Piranha—the debt to Jaws is obvious, and acknowledged at the beginning with someone playing the Jaws video game on screen, but this is like what if the first half of Jaws were the whole movie? So instead of a lengthy hunt sequence, we just have more and more people put in the path of the swarming genetically enhanced Piranhas, and this movie has the courage to put literally anyone in danger and kill them. Packed with great character actors like Keenan Wynn and Dick Miller, and featuring a movie-stealing performance from Paul Bartel as an evil camp director. Absolutely top-notch, with script co-written by John Sayles and direction from Joe Dante.

Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein— A re-watch, but this is a stone classic. Not just Frankenstein, but also Dracula and the Wolf Man are on board, and Abbot and Costello are very funny. It’s fun to watch this and see how Scooby-Doo and pretty much every other horror comedy took cues from this. Farcical and very funny!

Abbot and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde— A strange movie in that it’s really mostly a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story (featuring Boris Karloff!) with Abbot and Costello on board for comic relief including one fantastic sequence where Costello is transformed into…well, I won’t spoil it. Not as funny as Meet Frankenstein, but still an entertaining movie!

Grizzly II: Revenge—Of course, countless movies feature disposable horny teens who die in the first five minutes of the movie, but how many movies have the crazy good fortune to cast future stars in those roles? Just this one, apparently, with George Clooney, Laura Dern, and Charlie Sheen being horny and dying early. Someone clearly shot a new opening to give these three top billing in the credits, and it’s fun to watch their inevitable deaths. Sadly, the movie goes rapidly downhill after this, and even the fantastically and possibly unintentionally comic performance of John Rhys-Davies as some kind of 19th century French Canadian trapper inexplicably roaming a National Park in 1982, complete with fringed jacket, can’t save it. Didn’t finish.

Zombeavers— I love when a movie understands the assignment. If you’re turning on a movie about horny college students being attacked by ravenous undead beavers, you have certain expectations. I’m happy to report that they are all met. You want laughs? Horrible creature effects? Gore? This movie has you covered. Also wonderful comic sequence featuring Bill Burr and John Mayer to open the movie/kick off the zombie beaver outbreak. An hour and seventeen minutes very well spent.

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Your mileage may vary. I know a lot of people are fed up with found footage, and I have some thoughts on why that might be in my review of

V/H/S Beyond. This is the, I dunno, forty-eleventh entry in this series, I really like horror anthologies as well as found footage, so I always watch them. This is a solid entry in the series, though I was disappointed that there was no satisfying crossovers between the segments as there were in V/H/S 94 and V/H/S 85. They’ve done away with the gimmick that all the segments are shot on VHS, which is a good move because who cares. Here only the frame story features VHS footage. And here, as in most entries, the frame story feels unnecessary and unsatisfying.

Every segment is well done, but here’s the problem. There is a found footage formula, which goes like this: people go investigate a thing. The thing is way worse/scarier than they anticipated. Things get worse until everybody dies. You can deviate from this formula, as many segments in the V/H/S series have, but here we get the same thing in 4 out of the 5 main segments, so that by the end, I was just kind of tired of the whole thing. “Live and Let Dive,” about a birthday skydiving trip gone horribly wrong, is probably the best segment, though “Dream Girl” was pretty good too. Each segment had some good, scary images, but the formula wore very thin for me by the end.

WNUF Halloween Special is another formulaic found footage film, but this one takes the form of a local TV reporter going to a haunted house in 1987. The movie is peppered with a TON of incredibly authentic 80’s-style TV ads, which cuts two ways—on the one hand, the many ads break up any suspense that the main plot is building, but on the other hand, they ad to the immersive feeling. I really felt like I was watching a recording of an 80’s TV broadcast. Paul Fahrenkopf gives a fantastic performance as the cynical, world-weary reporter who is trying to simultaneously sell and mock the proceedings. There are some laugh out loud funny moments in this movie, and I found the end both surprising and satisfying. In terms of both its format and sensibility, this is unlike pretty much any other movie out there. I recommend it!

Both movies are on Shudder.

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But for me, the fact that the movie was as interested in the family stuff as it was in the satire kind of blunted the effect of the satire. I am a white person, and this satirical movie about racism did not make me the least bit uncomfortable, which seems like a sign of failure for a satire. Honestly, I would have preferred this movie focus on Monk trying to become less of an asshole and just left the book stuff out altogether.

But I found this movie problematic in a couple of ways. I can’t talk about this without spoiling big chunks of the movie, so if you haven’t seen it, stop here! I leave you with the thought that this is an incredibly well-acted, ambitious, somewhat over-long and thought-provoking movie that didn’t ultimately work for me. Okay, on to the spoilers!

Man, I hate a meta ending, especially since it seems to punish the viewer for getting invested in the family story. But since the ending suggests that Monk’s movie is going to be pandering to white people, I think it’s worth investigating the ways in which this movie panders, either consciously or unconsciously, to a white audience.

