Category Archives: Movies

Wakanda and Westeros

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Two of the great cultural fictional kingdoms of recent times, kingdoms that have been taken to heart and have occupied the minds of millions, are Westeros and Wakanda.

Westeros, from the mind of author George R.R. Martin, and thrust into the vast public consciousness by the impressive HBO show Game of Thrones, is the fantasy kingdom where treachery, murder, incest, dragons, and ancient magical powers vie for the throne that ruled over the island continent.

Wakanda, from the pages of Marvel Comics and the hit feature films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is home to the secretive tribes that discovered the rare and fantastical abilities of the fictional metal Vibranium and the super-science that it allowed.

Each fictional setting presented its kingdom in crisis and civil war: Westeros plunged into a long and bloody affair when the succession line became tangled and powerful lords arrayed against one another, while in Wakanda, unpleasant secrets surfaced, bringing a murderous thug to victory in the trial by combat that defined their succession. (Yes, I am aware that by some definitions the trial never finished and as such Killmonger’s ascension was never official, that is not the point here.)

In each case we, the audience, are supposed to believe that the matter has been resolved in a manner where we can rest easy and that the troubles lie in these lands’ pasts. In Westeros, Brandon Stark, gifted with sight beyond time and space and wisdom born of his magical gifts, sits upon the throne with benevolence and good will, to rule justly. While in Wakanda, with the would-be dictator and global threat dead, T’Challa, the Black Panther, sits on the throne undoing the centuries of isolation and bringing his nation and his people into the global community, ruling, presumably, as justly as the fictional king Brandon Stark.

But neither kingdom corrected the actual root cause of their terrible troubles.

In both cases the kingdoms are presided over by absolute monarchs whose powers are unconstrained, with their every whim and proclamation passing instantly into law and action. Brandon may be a good and supernaturally wise man. T’Challa is a good man with a good heart, but they are mere mortal men, doomed to die and pass on these unchecked powers to another. The warning is not that bad men should be kept from the thrones of kingdoms but that the powers of any ruler, king or president, must be checked or eventually they pass to those unworthy, untrustworthy, and whose appetites can never be satisfied.

It is a lesson that extends far beyond the borders of fantasies and comic books.

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Beware Poorly Transferred Films

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Last week my sweetie-wife and I watched a Giallo that we streamed on the ad-supported service Tubi; the film in question was titled Ring of Death, a 1969 Italian crime/thriller, and not to be confused with the early 80s martial arts movie. The film can be found on IMDb as Detective Belli. But Tubi, in addition to frequent breaks for up to 5 commercials in a row, hid another reason why budget streaming isn’t always the best option.

Belli (Franco Nero) is a corrupt senior police officer in Rome who is drawn into a web of blackmail, extortion, infidelity, and murder when he takes on investigating a rich man’s son who has begun associating with people of low character. As is typical of the giallo genre this movie is lurid and darker than the American genre of film noir with few if any admirable or moral characters. Everyone has a secret, and everyone is willing to do terrible things to keep their secrets concealed.

We, my sweetie-wife and I, prefer whenever possible, to watch these films with the original Italian language track but Tubi, being an ad-supported service, caters to the lowest common denominator and nearly always only has the English language dub for their foreign films, particularly with the older ones. Still, Ring of Death Detective Belli boasted a dubbed track where most of the actors provided their own English language dialog and as such was far superior to the vast majority of dubbed versions.

That is until the particular failings of this apparently hastily assembled version made themselves plain.

Random scenes, for no discernable reason, suddenly presented themselves with the Italian language soundtrack but without any accompanying subtitling. These instances where we were subjected to Italian never lasted more than scene or two, and never as long of a reel, before just as randomly switching back to the English dub.

For the most part this was tolerable, the context of the scenes usually provided enough that we could guess as to what transpired but this all fell apart with the final, and most ironic, sequence for this fault to reveal itself. As with most mysteries and thrillers there comes to scene where the detective, having finally worked out all the twists and turns of the plot, lays it all out for the other characters and the audience in a lengthy spot of exposition and Ring of Death/Detective Belli was no different in this respect, just for us, it was presented in Italian without subtitles. While the solution was plain, in this case Belli was explaining to the culprit just how he worked it all out, all of the nuances were lost in a language neither of us spoke. I could recognize names of characters as they flew by the explanation but nothing more than that.

My sweetie-wife searched the county and city libraries for the film on disc so we might check it out but that proved fruitless.

Sometimes with the free streaming services you get exactly what you pay for.

