Category Archives: Movies

Movie Review: Klara and the Sun

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After I recovered from a brief illness from some bug I caught at jury duty that kept me home on Friday, my sweetie-wife and I attended a screening of Klara and the Sun on Sunday morning.

Sony/Columbia Pictures

Adapted from a novel by prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, who penned the novel that was the source material for one of my favorite films, The Remains of the Day, and adapted to the screen by Kiwi filmmaker Taika Waititi and co-scripter Dahvi Waller, Klara and the Sun is the story of an artificial friend, Klara (Jenna Ortega), a humanoid robot that is purchased as a companion for an ill teenager, Josie (Mia Tharia). Klara, who has never experienced anything beyond the confines of the retail store, has a childlike understanding of the larger world and believes the sun to be a magical being with healing powers. Josie’s home is a broken one, her father having left after the death of Josie’s older sister, and her mother (Amy Adams) still harboring secrets and unresolved grief that are exacerbated by Josie’s serious illness, an illness that is an adverse event from Josie being “lifted,” that is, genetically manipulated into superior academic ability. Klara attempts to navigate a world that she doesn’t understand, Josie’s illness, the housekeeper’s suspicions, and the secret plot hiding at the heart of the shattered family while growing beyond the confines of her programming.

Waititi is a filmmaker known for an energetic and somewhat chaotic style of cinema. His first entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor: Ragnarok, shook that franchise free from the staid and neo-Shakespearean style in favor of something more akin to the wild and psychedelic art of Jack Kirby. His adaptation of Caging Skies into the dramatic comedy Jojo Rabbit, where Waititi himself played the young protagonist’s imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler, won both critical and popular praise but again leaned heavily into wild absurdist humor that served as a contrast to the darker story of a young boy enraptured by Nazi ideology and his process of breaking free from it. Klara and the Sun required a lighter touch than Waititi typically employs, and he managed it.

I have read only one novel by Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, and while the writing is absolutely brilliant, I have no memory of the text being particularly funny. It is a tragic tale of a man so bound by his sense of duty that he puts everything else aside, including family and his own chance at real happiness, to perform services that are mostly taken for granted. I suspect that the novel Klara and the Sun is equally humor-free, and expecting Waititi to craft a feature film free of humor would be asking too much. Waititi managed to find a balance between his own wild sense of humor and the needs of this particular project.

Cinematographer Mike Berlucchi captures Klara’s wondrous rapture with the sun quite well, giving us magical moments at sunrises and sunsets, even finding those fleeting moments in the middle of an urban landscape when the sun can still bring life to the tired.

Klara and the Sun is a charming and sentimental film that never stumbles into being maudlin, one that reminds us that there is magic in life if only we would look for it with the right eyes.

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Movie Review: Resident Evil (2026)

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The PlayStation horror-themed video game Resident Evil spawned a film franchise that, from 2002 through 2021, comprised seven feature films and now, in 2026, the franchise is restarted with a new movie set in its own continuity.

Directed and co-written by Zach Cregger, Resident Evil (2026) reduced much of the lore and expectations from both the previous movies and the video game series itself, opting for a simplified structure and character set-up.

Sony Pictures

Bryan (Austin Abrams) is a medical courier floating through life, not quite ready to grow up and assume the responsibilities of adulthood and parenthood with his unseen significant other. He is offered an emergency high-speed run delivering a vital package to the general hospital in Raccoon City, and despite not having the required snow chains and other equipment for icy mountain roads, he accepts the contract.

It has been commented by others, quite correctly, that Resident Evil (2026) is structured like a video game. Bryan’s first encounters with the bizarre monsters between him and his goal are simple, easy to navigate, almost tutorial in nature, but each new set piece is more complex, requires greater danger to face and more skill to overcome, until his battles are with hordes of monsters.

