March 14, 2025 • 43 mins
Some people keep promises. Some people watch good movies. I did neither this week and let my intrusive thoughts convince me to watch Desert Monster (China, 2022) on Hi-Yah, a self-important monster flick that tries to deny it's B-movie bonnafides. Thankfully, Grady watched a good movie, Oddity (Ireland, 2024) on Shudder, a chilling blend of creepy house and Jewish folklore. We mourn the impromptu passing of Melissa, who was abducted and devoured by flying meatballs. Also, was Little Nicky a good movie or a great movie?
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
I actually don't have a cold open. Yeah,
(00:05):
how dare you. I know.
How dare you deprive ourlisteners of their cold open.
I know that's what they tuned in for.
I.
Know. I'm assuming.
(00:36):
So welcome to Imported Horror.
This is the podcast that brings youthe very best of creepy mannequins,
kaiju that I don't recognize, andreally, really, really, really,
really, really, really, really, really,really, really, really, really, really,
really bad movies that Ishouldn't have watched and I
(00:57):
knew I shouldn't have watched, butI let the intrusive thoughts win
from beyond the Shining seas.
I'm Marcus and I have intrusive thoughts,
and I'm here with one of my co-hostswho may also have intrusive thoughts.
I don't know.
I probably, I'm not a hundred percentsure what interests of thoughts are.
(01:17):
This is Grady, by the way.
Melissa, sadly,
she was on a plane and she hada nightmare and the plane landed
and there was nobody else in the airport.
And then these weird serial balllooking things that came and gobbled
up the entire known universe.
So unfortunately she willnot be joining us tonight.
(01:41):
I recognized that reference.
I was.
Trying.
To come up with somethingshe's, it's shiny.
Let's find wacky StephenKing stuff and Yeah,
exactly. The Shining, there you go.
The romantic comedy thatwe didn't know we needed.
Yes, I know it's from the Laniers.
(02:01):
I'm not so funny story about Stephen King.
I don't know why, but forsome, well, I can guess,
but because I think I looked up somerandom fact about Stephen King while I
was at work,
and my phone is the only
(02:22):
time I ever use a web browser withoutany sort of incognito mode or ad blocker
or anything that keeps Googlefrom invading my algorithms and
sending me targeted adsand whatnot and doing.
The Google thing.
Yeah, what a few searchesI do on my phone,
Google just latches onto like a lifeline.
So now every time Stephen Kingfarts and tweets about it,
(02:47):
my phone lets me know.
I mean, fun fact.
Do you know what his favorite Netflixwas two years ago or one year ago?
I think.
A year ago or two years ago.
It is a movie that we'vereviewed on the podcast.
(03:09):
Oh, Netflix. Okay.
I was going to say he was a big fan ofthe first season of Stranger Things.
I don't know. The firstseason was really good.
It kind of maybe got a little bittoo big for itself after that.
This is a movie from Francethat we've discussed. Please.
Tell me, please tell me. It's GirlsWith Balls. Please tell me that.
Stephen King's secret obsession. I doubt.
(03:32):
It. That would be amazing. But it's under,
oh, well good.
I could see that underParis is the movie from
Netflix that Stephen King really likedand actually tweeted positive things
about, or muska positivethings about a year.
Ago. Well, I think it was still tweetingback so shameless. It might've been.
(03:57):
Yeah, I got off it. I'm just as glad.
But Under Paris was soshameless, it knew what it was.
And.
It leaned into it so hard andthat confidence is really an
important part of horror movies,I think really any movie, but.
It has my favorite movieending of any shark movie ever.
And I will fight anyonethat says otherwise.
(04:21):
See, my favorite isn't actuallya movie, but you would love it.
There is a shark videogame called Man Eater.
Oh yeah, yeah.
Where
is basically Grand TheftAuto, but you're a shark and.
That should be the whatever the videogame equivalent of Letter Box's review
(04:44):
of that game because that is aperfect description and it would make
everyone that this game is targetingwant to play it immediately.
It's Grand Theft Auto, butyou're a shark five stars.
It's set up a fake basiccable like nature show,
(05:05):
sort of like an ancient alienstype of thing, but with Shark,
and it's narrated by Chris Parnellwho just owns it and just leans all
the way in. And it's not NewOrleans. They call it something else,
but it's New Orleans,
and if you're from the south andyou get all the redneck jokes,
it's even better. They're definitelylaughing with us, not at us,
(05:28):
but the ending of that, Ihaven't played the expansion,
but the ending of thevideo game, its Jaws,
but also it's just got an extralayer of Louisiana that just
absolutely perfect, fantastic,
and a great way to just wastea Sunday just swimming around.
(05:49):
Just eating people was great.
Statistically speaking,
all of these people were morelikely to die in an airplane crash.
Have you played it.
Or did you just watch me play some of.
It? I've just watched you play it,
but the parts that I watched you playhave stuck out in my brain because
they were amazing.
(06:10):
Yeah, I loved it. I loved it.I need to play the expansion.
It's sort of a summer type of thing. Idon't know how Roz would react to that.
Roz is getting to the point where sheunderstands to what's on the tv and we
have to be careful about what we haveon the TV when she's in the room.
She's what, 27 months, 28months, something like that.
(06:35):
And I don't know how muchnuance she would get,
but a shark running around chompingon swimmers who are screaming.
I think that might leave an impression.
She would identify at leastsome of that. She's pretty.
Smart. Yeah. I mean,
whether that would be bad news for heror bad news for whatever preschool she's
going to is completely upin the air. And honestly,
(06:58):
if I could absolutely guarantee thatit'd be the latter or not the former,
I'd be like, yes, show her theshark thing. That would be.
Funny. I think it would probably windup being both, but it would be funny.
I will admit.
So this week we wouldn'thave that much to talk about,
(07:19):
even if we were fully staffed.And Melissa's fine by the way.
The Lel ears got her, but other thanthat, she's fine. She'll be back. Yeah.
She'll wake up in medieval timesand become the queen of every,
I'm confusing the Angier withDr. Who, but she'll be fine.
It feels like a crossover. We didn't knowwe needed though. I kind of like that.
(07:40):
But this week, as best I can tell,
we've got nothing.
This is the 14th of Marchthrough the 20th of March,
and hardly anythinghorror wise is dropping,
let alone imported.
(08:01):
There's stuff coming in the rest ofMarch on the 21st and on the 28th
is one I'm really excited about becauseit's got John Lithgow and Jeffrey Rush
in it, and I don't evenneed to see the trailer.
I already know I'm going to watch thatbecause it's got the High Commander and
Jeffrey Rush in it. But yeah,
other than that, in the meantime,
(08:21):
there's not much at all.
I know I promised last week thatI would give myself a pep talk and
watch a real movie, not amovie film for theaters.
And I regret to inform that.
I to the surprise of noone have reneged on that
(08:43):
promise, flaked on that commitmentand watched a terrible, horrible,
no good, very bad movie on Haya.
At least it wasn't.
This time you're at least branching outinto different streaming services that
have bad movies.
And tubi, we're going to call that.
(09:03):
Progress.
Tubi just gets everythingsort of indiscriminately,
at least has a niche just you could tellthere's sometimes hurting for content
because that niche isn't huge.
And I have to bring this up.Every time we bring up Haya,
that niche has baby assassins,
(09:27):
which single handedlyjustifies Hay's existence.
I cannot stress so, and I doenjoy hay up. I do really like it.
Just this was not a good,
so I'll just get this one out ofthe way if that's cool. Go for it.
I let the intrusive thoughtswin while Raz was napping and I
pulled up Desert Monster from China.
(09:50):
This was bad.
