decapitate him and also drive a stake through his heart. But here in "Nosferatu", Count Orlok stays in Germany (enough with the traveling, already) and Ellen sacrifices herself by having sex with Orlok and allowing him to feed on her at the same time, which keeps him in bed long enough to be killed by the morning sunlight. Yes, this is very German, let's get the kinky vampire sex in there somehow, otherwise what's the point? Another difference is that the best friend character (Holmwood) survives and helps kill Dracula, but the best friend character in "Nosferatu" (Harding) dies from the plague while violating his wife's corpse. (Again, Germans...)

You can really tell here that the vampire story is really a plague story, perhaps it always was and we didn't really look at it that way. In a post-AIDS and post-COVID world perhaps this makes more sense, vampirism is a type of virus that gets passed from person to person via bodily fluids, after all. Ellen is upset that Thomas didn't heed her warning to stay home and instead he got tricked by a European count, and the flipside of that is that Thomas can't understand how his wife could overcome her "melancholy" but still be attracted to that same older gentleman, who looks quite nasty. It's an age-old conundrum, the lovers are jealous and controlling, but opening up their relationship isn't going to solve that problem, it's just going to make things more complicated. 

But the big problem here is that this is supposed to be scary, and despite being gory and disgusting in parts, I didn't really find this scary. Orlok's voice and exaggerated Eastern European accent didn't help, it just made Orlok into a caricature, and some of his statements, such as "I am an appetite!" are meant to be insightful, but just come off as nonsense. Then all of the other characters are so ultra-serious about everything that the film goes way past serious and loops around to silly, if you know what I mean. They tried to make Orlok scarier by having him appear as a walking corpse, but is that really what we want to see? And then Ellen's attraction for the Count causes her to have violent reactions that are akin to demonic possession, which is more disturbing than scary, again it's all about tone at the end of the day. 

The first "Nosferatu" film was where someone first depicted a vampire dying because of sunlight, that's a movie-maker's invention and is NOT in the "Dracula" novel. Similarly, this "Nosferatu" remake has an invention of its own, where Orlok bites people in the chest and not the neck. I don't see the point, because that's just not that sexy at all. 

EDIT: I learned that whoever was supposed to file the U.S. copyright on the novel "Dracula" back in the day screwed it all up, so the book NEVER had protection, which might be why there are so many filmed versions of it, and so many bad sequels over the years, because anyone could use the character without paying. This seems like a counter-intuitive path to success, if you want your work to really take off, just don't protect it and let everyone have fair use, you may not get rich but your work could become super popular - is it worth it? 

Directed by Robert Eggers (director of "The Northman" and "The Witch")

Also starring Lily-Rose Depp (last seen in "Voyagers"), Nicholas Hoult (last seen in "Superman" (2025)), Bill Skarsgard (last seen in "Allegiant"), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (last seen in "Kraven the Hunter"), Willem Dafoe (last seen in "Kinds of Kindness"), Emma Corrin (last seen in "Good Grief"), Simon McBurney (last seen in "Boogie Woogie"), Adela Hesova, Milena Konstantinova, Stacy Thunes, Gregory Gudgeon, Claudiu Trandafir, Gherghina Bereghianu, Jordan Haj, Katerina Bila, Maria Ion, Tereza Duskova, Liana Navrot, Mihai Verbintschi, Karel Dobry (last seen in "Child 44"), Andrei Sergeev, and the voices of Ella Summer, Meredith Digings

RATING: 4 out of 10 vomiting sailors

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Year 17, Day 285 - 10/12/25 - Movie #5,168 - WATCHED ON 8/5/25.   

BEFORE: Well, let's just say I had a feeling back in August that I should go see this movie in theaters (and actually PAY for it, which is a bit unusual). This is the third film I've seen in a real movie theater this year, the first two were "Thunderbolts" and "Superman", so clearly I have my priorities in order. I only saw "Superman" for free, I went to AMC for "Discount Tuesday" on the other two, so I probably spent more on popcorn and a bevvie than I did for the tickets. Also "Superman" was probably the most crowded, as I was seeing it along with guild members who didn't pay either, at the theater where I work. Well, I may be underpaid but I get some cool fringe benefits once in a while. I know, I know, I shouldn't get high on my own supply but for superhero films I'm willing to make an exception. 

I just knew this would fit into my planned horror film SOMEWHERE, since it has Ralph Ineson in it. He carries over from "The First Omen" and provides the voice of Galactus, the main villain who had been proven impossible to film in previous movies based on this superhero quartet. 

It kind of feels like I hit the halfway point for the October horror chain a couple days ago (the real halfway point is still coming up) and now the films coming up are some weird kind of reverse echo of the first half, like I'm getting out of this chain the same way I came in, but that's not totally accurate. There's really no rhyme or reason to it all, because I planned it by linking and not by genre or themes, but I think the really scary stuff's going to kick in soon and the next two weeks are really just another mish-mash of various horror types, I think it only FEELS symmetrical, if that makes any sense. But the important thing is that I ended up with Marvel movies on the first and last days of New York Comic-Con, I know it's just circumstantial, but another part of me looks at occurrences like that and it all seems like it's in order somehow. 