Cregger and co-writer Shay Hatten, in addition to the video game feel of the structure and the body-horror of the people deformed by the loosed reagent, also infuse the script with plenty of humor derived from Bryan’s most understandable reactions. Perhaps the most uttered line in the film is Bryan whispering, “What the fuck?” The comedic and absurdist aspects of the script are enhanced by Abrams’ performance. He takes a character that is very, very thin on the page, with only the barest sketches of anything beyond the needs of the plot, and imbues it with a warmth that makes Bryan sympathetic and likable.

Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski and Cregger shot the film quite well, photographing at night in a manner that preserved that the darkness held terror just out of sight but without producing a screen so dim that the action became hard to follow. Cregger only occasionally slips into a loose point-of-view shot that echoes the screen of a first-person shooter video game but not so much that it becames a tiresome gimmick.

With Austin Abrams’ performance and the light touch of comedy throughout the movie, I was ready to judge that I had had a good time watching Resident Evil, but, alas, that is not something I can say in good conscience.

At the opening of David Lynch’s adaptation of Dune, Princess Irulan advises the audience, “A beginning is a very delicate time.” The same is quite true of endings. I would even argue that it is possible to recover from a bad beginning, as you have the rest of the story to course-correct, but a bad ending only leaves you with a sour note as your conclusion.

Resident Evil’s ending is bad.

A good ending unifies three elements: Character, Theme, and Tone, producing the conclusion that fits the story and satisfies the audience.

Had Steven Spielberg in Jaws filmed the novel’s ending, that movie would not have spawned the age of the blockbuster. In the book the shark, exhausted by the barrels, loses the strength to swim and, unable to push water across its gills, suffocates. That is a realistic ending but not one that would have been in step with the tone of the film. The exploding compressed air tank, however physics-defying it was, provided the audience with the heroic and victorious bang that they needed.

In Star Wars, had Biggs or Wedge scored the ‘kill shot’ on the Death Star, that would have been a terrible ending. The ending must flow from our principal character, their actions, and their decisions. It must be Luke, and he must trust to the Force for all three elements to come together.

These elements are required for the right ending even when the right ending is not a “happily ever after” one. With The Godfather, Michael by the end of the film has become what he did not want to be. He had told Kay, “That’s my family, Kay. It’s not me.” However, by his decisions, step by step, he has become that criminal Don, unifying in theme, tone, and character with that moment as the door closes, shutting Kay out of the office.

Resident Evil‘s ending fails on all three elements.

The movie has a very weak theme, if any is present at all, and so, being generous, we can disregard this element, but on the remaining two criteria this script’s ending is seriously flawed.

Tonally, it swerves from the comedic horror to a dark, dreary, and cynical take that is wholly unearned. The goodwill of the previous hour-plus of footage is discarded without preamble or consideration. The ending feels very much like a case of cynicism being mistaken for wisdom.

But perhaps the greater writing crime is that the finale, the last action set piece takes place without Bryan having any agency at all over its nature or its outcome. Bryan, as a character driving a story with his decisions and actions vanishes and instead is railroaded to a disappointing conclusion.

I was quite disappointed by the final act of Cregger’s Barbarian, and while the whole of Weaponsworks beautifully, it would seem with Resident Evil he again shows that where he needs to grow the most as a writer is crafting endings. He, so far, only lands that task one time in three.

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Carrie: Episode 1, First Period

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I first read Carrie, the debut novel of Stephen King, during my final year of high school in 1978. I quite liked the novel, and it sparked a King fandom that lasted about a decade before the author just sort of slipped off my reading pile. There was no break with King, no novel that so offended me in some manner, as has happened with other writers, that drove me away, but just a gradual drifting into different tastes. I have never been a hater nor a great fan of Brian de Palma’s feature film adaptation of the text. I am more partial to his other psychic-teenagers movie, The Fury, so there is no inherent need to defend de Palma’s version over others as this newest adaptation by Mike Flanagan arrives.

Flanagan has adapted the novel into a limited series show of eight episodes, each titled after an aspect of high school with the premiere episode having the punning title of First Period.

