fascinating doc. this article has some good background:
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We’ve been watching The Bridge, set in Mexico and the US
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_bridge_2013.
Which was based on this The Bridge, set in Sweden and Denmark.
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I believe they also made a British/French version called the Tunnel.
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After two misses, Daddy’s Head had a pretty low bar to beat, and it did. Creepy in a Babadook kinda way, but not as good.
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I loved Love Lies Bleeding. So visceral and tense, but also funny.
@Lectroid this actually makes me think of The Substance in the way both draw on genre film conventions. In fact, the are genre films in excess.
(I’ve been rethinking my position on The Substance, btw, following a conversation with a friend of mine. We were discussing how it was just a fun genre film. In that regard, it’s really been disadvantaged by the prestige treatment which places a burden of doing more on the film (although the run time also does that— if it had been shorter it wouldn’t have worn my patience with expectation of greater payoff.)
Just watched Small Town Crimes starring the distinctive character actor John Hawkes, ably supported by Anthony Anderson and a host of lesser known faces. Don’t expect a masterclass in filmmaking, but if you enjoy neo-noir B movies, this is a good one.
We watched Killer Heat, a modern film noir which takes place in Crete. I couldn’t get into it.
I only watched it because I watch almost any movie set in Greece. 
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Last night’s Halloween horror flick was Starve Acre, a horror/fantasy flick from 2023. It moves slowly, with the familiar British countryside and the lore it hides just beneath the surface being one of the major characters. It’s pretty bleak, and while the ending is not a shocking surprise, it is definitely shocking. Wow.
Speaking of bleak, we’ve also been watching the 3rd season of From, arguably one of the most unrelentingly depressing fictional shows, while at the same time incredibly tense and with terrifying monsters who seem to gleefully relish their calculated cruelty in tormenting the villagers and squashing any and all sense of hope. There’s a new threat materializing, and I cannot wait for the next epi to drop.
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Watched Season 3, Episode 3 of The Tower on BritBox.
Just started Suspect , also on BritBox.
Great horror flick last night: Oddity, another Shudder production. Creepy, with a very satisfying ending.
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Came across this while filling out a work survey… Just saw War Games last weekend again for the n-th time! Still such a great 80s movie - and prescient when it comes to AI.
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Watched and enjoyed Hellboy: The Crooked Man. No one is ever going to be Ron Perlman, but the actor did well enough (I found the appliance they used on his torso poorly done and distracting, but that’s not his fault). The script was written by Mike Mignola (the creator of the comic property) and Christopher Golden (who has partnered with Mignola on other novels about this comic series) and the story was very solid and rang true to the property.
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Smile 2 (2024) - dir. Parker Finn
2022’s Smile was a surprise hit, blessed with a low budget and a solid, simple premise. The AV Club, in a review of Smile 2, called the original film a “watered-down version of those A24 trauma creepers”. Which… fair enough. The premise of the franchise is an evil force/parasite/creature that infects a host and then drives them crazy over the next 7 days, until it fully possesses them, and then forces them to commit a particularly gruesome suicide in front of a witness, so the curse may be passed on. It’s a pretty clear and unambiguous metaphor for how trauma stays with us, made clearer by the fact that all the victims also have significant trauma in their distant past.
BUT. That explicit “make the subtext into text” flaw didn’t hurt, and Finn’s excellent camera work and a stellar performance by Sosie Bacon yielded a tense and twisty bit of fun, with the very effective occasional bit of SERIOUS gore thrown in at the right moments.
All of which is to say that Smile 2 COULD have been “Just do that, but more…” and the franchise would become another in a long list of slowly diminishing returns. Instead, the sequel shifts the focus just a bit, while still adhering to the well established rules, and actually goes bigger with the premise while not becoming bogged down in pointless lore and backstory.
Smile 2 picks up 6 days after the last frame of Smile, with zero intro or recap for a new audience. The original is available on Hulu in the US currently. Watching it the day before gives you an appreciation for how nicely things tie together, but isn’t strictly required.
The premise this time is the same as the first, but rather than meek psychiatric resident Rose, we have fresh-out-of-rehab mega pop star Skye Riley (played with fantastic intensity by Naomi Scott) being driven slowly mad by both the curse she’s acquired and by the insane demands of her big comeback tour.
It does a fantastic job linking up our response to big events to all the ways we absorb those “death by a thousand cuts” throughout our lives, made more intense by making our heroine someone CONSTANTLY under public and private scrutiny.
