Film diary

The very definition of lean and mean. 🖤

I finally got around to seeing all the Child’s Play / Chucky movies, and pound for pound, this is probably the most tolerable deep dive of a long-running horror franchise I’ve ever done. A few notes:

• The decision to continue with animatronics and puppetry for the duration of the series is absolutely crucial to its success. CGI would have made these movies unwatchable.
• I like how the series is kind of made up of rhyming… See more →

I’m always grateful for an opportunity to see artful indie animated shorts on a big screen within biking distance from my home, and in recent years the Philadelphia Film Festival’s program has been reliably good. This year’s, though it included some strong entries, was unfortunately sorely lacking in thematic variety: Six of the eight films were about parenting or marriage. I won’t say they didn’t honor those experiences, but few felt especially insightful. Unlike their… See more →

I initially decided against Dr. Giggles tonight in favor of watching Dark Night of the Scarecrow, but when the doctor himself, Larry Drake, showed up in the very first scene in Scarecrow, I took it as an omen and made it a double feature. I got slightly more than I expected from Giggles (his demented giggling is truly infectious!), a video store staple I never got around to seeing in its early-90s heyday. I wonder… See more →

I always assumed Lady Terminator was trying to piggyback on the success of James Cameron’s iconic film without bearing any real resemblance to it, so imagine my surprise when I witnessed a big chunk of its runtime explicitly copying scenes from The Terminator. But don’t worry, it’s a totally different movie because the Terminator is a lady this time, and she trades in the cyborg part for some Indonesian folklore involving vagina dentata.

I’ve wanted… See more →

Yes! Fumbling through the dark; ears twitching at every unidentified sound; scanning the environment for weapons, ammo, keys, exits, and most importantly, threats; hoping upon hope you’re prepared to face whatever misbegotten grotesquerie comes next in this spiraling nightmare. This movie gets it, making little reference to specific Resident Evil lore but still feeling very much like a Resident Evil game, without forgetting to be cinema in the process. And its quest-oriented plot is an… See more →

Indy the dog is indeed a very good boy. But everything else about the movie is pretty meh.

The many hours I spent with the first two Resident Evil games didn’t do my college GPA any favors, but the sweet spot they found between the immersive dread of a good zombie movie and the adrenaline rush of a good action/adventure game was a revelation. Two great tastes that taste great together, and they even threw in some fun puzzles while they were at it.

The series lost me when it veered into convoluted… See more →

My long overdue first visit to Lightbox Film Center’s new location in the Bok building after UArts’s untimely demise two years ago. I’m glad Bok’s massive old high school auditorium is available to them, and if they decide someday to do less esoteric programming, the room can hold a lot of people. Hopefully those people will be prepared for some discomfort, because the uncushioned wooden seats are not great! By now it seems like a… See more →

I’ve never really had any interest in John Grisham’s work, but for some reason we’ve been watching the film adaptations the last few Sundays, and this one might be my favorite so far! Sometimes a stacked cast giving its all to a twisty potboiler premise lands just right. Its supersaturated assembly feels very of its time, and while early-aughts pop culture isn’t a source of much nostalgia for me, I’m not entirely immune to the… See more →

I hadn’t heard of this one before its recent Blu-ray upgrade, and what a gem! It goes for broke pretty much from start to finish, with James Brolin rampaging through upper Manhattan and the Bronx as he hunts his daughter’s kidnapper, pounding his way through street gangs and crooked cops, leveling half the city in the process. In the 1970s-NYC-as-hellhole pantheon, I’d say it triangulates somewhere between Serpico, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three… See more →

The interviews get pretty repetitive in this rock doc about the post-“Smells Like Teen Spirit” feeding frenzy in Seattle, but they’re well worth sitting through for the film’s treasure trove of live footage of a ton of great bands from the scene who never hit the big time. Oddly enough, for as much as Hype! is about the Pacific Northwest, its most memorable moment for me is a bunch of Japanese rockabilly dudes with comically… See more →

I find that a terrible movie that broadcasts its amateur maker’s steep learning curve is usually more interesting than a terrible movie made by a professional for whom it was just another day at the office. And the more ambitious the amateur’s vision, the more compelling their failure. In the case of Almost Invisible, apparently the first and last writing/producing/directing effort of a 50-something MD (currently serving a 13-year federal prison sentence for running a… See more →

This thing is so overloaded with ridiculous ’80s signifiers, and its picture is so pristine, I initially thought it was a nostalgic throwback made sometime in the last 10 years (à la the dreadful Kung Fury). But the hair, the clothes, the cars, and the music are simply too perfect, and that pristine picture comes courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome, patron saints of pulling out all the stops on film restorations no one else would have… See more →

I’m not really into Christopher Nolan or epic movies, but my knowledge of Greek mythology is shamefully cursory, so I hoped seeing Nolan’s Odyssey would give me the nudge I needed to finally do some proper reading. I enjoyed the film more than I expected to; it’s very effective in many ways (Polyphemus! Circe!) and clunky in others (loud plot forecasting and a clumsy big finish), but I don’t think I looked at my watch… See more →