Alright. I coulda sworn@Lectroid had posted about this flick here already, but evidently not.
The Home features Pete Davidson (yeah, I know) as Max, a former foster child who went down the wrong path, having never gotten over the death of his beloved foster brother when he was 11 years old. After being arrested for graffiti for the umpteenth time, his foster dad pulls some strings and gets him a community service job as a janitor at a nursing home out in the boonies in lieu of being sent to jail.
The folks at the home seem nice, although their late night parties and the occasional blood-curdling scream coming from the 4th floor — off-limits to Max — are sufficiently odd to give Max pause.
I don’t want to give away more, because this movie is a RIDE. Probably one of the best horror flicks we’ve watched all year, and Pete Davidson was really quite good in it.
PS: NOT for the faint of heart. There is a scene that made me want to leave the room, and I’m pretty hardcore. It’ll stay with you for a while, trust.
I haven’t seen this one. I’ll put it on the list. You might be thinking of my post on The Rule of Jenny Pen, which has Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow as adversarial residents of an old age home. Reccomended.
Are foster parents the new scary clowns? Another night, another horror movie — this time, Bring Her Back, the trailers for which I seemed to recall being sufficiently creepy.
It is indeed very creepy & has some positively terrifying moments, but it couldn’t quite live up to The Home.
Because Bring Her Back went pretty goddamned hard.
When [details=“Summary”] “Ollie” decides to have a butcher knife for lunch [/details] would be hard to top without heading into The Ugly Stepsister territory.
Picked up Alice Sweet Alice at Barnes and Noble yesterday. Mostly enjoyed it, but it did not stick the landing. An absolutely out of nowhere reveal for the murder culprit which just ruined it. Oh well.
Ok. Totally weird fact about Alice, Sweet Alice. The girl who plays Alice is Paula Shepherd. She has done exactly one other role, that of a NYC drug dealer and performance artist/club kid in 1981’s gender bending Liquid Sky (which you should absolutely see. So weird, on the coolest way!)
My personal head cannon is that Alice was all freaked out by all the events of the film, (set in suburban upstate NY) and Dad felt super guilty, so paid for her to go into the city for art school. The led to changing her name amd “you don’t understand me!” at Dad, so no more school, so now she’s dealing and doing ‘art’.
That’s how it went down. I will not be taking questions.
I really liked this one. It was wonderful how unhinged Sally Hawkins was, and how it drew on the kooky sunniness she exudes in other films for its horror.
It was also deeply disturbing.
Hawkins has a lot of that same energy that makes performers like Lili Taylor, Amanda Plummer and Carol Kane so endlessly watchable. They can all pull off this quirky sort of wide-eyed, almost child-like innocence. When they get happy, they get really happy and it’s a delight to watch. But if they put that same intensity towards darker purposes, they seem totally and BELIEVABLY dangerous and unstable. Hawkins in Bring Her Back, Taylor in I Shot Andy Warhol and The Addiction, Kane in The Mafu Cage, and Plummer in Pulp Fiction and, well, almost everything she’s ever done.
With all the shit going on in the world and our lives, silly entertainment has been a priority. Still LOVING every season of Taskmaster we watch — some of which we have to purchase (worth it!), and are just about to finish with Tisk (thx again for the rec, @Annegrace).
From our list of horror flicks, we chose the aptly titled slasher Clown in a Cornfield — there’s a cornfield & a clown, and a bunch of teenagers with the usual stereotypical characters. The mean girl, the mean girl’s sidekicks, the popular dude, the ‘redneck’ kid nobody takes seriously, and the outsider who is moved to town bc of her dad’s job & isn’t particularly thrilled about it.
It’s entertaining enough, with a few twists, but after the legendary The Home I think most horror flicks we watch in the near future will be falling short.
Last night we started Code of Silence, which we like a lot. A deaf dishwasher at a police station is recruited to do some lip reading to help with an ongoing investigation, and she makes some terribly bad decisions, and gets a little too involved for her own good. Highly recommend
It also reminded me of my intention to learn sign language.
Troma films all about having the most amount of fun for the least amount of money. If the effects are less than state of the art, you roll with it. When the lines are hokey and the actors make up in enthusiasm when they might lack in talent, that’s all part of the charm. What they all have in common is an inerrant sense of rooting for the little guy, the underdog, against the rich, the comfortable, the well off, or the ‘normal’, all the while diving headlong into the deliberately offensive, juvenile, and crude. From the absurdity of Sgt. Kabukiman to the genuinely inspired Tromeo and Juliet (with LEMMY KILLMEISTER narrating!), Troma has a pretty core set of themes and aesthetics.
So the question this new version of The Toxic Avenger posits is: What if Troma, but actual budget?
I’m pleased to say that the results are surely among the better of all possible answers to that question. What Macon Blair and Co. have done is taken a VERY Troma-like script, but rather than film the first draft with a bunch of friends and homemade Karo syrup blood and goop, they took the time to refine the script a bit. Not TOO much, mind you, but enough to knock of all the places where the lo budget seams used to show. They got actual performers, all VERY game. Peter Dinklage as Winston Goon, a poor janitor whose company insurance won’t pay for his treatment, thanks to Big Boss Kevin Bacon. They put a little money into the effects budget, where a little CG let’s them get cartoonishly gruesome and stay in budget.
For those with long time affection for Toxie and Troma, you’ll be very pleased that the spirit and values of this entry are fully in line with its rude, crude, but good-hearted predecessors. Sure, it’s the FANCY cousin, but it’s happy to drink the cheap shit just like the rest of the family.
The Thursday Murder Club. It was fine. The bar has been raised for this sort of thing, with Only Murders and The Residence and Knives Out, et al. Hence, this entry into the canon feels a bit behind the curve, despite the excellent cast.
Damages- 2007- Starring Glen Close as a high powered /questionable lawyer. Featuring Ted Danson. Season 1. If I had known it would take 13 episodes to solve one case never would have bothered with it., Still three to go., There won’t be any Season 2.
I finished watching both seasons of The Knick (from 2014), on HBO MAX. This was an excellent series about a brilliant drug addicted surgeon in 1900. Clive Owens was phenomenal. This series covered some major topics like racism, misogyny, eugenics, corruption, drug addiction, abortion, among other things. It’s scary how in 2025 (125 years later), the more things change the more they stay the same.
Highly recommended for those that haven’t seen this when it first came out on Cinemax (which I didn’t subscribe to at the time).
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