THE PLOT: Forced to balance their roles as heroes with the strength of their family bond, the Fantastic Four must defend Earth from a ravenous space god called Galactus and his enigmatic herald, Silver Surfer.

AFTER: Good or bad, the Fantastic Four are my jam, this is based on the FIRST Marvel Comic that I read regularly - obviously I'm not old enough to have read their first adventures from 1963, but for a lot of people, not just me, Fantastic Four was their first Marvel comic. I got into collecting comics with FF and the Marvel adaptations of "Star Wars", they also continued the S.W. story past the movie, they had the "untold" stories of what the characters did between the movies, and i just had to know. 

But Fantastic Four was my gateway to the Marvel Universe, and I was lucky enough to get on board when the team was the classic four of Mister Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch and the Thing, and John Byrne was the writer/artist and their adventures were killer and classic. Two years after I started reading they came out with a 12-issue maxi-series called "Secret Wars", where all the best heroes and villains got teleported away to another planet and had to fight each other while being observed by a cosmic being called The Beyonder. They were gone a month or two (in Marvel time) but for the people they left on earth, 1 or 2 fill-in issues were published, focused on minor characters or what happened while the heroes were away. Then the heroes came back and Spider-Man had a new costume, the line-up of the Fantastic Four was different, and other heroes were similarly affected by whatever happened in space, and you then had to buy 12 more issues over the next year to find out what went down. 

Very sneaky, and it made me want to start reading Avengers and X-Men and Spider-Man books, this was all masterminded by a writer named Jim Shooter, who also happened to be Marvel's editor in chief. He kind of revolutionized the industry by inventing the company-wide crossover, otherwise known as "Hey, if you like the book you're reading, you have to buy these ten OTHER comics to see the rest of the story." Shooter passed away four months ago, and I'm not sure if he's in comic-book heaven now or comic-book hell, honestly. I mean, he wrote some good stories but his sales tactics were just plain ruthless. But those tactics live on as a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, whose motto is, "Hey, if you like the movie you're watching, you also have to watch these ten OTHER movies to see the rest of the story." Tell me I'm wrong, but I'm not. 

This version of the Fantastic Four story is set in Earth-818, a different dimension from the usual MCU, a place where it's always 1972 but still technology is very futuristic, also the American culture is miraculously ethnically diverse and pretty damn woke. Well, sure, a movie represents the time period that it's made in, not the time period that it's set in. We think of things like vinyl records, primitive rocket ships, groovy furniture and a functioning democracy and we recognize this as the 1960's, but this is also a world that has working robots, people with super-powers and a shot at inter-stellar travel. No doubt some of this is due to the inventive genius of Reed Richards, a guy who's smart enough to build a rocket to go into space, but not smart enough to properly shield the astronauts inside from cosmic rays. (Or maybe he KNEW about them and chose to gain super-powers from them, this is a bone of contention in some of the comics.)

It's been FOUR years (coincidence?) since the mission that gave Reed and his wife, brother-in-law and best friend super-powers, and there's a convenient TV special that is celebrating their power-versary and also giving us their complete back-story, in case you never read the comics. They're apparently the ONLY heroes on this earth, which is, you know, a choice - we saw an alternate version of Reed Richards in the second "Dr. Strange" movie, he was part of another reality's Illuminati, aka the ones with super-powers who are also in charge. Reed was played by a different actor there, so we have to believe that all Reeds are not alike, however the comic book suggests that all the Reed Richardses in the Multiverse can talk to each other, once each one figures out that there IS a multiverse, and how to access it. Council of the Cross-Time Mister Fantastics, or something like that. Put a pin in that for a moment. 

Things are looking up in this reality, which some are calling the "Kirby-Verse", not for actress Vanessa Kirby but for Marvel artist legend Jack Kirby, who co-created the FF with Stan Lee and probably decided what they all should look like.  The world is at peace, super-villain crime is kept in check by the Fantastic Four and Reed's now working on curing cancer, probably. Reed and his wife Sue learn that she's having a baby, and the only question is about whether it will have super-powers. 

But this peace is interrupted by the arrival of the Silver Surfer, a cosmic herald who warns them that the planet has been designated as "tasty" by the planet-devouring Galactus, so really, it's a great honor to be chosen as his next meal, it's part of the cosmic order of things, kind of like black holes. But the Fantastic Four aren't ready to back down without a fight, so they track the Surfer (a female in this universe, but the one in the main comic-book universe is a dude) by her energy. They use Reed's new faster rocket to follow her into space, where they confirm that Galactus IS eating planets, basically converting matter into energy, because we all know that matter can't be destroyed, only transformed. Despite Galactus' enormous size, the puny humans gain an audience with him, and he agrees to spare the Earth, in exchange for Reed & Sue's unborn baby, as he can sense the child's cosmic power and believes it could put an end to his hunger somehow.  