I feel like we did the trailerfor it in a coming soon,
and we kind of had the,
are we going to evertouch this discussion?
And I think Mad Spider Sea was a nottoo distant memory at the time and
we agreed on no. Yes.
(10:12):
So really you only haveyourself to blame for this.
Yes, this is absolutely true,but it's only 76 minutes long.
And I was worried that if I waited untilthe evening or sometime I knew she was
asleep, then I wouldn't getthrough an entire movie.
And it's spring break and Roz hasspring break at the same time I do,
(10:32):
which is great because otherwisechildcare would be a bitch, but
it does mean I've been chasing heraround all week and been a little extra
tired. But
Desert Monster is from China 2022.
IMDB has very, very little about it.
So I'm just going to go to Letterboxed
(10:57):
And I don't want to dunk too muchon this description because I think
translation errors and issues were partof it, but even so I'm just going to,
it's a roller coaster. In the earlyyears of the Republic of China,
the Institute of Biology of theNorthwest Science Society received
a mysterious letter learning that therewere mutant creatures investing the
(11:18):
Sandy Sea. So they sent an explorationteam to the biology laboratory,
but they were almost wiped out Mxi,
sorry if I'm mispronouncing those.
And Wan escaped assurvivors with the samples.
What samples? I don't know.And I watched the movie,
your Guess is as good as mine,
(11:39):
but they meet the Each In Sand Dune Town,
the name of the place, sand Dune Town.
I think that's an actual place in NewMexico. The samples were damaged and
decoration and parentheses rescued.
(12:00):
Don't know what that means. I thinkthere were some typing errors here.
The two of them found thatalmost only old, weak,
sick and disabled were left in SandDune town on account of the desert
monsters and outside the town, themonster, there's more than one by the way,
seemed to have heard something and wasquietly approaching Sand Dune Town.
(12:26):
Now there are a whoppingtwo reviews of this
movie on Letterboxed. One of them is mine.
Oh, good. So you have a plurality on
Opinions of Desert Monster.
It would appear there were morepeople who have given a rating
(12:50):
and just two, it lookslike maybe four. Wow.
Yeah, maybe six. Yeah,
not a lot. Okay. Okay.Anyway, the highest review,
two stars feature length screeching,
which frankly I think is generous mine.
(13:12):
There are lots of terriblemonster movies with amateur CGI.
Most of them are better than this one.
It is.
A grim diagnosis. It is, it.
Is.
And I've been trying.
Turn it over.
In my head, worse than MadSpider Sea. Give me a baseline.
(13:40):
Maybe a smidge betterIf only because it was
shorter.
I will do.
Mad.
Spider Sea I think went on for a littlewhile and it was trying to do a lot more
this and failing.
So I guess the asylum movies andSharknato and all the rest of 'em,
(14:04):
they had a sense of humor about it.
They knew they were bad andthey sort of leaned into that.
And maybe some of that sense ofhumor gets lost in the cultural
divide and translation andeverything. But even so,
this movie seemed like it was takingitself way the hell too seriously for
a ridiculous low budget CGI heavy monster
(14:26):
movie. And that pretension isreally what drilled it down,
but also just it being confusing.
And there wasn't a greatFox molar moment of Yes,
this is ridiculous andwe're cool with that.
Favorite example of that is BloodLake, where they're like, yeah,
I mean technically Lampre doall the things that we're saying
(14:50):
they do, but what if maybe they do.
And even with the benefitof Jeremy Wade and
Christopher Lloyd and Shannon Daughtryand all the real rock stars in that
movie. It's a masterpiece. But
I'm.
Going to agree with you tomove this conversation along.
(15:13):
I don't know, even culturaltranslation issues,
notwithstanding this seemed like itreally thought it was something and it
wasn't, and it justdidn't do it for me. And
Water Monster did that was ridiculous.
They leaned into it at one point.
(15:33):
The water monster is running on allfours across the surface of the water and
it's laughable and it's great. Andthis didn't have that sense of humor.
That's when the bad movie takes itself
seriously.
And not in a hilarioustry hard way, but just
(15:56):
if it's a hilarious try hard way, thatgives you something to latch onto.
But if it's just in a sixout of 10, they just didn't,
they just played this seriously.
It would not for comedy and didn'tdo anything else with it kind of way.
That's a bad movie.
Yep.
Guess how many IMDBratings there are of it.
(16:20):
Three.
Marcus is holding up a zero forthe benefit of our listeners who
I feel like I must constantlyremind the both of us can't see us.
Yeah. No rating. So yeah,
(16:41):
I feel like this is onethat Haya was like, okay,
we really need some volume here. Okay,screw it. Let's just get that one.
This is the movie equivalentof when Spotify creates songs wholesale from AI and
puts them in your playlist.
Yes.
You cannot convince me they don't do that.
(17:02):
So well. Yeah. No, I would sayhard pass on Desert Monster.
If you're in a hiya mood,watch Water Monster instead.
Or really anything on Hiya. Ifyou're looking for horror on Hiya,
you got limited selection. Ifyou just want to watch Kung fu,
they got lots of good choices.
Yeah, I feel like Hi,
ya's Niche maybe doesn'tnecessarily perfectly aligned
(17:25):
with ours. So if it seems like webag on Haya too much, keep in mind
our genre is very secondaryto Hay's mission statement.
And I like talking about it because Ifeel like the Venn diagram of people that
like horror movies and who kung fu movies,
(17:47):
there's a big chunk of overlap there.
I feel they share some DNA, but
their Differe differencesare enough that it's
difficult to, and all thereally good horror movies,
they're going to go to ShutterFirst, or I don't know,
(18:09):
I guess Guess Shutter'sstill the main one.
I think AMC's done bending it over andI'm going to stop that sentence right
there. No, but not going anywhere good.
I was worried about Shutter for Yes.Yeah, no, I was, and I dunno. I like it.
And Tubby will take anything.
(18:32):
Netflix,
I feel like a big part of the reasonthe coming had as much lately is
Netflix really isn't focusing onhorror as much as they used to.
They were on.
A real big internationalhorror kick like a year ago,
and it feels like that's just not wheretheir algorithm's steering them anymore.
Maybe they didn't get as many newviewers in Indonesia as they were hoping,
(18:55):
or new subscribers in Indonesia.
Or maybe it's, we were coasting onthe pandemic for a long time because.
Also that.
Netflix needed content and there wasa backlog of international content and
other studios like in South Koreaopened a lot sooner than the US did. So
that momentum had to run out sooner orlater. And it's been five years now,
(19:18):
but I don't know. I don't know.
But it dawned on me that Emily and I don'teven watch that much Netflix anymore.
The occasional show hereor there we're doing their.
Anime selection is surprisingly good.And
There's actually an anime,
I'm not prepared to talk about it yetbecause I kind of want to get my thoughts
(19:39):
in order a lot. But there's a
anime that came out lastyear called Danda Dan,
which is a very good poor anime
that I am absolutely going to give ashout out to on the podcast once I finally
have time to watch all the episodesAnd get my thoughts in order on it.
(20:07):
We watched Two episodes when we were allover for New Year's and you were with
the maybe,
and I may have accidentally scarred Danand Melissa for life because the first
episode is a lot, but
I Dunno, it's worth talkingabout. I'll get to it eventually.
(20:29):
Yeah, no, I just looked it up.I'll check it out too. I'm all for.
The first episode is a.
Lot.
I don't know if I've said this to you infull or if I've said it on the podcast,
but I was kind of a snob aboutanime in college and that's my
bad. I don't even knowwhy you had no reasons.
(20:51):
Did. I mean, they weren'tnecessarily great reasons,
but for an 18 to 21-year-old
being out in the real worldworld for the first time,
they were sufficient reasons enoughthat I didn't press too hard.
