The Lady Vanishes:

1930s Alfred Hitchcock. Difficult to understand all of the old-timey accents at first. Unsure who the protagonist is until 45 minutes in. Unsure if it was a comedy. Some boring parts (probably just a generational thing). The movie got enjoyable once the lady FINALLY vanished (too far into the movie). The last shot of the movie is a hilarious one.

-Vicki

Don’t Look Back 2009
Dir: Marina de Van

Repulsion + Double Life of Veronique + Sliding Doors + un petite peu of Jeanne Dielman

Not the best I’ve ever seen. Sophie Marceau is giving her all to a character that is just beyond her range and sometimes the cheesy music swells in such a corny TV movie way you can’t believe you’re even watching watching it. But so what. It’s an old fashioned 1950s B thriller with aging sex bombs where the undercurrent is fear of domesticity and growing old. Thank you Joan Crawford.

Marceau plays a wife and a mother of two who starts losing her ability to recognize her family. Then she begins to see her body differently, her house is changing, her husband isn’t who he’s always been. It’s scary.

Watch it just for a lengthy sex scene midway through that involved overtime from the art department. Disturbing and awesome. Based on that alone I will give any of Marina de Van’s movies a viewing.

Is also the only movie in history with the title Don’t Look Back.

Below - 2002

Written by Darren Aronofsky, directed by the guy who did Pitch Black (which is good), starring Olivia Williams (6th Sense, Rushmore) with Zach Galifianakis? Yes please.

This movie does not deliver! At all! There’s nothing interesting or even weird about it except how boring it is. The only good part is when Zach Galifianakis reads a passage from a book. His delivery says “This movie sucks. I give up.”

The premise is that they are on a submarine with a ghost who is really into Benny Goodman? I don’t know. Its seems like the parties involved wanted to make a really “classy” genre movie. All the takes are long, everyone is talking about stuff that I don’t care about, there’s such an effort made to announce that this is an ALLEGORY not just some spooky story with no SIGNIFICANCE as if we fans of sci-fi/horror/fantasy etc don’t deserve to be entertained.

If I could pick one thing lacking from nearly all those weirdly cutesy 80s slasher-tit movies (is that a term?) I would say it is emotional realism. And in this low budget movie where everything is a little too late night TV, Klaus Kinsky is just too real. It’s unsettling.

He’s playing the son of a Nazi doctor who brings young women into his home to do things like cut out their tongues and keep them in a cage. How does he decide when it’s time to do this? By playing Russian Roulette with himself.

I definitely appreciate this movie but Klaus Kinsky does so much internal work it makes it kind of hard to watch. I read that dude’s autobiography, I wouldn’t put anything past him.

Thankfully there’s stuff like sex, musical interludes and cookie parties to break up Klaus’ lecherous gaze.

Fun fact: George Clooney ex-wife, John Slattery (Roger Sterling) current wife and Roger Sterling ex-wife Talia Balsam is in this movie

Body Snatchers! Better than you think it is!

There was a very unexpected problem with my netflix during this movie. About 25 minutes before Body Snatchers ended it turned into the movie Traitor starring Don Cheadle, Jeff Daniels and Guy Pearce. Seamlessly. And I’ll be honest, it took me a good 10 minutes to figure out there was a problem.

Let me take you through my thought process:
- What the hell? Is that Don Cheadle? Abel Ferrara is so ahead of the curve!
- This is a strange thing to do at the end of a movie but I kind of like it
- Hmm … I thought that the Body Snatching was an allegory for growing up and becoming an adult - I’m actually not sure what this terrorism lay-on has to do with anything but I’ll stick it out.
- How weird. This is the first movie he did after Bad Lieutenant.
- Why does Guy Pearce look so old?

I hope this gets straightened out because I was really digging Body Snatchers. Meg Tilly is SO FREAKING GOOD. I’m trying to find a clip of the “Where ya gonna go?” monologue she delivered before Traitor started playing because right now, it’s my favorite thing.

Ah! October. I love watching horror movies all year round but in October it really feels like you’re doing something festive with your time.

This movie was pretty good. It’s about a grieving family dealing with the death of their 16 year old daughter after she dies in a drowning accident and then decides to hang around their house. Done in the ever popular mockumentary style featuring interviews, old news footage, audio tapes and photos, its low key attitude makes for some low key frights. There are no outright scares but they manage to make zooming in on a photograph freaky.

Midway through they add on some stuff about the daughter leading a double life and the whole thing gets to feeling very 3rd generation Twin Peaks. Did I mention that the family name is Palmer?

It’s Australian and I read that the people who remade The Ring are going to be remaking Lake Mungo. I will go see this remake. I think it could benefit from a touch of crass American razzle dazzle.