Amazon Studios

From the start of this first episode, it is clear that Flanagan is making significant changes to the text in his adaptation. Carrie White’s father (Tahmoh Penikett) is not an absent figure in Carrie’s life, but a doomsday conspiracist whose untimely death forces the home-schooled Carrie (Summer H. Howell) into the public education system and her mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan) into the workforce in order to maintain custody of her child. While Margaret is portrayed as hyper-religious, Flanagan pulls back from the gross caricature of both de Palma and King, crafting a character that is a little more credible than Piper Laurie’s inspired performance. Laurie breathes life into a role that is little more than a collection of tropes and exaggerations. While I myself have no religious convictions or beliefs, I find overly zealous Christians so common in King’s works and in so many others, to be a tiresome and unimaginative antagonist.

Updating the story to the current age, Flanagan gives us a high school with security guards and metal detectors at the entrances and a far more diverse student body than that lily-white set that populated both Maine in the 1970s and King’s novel.

Just like both previous adaptations, Carrie White is not an overweight, pimpled religious zealot, but a conventionally attractive young woman already testing the boundaries of her mother’s worldview and dogma. Soft-spoken but outgoing, Carrie, ignorant of the realities of the modern age, thrilled to the be engaging with school and what she imagined to be other people her own age as obsessed with reading as she is, enters the school happy and hopeful. Instead, the events of her first day in a public school traumatize her.

When the series showed Carrie navigating the metal detector and bag-search screening to enter the high school the thought passed through my mind that Flanagan was not going to take up valuable screentime to also show us an active shooter drill, a routine in many schools these days that traumatizes both staff and students.

I was wrong.

Ewen High does indeed have an active shooter drill on the very first day back after the holiday break. The students and staff are shown as bored with the routine, having followed the script for years, but Carrie, ignorant of even the existence of school shootings and the practice nature of a drill, is understandably terrified and, in her terror, ignites her telekinetic talent that will drive the story’s horrific conclusion.

It is the next day that brings one of the most recognized sequences to life, Carrie’s first menstruation. Kept ignorant of the realities of biology, Carrie, convinced that she is dying from this unprovoked and inexplicable bleeding, is taunted and torments by the other young women who hurl tampons and pads at her while chanting “Plug it up!” sparking another burst of terror-triggered telekinesis.

Flanagan’s most divergent change from the text takes place here, with an abrupt scene change to some unknown location, where another young woman psychically experiences Carrie’s terror and her telekinetic outburst before reporting it to some unseen authority.

This adaptation also spends some of its screentime exploring the home life of the story’s chief antagonist, the bully, Christine (Chris), who conceived of the horrific prank that ends in tragedy for the town. It has been decades since I read the novel, and I have no memory of any pages being devoted to Chris and her inner life. I have a vague memory of her brutal boyfriend and possibly of his enjoyment of running down dogs with his car, but it is possible that memory is tangled with the novel Christine and not Carrie. I do not believe that Flanagan is trying to generate sympathy for Chris, but only further episodes will reveal his intent. I can say that it is hard for me to have sympathy for the poor little rich girl who torments those lower down on the social ladder, no matter how horrid and idiotic her father may be.

I am intrigued enough that I will not only continue watching the series but I shall also continue avoiding the spoilers and discussions that are already roiling on social media. Since this was deployed with the binge-model of release, meaning that the entire series became available on Amazon Prime Video, instead of the more traditional model of releasing an episode a week, social media is already flooded with opinions and arguments from people who have devoured the entire show. I prefer the weekly release; not only does that avoid the issue of different discussions at different levels of knowledge about the show, and not only does that help build attention from week to week as people tell others about the program that they are watching, but for me personally it makes it more likely I will not watch the show at all. For some reason, when the entire thing is available at one time, I am disinclined to even start it. Even when I do, I rarely watch more than a single episode at a time. Sadly, while researching actors’ names and such for this post, I became exposed to some of the text-shattering twists that Flanagan has crafted for his version of Carrie, robbing me of the fun of speculating what might be happening at the unknown location.

Still, I expect that I will watch the rest of the series, possibly one or two episodes a week until I finish. I adored Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep but did not care for his adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, so we will have to see where his Carrie ends up.