If you enjoyed the first, I am quite confident you will enjoy the sequel. It might be a rare case where it surpasses the original.
I note with interest that Finn’s next project is reportedly a remake of Zulawski’s absolutely batshit psychodrama/horror hybrid, Possession. It seems like a good fit.
Minor personal peeve-
The name “Skye Riley” irritates the hell out of me, as it seems entirely cliche and something a hipster agent would think of as a terrible pseudonym. But then I look at the director’s name, Parker Finn, and realize that ALSO sounds like a cliche’d name for a hipster millennial, and I realize that I am the problem, because I am, in fact, old and rapidly approaching fogey-dom.
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Megalopolis (2024) - dir Francis Ford Coppola
Now, I’m just some guy. I’ve been involved in making films, but I am only what could marginally be considered a “filmmaker”. I am certainly nobody that has ANY sort of business telling the director of The Godfather or Apocalypse Now what he should be doing with his time and money. Hell, maybe I don’t have the credentials to be considered WORTHY of judging the man’s work at all.
But I know what I like, and I did NOT like Megalopolis. At all. Well, I tell a lie. There was ONE moment in the film I thought was beautiful and inspired. Unfortunately, it was surrounded by 2+ hours of pseudo-profundity and speechmaking and a byzantine, pointless plot that makes less and less sense the more you think about it.
The premise, such as it is, is that in some distant alternate future, New York City is now “New Rome”. The country has fallen into decadence, as evidenced by the fact that all the attractive women wear sheer tops with no bras. Caesar Catalina (Adam Driver) is an architect/scientist/John Galt-like figure that has discovered megalon, the miracle material that can become great skyscrapers and heal gunshots to the face. He is obsessed with basically gentrifying New Rome into a megalon-enhanced utopia. Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) is more concerned with the welfare of the people currently inhabiting the city, rather than those of the future. Jon Voigt is the doddering, Trumpian Hamilton Crassus, and poor Aubrey Plaza plays a Lady Macbeth-like news reporter named, and I am being completely serious here: Wow Platinum. Dustin Hoffman and Shia LaBeouf show up too, if that matters (It doesn’t). There’s some sort of tie in to the Catalinian Conspiracy of ancient Rome, but a cursory skim through the Wikipedia page on it offered no help in making sense of things, and I am NOT among the “men of a certain age” who get obsessed with military and empiric history. I have little interest in Roman politics, Civil War battles, or exacting replicas of WWII paratrooper knives, or what have you.
I can’t begin to tell you what’s going on, or why anything happens the way it does. Apparently, things got adjusted and redone wildly in the edit. The original script is, at least, reported to make SOME sort of sense.
The one lovely moment: a scene in which giant stone statues of old gods throughout the city begin to collapse. But they don’t just crumble. Rather, they collapse as if they were actual people, falling, fainting, dropping their swords and shields and such before cracking into rubble. It’s a sad and beautiful effect. It runs less than 2 minutes total.
I suggest you find a clip of that scene on youtube. For god’s sake, you have better things to do with two hours of your life that watch what I can only describe as an old man trying to convey some great important lesson to his great-grandson, but getting lost on the way and ranting how back in his day they wore onions on their belts, which was the style at the time.
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I was not impressed with the first one, but will catch the sequel once it streams 
Thanks for another great review, even though I had zero interest in the movie in the first place. You just confirmed my decision.
MaXXXine (2024) is now on HBO (haven’t watched it yet). The third in the trilogy, following X (2022) and Pearl (2022). i really appreciated X and so sought out the prequel. although i found that one uneven, Mia Goth is just remarkable. i think i’d watch anything she’s in. Ti West is doing MaXXXine in the style of an 80’s slasher. i’m in.
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On our list as well, and I agree with your assessment of the previous movies.
Terrifier. We only watched the OG movie bc the Times recently recommended a few horror flicks (2 of which were total duds, and Terrifier 3 was mentioned.
I thought the clown character was positively creepy and the mood tense, but the effects looked like the film was made in the 90s vs. 2016, but perhaps that was on purpose. The acting from the other protagonists is also pretty bad.
That said, we may just watch the sequel if it’s available for streaming. 'tis the season.
We also watched the latest epi of Disclaimer, which may have had the hottest sex scene I’ve seen on the teevee in a long time, then practically snaps you out of it with an ice-cold shower of witnessing the parents’ grief. Not sure I’m crazy about Kevin Kline’s attempt at a British accent, but that’s a minor complaint. It’s a weird show that doesn’t quite seem to know where it’s going or what it is.
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