And in fairness,
there were also some really obnoxiousanime fans in college that didn't
(21:13):
help my case.
Okay, fair. I'll giveyou that. Yeah, fair.
It wasn't nearly as mainstreamas it is now, All that,
I mean, well, the fans,
yeah. Yeah.
(21:33):
Part of being a geek is beingexcited about your interests,
sharing those interests with other people.You got to read the room sometimes,
guys.
Well, I can relate to that.Or at least at almost 40.
I was kind of a punk ass in college, but.
Yeah, we all were.
(21:54):
Yeah. Yeah, fair.
But I decided to stop with the monster
stuff.
So every day since thatRA goes down for a nap,
I've been knocking out an episodeof Monarch legacy of Monsters,
which is the Godzilla show on Apple tv.
And I'm only four episodesin. And so if it's.
(22:17):
Like other Godzillathings that aren't movies,
you have not actually seen Godzilla yet.
I have briefly, andthere've been other Kaiju,
at least one of whom, if it'snamed, I don't know the name.
There is a bunch of 'em.
And I wouldn't know allof them either. Well,
and this one might belike a recent invention.
(22:41):
I don't know if this is one that theypulled from the Toho archives or whatever,
but I like it for themost part. But it is,
the ratio of talkie to Monster isstill a little high and they're clearly
building towards something.But the coolest part about it,
they've got Kurt Russell who I will watchpretty much anything with Kurt Russell
(23:03):
in it.And he's playing the same character as his
son Wyatt. And they look identical.
And maybe there's some makeupand some CG going into that too,
but just they look like you totallybelieve that it's the same guy.
Just one of them is in the fiftiesand one of them is in 2015.
(23:24):
It is seamless. And evenin the opening credits,
they've got Kurt Russellin the role of Lee Shaw,
and then they change Kurtto Wyatt in this really fun,
they make a big deal out of it. Yeah.It's the kid. It's the same. I love that.
And I know people complain about Nepobabies and all like that, but come on,
(23:45):
if you have a chance to help your kidget started in an industry that you've
spent your life in, of courseyou're going to, of course,
people are going to support that.
Some of them, not nearlyas many as there are,
but some percentage of them are actuallyperfectly good actors in your room,
in their room. And you should givethem a shot. Not nearly enough of them,
but some of them.
(24:07):
Well,
and at least so far by universal monstersor I guess they're not universal,
but by Godzilla standards,why it's holding his own.
So it's kind of a messy narrative.
They pinball back and forth between thefifties and 2015 and the seventies at
one point. But it's holdingtogether well enough.
(24:28):
I feel like I can followit for the most part.
I just don't want to say too muchbecause I haven't gotten to the end yet.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right. And it isAmerican, but also it's Godzilla,
so I think it counts.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
the only American Godzilla thatabsolutely does not count for the podcast
under any circumstancesis the Roland Emrick one.
(24:49):
Any other Godzilla thing, fairgame to talk about on our show?
Other Godzillas have respected thesource material enough that they merit
discussion. Absolutely. Absolutely.
He says bravely have not seen allof the American Godzilla things.
I'm probably going to eatmy words in a few weeks.
(25:11):
I mean, the recent Godzillamovies were all right,
maybe they weren'tgreat, but I liked them.
I loved Kong Skull Island. Thatwas just a good monster movie
that just worked for me really.10 out of 10, that was great.
And maybe the recent Godzilla, theAmerican as good by comparison.
(25:34):
But even so there's still, it's Godzilla.Of course, you're going to watch it.
And I mean, I feel likewe talked about this,
I think the last time wetalked about Godzilla,
the ratio of Taki talkie to Smashy smashy.
That's an annoying thing that'sconsistent across the Kaiju franchise.
But it is also something I understandfrom a pacing standpoint is if
(25:58):
you've got a 90 minute movie andGodzilla is just smashing things nonstop
for 85 minutes, you're notgoing to have a Tokyo left.
Or at least it's really going tostretch the suspension of disbelief that
there's a Tokyo left.
It's tricky. It's tricky.
(26:21):
Yeah. So let alone 10 45minute long TV episodes.
But I like it so far. It's a hellof a lot better than Desert Monster,
I tell you that. There you go.
Ever. You watch betterthan Desert Monster.
(26:46):
Hey, the key to life is to have,
imagine that on the backof the citizen KDVD case.
Reasonable expectations, people.That's what life is all about.
And parenting, is thekid still alive? Yes.
Good parenting wind for today.
(27:10):
You did it. Your childdoesn't have cholera yet.
Yay. Or measles despite.
Anyway. Hashtag getting political. Youbelieve in vaccinations, you are fine.
End hashtag political. Yes.
(27:30):
Yes.
So you watched a good movie thisweek and I was going to watch it,
and then I didn't, but I want to. No.
Fair. Fair. Yeah. Soyes, I watched Oddity.
It is on shutter.
The IMDB summary is woefully lacking.
It is one very short,very misleading sentence.
(27:52):
So I am going to very quicklytry to improvise my own.
This is why I need to look up IMDBsummaries before we start recording.
A year after her sister'smurder blind Clear Voyant Darcy
Ello
visits the spacious home ofher widowed brother-in-law
(28:15):
and his new girlfriend,
which was also the sceneof said sister's murder
When the brother-in-law leavesbecause he is a massive douche,
the
Blind clairvoyant woman and the girlfriendare forced to spend the night in the
(28:38):
dark spooky house together.
And also there's a golumthat they keep calling a
mannequin because the douchey
husband and the girlfriend aretoo uninformed to know what a
golum is.
And the blind psychic womanis certainly not going to
(29:02):
tell them because she kind ofhates them and spooky things
happen.
Nice. So not much of a foxMulder moment. I take it.
There is not reallyabout the mannequin, but
(29:23):
there are twists.
I feel like this movie telegraphsthose twists kind of heavily,
but I still don't necessarily wantto spoil them. Yeah, Fair enough.
There's a
Murder mystery elementwith a kind of obvious
(29:45):
answer, but it is about the journey,
not the destination. Andthis movie does that well,
and there are somelegitimately spooky elements
set design for the creepy old house.
It looks almost like a small ScottIrish castle more than a house,
(30:06):
which is interesting and it's sufficiently
spooky. The Golum,
I refuse to call it a mannequin,
is sufficiently spooky when it's
not moving. When it's moving,
it admittedly looks like thePutties from Power Rangers.
(30:32):
See, I find there is one instance ofmannequins where they are terrifying.
And I know you have encountered them,and I know they have scared you too.
And that's when Skyrim bugs out and the
mannequins that aresupposed to be stationary.
Decorations suddenly start twitching andjust flying all over the walls of your
(30:55):
house and making thoseunsettling thumping noises. Yes.
Yes, yes.
Or chasing just kind of glitchingout in this twitchy sort of way.
And you don't expect it.
Adopted digital daughter's petFox as it runs around the room.
Yeah. Yes.
And especially if it's late at nightand you're just playing it to decompress
(31:17):
and you walk into yourhouse and you see that
that will get you, you need togo to bed. But other than that,
I can't think of a time thatmannequins are scary. Golum. Yes.
Mannequins may be not so much.
There are some legitimatelyscary things about, I'm actually,
(31:37):
despite my complaining aboutthe golum effects just now,
I am probably going to givethis a very high motion picture,
tariff scale rating,
because there were some parts ofthis movie that skewed me out.
So it,
so the husband is apsychiatrist or a doctor,
(31:59):
I think psychiatrist. But either way,
he works the night shiftat an insane asylum.
Nice.
AndThat comes into play
later on in theMovie. I don't feel uncomfortable.