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Movie Review: Beware Boiúna

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Friday night, with a hankering to see something in the theaters to kick off this year’s spooky season, I did something I have not done in a very long time: I saw a movie knowing so little about it I had not even watched a trailer. Scanning through the AMC app on my phone, I read the bare details about Beware Boiúna: “deep in the Amazon, a medical mission spirals into a fight for survival when Boiúna, a colossal ancient predator, awakens to reclaim her domain in the jungle were nature holds absolute power, she decides who lives and who dies.”

Lionsgate Films

Okay, so Beware Boiúna was a creature feature, a monster movie, and frankly that was just the sort of shallow horror film that suited my mood. I clicked on a show time, confirmed it as one of the subscription screenings, which came at no additional cost, and after my sweetie-wife had retired for the evening, drove to Fashion Valley mall for the film. I seated myself in the nearly empty theater with quite low expectations. Monster movies along with slashers are not known for deep and engaging stories, often populated by caricatures of people rather than characters, and ones that make the most idiotic of decisions. This sub-genre can be fun in a silly, campy sort of way. (Though it is possible to be just bad enough that the movie is painful to watch without any redeeming camp value.)

Beware Boiúna surprised me.

While it clearly does not carry the heft of more celebrated recent horror films such as Obsession, Backrooms, Midsommar, or Nosferatu, this movie is smart enough and entertaining enough to be counted among the rare category of good monster movies. It possesses just enough story within its plot to have something to say about the human condition but without becoming a meditation on grief, or loss, or identity.

The plot of the film is straightforward: a team of doctors and medical students travel by chartered boat deep along the Amazon River in Colombia, delivering medical supplies and care to impoverished villages. The team comes into conflict with a commercial survey/prospecting team which rapidly spirals into violence. When both groups find themselves on an isolated tributary, they are forced to reckon with a serpent of gigantic stature, Boiúna, and it is unclear who, if anyone, will survive.

In my opinion, Beware Boiúna, while not reaching the heights of these films, carries the genetic heritage of three great films of the horror canon: Jaws, Alien, and Aliens.

Like that Spielberg classic Jaws, this film doesn’t overexpose the audience to the monster at the center of the story. Boiúna makes her appearances in the first half of the movie without fully exposing her horrific nature. Like ‘Bruce’ the shark, her presence is represented by the things she affects instead of blatant CGI. It isn’t until the final act of the film that the creature is fully seen and even then, the director, Mike P. Nelson, and the VFX teams wisely restrict these scenes to the forgiving nature of well-shot night sequences.

Alien is famous for hiding just which character is the actual protagonist of the tale. It isn’t until Dallas’ foray into the airshafts that it becomes clear that Ripley is the story’s main character. Beware Boiúna performs a similar sleight of hand, revealing its protagonist at the film’s midpoint.

The connection to Cameron’s Aliens is more tenuous but struck me as plain when our surviving protagonist battles the enormous creature with massive claw-equipped machinery, echoing Ripley’s power-loader battle with the alien queen.

Well-directed by Mike P. Nelson and well-scripted by writer Alan B. McElroy, Beware Boiúna is a rare thing, a rather decent creature feature that doesn’t try for too much or overstay its welcome with a slim 104-minute running time. Cinematographer Nick Junkersfeld shot the film well; there are no overly showy flourishes of photography but rather a simple and direct style that helps ground the fantastic premise.

Overall, I found this film worth my time, and while it is not getting as wide a release as it deserves and will be overshadowed by films such as Obsession, Beware Boiúna is a film that horror fans should see, and if possible, in a theater.

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They Live Is Overrated

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They Live (1988) was the 11th feature film from celebrated writer/director John Carpenter, and, in my contested opinion, halfway through the movie it becomes evident that Carpenter’s talent had fled, never to return. (Do NOT try to argue that In the Mouth of Madness is a great or even good film. A story where a shotgun-armed angry mob of men are chased off by mere dogs is stupid and expects its audience to be stupid.) I will be spoiling an already spoiled story.