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Obsession, Backrooms, and The Mandalorian

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It is a strange time when one of the, if not the most, popular film series of all time, Star Wars, generates such lackluster interest that a pair of low-budget, non-Intellectual Property driven horror films perform better than the most recent entry in the long-loved franchise.

As with most things in life I believe that there is no simple single answer to as to why Obsessionand Backrooms pulled into such audience number while The Mandalorian and Grogu suffered middling success.

Certainly, the fact that three years passed between the last season of the once hit show, The Mandalorian and the release of the feature film it inspired dulled general interest. It today’s fast moving short attention span driven culture to paraphrase an extra in Jaws, ‘Three years is like three decades!’ It is also not helpful that the third season of that show proved to be the most lackluster one offered, splitting up the dynamic pairing that had driven viewer interest and delving into ‘lore’ of the Star Wars universe that interested the most die-hard fans but for everyone else came off as impenetrable and uninteresting.

When the trailers for The Mandalorian and Grogu finally appeared, promising the return of that pairing they seemed to rely entirely on the affection people once had for the pairing, offering nothing of the plot or story. The studio’s only pitched seemed to be, here are the characters you loved, come see them, and nothing more. In a time of already declining theater attendance, shortening windows between theatrical release and streaming availability, offering up nothing more than television characters on a theatrical screen is not enough to coax people out of their homes for an expensive trip to the local multiplex. The ones who did go reported that the film had no real story to it, it was a very expensive collection of action scenes and references to other programs that the creators of already shown on television. the script was so flabby and pointless that the first 15 or 20 minutes of the film could be edited out and absolutely nothing would change.

The tired and reheated offering from a franchise nearly 50 years old cannot explain why a pair of horror films exploded with financial and cultural success.

The horror movie genre mirrored the Star Wars franchise in the manner that 2026 with yet another entry in a horror series that had grown quite long in the tooth with the release of Scream 7 the latest addition in that 30-years-old franchise. Now, my opinion on this may be somewhat prejudiced as I have never loved or even enjoyed the original Scream when so many people found the movie so perfectly suited to their tastes. That said I find it hard to imagine how a script can breathe new life into a slasher that has continued for seven feature films without becoming a parody of itself. I will confess that ‘slashers’ are my least favorite sub-genre of horror with very, very few holding my interest. While other people adored Ti West’s X, I could only groan as the characters throughout the movie runtime veered further and further from anything I could believe as genuine human action and reaction.  What Obsession and Backrooms offered were fresh interesting horror stories that were either a series of ‘kills’ displaying technical expertise in the effects nor yet another exploration of grief using horror as a metaphor. Instead, each film spoke to a relevant cultural moment that resonated with people, particularly younger adults, and not the grey-haired fans of quite old franchises.

Obsession speaks to entitlement and consent with Nikki being stripped of agency over her body and her mind being the real horror of the tale. This is a subject that is very real to nearly all, if not all, women today. Between rights being stripped away by their government and the need to exercise vigilance over ever drink in public it is hardly surprising that film like Obsession strikes such a powerful emotional chord. Some have suggested the film would be more powerful if it presented the story from Nikki’s point of view however I think that is a challenge that would be nearly insurmountable in a cinematic form. A character without the ability to influence the events around her or even her own actions is one that would not thrive in a visual medium, that would work in prose, I can see a terrific novel with that approach but not a movie. I found the true horror of Obsession to be NIkki’s enslavement and not her outbursts of violent possessiveness. This movie is very much one of its time as is Backrooms.

Backrooms, inspired and adapted from the directors short projects on YouTube is a movie that, while set in the dreary 1990s, speaks to the young adult suffering the early 21st century. In addition to coming from a medium with which they are very familiar, the internet, its visual presentation, an empty, haunted, and ultimately incomprehensible world. Strip malls were not dead and empty spaces in the 90s but they are today and the vast lonely volumes present in Backrooms is an apt metaphor for the lives of young adults today, a cohort of people who suffered the pandemic for their teenage years, and emerged from college burden with debt and few if any prospect to have even the same lives much less better ones of their parents. A seemingly endless world that lacks maps or any other method of navigating is the world that they are attempting to build lives in. Is it any surprise that this is also a horror that touches their souls?

Star Wars emerged in the late 70s, a time of deep cynicism when heroes were often depicted as doomed their values a futile expression. Lucas painted a simpler time with simpler morality, one where it was easy to know right from wrong, that life had a light side and dark side and that resonated with the next several generations but this generation cannot believe in such a world. They have suffered too much to adopt a pollyannish view of reality; the dark, haunted, and manipulative horrors of Backrooms and Obsession mirrors the world that they know far more than a bounty hunter bound by some honorable code.