I don't feel uncomfortable swellingthat because if you have a guy working a
(32:22):
night shift at an insaneasylum in a horror movie,
obviously you are going to have horrorhappening at an insane asylum at night
that is a chekhov's gun thatyou are obligated to fire.
Fire. Yes. Yeah. No, it'd be weird if you.
Didn't.
And there is one scene that
legitimately spooked me.
(32:44):
We've got a character
tied to a bed like the beds in insaneasylums of the leather straps like
you see in the old school,scary asylum kind of things.
And.
I can hear Melissa cackling and goingin a very different direction with that.
(33:06):
Yeah, yeah. Kind of astrange She's not here. And
the
villains leave the door unlockedAnd let some
particularly dangerous inmates loose.
And one of them's coming in And Thewhole thing is from the perspective,
(33:28):
like the first person perspectiveof the guy on the bed.
So you see the door slowly openAnd you hears some shuffling
and he looks away and helooks back and there's a face.
Now, admittedly,
what that face does causes it toimmediately stop being scary and
(33:50):
start being funny because
it comes across a little sillierthan I think the writers intended,
but that buildup genuinely got me.
Yeah.
Well.
And the POV stuff is.
Hard. May or may not be where thefoot thing came in, but anyway.
Nice. I mean, POV is hard to do,
(34:14):
especially outside of found footage.
I think the last time we encounteredit was the snake cam in that God awful
movie. And I did like thesnake cam, the quicksand.
Yes.
Snakes do you like? We do blurry.
(34:35):
Well, so what made yougravitate to this one?
I was looking for something towatch, and I clicked onto Shutter,
and this was on their homepage. And aquick Google search advised me that, yes,
this is foreign.
That'll do it.
I love the minimalism of theapproach that will absolutely.
(34:57):
Work.
Some days I am in a mood for somethingspecific and I actively look for things.
I do my research. SometimesI'm just like, oh crap,
I have to watch a horror movie thisweek and throw it Art at the wall.
And this was a, it works Art at theWall movie, but it was a good one.
I will admit something.
(35:17):
I pulled it up on IMDB every time Isee this because I'd heard about it.
It was in limited theaters.
You're not the only positivereview I've heard of it,
but I thought that was Tilda Swinton.
When you're going through Shutterand you see the, I got that vibe too.
The woman.
Yeah. She was going fora Tilda Swinton vibe.
(35:39):
You can see that in theperformance as well.
Which I mean is great. TildaSwinton can do whatever she wants,
but I was surprised that it wasn'ther when I pulled it up on IMDB
and I totally expected to seeTilda Swinton and I didn't.
And the other kind of creepything about this movie,
(36:01):
this has one of the,
and here I may start dangerouslygetting close to spoilers,
but I'll try to keep itas vague as possible.
This movie has one of the moreconvincing portrayals of a
sociopath that I've seen. Nice.
And it gets surprisingly creepy
(36:23):
once the pieces start to fit together
and this character starts beingSociopathic
nice.
I mean.
You got to love a good sociopath, andit's kind hard to pull that off weld.
(36:44):
Yeah.
This isn't like a HannibalElectric sort of thing.
This guy seems perfectly normal ifa boat stilted until suddenly he's
not.
Well, that's awesome. It's been onmy list ever since it hit shutter.
(37:08):
I need to get to it. I recommend it.
Where would you put it to hearyou say it actually scared you?
Don't say that often.
No.
Going by the scariest scene,
not taking the somewhat weakpayoff of it into account
(37:28):
just going on, how muchthat tense buildup scare me.
I would be tempted to give it a four.With everything else in the movie,
I feel a little bit obligatedto knock it down to a three.
Fair.
Which again,
the way that I usually classifymotion picture teske for me,
one, it's either not trying to bescary or it's failing massively at it.
(37:52):
Two didn't scare me, but I could seeother people, three actually scare me
and four really scared me. And five, Iwill never watch voluntarily ever again.
Which is a short list. But I love it.
And quality enjoyment. I'm goingto give both of 'em. Fours.
(38:14):
Nice.
Okay.
Okay. I am definitelygoing to check it out.
I need to spend more time with Shutter.
This monster Dumpsterdive has got to stop.
Now to set some realisticexpectations here.
This is the first horror movieI watched after the birthday,
(38:38):
so its score may be inflated a little bit,
but I do still think it's a genuine,
I don't think it would cause birthdaybias would cause me to call a bad movie.
Good. I think it's a legitimatelygood movie. Just as a warning,
I may be overhyping it ever so slightly.
You did not like the birthday. No.
(39:03):
I need to troll the letterboxreviews. See, I feel like it was,
the ones I did see were prettypolarized. Either loved it or you.
I'm pretty sure I am not the only personto compare Cory Feldman's performance
to Little Nikki, so thatmakes me feel better.
Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean,that's very specific,
(39:25):
especially for our age group.
I feel like I'm the only person in ourage group that's ever voluntarily sat
through Little Nikki, and it's kindof a relief. If that's not the case.
Maybe that's not. Whenwe watched in college.
I would not have subjected y'all to thatin college. No. This is a high school.
(39:47):
Grady with too much time on his handsdoesn't know the difference between good
comedies and bad comedies.Time Filler Palooza.
Now, you.
Know who, and I.
Can still quote fromthem, mostly from memory,
despite knowing thatit's a terrible movie,
and absolutely ruining my credit as acritic by being able to quote most of it
(40:07):
for memory.
Well, you to fly.
And go into that little circle.
You know who would die onthat hill with you, Emily?
Really? Yes.
So big Adam Sandlerfan defended Mr. Deeds,
(40:28):
which is not a terrible movie.
Oh no, that's not the worst movieAdam Sandler did by a long shot.
And I say that as someone who voluntarilysat through Little Nikki several times
as a kid.
Well, I could be confusing.
I'll double check with her,
but I'm pretty sure she hassaid Little Nikki is fantastic.
(40:48):
I'm pretty sure she puts that inthe S tier of Adam Sandler movies.
Okay.
I will maybe agree that it's a little over
hated compared to some of AdamSandler's streaming era output.
But I dunno, I'm not quite ready togo to bat and say it's a good movie.
(41:10):
Maybe just not thehorrific dumpster fire that
Mike Nelson from MST three K saysIt is. I feel like Mike Nelson,
he's a funny dude andhe knows his bad movies,
but I feel like sometimes he overstatesthings for the sake of a cheap joke.
And this may have been one of those times.
(41:33):
I mean, they can't all be,what was it, Halloween Town,
the really terrible one that he did after.
Yeah, I saw dead minutesof that and gave up.
Yeah, it's on Netflix. He didn't getan Oscar nomination for Uncut Gems.
And in all fairness, he deserved one.
But he said that if theAcademy ignored him,
(41:55):
he was going to retaliate by makingthe worst movie he possibly could. And.
That is a.
Give the man credit.
A dire threat from the manthat made eight crazy nights.
Yes. Well, they called.He wasn't bluffing.
They called his bluff andhe was not bluffing. So
(42:17):
yeah, that was a good God.
At least 20 years before, or 20 yearsafter Little Nicky, give or take, I
ish. I don't know. The yearsall start to blur together.
But anyway, that's all Igot. I dunno about you. Yeah.
(42:38):
I mean, we started talking about AdamSandler movies instead of imported horror.
So I think that's kind the pointwhere the music starts playing.
Usually.
That's our cue. Well, ifyou're still listening,
go watch Little Nikki and we'll have adeep dive discussion of it next week.
And you don't have toletterbox, don't do it, do it.
(43:02):
Do it it. Follow us on letterbox.Email us at imported horror@gmail.com.