Let’s start with the low stakes—there are certainly life or death issues in this movie, but whether Monk’s retelling of a Greek tragedy (or maybe comedy? I don’t remember) is going to sell just isn’t one. A big theme in the movie is that there’s just not enough representation of wealthy black professionals. Which, okay, yes, I believe that, though casting Max from Living Single as the love interest kind of reminds us that this is an oversimplification. (She played a lawyer on that show! In the 90’s! You could look it up! Or watch it! Funny show!) But I guess I feel like given that racism actually kills people in the United States of America, Monk’s plight never seems urgent.

But, more importantly, and I don’t know how writer/director Cord Jefferson feels about this, but WOW does this movie hate poor black people. Which is, of course, comforting to a white audience! See, it’s okay if you look down on Black Vernacular English because Black people do too! Sick of hearing about Black men being murdered by police? It’s okay! Black people are too! Don’t let it trouble your conscience! Someone in the movie, I think it’s Issa Rae’s character, says, “white people don’t want the truth; they want absolution.” And that’s exactly what this movie gives us. The protagonist’s classist hatred of poor Black people absolves white people of any guilt they might feel about their own racist hatred of poor Black people.

And now let’s talk about the homophobia for a minute, shall we? We’re clearly supposed to side with Cliff when he’s rejected by his mom, okay, but there are three gay characters in this movie (and two anonymous twinks). One is a selfish, oversexed, coked-out party animal, and the other are classic queer-coded villains whose gayness is essential to their villainy. In other words, nobody gay in this movie is just a regular person, and the characters’ problematic behaviors and attitudes are inextricably linked to their gayness.

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First of all, the performances are great: David Dastmalchian is both charming and slightly off-putting as the host, Ian Bliss is a delight as an arrogant, showboating magician-turned-professional skeptic, Rhys Auteri plays the long-suffering sidekick with just the perfect amount of supressed rage, and Ingrid Torellis is fantastic as Lilly, which is good because the entire movie depends on her performance.

It just makes such a difference when everyone in a horror movie can act. No weak links in this cast. The script is good too—not just another version of something we’ve seen a million times, but a pretty fresh twist on both found footage and demonic possession. You know what else I liked? The filmmakers drop some information early on, and I was pretty sure this was going to come out later in the movie as a Big Reveal, but, in fact, they trusted that their audience had seen enough horror movies to draw their own conclusions, and it wasn’t necessary to construct a big reveal on those points! I cannot stress enough how rare this is.

Also good—the movie captures the 70’s atmosphere perfectly, in everything from the look and feel to the show to the creepy kid, which was a strong trope in 70’s horror cinema. So far so good, and I enjoyed watching it.

I do of course have 2 quibbles. The first involves spoilers, so skip the next paragraph if you want to avoid them.

Okay, so Carmichael Haig has a rational explanation for everything, but then his rational explanation for the…initial event with Lilly is involuntary mass hypnosis, which he then demonstrates? Nah. Not buying it. I mean, I could buy it from another movie, but it seemed to violate the movie’s internal logic and therefore seemed like a cheesy development.

And, perhaps more importantly, the filmmakers made their own deal with the devil by using AI-generated, or, more simply, plagiarized, images on some of the “more to come” and “be right back” title cards that come up on commercial breaks. I mean, the title cards did help build the 70’s atmosphere (much as the non-AI-generated ones on Hanging With Dr. Z do), but why involve the Automated Plagiarism Machine on something a human graphic designer could do easily? It’s not like this was a low-budget production, by horror standards. Dumb, shitty decision. I knew this going in to the movie and so obviously didn’t boycott it as a result, but it’s actually mystifying to me why they did this unless it was simply to get us used to machine-plagiarized art in movies so they can phase out real artists in the future.

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Last week I watched Christmas Evil, which asks the question, “what kind of psychological damage would it do to be the kid in ‘I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus?’” (In this case it’s “I saw Santa perorming oral sex on Mommy,” but I guess the concept is the same.)

The answer is, “He’d develop an unhealthy obsession with Santa and eventually go on a killing spree!” The kills are nothing to write home about, gore-wise, but there’s a lot to recommend this. First, though it was released in 1980, it’s thoroughly grounded in the New York City of the 70’s. So if you dig that grainy, gritty 70’s vibe, this movie is for you.

Also, Brandon Maggart gives a fantastic performance as the guy who snaps. He’s believably beleaguered at the beginning, and even after he snaps, he maintains this weird, touching love for the idea of Santa and wants nothing more than to be loved by children, but not in a creepy way. (Except for Moss Garcia, who is on the naughty list and receives a bag of dirt! Shame on him for always talking about porn!)

Also the ending was completely unexpected and totally changes the movie. I really enjoyed this one.

But I just loved It’s a Wonderful Knife. It’s a slasher version of It’s a Wonderful Life that asks the question, “what if the final girl never existed?” Absolutely fantastic performance from Justin Long, but Jane Widdop and Jess McCleoud carry the movie’s pretty spectacular tone shift and both give great, winning performances.

(I guess it’s a work rules thing, but why does every movie cast people in their 20s as high school students?)