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Backrooms: Liminal Horror and Something Older

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“No Matter Where You Go, there you are”. Dr. B. Banzai PhD, MD, MFA

I had intended to see the new horror film Backrooms on its opening weekend but a cluster of migraines kept me at home and it wasn’t until this past weekend that I managed to get out to the theater to catch this latest horror sensation.

A24

Backrooms, the brainchild of Kane Parsons and born of his internet posted short subjects, centers on Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) a man for whom life has not turned out at all the way he had hoped or wanted. Turned out of his home by divorce and living in his discount furniture store Clark listlessly seeks help from a therapist, Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) but clearly struggles to make progress. Late one evening Clark discovers a portal in the sub-floor of his store that leads to an uninhabited and seemingly endless series of rooms and corridors laid out by some sort of inaccessible dream logic. Exploring the labyrinth Clark discovers terrors that echo his own distraught mental heath but remain beyond comprehension.

Liminal Horror entered the lexicon quite recently in 2019 with images of abandoned malls and disused spaces appearing on internet chatrooms and message boards. By 2022 Parsons began uploading short subjects of CGI crafted liminal horror to his YouTube account, developing a talent and fandom that eventually led to the feature film Backrooms with its attendant success and recognition. As a subgenre of horror liminal is the most mood defined. Where supernatural horror ranges from ghosts to demons, to witchcraft, and slashers are very specifically about a series of gruesome and on-screen ‘kills’ and zombies, either undead or virally induced, are about the implacable masses, liminal horror has no clearly defined monster at its core but consists almost entirely of atmosphere. In its purest form it would be possible to craft something that is recognizably liminal horror from a single still image. Backrooms, in its expanded feature film form, is more than liminal horror but rests, in my opinion, on a subgenre of horror just over a century old, cosmic horror.

Cosmic horror, perhaps best illustrated by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, is the subgenre that while often reduced to tentacled monstrosities is at its center about the relationship between humanity and reality, but that reality as presented in the piece is far stranger and utterly incomprehensible to the puny human mind rendering it terrifying. It is not that there are simply great areas that lie unknown to humanity, but that reality itself is unknowable and our pitiful understanding of it is utterly in error. The horrific nature of the universe cannot be explained because it cannot be understood at all.

The strange, nightmarish world that Clark discovers in the sub-levels of his furniture store is never explained, with hints at the film’s conclusion that this is not the only occurrence. While the space, its shape, and its nature is twisted by the psyches that invade it, those psyches do not create nor do they dictate it, merely influence the bizarre and unpredictable events and forms it takes.  The Backrooms are not constructed of timber and drywall; their nature is beyond human understanding and realizing just how far beyond our meager intellect it lies is the true nature of its horror.

I both rejoice in the tremendous success Backrooms is finding at the box office and fear it as well. There will be terrible pressure for a sequel, for a continuation of the story and if that comes to pass then each iteration will rob a little more of the mystery, will seek to explain a little more the terror until nothing at all is left to experience.

I opened this review with a quote from a classic cult film of the 80s because the Backrooms are the dark interpretation of that saying, no matter where you go you take yourself with you, and that includes the demons that haunt our every footstep and the loops of destructive behaviors we are unable to unlearn.

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Weekend Movie Plans

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Unless I am again derailed by migraines I have plans to see two films in the theaters this weekend.

Tonight, Friday night, I want to go out and catch Backrooms. It is so nice to see a wider selection of horror than the slashers and murderous home invaders subgenres. I have nothing against those types of movies which are just more often than not dull and tedious to me. The black-gloved killers of giallo are more interesting, but they too can become rather uninspired and repetitive rather quickly. Backrooms looks to be much more a vibe than a plot, which I will wager either works very well or not at all and I am looking forward to finding out.

Tomorrow, June 6th, strikes me as an ironically perfect day to see the D-Day invasion film Pressure, a film that looks to focus on the vital and uncertain weather forecasts that determined the success of the Normandy invasions. I do know as a historical fact that one of the vital elements for that invasion and the Battle for the North Atlantic was the Allied control of Iceland, occupied since its actual controlling government, the Danish Kingdom, was under Axis domination.

Sunday evening, after my sweetie-wife has retired for the night, I plan to watch the next in the Plaid Project, Johnny Eager, a movie I know almost nothing about.