It says on wikipedia that Wes Craven, who admits in the documentary Inside Deep Throat that he spent his early career directing porn, originally set out to make this a hardcore movie. But when they started filming it they realized it was too good to not be mainstream. Additionally, it’s a remake of The Virgin Spring which is an adaptation of a medieval Swedish folk ballad about two sisters killed by highwaymen who then seek shelter at the girls’ parents house.

Those are two of the best fun facts I’ve heard about a movie in a long time.

It’s hard to believe it was made in 1972, I think it’s aged very well. It’s a crude and effective mix of exploitation (Abel Ferarra) mixed with realistic emotional reactions (Michael Haneke). What a combination. It’s funny to think that Funny Games came over 20 years after Last House on the Left when it feels like a predecessor.

The songs were written by the actor who plays the villian Krug. Early 70s acoustic. Amazing. The final act of this movie is actually shocking and crazy good.

Watching this again as an adult I realized that Just One of the Guys to me what Teen Wolf is to most other people my age. I know every beat of this movie. It is hard wired into my subconscious and my reaction was as visceral as smelling that glue you used in kindergarten.

It made me remember that from a shockingly young age I was an avid viewer of USA Up All Night. I would wait until my parents went to sleep and then sneak in the living room on Friday and Saturday nights to catch both the Rhonda Shear and Gilbert Gottfried hosted evenings. I love a “Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2” as much as the next gal but I definitely preferred the tacky sex romps to the tacky ‘horror’ flicks. Jim Hanks in Beauford’s Beach Bunnies anyone?

I am terrified to think of how much JOOTG contributed to my development as both a feminist and a sexual person.

Midway through I thought ‘considering the subject matter, this has an awfully male voice’. wikiwikiwiki. Sure enough it was written by two gentleman and directed by a woman named Lisa Gottlieb whose previous film experience was as a casting assistant and who went on to direct an episode of Boy Meets World. I would LOVE to see a documentary about this movie.

“Lucy Harbin. Born and raised on a farm. Parents, poor. Education, meager. Very much a woman and very much aware of the fact.”

I know this era of Joan Crawford’s career got a lot of shit (Psycho-biddy, Grand Dame Guignol, hagsploitation) which is too bad because it’s fun and she’s great. She plays Lucy Harbin, an older woman who marries a younger man only to catch him in the sack with a babe his own age. She decapitates them with an axe while her daughter watches in horror:

Then time skips ahead 20 years. This is what she’s been up to:

She’s released from an asylum and is reunited with her daughter. They are living on a farm so there plenty of awkward mentions of animals being slaughtered, lots of sharp objects around and more than one shot of someone slicing into a thick slab of meat.

The people responsible for this tumblr recently created a musical about Lizzie Borden and after the show a couple weeks ago an audience member pointed us towards this movie. The connection is slight but intentional - there’s even a modified version of Lizzie’s nursery rhyme sung by creepy jump roping twins! Yes! That is like catnip for me.

I might dress like Joan Crawford for Halloween.

                                            A few spoilers ahead:

Give me a break.

Based on watching Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville my impression is that despite the pious way he usually portrays them, Lars von Trier has a deep hatred of women. He delights in the unrelenting torture, sexual humiliation and destruction of his females. And for what? Seriously, for what.

In any case, Antichrist. Jesus. Give me a break. We’ve moved from soft tortured saint to a ball bursting (yup) maniac totally at the mercy of her feelings (ew!), would rather fuck than be a mother and who in the course of writing a paper on gendercide (gynocide) realizes that women are basically evil. The movie works it’s ass off to prove this last point.

I think that Lars and Catherine Briellat should collaborate to make the most punishing, pessimistic movie about women of all time.

Charlotte Gainsbourg is fantastic. I liked the title cards and chapter breaks. The whole thing looked beautiful but who cares about the scenery when Willem Dafoe is jazzing out blood.

PS - In the first 20 mins there’s a doe with a dead deer-baby hanging out of its womb. Be more obvious and GIVE ME A BREAK!

17 of 91 minutes

I love horror movies and I thought this was a straight up (MADE UP) thriller. Steven King’s descriptor “a long look into hell, suburban style” really piqued my interest.

10 minutes in I was kind of digging it and thought “oh wow, this is pretty interesting and restrained, let me wiki what I’m watching”. I find out that its based on the real torture and murder of Sylvia Likens. It took me 7 minutes to read about Sylvia Likens and her sadistic caregiver Gertrude before I decided to turn it off and go back to a horror show where no one gets tortured or sexmurdered - the Hills. - Irene