What's the big deal, it's one baby - they can just have another one, right? One baby to save the life of BILLIONS on humans on Earth. That sounds like a great deal, the Fantastic Four can go back to Earth and be even greater heroes than before, everybody on Earth will owe them a huge favor and they'll be hailed as saviors, and peace and prosperity can reign. Except for some reason they DON'T take Galactus up on his deal, and they get back in their spaceship to return to Earth and plan an impossible defense. Sue gives birth along the way, but, you know, it's a family film so this is tastefully handled, really if you're nervous about having "the talk" with your own kids maybe just show them this, and they'll either understand everything or they'll think that babies are born in zero gravity whenever a woman takes her clothes off.

Back home on Earth, the heroes hold a press conference, and it seems that many citizens agree with me, they can't believe that the Fantastic Four didn't give up their BABY to save Earth. Again, I think this was the simplest solution, and with Reed Richards being the totally logical genius that they claim he is, I don't know why he didn't see things that way himself. (Galactus here is really just a take on the Fat Bastard character from the Austin Powers movies, he just wants to eat a baby, is that so wrong? Are we really going so pro-life here?)  But anyway, now they have a limited amount of time to find a way to defeat Galactus. I remember one issue of the comic book where Reed said that he considered his real super-power to be his brain, not his stretchiness. There's some truth to that, because we do see him here coming up with scientific solutions that represent out-of-the-box thinking. (Just not "give up your baby" out-of-the-box.) 

But it's Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, who comes up with the idea of deciphering the alien language of the Silver Surfer from the deep space transmissions that they have on vinyl records (classic!) which were heard before each time Galactus snacked on a planet. This is pretty out of character for Johnny, he's really only supposed to be about racing hot cars and dating hotter women at this point in his life, so it's a little hard for me to believe in his alien language translating skills It would have been more believable if Reed Richards just invented some kind of universal translator, which should be within his skill set. But they tried to tone down Johnny's serial horny bachelor ways, and also Reed's busy coming up with a way to defeat Galactus, of course, and there's part of me that's not crazy about his solution, either. THIS is impossible, THAT's impossible, this other thing is unproven but it's just crazy enough to work - none of this feels very scientific, and Reed should be all about the science. 

I also think they should have just gone with time-dilation as a way to bring the F.F. into the MCU - they could have had their rocket ship launch from Earth in 1972, but the original rocket design wasn't faster than light, so it took them years to reach another planet, and then when they finally make their way BACK, only a few months have passed for them, but maybe 30 or 40 years have gone by on Earth. But I guess they already used that trick in the "Captain Marvel" movie, plus they would need the movie audience to understand the theory of relativity and its effect on non-hyperspace travel, and most people probably don't have the education for that.  

I've got some issues with the depiction of the Thing here, for starters his voice is too high. And it's not gravel-ly enough, it's just not how I imagine the Thing sounds when he talks. I realize this depends on the actor playing him, but since the voice doesn't match the character for me, and we never really SEE the human Ben Grimm, I don't understand why they cast THIS guy, sorry. I also hate, hate, HATE the robot known as H.E.R.B.I.E. and I don't see why they had to include him in the movie. Sure, he's retro but he's also silly and stupid.

Also also, I don't understand why the Fantastic Four need their own universe, the X-Men need their own universe, and Venom and some of the Spider-Man villains have their own as well. If only there were a way to bring all of these stories together, in some kind of new, shared universe so they could all meet each other...oh, I think this is coming eventually, so do yourself a favor and go out and buy the trade paperback of something called "Secret Wars" (the first Marvel series with this name, from 1983, not the lame second one) and you may get a glimpse of what's ahead in the MCU, just saying. Comic book history tends to repeat itself, over and over.

Still, this is the BEST Fantastic Four movie made to date, it's much much better than the last one that was served up to us in 2015, the Josh Trank one. That was embarrassingly terrible. By comparison, this new one is closer to "Citizen Kane" or "Gone with the Wind" - even if I'm not 100% on-board for everything that happened here, it's a vast improvement. 

Directed by Matt Shakman (director of "Cut Bank")

Also starring Pedro Pascal (last heard in "The Wild Robot"), Vanessa Kirby (last seen in "Napoleon"), Ebon Moss-Bachrach (last seen in "Lying and Stealing"), Joseph Quinn (last seen in "Gladiator II"), Julia Garner (last seen in "The Assistant"), Natasha Lyonne (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Paul Walter Hauser (last seen in "Old Dads"), Sarah Niles (last seen in "Happy-Go-Lucky"), Mark Gatiss (last seen in "Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie"), Ada Scott, Maisie Shakman, Patrick Miller, Mather Zickel (last seen in "Balls of Fury"), Bertie Caplan (last seen in "Wonka"), Martin Dickinson, Greg Haiste, Nathaniel Brimmer-Beller, Cheyenne Dasri,

and with cameos from Alex Hyde-White (last seen in "Nope"), Rebecca Staab, (redacted) and the voices of Matthew Wood (last heard in "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania"), Corey Burton (last heard in "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood")

RATING: 7 out of 10 Moloids (underground mole people, yeah, that's a thing)