But, like I said much of this turns on if eye strain doesn’t trigger yet another series of migraines.

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Movie Review: The Mandalorian and Grogu

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I am, at most, a casual Star Wars fan, old enough that I watched the original set of films on their initial release and to have been disappointed by the sequel set. Most of the television series that have followed I have had little to no interest in with the exception of Andor and The Mandalorian. Andorbrought a gritty moral ambiguity to the story of a rebellion that struggled to overthrow an authoritarian empire while The Mandalorian told tales in the setting of a more straight-forward morality much like many classic Western movies. Both approaches are valid lines of exploration within a setting as vast as the Star Wars franchise, and both appealed to me on very different thematic fronts. I will confess that while I adored the first two seasons of The Mandalorian, I felt that the producers had damaged their show and premise with the changes presented in its third season. Now, three years after that final season aired, a curious phrase considering that the program was never actually broadcast, the long-awaited feature film centered on the two principal characters has arrived in theaters.

Sadly, the disintegrating quality of the story-telling that began with Season three continues in The Mandalorian and Grogu. While I cannot honestly say that this film is bad in some ways, my opinion is worse than that, because this film is dull and uninspired, vanishing from my memory like a dream a few hours after waking. This movie strikes me as the worst sort of ‘fan service’ with callbacks to characters from other media that serve no thematic or story purpose beyond having a fan point and smile because they recognized the reference.

Lucasfilm/Disney Studios

The movie begins as we follow Mando executing the final elements of a bounty hunt against an ex-imperial officer that has set himself up as a warlord. It is a prolonged action sequence that carries no narrative weight; we know nothing of the person that is being hunted and have no emotional connection to anything that transpires. There is no drama or suspense as the movie’s principal character dispatches unnamed stormtroopers with an ease that drains the action of any stakes. Worse yet, the entire sequence has absolutely no impact on the events that follow. The entire bit could be excised from the film and not one following scene would change. To the plot it matters not at all. It exists only to be a ‘thrilling’ scene for the fans who want to see Mando ‘kick ass.’ I found the entire thing as interesting as playing a video game on ‘God Mode’ where your digital enemies are incapable of any victory.

The rest of the movie is equally meaningless.

Stories, when they are well written, are about change, about characters either growing into a better version of themselves or falling due to the flaws in their nature that they are unable to overcome. The Mandalorian and Grogu is utterly static. The characters enter and exit the story unmoved and unaltered by their experiences. Even when it might appear that Mando has caused troubles by eliminating a criminal contact that the fledgling New Republic had compromised itself by working with, an off-screen deus ex machina absolves him of any error with a bit of clumsy exposition revealing that the criminals were in fact, sans any evidence presented in the movie itself,  betraying the Republic the entire time. Our hero, The Mandalorian, is incapable of making mistakes of any consequence or of judgment. A hero like that can only come off as flat, dull, and uninteresting.

Truly, the only section of the movie that held my interest was the street food vendor voiced by the legendary Martin Scorsese.

The Mandalorian and Grogu has neither the cynical tone of evil acts performed for the greater good of Andor nor the direct and easily understood choosing the morally right path of the series The Mandalorian or of the films, instead telling a tale that makes no stand and chooses no side. I fully expect to have forgotten this movie within a week.

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The Most Reality-Defying Aspect of Obsession.

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The quite successful supernatural horror film Obsession turns on the protagonist Bear gaining a wish by way of a magical and apparently mass produced gag gift, the One Wish Willow but the wish-granting twig is not in my opinion that aspect of the film that is at odds the most with our objective reality and the element that fits that category is syptomatic of an issue across Hollywood.

Bear, the girl he has an unrequited crush on, Nikki, and their friends, Ian and Sarah, in addition to comprising a bar hopping trivia team, all work in the musical instrument and sheet music shop of Sarah’s father. They are young college-aged persons with their lives currently unmoored by deep responsibilities and serious careers, ideal characters that could have an affinity with horror’s prime demographic, the under-30 movie goer. And yet there is an element in the film that is utterly unrealistic — apparently not one of them is a roommate arrangement.

Nikki lives in a house, we see Bear drop her off there in the film’s first act, a small but nice standalone structure, with no mention of anyone expecting her home. Bear has a house that he apparently inherited from his grandmother. These four young adults, holding down minimum wage retail jobs, have credit cards, can afford to go bar hopping, and all live alone with the privacy and seclusion that works so well in a horror movie.

