Robtober
Topic archive / 366 posts
The Forever Purge
Maybe the best thing you can say for The Forever Purge, which was originally slated for release in July of 2020, is that it cleverly predicts January 6th, at least until you remember that the loudest man on the planet had a global captive audience that year, not limited to his devoted cult of wackos, and anyone with half a brain cell could read the tea leaves.
In perhaps the series’s most ham-fisted attempt at… See more →
The First Purge
Like the other films in the franchise, The First Purge’s clear polemical ambitions are paved over by commercial ones. But this one’s blaxploitation revival is a bigger missed opportunity, because it might have really had something to say.
At the top, a montage of TV news talking heads gives us a cursory history of the rise of the New Founding Fathers of America, an autocratic political party whose introduction of the Purge, an annual… See more →
The Purge: Election Year
I’m not having a good month, and these Purge movies are not helping. But will I stop watching them? Apparently I will not.
There’s a MacGuffin this time, an anti-Purge senator (Elizabeth Mitchell) whose presidential bid aims to upend the barbaric status quo, which of course makes her a target. After narrowly escaping an assassination attempt, she flees her home, and it just so happens the head of her security detail is Leo Barnes (Frank… See more →
The Purge: Anarchy
I couldn’t find any indication that Jello Biafra was offered a cameo in The Purge: Anarchy, which seems like an injustice given that it’s essentially a film adaptation of Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor,” albeit an adaptation whose 104-minute runtime is markedly less incisive than what the DK song manages to say in a mere 180 seconds.
Still, Anarchy is an unqualified improvement over the first Purge film, whose one-note home-invasion plot Anarchy upgrades to… See more →
The Purge
In keeping with this year’s ad hoc and mostly lowbrow Robtober, and since most of the Purge movies are available on streaming services I currently have access to, I’m reluctantly giving them a go. I didn’t hate this one any less than the first time I saw it; it’s perhaps the low-water mark of boneheaded Blumhouse mediocrity, with a kindergarten-level attempt at social commentary, cut-rate cinematography, and the most irritating villain this side of Martin… See more →
Bug
Stuck
Terrifier 3
We’ve reached the “am I the asshole” stage of my reproachful trudge through this franchise, as Terrifier 3 ostensibly comes ever closer to the sort of 1980s genre trash that’s always warmed my contaminated heart. Its Silent Night, Deadly Night homage is unmistakable, its anamorphic cinematography nails the era’s unpolished 35mm aesthetic, and its uninhibited gore gleefully actualizes what all those VHS boxes on my local West Coast Video’s horror shelves always promised but rarely… See more →
Terrifier 2
In “Homie the Clown,” a fan-favorite Simpsons episode, Homer Simpson goes to clown college. The lessons he receives in baggy pants, balloon animals, and tiny bicycles were probably not drawn directly from the curriculum of an existing clown college, but they at least evince an awareness that such institutions actually exist.
In an adjacent hemisphere of the late 20th century entertainment world, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, a gonzo B-movie throwback, mines campy scares from… See more →
Terrifier
Another practical effects showreel barely disguised as a movie featuring the maniacal killer Art the Clown, a try-hard whose yearning to be a horror icon is as plain (and plainly mortifying) as our Commander in Chief’s yearning for a Nobel Prize. Despite the fact that Art, after being introduced gearing up Rambo-style in an unearned montage, indulges in some hacksaw shenanigans nasty enough to arouse the kind of guy who owns more than one Cannibal… See more →
All Hallows’ Eve
It seems as though Terrifier is the slasher franchise of the moment, with 2024’s third installment reportedly becoming the highest grossing unrated film of all time, so it’s time once again for me to hold my nose and commune with the zeitgeist.
You’d be forgiven for assuming Terrifier’s stabby antihero, Art the Clown, was the product of an 11-year-old Fangoria subscriber’s very first ChatGPT prompt, but Art actually made his debut in a 2008… See more →
Brainscan
The First Omen
Too bad the franchise police put all their fingers in the pie at the end, but this is otherwise a far better crafted film than it has any right to be.
The Exorcist: Believer
Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist
So Paul Schrader made this somewhat elegiac Exorcist prequel, and the studio rejected it and hired Renny Harlin to preside over a rewrite/reshoot, which was released in 2004 as Exorcist: The Beginning. And then that film’s poor critical and commercial performance led them to try to squeeze a few bucks out of a limited release of Schrader’s version less than a year later. And neither of the films is good. And I find the whole… See more →
Exorcist: The Beginning
Omen IV: The Awakening
The Exorcist III
The Final Conflict
Was Jerry Goldsmith the only person involved who was told the title of this film? His apocalyptic score is at 11 almost the whole time, but everything else about the film’s execution is relatively sedate, which is pretty weird considering the script includes a huge satanist rally in what looks like a volcanic crater, the systematic murder of hundreds of newborn babies, and the literal second coming of Christ. Sam Neill is probably as good… See more →
Damien: Omen II
Exorcist II: The Heretic
The Omen
I watched The Omen in a double feature with The Exorcist, and in terms of overall sophistication, the juxtaposition does The Omen no favors, but it’s still a pretty fun ride, and it must be said that Satan siring a human child to clandestinely seize the world’s levers of power is a far more potent strategy for spreading evil than commandeering a tween’s body and making her throw up all over everyone.