This is a slasher movie (great costume for the slasher, but the kills are, again, nothing special), but it’s got a squishy, sentimental heart. It was touching without feeling saccharine or maudlin, and, readers, I cried tears of joy at the end. (this is not much of an achievement—I have been known to cry at commercials—but it was thoroughly unexpected from a horror movie.)

This one will be joining Bad Santa in my regular Christmas movie rotation.

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Anyway, the blurb called this a “forgotten classic” or something, and while that may be stretching it a little, it’s definitely worth watching despite its flaws. So let me start with the flaws. It just doesn’t really hang together as a story, and we never really get to know the protagonist (played by Marianna Hill) that well and anyway Michael Greer as Thom steals every scene he’s in. ( Apparently he did a couple of gay porn movies and basically ruined his non-porn acting career, which is a shame because he’s got a great screen presence, and the question of whether and how much we should trust him is the most engaging through line in the movie.)

The setting seems very creepy because we only see brightly-lit, mostly-deserted spaces at night. The island of fluorescent light in a sea of darkness turns out to be a creepy rather than reassuring image here.

And there are two sequences that are among the best I’ve seen in a horror movie. I’m not going to go into detail, but the supermarket scene and the movie theater scene are both absolutely top-notch. The movie theater especially is a masterpiece of slow burning dread.

The movie is surprisingly squeamish about gore for a movie about cannibals, but those two scenes alone make it worth your ninety minutes.

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Let’s start with Spirit Halloween. I couldn’t resist the premise, which is that complications ensue when some kids get locked in a Spirit Halloween overnight. And then I saw Christopher Lloyd and Marla Gibbs both being creepy as hell! This could be good!

And yet, it wasn’t. The movie focuses on the kids, who are…let’s just say not as interesting as the old folks. And the whole thing was pretty devoid of either scares or laughs, and you’ve gotta have one or the other in a movie like this.

Ultimately I turned it off halfway through because, unlike so many horror movies, this one felt like it was made with no love. One of the reasons I love horror movies so much is that the folks who make them so often have a deep love for the genre, and the love shines through even when budget constraints or lack of skill get in the way of a really good movie.

Here, though, it’s all really professional to the point of feeling cynical. We’ve got some kids on bikes for that Stranger Things vibe (the main kid here even bears a strong resemblance to the main Stranger Things kid), we’ve got a brand-name tie in, (Which prevents any interesting exploration of the cause of the abandoned storefronts where Spirit Halloween makes its home) and we’ve got some kind of scare-free supernatural happenings with an incoherent explanation. Ultimately a waste of Christopher Lloyd, Marla Gibbs, Rachel Leigh Cook, and 45 minutes of my time.

But surely you can’t go wrong with a Hammer Dracula movie starring Christopher Lee! O, would that it were so! Dracula Has Risen From the Grave does have Lee and a couple of really great images (why are Dracula’s blooshot eyes so creepy? I don’t know! Also him whipping the hell out of the horses is genuinely disturbing), but overall it spends wayyyy to much time with the anodyne young lovers. I realized that apart from the tempera paint blood and the cleavage (only the barmaid gets to show any in this movie so it’s clearly before Hammer fully figured out their brand), what a Hammer Dracula movie needs to succeed is a worthy antagonist for Dracula. That’s where Peter Cushing comes in, except he doesn’t in this movie. So instead of Van Helsing’s steely obsessiveness, we’ve just got some horny young people, and a subplot about how fighting vampires can cure you of atheism.

I watched it all, but if you’re making your way through the Hammer Dracula movies, this one is VERY skippable. It’s on MAX along with Horror of Dracula and Dracula A.D. 1972, both of which are superior to this. (A.D. 1972 also features a great party scene where a San Francisco roots/psychedelic band is inexplicably playing at a posh party in England!)

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Fun adventure movies are few and far between. Pixar always wants you to cry, and Marvel somehow got a sense that they’re Important, and so the idea that you can have a good time at the movies watching a bunch of folks do something difficult and heroic seems to have gotten lost. I’m glad this movie found it.

On TV, I watched a really good fantasy show. Karen Pirie (on Britbox) doesn’t have magic or wizards or Owlbears, but it does feature a familiar fantasy trope: the incredibly competent cop who will stop at nothing to solve a case, even if it means taking on the entire power structure of the city.

If you can suspend your disbelief and remind yourself that this is only a fantasy, you’ll have a very good time with this well-acted, cleverly-plotted show. Lauren Lyle is especially winning in the title role, but there really isn’t a weak link in the cast. Of course it’s easier to turn in a good performance when you’re working from a good script, and Emer Kenny’s adaptation of Val McDermid’s novel (I was impressed enough by her 1979 to want to watch this because it was based on her writing) is really strong.

Fantasy media is fun, but it’s important to remember that if you see a guy in a robe on the street, he’s not going to be able to do any actual magic, and, similarly, you shouldn’t expect the folks in your town cosplaying dedicated, hyper-competent, deeply moral characters like Karen Pirie to actually be like that.

[Tangent: I watch a fair amount of British fantasy police shows, and everybody is DS this and DI that, and I think there’s a lot of opportunity for a “DS Nuts” joke that nobody has thus far taken advantage of. I hope British TV will get on this ASAP.]

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