Universal Pictures

A conspiratorial mess, the story follows Nada (Roddy Piper), an unnamed and unhoused itinerant worker who has come to Los Angeles and is drawn into a vast alien plot to subjugate humanity and transform the planet to an environment more suitable to their lifeforms. Nada and another displaced worker, Frank (Keith David), join up with a resistance group and eventually destroy the single satellite transmitter that has hypnotized humanity in a walking sleep that has prevented anyone from perceiving the aliens or their subliminal manipulation.

The first half or so of They Live is actually quite good, subtle, with a growing unease that creates an uncanny valley as the audience remains as ignorant of the reality of the story as the protagonist. However, once the vast conspiracy is revealed, all semblance of intelligence flees the pages of the script, replaced with overly extended fight sequences and action movie tropes that, even by 1988, had become tired, worn out, and cliché. The descent into formula is further degraded by the ham-handed nature of Carpenter’s political preaching. Meant as a commentary on Conservatism as Reagan’s second term drew to a close, They Live delivers its message with all of the subtlety of a cocaine-addled bull elephant. Compounding this clumsy critique is a level of world building that cannot stand even a moment’s analysis and consideration.

The unnamed alien race has come to Earth to extract wealth and convert the planet’s climate to their own by way of industrial pollution. Okay, a metaphor for capitalism: it’s not particularly original, but it’s serviceable enough that Carpenter is not the only storyteller to have stumbled upon it. I will even accept the hand-waving over exactly how that wealth is being extracted, as, one, a film has no time to delve into interstellar economics and, two, we have no clue how such an economy would function anyway. The idea that aliens are covertly manipulating humanity is hardly original; too many people already accept it as a true thing, but it can be made to work.

But not in this movie.

The aliens have covered incomprehensible distances to come to Earth, but after that terrible expenditure of resources, what do they do? They become beat cops in Los Angeles. Oh, sure, they are presented at the very top of society and government, with one shot meant to imply that Reagan is one of them, but so, so many are walking about as working-class and lower-upper-class individuals. This is patently ridiculous. Yes, you might make the argument that this echoes humanity’s own action as European nations colonized much of the world, but colonization is not Carpenter’s metaphor. He is explicitly playing on the secret forces that really control society, using aliens as a metaphor for capitalism, but that idea doesn’t work if the secret masters of the economy are also the ones driving the patrol cars. This is the reason that, while he had aimed his satire at capitalism, the metaphor was handled so clumsily that Nazis took the aliens as a stand-in for Jews. Carpenter warred with them online about this reading, but he left that door open with his slipshod world building. Of course, if Carpenter had reserved his aliens for the ones pulling the strings from secret positions high above the common rabble, then he couldn’t have had his glorious scenes of Nada gunning down aliens in public, scenes that have become only more and more disquieting as America experiences an endless horrid parade of mass shooter events.

Even if you accept the concept that aliens have come across light-years to hold down street-level jobs, They Live is still a deeply flawed mess of a story.

Nada, shortly after learning the truth and going on his spree of murdering aliens that to everyone around him look as human as anyone else, takes a hostage, Holly (Meg Foster), to escape downtown Los Angeles. In her expensive hillside home, Holly puts Nada at ease and then, shattering a champagne bottle across his skull, ejects him from the structure and down the steep embankment.

Later, when Nada and Frank attend their first resistance meeting, Holly is there, presumably because she has had her eyes literally opened by the magic sunglasses left behind after Nada was thrown from her home. She is all doe-eyed and sympathetic to Nada, despite her only interaction with the man having been as his hostage at gunpoint.

The evil controlling forces show up, some deus ex machina shit goes down, transporting Nada and Frank to the local cable station that manages the vast interstellar conspiracy. They regroup with Holly, last seen at the resistance meeting in a bad section of town and now present without explanation, and hustle to the roof where the final plot coupon, the transmitter, waits. In the stairwell Holly wordlessly murders Frank, but on the roof she, with more doe eyes, pleads with Nada, while holding him at gunpoint, not to destroy the transmitter. Apparently, in addition to selling out humanity, she has a very specific kink about being kidnapped and held at gunpoint. Nada destroys the transmitter and dies, but exposes the entire global plot because aliens smart enough to not only traverse light-years but manage a decades-long cultural conspiracy are too stupid to avoid a single-point-of-failure system.