We're on threads. I'm not doingmuch with the threads right now,
partly because the coming Soons thismonth have been a little few and far
between, but we are on there.
So give us a shout out andtell your friends about us.
We're cool most of the time.
I know a dear sweet man,
(43:24):
Henry Winkler covered in bees.
I actually don't have a cold open. Yeah,
(00:05):
how dare you. I know.
How dare you deprive ourlisteners of their cold open.
I know that's what they tuned in for.
I.
Know. I'm assuming.
(00:36):
So welcome to Imported Horror.
This is the podcast that brings youthe very best of creepy mannequins,
kaiju that I don't recognize, andreally, really, really, really,
really, really, really, really, really,really, really, really, really, really,
really bad movies that Ishouldn't have watched and I
(00:57):
knew I shouldn't have watched, butI let the intrusive thoughts win
from beyond the Shining seas.
I'm Marcus and I have intrusive thoughts,
and I'm here with one of my co-hostswho may also have intrusive thoughts.
I don't know.
I probably, I'm not a hundred percentsure what interests of thoughts are.
(01:17):
This is Grady, by the way.
Melissa, sadly,
she was on a plane and she hada nightmare and the plane landed
and there was nobody else in the airport.
And then these weird serial balllooking things that came and gobbled
up the entire known universe.
So unfortunately she willnot be joining us tonight.
(01:41):
I recognized that reference.
I was.
Trying.
To come up with somethingshe's, it's shiny.
Let's find wacky StephenKing stuff and Yeah,
exactly. The Shining, there you go.
The romantic comedy thatwe didn't know we needed.
Yes, I know it's from the Laniers.
(02:01):
I'm not so funny story about Stephen King.
I don't know why, but forsome, well, I can guess,
but because I think I looked up somerandom fact about Stephen King while I
was at work,
and my phone is the only
(02:22):
time I ever use a web browser withoutany sort of incognito mode or ad blocker
or anything that keeps Googlefrom invading my algorithms and
sending me targeted adsand whatnot and doing.
The Google thing.
Yeah, what a few searchesI do on my phone,
Google just latches onto like a lifeline.
So now every time Stephen Kingfarts and tweets about it,
(02:47):
my phone lets me know.
I mean, fun fact.
Do you know what his favorite Netflixwas two years ago or one year ago?
I think.
A year ago or two years ago.
It is a movie that we'vereviewed on the podcast.
(03:09):
Oh, Netflix. Okay.
I was going to say he was a big fan ofthe first season of Stranger Things.
I don't know. The firstseason was really good.
It kind of maybe got a little bittoo big for itself after that.
This is a movie from Francethat we've discussed. Please.
Tell me, please tell me. It's GirlsWith Balls. Please tell me that.
Stephen King's secret obsession. I doubt.
(03:32):
It. That would be amazing. But it's under,
oh, well good.
I could see that underParis is the movie from
Netflix that Stephen King really likedand actually tweeted positive things
about, or muska positivethings about a year.
Ago. Well, I think it was still tweetingback so shameless. It might've been.
(03:57):
Yeah, I got off it. I'm just as glad.
But Under Paris was soshameless, it knew what it was.
And.
It leaned into it so hard andthat confidence is really an
important part of horror movies,I think really any movie, but.
It has my favorite movieending of any shark movie ever.
And I will fight anyonethat says otherwise.
(04:21):
See, my favorite isn't actuallya movie, but you would love it.
There is a shark videogame called Man Eater.
Oh yeah, yeah.
Where
is basically Grand TheftAuto, but you're a shark and.
That should be the whatever the videogame equivalent of Letter Box's review
(04:44):
of that game because that is aperfect description and it would make
everyone that this game is targetingwant to play it immediately.
It's Grand Theft Auto, butyou're a shark five stars.
It's set up a fake basiccable like nature show,
(05:05):
sort of like an ancient alienstype of thing, but with Shark,
and it's narrated by Chris Parnellwho just owns it and just leans all
the way in. And it's not NewOrleans. They call it something else,
but it's New Orleans,
and if you're from the south andyou get all the redneck jokes,
it's even better. They're definitelylaughing with us, not at us,
(05:28):
but the ending of that, Ihaven't played the expansion,
but the ending of thevideo game, its Jaws,
but also it's just got an extralayer of Louisiana that just
absolutely perfect, fantastic,
and a great way to just wastea Sunday just swimming around.
(05:49):
Just eating people was great.
Statistically speaking,
all of these people were morelikely to die in an airplane crash.
Have you played it.
Or did you just watch me play some of.
It? I've just watched you play it,
but the parts that I watched you playhave stuck out in my brain because
they were amazing.
(06:10):
Yeah, I loved it. I loved it.I need to play the expansion.
It's sort of a summer type of thing. Idon't know how Roz would react to that.
Roz is getting to the point where sheunderstands to what's on the tv and we
have to be careful about what we haveon the TV when she's in the room.
She's what, 27 months, 28months, something like that.
(06:35):
And I don't know how muchnuance she would get,
but a shark running around chompingon swimmers who are screaming.
I think that might leave an impression.
She would identify at leastsome of that. She's pretty.
Smart. Yeah. I mean,
whether that would be bad news for heror bad news for whatever preschool she's
going to is completely upin the air. And honestly,
(06:58):
if I could absolutely guarantee thatit'd be the latter or not the former,
I'd be like, yes, show her theshark thing. That would be.
Funny. I think it would probably windup being both, but it would be funny.
I will admit.
So this week we wouldn'thave that much to talk about,
(07:19):
even if we were fully staffed.And Melissa's fine by the way.
The Lel ears got her, but other thanthat, she's fine. She'll be back. Yeah.
She'll wake up in medieval timesand become the queen of every,
I'm confusing the Angier withDr. Who, but she'll be fine.
It feels like a crossover. We didn't knowwe needed though. I kind of like that.
(07:40):
But this week, as best I can tell,
we've got nothing.
This is the 14th of Marchthrough the 20th of March,
and hardly anythinghorror wise is dropping,
let alone imported.
(08:01):
There's stuff coming in the rest ofMarch on the 21st and on the 28th
is one I'm really excited about becauseit's got John Lithgow and Jeffrey Rush
in it, and I don't evenneed to see the trailer.
I already know I'm going to watch thatbecause it's got the High Commander and
Jeffrey Rush in it. But yeah,
other than that, in the meantime,
(08:21):
there's not much at all.
I know I promised last week thatI would give myself a pep talk and
watch a real movie, not amovie film for theaters.
And I regret to inform that.
I to the surprise of noone have reneged on that
(08:43):
promise, flaked on that commitmentand watched a terrible, horrible,
no good, very bad movie on Haya.
At least it wasn't.
This time you're at least branching outinto different streaming services that
have bad movies.
And tubi, we're going to call that.
(09:03):
Progress.
Tubi just gets everythingsort of indiscriminately,
at least has a niche just you could tellthere's sometimes hurting for content
because that niche isn't huge.
And I have to bring this up.Every time we bring up Haya,
that niche has baby assassins,
(09:27):
which single handedlyjustifies Hay's existence.
I cannot stress so, and I doenjoy hay up. I do really like it.
Just this was not a good,
so I'll just get this one out ofthe way if that's cool. Go for it.
I let the intrusive thoughtswin while Raz was napping and I
pulled up Desert Monster from China.
(09:50):
This was bad.
I feel like we did the trailerfor it in a coming soon,
and we kind of had the,
are we going to evertouch this discussion?
And I think Mad Spider Sea was a nottoo distant memory at the time and
we agreed on no. Yes.
(10:12):
So really you only haveyourself to blame for this.
Yes, this is absolutely true,but it's only 76 minutes long.