The Exorcist
I think I was in college when I first saw The Exorcist, by which time my resentment of the Catholicism I grew up with had calcified, and that undeniably colored my reception of the film, and still does. It’s hard for me to take seriously anyone who lives in fear of a goat-man trying to lure everyone into a flaming cave of eternal suffering, and that mythology only gets sillier when viewed through the vaudevillian… See more →
Strip Nude for Your Killer
You’d never know it from the title, but this movie is kiiiiiiind of sleazy.
What Have They Done to Your Daughters?
Not quite as good as What Have You Done to Solange?, and the ending is anticlimactic, but still a great police procedural that never stops moving and gives plenty of screen time to its motorcycle maniac with an oversized meat cleaver. One of the rare occasions I kind of wish I had watched the English-dubbed version, which might have made the copious dialogue easier to follow.
Who Saw Her Die?
George Lazenby is great, as is all the Venetian location shooting, but the murder mystery is extremely unsatisfying, and there’s not nearly enough indulgent giallo style to compensate (with the exception of Ennio Morricone’s music, but it seems like he really just wrote a couple of themes, which are reused ad nauseam). I didn’t love Don’t Look Now either, so maybe I’m just not a grieving-parents-in-Venice kind of guy.
Don’t Torture a Duckling
When Evil Lurks
The more it explains itself, the less interesting it is, but damn if it isn’t otherwise very well executed.
Death Walks at Midnight
In a Violent Nature
An experiment doesn’t need to have an explicit goal, but I’m still left wondering what writer/director Chris Nash hoped to accomplish with In a Violent Nature. Slasher movies are categorically shallow affairs, and framing one from the killer’s perspective doesn’t add depth, nor do its costs (like the eradication of suspense) outweigh its benefits (of which I’m struggling to name a single one). Its approach is novel, I’ll give it that, but only insofar as… See more →
The Strangers: Prey at Night
I’ve decided Stranger (rhymes with hanger) is their family name, and when they show up at a barbecue, everyone is like “Ugh, who invited the Strangers.”
The Strangers
Having Helter Skelter as a primary inspiration doesn’t automatically make you a hack, but if your ultimate takeaway is limited to “Wouldn’t it be scary if a bunch of weirdos randomly attacked you in your home in the middle of the night?,” you’re probably a hack. Putting the attackers in “creepy” masks removes all doubt. (That said, I haven’t seen 2006’s Them since it came out, but I remember it using these same elements to… See more →
Stepfather 3
Since Terry O’Quinn declined to return for this third, made-for-TV installment, it opens with an overlong plastic surgery sequence to explain why our title character looks completely different. At no time in that sequence do we actually see his face, and once the movie settles into yet another idyllic suburban community, there seem to be some intriguing hints that maybe we can’t be sure which of this town’s painfully average dads is the one with… See more →
Robtober 2024
A month’s worth of movies to help you stay awake
Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films to watch, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. The schedule, a mix of theatrical screenings and home viewings, is published for posterity and for the sake of anyone who might like to join me.
This year I seem to be nostalgic for the age of Satanic panic, as I’ll be doing concurrent, chronological deep dives on The Exorcist and The Omen, two… See more →
Stepfather 2
The Stepfather
Terry O’Quinn’s socially regressive Reaganite dad is pitch-perfect, and the opening scene—showing him calmly strolling through the house, past the family he just slaughtered, en route to his new identity—is a doozy. But pretty much everything else in this, including the plot, characters, and color palette, is weirdly bland. Maybe that’s meant to be its own comment on the insipidity of the 1980s’ dominant conservative nostalgia, but a better movie would have just let its… See more →
Someone’s Watching Me!
The Spell
It Follows
Braindead
Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare
Black Roses
Wake in Fright
Cemetery Man
Infinity Pool
We're All Going to the World's Fair
Unfriended
Completely lazy script, but astonishing execution, which unexpectedly has me wondering if this whole screenlife shtick actually has legs? Next stop: Searching.
Saw X
Tobin Bell’s lucid stoicism, facile as its moralizing may be, has always been the Saw series’ biggest strength, and after nearly two decades of coolly calculated carnage, Saw X finally puts his Jigsaw front and center with the full antihero treatment. Taking place between the events of Saw and Saw II, this one is uncharacteristically patient and character-driven, and by the time the stage is set for the the latest round of mayhem, Jigsaw’s victims… See more →
Spiral: From the Book of Saw
A second try at a whodunit, and the most competent script in the series to date, though also the most conventional, which makes it pretty easy to solve (I’m not usually good at murder mysteries, but I cracked this one fast). Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson bring some real personality to the franchise for the first time, though the former doesn’t know quite what to do when he’s not cracking wise. This is Darren… See more →
Jigsaw
In the beginning of Saw V, it’s established that Jigsaw is 52 years old, and maybe the fact that he looks considerably older can be chalked up to his chemotherapy and years of disemboweling people. But at a certain point in Jigsaw, the eighth film in the franchise, we see the character a few years before that, presumably when he was in his late 40s, with no attempt made to disguise the fact that the… See more →