I cannot for the life of me understand why this film is held in such high regard. I found it trite, preachy, and stupid when I first saw it in ’88, and that opinion has only grown with the decades.

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End of Summer Movie Tally

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September is drawing to a close with October coming later this week, bringing with it spooky season and the busiest period for the next several months at my day job, a perfect time to reflect on my summer movies.

In April, I posted about some of the movies coming out this summer that I planned to see in their theatrical release.

  • Over Your Dead Body
  • Hokum
  • The Sheep Detectives
  • In the Grey
  • Obsession
  • Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
  • Backrooms
  • Pressure
  • Disclosure Day
  • Hungry
  • The Odyssey
  • Spider-Man: Brand New Day
  • Coyote vs. Acme

For various reasons, running time vs. showtimes, brief or non-existent theatrical releases in my area, or other factors, I missed Disclosure Day, Pressure, and Hungry in theaters, but I made all the rest. I must say that with the except of the Star Wars entry on the list, not one of these films felt like a waste of my time and energy. Most proved quite the opposite, well worth the voyage out to the local multiplex, with Obsession being the standout feature. I have given that horror film more thought, consideration, and public writing than any other this summer and possibly this year.

Of the 13 movies listed, three I still have not seen, one bored me so intensely I still harbor ill will towards it, and one assaulted my eardrums with such ferocity I find it difficult to remember anything else about the experience of seeing it. That leaves eight that I enjoyed watching from a rear-row seat at the theater. That’s a final score of 80 percent, discounting the ones I missed, because I may have loved one or more of those, giving this summer’s movies a B.

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“It’s Not a Romance; It’s a Love Story.”

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Nikki says this to Bear in the short window during the film Obsession when we, the audience, get to meet Nikki before she is replaced by the power of the wish by Freaky Nikki. Bear responds that he is unable to discern the difference between the genres.

This is an interesting observation with some commenting that the film from which the quote originates is itself a love story and not a romance. I think a strong argument both for and against that thesis is possible, but for me the deciding factor that this is not a love story is Bear’s utterly selfish disregard for the torment Nikki suffers as he continues to pursue his own base desires. With that said, I think it is interesting to investigate further the dichotomy between a romance and a love story.

The romance genre in both film and in print is a vast engine producing seemingly endless content that on the surface appears to adhere to a simplistic formula. So much so that one doesn’t need to specify the rules of the genre in order to satirize them. All you need to know is that you have a high-powered businesswoman, a trip to a small town, and a ruggedly handsome man in flannel, and you just know how the plot is going to work out. To be fair, there is a lot more to the romance genre than that oversimplification. Romance stretches from those Hallmark holiday movies to quite inventive fantasy fiction that sells quite well and pushes the boundaries beyond the heteronormative definitions most people expect. What is expected and violated only most rarely is that a romance story ends with some variation of ‘happily ever after’ while a love story is not so constrained.

I can think of two films, which as love stories, defy the happy ending trope of romance tales to quite powerful ends.

1970’s Love Story is an example that is burned into the minds of Baby Boomers with its box office success spurring imitators and satirization. With its dramatic, tragic ending eliminating the possibility of a happy ending the film is practically the platonic ideal of the concept that a love story is distinct from a romance.

The second example in both print and film is The Remains of the Day. Both the novel by British writer and knighthood recipient Sir Kazuo Ishiguro and the Merchant/Ivory film explore more than the romantic relationship of their lead characters with meditations on service and to whom we give, often unquestioningly, that service.

Both the novel and the film are presented from the point of view of Mr. Stevens, the butler and head of the household staff to a British lord in the period leading up to World War II. While Lord Darlington, seeking to avoid another disastrous war, flirts with fascism, Stevens manages the large manor while suppressing his deep emotional feelings for the newly hired housekeeper Miss Kenton, second only to Stevens himself in the hierarchy of servants. Stevens’s devotion to his duty to his lord, even as the poisonous nature of Darlington’s politics becomes evident, causes the man to miss the love life he might have shared with Miss Kenton. The story is deeply romantic but is very much not a romance.