And I was worried that if I waited untilthe evening or sometime I knew she was
asleep, then I wouldn't getthrough an entire movie.
And it's spring break and Roz hasspring break at the same time I do,
(10:32):
which is great because otherwisechildcare would be a bitch, but
it does mean I've been chasing heraround all week and been a little extra
tired. But
Desert Monster is from China 2022.
IMDB has very, very little about it.
So I'm just going to go to Letterboxed
(10:57):
And I don't want to dunk too muchon this description because I think
translation errors and issues were partof it, but even so I'm just going to,
it's a roller coaster. In the earlyyears of the Republic of China,
the Institute of Biology of theNorthwest Science Society received
a mysterious letter learning that therewere mutant creatures investing the
(11:18):
Sandy Sea. So they sent an explorationteam to the biology laboratory,
but they were almost wiped out Mxi,
sorry if I'm mispronouncing those.
And Wan escaped assurvivors with the samples.
What samples? I don't know.And I watched the movie,
your Guess is as good as mine,
(11:39):
but they meet the Each In Sand Dune Town,
the name of the place, sand Dune Town.
I think that's an actual place in NewMexico. The samples were damaged and
decoration and parentheses rescued.
(12:00):
Don't know what that means. I thinkthere were some typing errors here.
The two of them found thatalmost only old, weak,
sick and disabled were left in SandDune town on account of the desert
monsters and outside the town, themonster, there's more than one by the way,
seemed to have heard something and wasquietly approaching Sand Dune Town.
(12:26):
Now there are a whoppingtwo reviews of this
movie on Letterboxed. One of them is mine.
Oh, good. So you have a plurality on
Opinions of Desert Monster.
It would appear there were morepeople who have given a rating
(12:50):
and just two, it lookslike maybe four. Wow.
Yeah, maybe six. Yeah,
not a lot. Okay. Okay.Anyway, the highest review,
two stars feature length screeching,
which frankly I think is generous mine.
(13:12):
There are lots of terriblemonster movies with amateur CGI.
Most of them are better than this one.
It is.
A grim diagnosis. It is, it.
Is.
And I've been trying.
Turn it over.
In my head, worse than MadSpider Sea. Give me a baseline.
(13:40):
Maybe a smidge betterIf only because it was
shorter.
I will do.
Mad.
Spider Sea I think went on for a littlewhile and it was trying to do a lot more
this and failing.
So I guess the asylum movies andSharknato and all the rest of 'em,
(14:04):
they had a sense of humor about it.
They knew they were bad andthey sort of leaned into that.
And maybe some of that sense ofhumor gets lost in the cultural
divide and translation andeverything. But even so,
this movie seemed like it was takingitself way the hell too seriously for
a ridiculous low budget CGI heavy monster
(14:26):
movie. And that pretension isreally what drilled it down,
but also just it being confusing.
And there wasn't a greatFox molar moment of Yes,
this is ridiculous andwe're cool with that.
Favorite example of that is BloodLake, where they're like, yeah,
I mean technically Lampre doall the things that we're saying
(14:50):
they do, but what if maybe they do.
And even with the benefitof Jeremy Wade and
Christopher Lloyd and Shannon Daughtryand all the real rock stars in that
movie. It's a masterpiece. But
I'm.
Going to agree with you tomove this conversation along.
(15:13):
I don't know, even culturaltranslation issues,
notwithstanding this seemed like itreally thought it was something and it
wasn't, and it justdidn't do it for me. And
Water Monster did that was ridiculous.
They leaned into it at one point.
(15:33):
The water monster is running on allfours across the surface of the water and
it's laughable and it's great. Andthis didn't have that sense of humor.
That's when the bad movie takes itself
seriously.
And not in a hilarioustry hard way, but just
(15:56):
if it's a hilarious try hard way, thatgives you something to latch onto.
But if it's just in a sixout of 10, they just didn't,
they just played this seriously.
It would not for comedy and didn'tdo anything else with it kind of way.
That's a bad movie.
Yep.
Guess how many IMDBratings there are of it.
(16:20):
Three.
Marcus is holding up a zero forthe benefit of our listeners who
I feel like I must constantlyremind the both of us can't see us.
Yeah. No rating. So yeah,
(16:41):
I feel like this is onethat Haya was like, okay,
we really need some volume here. Okay,screw it. Let's just get that one.
This is the movie equivalentof when Spotify creates songs wholesale from AI and
puts them in your playlist.
Yes.
You cannot convince me they don't do that.
(17:02):
So well. Yeah. No, I would sayhard pass on Desert Monster.
If you're in a hiya mood,watch Water Monster instead.
Or really anything on Hiya. Ifyou're looking for horror on Hiya,
you got limited selection. Ifyou just want to watch Kung fu,
they got lots of good choices.
Yeah, I feel like Hi,
ya's Niche maybe doesn'tnecessarily perfectly aligned
(17:25):
with ours. So if it seems like webag on Haya too much, keep in mind
our genre is very secondaryto Hay's mission statement.
And I like talking about it because Ifeel like the Venn diagram of people that
like horror movies and who kung fu movies,
(17:47):
there's a big chunk of overlap there.
I feel they share some DNA, but
their Differe differencesare enough that it's
difficult to, and all thereally good horror movies,
they're going to go to ShutterFirst, or I don't know,
(18:09):
I guess Guess Shutter'sstill the main one.
I think AMC's done bending it over andI'm going to stop that sentence right
there. No, but not going anywhere good.
I was worried about Shutter for Yes.Yeah, no, I was, and I dunno. I like it.
And Tubby will take anything.
(18:32):
Netflix,
I feel like a big part of the reasonthe coming had as much lately is
Netflix really isn't focusing onhorror as much as they used to.
They were on.
A real big internationalhorror kick like a year ago,
and it feels like that's just not wheretheir algorithm's steering them anymore.
Maybe they didn't get as many newviewers in Indonesia as they were hoping,
(18:55):
or new subscribers in Indonesia.
Or maybe it's, we were coasting onthe pandemic for a long time because.
Also that.
Netflix needed content and there wasa backlog of international content and
other studios like in South Koreaopened a lot sooner than the US did. So
that momentum had to run out sooner orlater. And it's been five years now,
(19:18):
but I don't know. I don't know.
But it dawned on me that Emily and I don'teven watch that much Netflix anymore.
The occasional show hereor there we're doing their.
Anime selection is surprisingly good.And
There's actually an anime,
I'm not prepared to talk about it yetbecause I kind of want to get my thoughts
(19:39):
in order a lot. But there's a
anime that came out lastyear called Danda Dan,
which is a very good poor anime
that I am absolutely going to give ashout out to on the podcast once I finally
have time to watch all the episodesAnd get my thoughts in order on it.
(20:07):
We watched Two episodes when we were allover for New Year's and you were with
the maybe,
and I may have accidentally scarred Danand Melissa for life because the first
episode is a lot, but
I Dunno, it's worth talkingabout. I'll get to it eventually.
(20:29):
Yeah, no, I just looked it up.I'll check it out too. I'm all for.
The first episode is a.
Lot.
I don't know if I've said this to you infull or if I've said it on the podcast,
but I was kind of a snob aboutanime in college and that's my
bad. I don't even knowwhy you had no reasons.
(20:51):
Did. I mean, they weren'tnecessarily great reasons,
but for an 18 to 21-year-old
being out in the real worldworld for the first time,
they were sufficient reasons enoughthat I didn't press too hard.
And in fairness,
there were also some really obnoxiousanime fans in college that didn't
(21:13):
help my case.
Okay, fair. I'll giveyou that. Yeah, fair.