I have worked a number of dead end, low wage, retail jobs, and not one of them afforded me the ability to live alone. When I did live alone for a short while working that sort of minimum wage job it took two of them and even then, every penny mattered. I certainly did not have the resources for repeated nights out visiting multiple bars. (Even if I had been the sort of person for whom that would have been attractive.) The idea that three of them, discounting Sarah because her family owned the business, would even get full time employment and not something more realistic like a work week under 30 hours is stretching credulity to the breaking point.

This highlights a systemic issue in Hollywood, fewer and fewer of the creatives have had personal lived experience outside of upper-middleclass lives that afforded easy access to college, and all that opportunity affords. I recall in the later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer after her mother had passed away, Buffy needed to get a job at a fast-food burger joint in order to take care of her and her sister. Again, even if her mother had somehow managed to purchase a California house outright with no mortgage, it would be impossible for Buffy to support herself, maintain the home, and raise her sister on the meager wages afforded by such a menial job.

This extends beyond low wage jobs that are below the poverty line. The lack of military personnel also affects the quality of storytelling in the film and television industry. Sure, they bring in consultants and such when they are making a war movie but all too often the writers, producers, and directors work from a state of ignorance when they attempt to have military characters that are not specifically working in battlefield condition. It is that sort of blindness to how things really work that allows J.J. Abrams to have someone go to a military-style academy and graduate not as an ensign but as captain despite having no actual command experience.  or for Joss Whedon to have elite special forces that blindly accept a briefing with no questions asked about the particulars. Those sorts of unit are comprised of some of the smartest people in the military. Far from perfect, granted, and prey to any other human failing, but they are not dumb just accept what is presented types.

The stratification of the people and the limited backgrounds that they represent are a far more damaging force to film and television than any ‘nepo-baby’ troubles.

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Finally, it’s not About Grief: A review of Obsession

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Saturday was a rare two-trip to the local multiplex. In the morning with my sweetie-wife we saw the light action film In The Grey, a quick observation, is a fun film and worth the trip. This review is for my evening feature at the theater, the new horror film Obsession.

Focus Features

From writer/director Curry Barker Obsession focuses on Baron ‘Bear’ Bailey (Michael Johnston) and his seven-year crush on Nikki Freemen (Inde Navarrette.) Though he has known Nikki since high school and is socially a friend, a teammate with her on a trivia team, and a co-worker at a local musical instrument store, Bear had never confessed his feelings or attraction to her, unable to conquer his own crushing insecurities and doubt. While seeking a gift for her at the local crystal and mysticism store, he purchases a ‘One Wish Willow Branch’ and after yet another bout of frustration where he again fails to tell her his feelings, Bear snaps the branch as instructed and wishes for Nikki to love him more than anyone and anything in the world. Now the object of her obsession, Bear discovers, as Spock warned Stonn, that having a thing is not as pleasing as wanting, and by the third act the discomfort turns to outright horror.

The true horror in Obsession is not the maniacal jealousy that the mystically enslaved Nikki presents whenever anything or anyone frustrates her unquenchable need to be with Bear but that enslavement itself. Nikki’s will and her ability to make any choices for herself have been ripped away by Bear’s selfish and childish wish. Here and there throughout the film flashes of the person trapped by the spell peek through the facade of the Nikki that is supposedly ‘in love’ with Bear. By the third act it is clear that the real Nikki is unable to avail herself of any action as her body is puppeteered by forces beyond her control. She is not possessed by an evil entity but has been rendered a ragdoll forced to live out a distorted fantasy of desire and affection. While many recent horror films have been meditations on grief and loss Obsession is about consent and the evil of an entitled mindset.

Barker and cinematographer Taylor Clemons made excellent use of silhouettes, often presenting the ensorcelled Nikki as a figure that could only been seen in outline, with all of her features lost in impenetrable darkness, making her both a terrifying figure to behold and one that reflected the nature of her own entrapment. Inde Navarrette is the stand-out performer of this film, first giving us a Nikki of depth and complexity that we get to know before Bear enslaved her and then a Nikki driven only by her obsession that switches in the blink of an eye from loving to frightening when frustrated in her ‘desires.’ The film’s final resolution comes as both inevitable and a terribly tragic with Inde giving perhaps one of cinema’s best screams that transmutes into heart-wrenching cries.

While this may not satisfy the horror fans form whom ‘body counts’ and ‘kills’ are the metrics of a successful horror movie it worked quite well for me. It is not in the zone of a film where it might be possible to read everything as only suggesting the supernatural, such as last week’s film Hokum, the filmmakers leave no doubt that the mystical nature of the ‘One Wish Willow’ is, in the world of the film, real, placing this clearly more in line with Hereditary than The Wicker Man and that should be enough to let you know if Obsession a film I thoroughly enjoyed is rigth for you.