I think one of the vectors on which we can determine the difference between a romance and a love story is that a romance is inherently optimistic while love stories may be optimistic, but often have a darker streak running through them.

While Obsession, which ends as far from ‘happily ever after’ as seemingly possible, is appropriately dark for a horror film, it is not a love story because unlike poor, self-deluded Mr. Stevens, Bear’s interests end at his own desires.

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Road Trip Tomorrow

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Tomorrow, September 25, 2026, I will take the day off from my full-time job, bundle myself into my Kia Soul in the morning, and embark on the two-to-three-hour drive from home to the dream place, Hollywood, California. There I will visit the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures to get a sneak preview of the exhibit The Horror Show, a history of horror cinema, before returning to my car for the lengthy and undoubtedly traffic-congested drive back home.

It has been nearly two years since I last made a foray to the heart of cinema, Hollywood, when I drove to see Quatermass and the Pit at the New Beverly Cinema, but this exhibit at the museum feels worth the drive.

I visited the Academy Museum once before, and I learned quite a bit, such as how African American cinema invented the music video well before the advent of cable television, and I got to see many fine items and memorabilia from over a century of filmmaking. The Horror Show, in addition to having items such as the original cape worn by Bela Lugosi in Dracula and the production mask from Creature from the Black Lagoon (one of my favorite movies of the original Universal horror cycle), will also explore the impact of horror films on culture and on the culture that these movies comment upon.

I will have lunch in Hollywood, probably not at the museum’s cafe, since my meal there last time was less than satisfying, and then return home, hopefully before dinnertime, to spend the evening with my sweetie-wife. It will be a long day of driving, but one that I hope will be worth the investment of time.

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Why “Conservative” Entertainment Fails

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With the release and scathing reviews of Run Hide Fight: Infidels and the expanding slate of productions from Angel Studios, explicitly conservative entertainment is once again in the air. As with previous attempts at “right-wing” entertainment media, these releases are not finding tremendous commercial or critical success.

Some attribute these failures to the fact that they are conservative, but that is far too simplistic an answer, in my opinion. The Passion of the Christ, which presented the biblical story in a decidedly conservative (some would argue antisemitic) manner as a two-hour subtitled film, took in over half a billion dollars at the box office: hardly a failure. Outspoken and larger-than-life writer and filmmaker John Milius, he of the original Red Dawn, has never shied away from his conservative beliefs, and his notions of honor, masculinity, and living by a code infuse his writings. While Milius never found the outsized success of some of his friends, such as Lucas and Spielberg, he remained an active and vital filmmaker until he was sidelined by health issues.

No, productions like Run Hide Fight: Infidels, its predecessor, Run Hide Fight, or the ill-fated The 1/2 Hour News Hour, a poor attempt to replicate the success of The Daily Show, fail because they prioritize their political hits over any sense of what is actually entertaining.

Some may think that this is an unfair judgment because, after all, The Daily Show is unabashedly liberal, its targets are overwhelmingly conservative, and in the era of MAGA and the Trump personality cult this has only intensified. That judgment is almost correct. The Daily Show is deeply colored by the liberal worldview of its writers and performers just as Red Dawn was deeply influenced by the worldview of its creator. A piece of creative art is stamped, sometimes blatantly, sometimes subtly, by the worldview of its creator. When they sit down to pen something that is funny, thrilling, or just interesting to them, it will reflect, to a greater or lesser degree, the manner in which they see and interpret the world. When the writers of The Daily Show look upon the absurdity of the world, they are by nature predisposed to satirize and ridicule the right, but that is a predisposition and not a commandment from on high.