It wasn't nearly as mainstreamas it is now, All that,
I mean, well, the fans,
yeah. Yeah.
(21:33):
Part of being a geek is beingexcited about your interests,
sharing those interests with other people.You got to read the room sometimes,
guys.
Well, I can relate to that.Or at least at almost 40.
I was kind of a punk ass in college, but.
Yeah, we all were.
(21:54):
Yeah. Yeah, fair.
But I decided to stop with the monster
stuff.
So every day since thatRA goes down for a nap,
I've been knocking out an episodeof Monarch legacy of Monsters,
which is the Godzilla show on Apple tv.
And I'm only four episodesin. And so if it's.
(22:17):
Like other Godzillathings that aren't movies,
you have not actually seen Godzilla yet.
I have briefly, andthere've been other Kaiju,
at least one of whom, if it'snamed, I don't know the name.
There is a bunch of 'em.
And I wouldn't know allof them either. Well,
and this one might belike a recent invention.
(22:41):
I don't know if this is one that theypulled from the Toho archives or whatever,
but I like it for themost part. But it is,
the ratio of talkie to Monster isstill a little high and they're clearly
building towards something.But the coolest part about it,
they've got Kurt Russell who I will watchpretty much anything with Kurt Russell
(23:03):
in it.And he's playing the same character as his
son Wyatt. And they look identical.
And maybe there's some makeupand some CG going into that too,
but just they look like you totallybelieve that it's the same guy.
Just one of them is in the fiftiesand one of them is in 2015.
(23:24):
It is seamless. And evenin the opening credits,
they've got Kurt Russellin the role of Lee Shaw,
and then they change Kurtto Wyatt in this really fun,
they make a big deal out of it. Yeah.It's the kid. It's the same. I love that.
And I know people complain about Nepobabies and all like that, but come on,
(23:45):
if you have a chance to help your kidget started in an industry that you've
spent your life in, of courseyou're going to, of course,
people are going to support that.
Some of them, not nearlyas many as there are,
but some percentage of them are actuallyperfectly good actors in your room,
in their room. And you should givethem a shot. Not nearly enough of them,
but some of them.
(24:07):
Well,
and at least so far by universal monstersor I guess they're not universal,
but by Godzilla standards,why it's holding his own.
So it's kind of a messy narrative.
They pinball back and forth between thefifties and 2015 and the seventies at
one point. But it's holdingtogether well enough.
(24:28):
I feel like I can followit for the most part.
I just don't want to say too muchbecause I haven't gotten to the end yet.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right. And it isAmerican, but also it's Godzilla,
so I think it counts.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
the only American Godzilla thatabsolutely does not count for the podcast
under any circumstancesis the Roland Emrick one.
(24:49):
Any other Godzilla thing, fairgame to talk about on our show?
Other Godzillas have respected thesource material enough that they merit
discussion. Absolutely. Absolutely.
He says bravely have not seen allof the American Godzilla things.
I'm probably going to eatmy words in a few weeks.
(25:11):
I mean, the recent Godzillamovies were all right,
maybe they weren'tgreat, but I liked them.
I loved Kong Skull Island. Thatwas just a good monster movie
that just worked for me really.10 out of 10, that was great.
And maybe the recent Godzilla, theAmerican as good by comparison.
(25:34):
But even so there's still, it's Godzilla.Of course, you're going to watch it.
And I mean, I feel likewe talked about this,
I think the last time wetalked about Godzilla,
the ratio of Taki talkie to Smashy smashy.
That's an annoying thing that'sconsistent across the Kaiju franchise.
But it is also something I understandfrom a pacing standpoint is if
(25:58):
you've got a 90 minute movie andGodzilla is just smashing things nonstop
for 85 minutes, you're notgoing to have a Tokyo left.
Or at least it's really going tostretch the suspension of disbelief that
there's a Tokyo left.
It's tricky. It's tricky.
(26:21):
Yeah. So let alone 10 45minute long TV episodes.
But I like it so far. It's a hellof a lot better than Desert Monster,
I tell you that. There you go.
Ever. You watch betterthan Desert Monster.
(26:46):
Hey, the key to life is to have,
imagine that on the backof the citizen KDVD case.
Reasonable expectations, people.That's what life is all about.
And parenting, is thekid still alive? Yes.
Good parenting wind for today.
(27:10):
You did it. Your childdoesn't have cholera yet.
Yay. Or measles despite.
Anyway. Hashtag getting political. Youbelieve in vaccinations, you are fine.
End hashtag political. Yes.
(27:30):
Yes.
So you watched a good movie thisweek and I was going to watch it,
and then I didn't, but I want to. No.
Fair. Fair. Yeah. Soyes, I watched Oddity.
It is on shutter.
The IMDB summary is woefully lacking.
It is one very short,very misleading sentence.
(27:52):
So I am going to very quicklytry to improvise my own.
This is why I need to look up IMDBsummaries before we start recording.
A year after her sister'smurder blind Clear Voyant Darcy
Ello
visits the spacious home ofher widowed brother-in-law
(28:15):
and his new girlfriend,
which was also the sceneof said sister's murder
When the brother-in-law leavesbecause he is a massive douche,
the
Blind clairvoyant woman and the girlfriendare forced to spend the night in the
(28:38):
dark spooky house together.
And also there's a golumthat they keep calling a
mannequin because the douchey
husband and the girlfriend aretoo uninformed to know what a
golum is.
And the blind psychic womanis certainly not going to
(29:02):
tell them because she kind ofhates them and spooky things
happen.
Nice. So not much of a foxMulder moment. I take it.
There is not reallyabout the mannequin, but
(29:23):
there are twists.
I feel like this movie telegraphsthose twists kind of heavily,
but I still don't necessarily wantto spoil them. Yeah, Fair enough.
There's a
Murder mystery elementwith a kind of obvious
(29:45):
answer, but it is about the journey,
not the destination. Andthis movie does that well,
and there are somelegitimately spooky elements
set design for the creepy old house.
It looks almost like a small ScottIrish castle more than a house,
(30:06):
which is interesting and it's sufficiently
spooky. The Golum,
I refuse to call it a mannequin,
is sufficiently spooky when it's
not moving. When it's moving,
it admittedly looks like thePutties from Power Rangers.
(30:32):
See, I find there is one instance ofmannequins where they are terrifying.
And I know you have encountered them,and I know they have scared you too.
And that's when Skyrim bugs out and the
mannequins that aresupposed to be stationary.
Decorations suddenly start twitching andjust flying all over the walls of your
(30:55):
house and making thoseunsettling thumping noises. Yes.
Yes, yes.
Or chasing just kind of glitchingout in this twitchy sort of way.
And you don't expect it.
Adopted digital daughter's petFox as it runs around the room.
Yeah. Yes.
And especially if it's late at nightand you're just playing it to decompress
(31:17):
and you walk into yourhouse and you see that
that will get you, you need togo to bed. But other than that,
I can't think of a time thatmannequins are scary. Golum. Yes.
Mannequins may be not so much.
There are some legitimatelyscary things about, I'm actually,
(31:37):
despite my complaining aboutthe golum effects just now,
I am probably going to givethis a very high motion picture,
tariff scale rating,
because there were some parts ofthis movie that skewed me out.
So it,
so the husband is apsychiatrist or a doctor,
(31:59):
I think psychiatrist. But either way,
he works the night shiftat an insane asylum.
Nice.
AndThat comes into play
later on in theMovie. I don't feel uncomfortable.
I don't feel uncomfortable swellingthat because if you have a guy working a
(32:22):
night shift at an insaneasylum in a horror movie,
obviously you are going to have horrorhappening at an insane asylum at night
that is a chekhov's gun thatyou are obligated to fire.
