Eric's October Challenge Movie Journal, Part One

Eric took the October Challenge, and since nothing is valid unless you're sharing it online, he decided to drop a bonus podcast series all by his lonesome detailing his thoughts on the horror movies he's watched this month! Part One includes mini-reviews (or ramblings) for: Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, Bodies Bodies Bodies, The Funhouse, At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul, 1922, Possessor, Meg 2: The Trench, Twins of Evil, Destiny, Skinamarink, The Stepfather, House on Haunted Hill, The Skeleton of Mrs. Morales, The Strangers, Shivers, and We're All Going to the World's Fair.

Episode Transcript

(00:30):
Hello there listeners, it's Eric here.
Throwing a bonus episode at you or potentially a series of bonus episodes depending on how
quickly I get through these movies.
But this is basically a movie journal.

(00:51):
Just me, no Jose here.
And every October since I believe 2016, I've been doing the October challenge, you know,
where you watch 31 movies in the month of October that you hadn't seen before.
Or I'm not sure if it's a formal part of the rules that they are only allowed to be movies

(01:16):
that you haven't seen before.
But I always do only ones that I haven't seen before just because there are so many that
I need to catch up on.
Even though I am a horror fan and I do a horror podcast, whoops, bumped my mic there.
I don't necessarily watch that many horror movies throughout the rest of the year for

(01:40):
some reason.
I'm not sure why.
I just not always in the mood.
But so kind of a lot of the ones that come out in a year, I cram into my October watching
and then also just try to catch up on ones that have been around for a while that I just
hadn't gotten around to.

(02:00):
So, you know, it's fun to curate a list of movies to watch in October and try to hit
as many different decades as possible and try to get a lot of different countries in
there.
Although I would say this year a lot of the watching has skewed towards pretty recently
and mostly the US or the US and Canada.

(02:25):
But let's see, I have so the initial list that I set out for myself, I think had something
like probably 40 ish movies on there between, you know, movies that I've just been meaning
to get around to watch for a really long time and also just new stuff that came out in the
past couple of years that I hadn't gotten around to yet.

(02:47):
And currently, the list consisting of both movies that I have already watched so far
this month, which is 29 of them and also movies that I initially wrote down on that list to
watch and just haven't gotten around to yet.
There's 52 movies total watched and unwatched on there.

(03:07):
So that's a lot of movies.
So I don't know, I don't know if I'm going to stop when I get to 31 and then just put
the rest on my ongoing list of movies to watch for this list.
I mean, for this challenge and just wait until next year or maybe I'll just keep going well
into November.
I guess it really just depends on my mood more than anything else.

(03:30):
And yeah, so I just thought I would give little mini reviews for all of these movies and just
see if any of them sound appealing to you.
I don't know.
I don't even know who's going to listen to this because who wants to hear me just talking
extemporaneously is I'm clearly so good at.
But let's get started.

(03:53):
What do you think, Jose?
To get together.
Oh, speaking of Jose, actually, the first movie on the list makes me think of him because
of his incessant blathering on about cozy horror.
Just kidding.
I don't think he blathers, but cozy horror is obviously a big thing for Jose and the

(04:17):
first movie.
Oh, by the way, I think I probably will split this list into multiple parts.
So I'm not bombarding you guys with 29 movies all in one go.
I think I'll probably just do about half of what I've seen so far right now and then talk
about the rest once I finish that up.
And then if I keep watching this into November and attempt to actually get all the movies

(04:41):
on this list watched, then I will release a third and maybe even a fourth episode of
like 10 or 15 movies each on those.
We'll see how it goes.
Lucy, you see.
But the first movie that I kicked off the season with was Dr. Terror's House of Horrors from
1965 and that's from the UK, our friends overseas.

(05:06):
And that's the first actually of the Amicus anthology movies.
I don't know if you don't know who Amicus is.
I mean, I'm not sure I can imagine you not knowing that if you're listening to this podcast,
but just for the sake of it.
This was the other movie studio in Britain that was making horror movies throughout the

(05:29):
60s and 70s.
And I guess kind of ripping off the flavor of Hammer movies to the extent of even borrowing
a lot of their main cast members.
I mean, this movie alone has Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and Michael Goff, pretty
big hitters over on the Hammer scene.