In 2009, during the first few months of Obama’s first term and nearly eight years after the horrific attacks of 9/11, a low-flying jumbo jet provoked low-grade panic in New York City. The Daily Show performed a bit wondering what sort of brain-damaged nut would do such a thing to the traumatized city, and then revealed, through a doctored image, Vice President Joe Biden at the controls of the aircraft. At the time, the defining image of Biden was one of a person who tended to say and do things that caused the administration public-relations troubles, and so the skit exaggerated this for comedic effect, even though the vice president was on “their side.” The 1/2 Hour News Hour never ever skewered anyone on the right, because its mandate was to deliver conservative talking points. It was never comedy produced by a conservative mind, such as the films of John Hughes; it was a terrible attempt to use comedy to propagandize for conservatism.

The very same things are true of The Daily Wire’s and Angel Studios’ productions and releases. Whether it is George Washington converting Native Americans into joyously celebrating Christ, or a very attractive young woman and her guns emerging victorious over school shooters, or a hardened combat veteran saving a feckless and impotent police force and a university from Islamic terrorists, the ideology comes first rather than emerging organically from a creative who is writing and talking about the world as they see it. That is the very heart of the trouble with most “conservative” entertainment: it is a polemic first and often only.

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Secret Morgue 7

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It is September and therefore time for another horror movie marathon hosted by Film Geeks San Diego with their annual Secret Morgue.  I have attended all of the Secret Morgues except for 2023, when they hosted two, one themed on witches and witchcraft, which I attended, and the September edition focused on animal attacks, which I did not.

I knew going into the event this year that I faced the highest likelihood that more than not several if not most of the films playing would not really work for me as the theme was my least-liked sub-genre of horror, slashers and serial killers. Of the six films of the marathon, two I had not seen but thoroughly enjoyed; one was another unseen one but fell into the trappings of routine slashers that left me unimpressed; another I had seen and detested; one more I had previously watched and found mildly interesting and the final film of the evening; which I missed due to a growing migraine attack, I could tell from a trailer I would not have liked at all.

Peeping Tom from the UK kicked off the event. Released in 1960, the same year as Psycho, this film was savaged by critics and the public upon its release and fell into obscurity only to be later recognized as a work of superb filmmaking.  The film’s focus is Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), a shy, quiet young man who records the women he murders with a motion picture camera. Peeping Tom explores the damaged and lethal psyche created by years of childhood abuse, placing it far ahead of any film of its period in actually trying to understand the psychology of serial murder. This was quite good and I am happy it has been restored not only physically but in terms of its filmmaking as well.

Memories of Murder by Oscar winner Bong Joon-Ho is a police procedural following two mis-matched cops as they attempt to identify and capture a serial rapist and murderer in a rural Korean district. Where most ‘mis-matched cops’ movies are conceived as ‘buddy cop’ stories, this one is not.Memories of Murder carries Bong Joon-Ho’s biting commentary on Korean culture, inspired by and loosely based on a series of actual murders. This film sidesteps easy answers or even an illusion of closure.

The third film, which I have already reviewed here on my site and sent me out of the Comicon museum where the Secret Morgue is hosted to walk around Balboa Park for the next 87 minutes because I have no need at all to ever see again Strange Darling.

Kolobos kicked off the swing into the evening programming. A first feature from a pair of film school graduates, Kolobos does not follow in the meta commentary of the Scream clones of the late ’90s but rather is supposed to take more of its inspiration from the Italian giallo genre of the early ’70s. That said, Kolobos I found lacked the character and writing that exemplifies the best of the giallo genre. The characters were flat stock stereotypes with trite and too on-the-nose dialog. By the end of the film’s short running time I had already begun to have the stirring of a migraine attack.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare started as the fifth film of the evening, but the twin facts that I had already seen the film and the growing migraine prompted me to abandon the rest of the marathon and return home early. New Nightmare is a much more interesting meta commentary on horror film than Scream or any of its imitators. (And yes, I am aware that Craven directed both.)

I later learned that the final film, again from the UK, was Stitches, a slasher featuring a clown, that from the trailer, I am sure would have tested my patience.

Even with the headache and being haunted by Strange Darling dogging my steps, I am glad I attended and look forward to next year’s marathon.

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