Fire. Yes. Yeah. No, it'd be weird if you.
Didn't.
And there is one scene that
legitimately spooked me.
(32:44):
We've got a character
tied to a bed like the beds in insaneasylums of the leather straps like
you see in the old school,scary asylum kind of things.
And.
I can hear Melissa cackling and goingin a very different direction with that.
(33:06):
Yeah, yeah. Kind of astrange She's not here. And
the
villains leave the door unlockedAnd let some
particularly dangerous inmates loose.
And one of them's coming in And Thewhole thing is from the perspective,
(33:28):
like the first person perspectiveof the guy on the bed.
So you see the door slowly openAnd you hears some shuffling
and he looks away and helooks back and there's a face.
Now, admittedly,
what that face does causes it toimmediately stop being scary and
(33:50):
start being funny because
it comes across a little sillierthan I think the writers intended,
but that buildup genuinely got me.
Yeah.
Well.
And the POV stuff is.
Hard. May or may not be where thefoot thing came in, but anyway.
Nice. I mean, POV is hard to do,
(34:14):
especially outside of found footage.
I think the last time we encounteredit was the snake cam in that God awful
movie. And I did like thesnake cam, the quicksand.
Yes.
Snakes do you like? We do blurry.
(34:35):
Well, so what made yougravitate to this one?
I was looking for something towatch, and I clicked onto Shutter,
and this was on their homepage. And aquick Google search advised me that, yes,
this is foreign.
That'll do it.
I love the minimalism of theapproach that will absolutely.
(34:57):
Work.
Some days I am in a mood for somethingspecific and I actively look for things.
I do my research. SometimesI'm just like, oh crap,
I have to watch a horror movie thisweek and throw it Art at the wall.
And this was a, it works Art at theWall movie, but it was a good one.
I will admit something.
(35:17):
I pulled it up on IMDB every time Isee this because I'd heard about it.
It was in limited theaters.
You're not the only positivereview I've heard of it,
but I thought that was Tilda Swinton.
When you're going through Shutterand you see the, I got that vibe too.
The woman.
Yeah. She was going fora Tilda Swinton vibe.
(35:39):
You can see that in theperformance as well.
Which I mean is great. TildaSwinton can do whatever she wants,
but I was surprised that it wasn'ther when I pulled it up on IMDB
and I totally expected to seeTilda Swinton and I didn't.
And the other kind of creepything about this movie,
(36:01):
this has one of the,
and here I may start dangerouslygetting close to spoilers,
but I'll try to keep itas vague as possible.
This movie has one of the moreconvincing portrayals of a
sociopath that I've seen. Nice.
And it gets surprisingly creepy
(36:23):
once the pieces start to fit together
and this character starts beingSociopathic
nice.
I mean.
You got to love a good sociopath, andit's kind hard to pull that off weld.
(36:44):
Yeah.
This isn't like a HannibalElectric sort of thing.
This guy seems perfectly normal ifa boat stilted until suddenly he's
not.
Well, that's awesome. It's been onmy list ever since it hit shutter.
(37:08):
I need to get to it. I recommend it.
Where would you put it to hearyou say it actually scared you?
Don't say that often.
No.
Going by the scariest scene,
not taking the somewhat weakpayoff of it into account
(37:28):
just going on, how muchthat tense buildup scare me.
I would be tempted to give it a four.With everything else in the movie,
I feel a little bit obligatedto knock it down to a three.
Fair.
Which again,
the way that I usually classifymotion picture teske for me,
one, it's either not trying to bescary or it's failing massively at it.
(37:52):
Two didn't scare me, but I could seeother people, three actually scare me
and four really scared me. And five, Iwill never watch voluntarily ever again.
Which is a short list. But I love it.
And quality enjoyment. I'm goingto give both of 'em. Fours.
(38:14):
Nice.
Okay.
Okay. I am definitelygoing to check it out.
I need to spend more time with Shutter.
This monster Dumpsterdive has got to stop.
Now to set some realisticexpectations here.
This is the first horror movieI watched after the birthday,
(38:38):
so its score may be inflated a little bit,
but I do still think it's a genuine,
I don't think it would cause birthdaybias would cause me to call a bad movie.
Good. I think it's a legitimatelygood movie. Just as a warning,
I may be overhyping it ever so slightly.
You did not like the birthday. No.
(39:03):
I need to troll the letterboxreviews. See, I feel like it was,
the ones I did see were prettypolarized. Either loved it or you.
I'm pretty sure I am not the only personto compare Cory Feldman's performance
to Little Nikki, so thatmakes me feel better.
Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean,that's very specific,
(39:25):
especially for our age group.
I feel like I'm the only person in ourage group that's ever voluntarily sat
through Little Nikki, and it's kindof a relief. If that's not the case.
Maybe that's not. Whenwe watched in college.
I would not have subjected y'all to thatin college. No. This is a high school.
(39:47):
Grady with too much time on his handsdoesn't know the difference between good
comedies and bad comedies.Time Filler Palooza.
Now, you.
Know who, and I.
Can still quote fromthem, mostly from memory,
despite knowing thatit's a terrible movie,
and absolutely ruining my credit as acritic by being able to quote most of it
(40:07):
for memory.
Well, you to fly.
And go into that little circle.
You know who would die onthat hill with you, Emily?
Really? Yes.
So big Adam Sandlerfan defended Mr. Deeds,
(40:28):
which is not a terrible movie.
Oh no, that's not the worst movieAdam Sandler did by a long shot.
And I say that as someone who voluntarilysat through Little Nikki several times
as a kid.
Well, I could be confusing.
I'll double check with her,
but I'm pretty sure she hassaid Little Nikki is fantastic.
(40:48):
I'm pretty sure she puts that inthe S tier of Adam Sandler movies.
Okay.
I will maybe agree that it's a little over
hated compared to some of AdamSandler's streaming era output.
But I dunno, I'm not quite ready togo to bat and say it's a good movie.
(41:10):
Maybe just not thehorrific dumpster fire that
Mike Nelson from MST three K saysIt is. I feel like Mike Nelson,
he's a funny dude andhe knows his bad movies,
but I feel like sometimes he overstatesthings for the sake of a cheap joke.
And this may have been one of those times.
(41:33):
I mean, they can't all be,what was it, Halloween Town,
the really terrible one that he did after.
Yeah, I saw dead minutesof that and gave up.
Yeah, it's on Netflix. He didn't getan Oscar nomination for Uncut Gems.
And in all fairness, he deserved one.
But he said that if theAcademy ignored him,
(41:55):
he was going to retaliate by makingthe worst movie he possibly could. And.
That is a.
Give the man credit.
A dire threat from the manthat made eight crazy nights.
Yes. Well, they called.He wasn't bluffing.
They called his bluff andhe was not bluffing. So
(42:17):
yeah, that was a good God.
At least 20 years before, or 20 yearsafter Little Nicky, give or take, I
ish. I don't know. The yearsall start to blur together.
But anyway, that's all Igot. I dunno about you. Yeah.
(42:38):
I mean, we started talking about AdamSandler movies instead of imported horror.
So I think that's kind the pointwhere the music starts playing.
Usually.
That's our cue. Well, ifyou're still listening,
go watch Little Nikki and we'll have adeep dive discussion of it next week.
And you don't have toletterbox, don't do it, do it.
(43:02):
Do it it. Follow us on letterbox.Email us at imported horror@gmail.com.
We're on threads. I'm not doingmuch with the threads right now,
partly because the coming Soons thismonth have been a little few and far
between, but we are on there.
So give us a shout out andtell your friends about us.
We're cool most of the time.
I know a dear sweet man,
(43:24):
Henry Winkler covered in bees.
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