(05:50):
And the atmosphere and the characterizations are a little bit similar.
But Amicus, they did do full length movies or narrative films with just one story.
I think probably the most famous of those.
When I say famous, I mean, I used to see it on AMC during, you know, Fright Fest or whatever

(06:12):
they did in October was called.
I think it was called and now the screaming starts or is that there are so many movies
in the 70s that had screaming in the title.
I don't remember if that's the Amicus one or not, but it was like a period piece.
And I remember that there was like a crawling hand, which is foreshadowing of things that
I will talk about with this entry because this one is.

(06:35):
But anyway, Amicus is mostly famous for their anthology films, which usually I mean, the
biggest one that they did was Tales from the Crypt.
The first live action adaptation or motion picture adaptation of Tales from the Crypt
came from them in the 70s.

(06:56):
And you know, with an old British guy playing the Crypt Keeper, just like wearing a Jedi
robe, basically, he wasn't really a rotting desiccated corpse or even just like, you know,
how it looks in the comics.
Just by the way, I'm rambling.
And a lot of their anthology films kind of took the same format, which is where you would

(07:17):
have somebody telling people like a disparate group of people would be gathered together
in one location through some contrivance or other.
And then you would have a central figure who was like a doomsayer or a prophet who would
tell them who would offer to read their future and their future invariably involved getting
killed in a horrible way.

(07:37):
So then that would become the basis of each individual story.
And Dr. Tarr's House of Horrors is one where Peter Cushing is the doomsayer.
And he's a tarot card reader.
So every character on the train or in this train compartment, which is why I think of
it as cozy horror, asked to have their fortune read in turn.

(08:00):
And so there's five different stories in a movie, which is impressive because the movie
is it might even be less than 90 minutes, I forget, but five different complete stories.
Well, I say complete.
Some of them feel more complete than others.
The best one is Christopher Lee as a snobby art critic and Michael Goff as a painter who

(08:22):
humiliates Christopher Lee publicly as Lee is very knowledgeably holding court about
modern art and why it's so terrible and how there's no artists who have vision anymore.
You know, all the pretentious things that you expect an art critic to say.
And Michael Goff is like comes out into the gallery and says, well, actually, we've just
got a new artist here working that you may find their work to be of some interest.

(08:47):
So he shows this basically looks like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Christopher Lee, you know, wearing glasses and putting his hand on his chin and tilting
his head like, hmm, yes, indeed.
Very intriguing.
This artist has a lot of promise.
Look at the use of color and the bold compositions and all these kinds of things.
And then Michael Goff brings out the artist who painted the portrait.

(09:10):
And of course, it's a monkey.
And Christopher Lee gets upset and eventually winds up running Michael Goff down in his
car because he's so his reputation has been ruined, you see.
And then Michael Goff doesn't die, but he loses a hand.
And wouldn't you know it, that darn hand just keeps cropping up in the most unlikely of

(09:31):
places as it attempts to enact some kind of revenge on Christopher Lee.
And I won't give away the twist ending to that one, but it's a pretty fun one.
It is really the best story in the whole collection.
But the movie is worth watching again for that kind of low key sort of British 60s atmosphere.
Next up, movie number two from 2022 US is Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, which is a movie that

(09:57):
I don't know.
It's always difficult these days to know what gets quote buzz and what doesn't because
kind of everything gets buzz in some circle or other.
So the movie podcast that I listened to, I have heard reference to Bodies, Bodies, Bodies,
and it seemed to be somewhat recommended, I guess.

(10:18):
Who even knows how you divine consensus anymore when it's so difficult to tell, you know,
the original takes from the hot takes and when the backlash seems to hit the second
that anybody says that anything is worth checking out, you suddenly have a seemingly equal percentage
of people rising up on the other side and saying, no, it's overrated and terrible.

(10:40):
So I don't know how people feel about Bodies, Bodies, Bodies in general, or the horror community.
I liked it.
It's about it's just about a gathering at a house of well, I'd say rich kids, kids with
rich parents or, you know, early 20 somethings or late 20 somethings.
I don't know.