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The Plaid Project Continues — The Keeper of the Flame

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As I wrote in February, I have made it a project of mine to watch every classic film noir that was clipped and used in the montage comedy Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, the Steve Martin/Carl Reiner feature from 1982. This past weekend I finally got back on the train and watched the 1942 film The Keeper of the Flame starring Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn.

MGM

The film started with a terrible thunderstorm and a car hurtling off a bridge, killing its sole occupant Robert Forrest, an idolized and beloved patriot of the United States, driving the entire nation into grief and mourning. The small New England community is quickly overrun with reporters eager to cover the man’s untimely death, eulogize him to the nation, and perhaps impossibly get access to the secretive Forrest estate and elusive and reclusive widow. Among the throng reporters is Stephen O’Malley (Tracy) freshly back from Germany as the Nazis begin their march towards war, already deep in their persecutions of the Jewish population along with everyone else they deem ‘undesirable’ to their deluded notions of national and racial purity. O’Malley, a devoted follower of Forrest and his ideal, intends not to simply cover the tragic accident but to produce a definitive biography of his idol but when he succeeds in infiltrating the estate his reporter’s instincts kick in and his suspicions grow that something is off, that a truth about the crash and about the man is being hidden and O’Malley digs for that secret while becoming enamored with Forrest’s widow, Catherine (Hepburn.)

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid used only the car crash at this film’s start for their feature, leaving the rest of this deeply political drama untouched for me to discover in this viewing. The secret that is hidden by the estate and the family I found to be one that was readily apparent but perhaps would not have been so obvious to an audience in 1942 freshly thrown into the global conflict that would see millions dead before it finally ended. Hepburn and Tracy maintain their unique chemistry even as they play, at least initially, characters who harbor a deep distrust of one another. The film was well shot and well written though my suspicion, later confirmed, about the ‘twist’ kept me from fully enjoying this feature. If you wish to see this film unspoiled, and its currently streaming on HBOMax, then stop here. Those unconcerned about spoilers, care read on.

The secret is of course that this beloved ultra-patriot who so perfectly embodied the ideals of the perfect American was in fact a fascist with intent to use his influence, connections, and wealth to seize control of the nation with himself as dictator like the foreign despots he so admired. His widow, seeing that the bridge had failed and knowing he would be taking that route, withheld any warning for her husband leaving him to die a hero in an accident and saving the nation from his plots.

It is charmingly naive that in 1942 the writers and creatives could only conceive of a fascist coming to power in the United States by hiding his true nature and not by blatantly bragging about his desires to be a dictator and openly flaunting his hatred and racism. Hopefully the next film, Johnny Eager, will be far less relevant.

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A Weekend of Cinema … or at Least Movies

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Friday has arrived bringing the weekend, and I, provided I do not manage to injure myself by performing the terribly risky action of turning my head, the weekend should contain two trips the theater for in-auditorium cinematic experiences.

Last weekend I had planned to see the horror film Hokum Saturday evening. Hokum has been getting good notices, though I have been burned before by movies being talked up — I am looking at you X and Barbarian — and it looks fascinating. However, when I went out to pick up the takeaway food for me and my sweetie-wife’s dinner, I twisted my neck in a wrong manner, pinched something, and found the pain too intense to allow me to submerge my mind into a film. So, I canceled my AMC theater’s A-List reservation and suffered at home. This weekend, on either Friday or Saturday, I shall once again try to see this Irish-set horror film about an unpleasant man and a haunted hotel.

In addition to creepy isolated locations and unsettling events, I also plan to enjoy a comedic murder mystery with The Sheep Detectives.

Co-written by Craig Mazin, the creator of the astounding limited series Chernobyl and showrunner for the equally well-received The Last of Us, Mazin returns to his comedy roots with a tale of a herd of sheep determined to solve the murder of their beloved herder. With a fantastic cast and a plethora of good reviews it promises to be entertaining, funny, and heartfelt. I had planned on seeing this film long before any of the reviews had arrived. Mazin also co-hosts the podcast Scriptnotes for screenwriters and things interesting to screenwriters, and has talked, without spoiling any of the details, about this script for years, naming it his personal favorite.

Aside from those two excursions to the cinema I plan to sit down and watch the next film in the Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid catalogue, Keeper of the Flame, here at home. It will be perhaps the last feature film to be shown on my dying LCD television.

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