(11:01):
It's got Pete Davidson in it.
So however old Pete Davidson is and then other actors who, you know, could play college students
or could play high school students, you know, they're kind of that or they could be moms
by now.
Just that that type of actor is sort of the predominant one in here.
And basically, it's just about this woman bringing a girl to meet the rest of her friends,

(11:28):
her new girlfriend.
And then power goes out because of an impending hurricane.
I think this takes place in Florida or might be, I actually don't even really remember.
But anyway, everybody's trapped there because of this storm and everybody's cell phone reception

(11:50):
goes down.
So basically, it just becomes when Pete Davidson's character turns up dead, you know, suddenly
all these characters are looking at each other suspiciously and friendships break down and
everybody's secrets come out and they all start killing each other off one by one, wondering,

(12:10):
you know, trying to figure out who the killer is.
The movie, like I said, came out last year.
The thing about it that I thought was interesting was that it feels like a very old kind of
story.
I mean, obviously, there's a lot of Agatha Christie type mysteries in single locations
where people are trapped and, you know, that some kind of terrible thing happens and everybody

(12:35):
becomes suspicious of one another.
Or even like the monsters are do on Maple Street is about the breakdown of society as
people start to question, you know, I thought I knew this person, but now something has
happened that has thrown my understanding into a new light and maybe I don't know them
as well as I thought.
And the consequences are violent and tragic.

(12:58):
So I thought it worked really well as a generally kind of an update on that old theme.
It did annoy me a bit that they occasionally throw in like, I just hate woke isms in dialogue.
It's not that I don't think that people talk about things like toxicity and gaslighting
and the patriarchy in real life, but it's often just kind of used as a as a signifier

(13:23):
of, I guess, Gen Z.
A lot of times it feels really hollow and authentic and it feels like it's kind of
being used without any real thought behind it.
Like, it's just sort of like, oh, we need to show these characters are young.
So let's have somebody say, oh, the patriarchy is forcing me to into this role.

(13:43):
I don't want or whatever, you know, just kind of thoughtlessly throwing around the terminology
without really examining it.
And so this happens a little bit in this movie.
I will say I think it sort of tries to get into thematically in terms of the way that
people perceive each other and the debates that they have about that kind of use of language

(14:06):
sort of feeding into the overall theme about, you know, how you can go from trusting somebody
to not trusting somebody and perceiving them based on the language they use or the language
that other people use that they react to and the way in which they react to it sort of
informs this idea of like, is this person more or less likely to be the violent killer

(14:29):
because of the things that they say and the words that they use?
So it is somewhat thoughtful here, but it does ultimately not add that much to essentially
a murder mystery where people are getting off one by one.
Part of me kind of wishes they would have left that off the table altogether.

(14:50):
But ultimately, I did find it a compelling movie.
And you know, when I told my girlfriend about it, her first thought was, I don't like Pete
Davidson.
That would have I probably would have skipped that one just because he was in it.
And I was like, well, turns out he's not really in it that long.
His death is the impetus that like sets everything else in motion.

(15:11):
So I don't know, it sounds like I was banging on that movie more.
But I really liked it.
I like the lighting.
The cinematography is interesting because again, the power outage and the fact that
people can't plug in their phones.
So it does seem plausible that people's phones are dying and not getting reception.
So there's a lot of lighting of like this flashlight lighting.

(15:32):
And one character has these like glow sticks that she's using to light her way the entire
time.
And the way that that creates this very shallow pool of illumination.
And I thought that that was interesting in terms of the cinematography and the technical
aspects of it, of the way that you would utilize a digital camera, and not even trying to make

(15:58):
it look like film, which I feel like is like we're finally getting to that era of digital
cinematography where the express purpose of it is not just to look like film.
It's meant to look like its own thing, which I think is much more interesting.
And it was really well used here in order to create that area of light and shadow where

(16:21):
you can only see a couple steps ahead of you at any time.
And that creates a good sense of suspense.
But with a lot of fun neon colors from glow sticks and whatnot, that made it feel contemporary.
Oh, man, this is taking longer than I imagined.
Maybe I'll only just talk about 10 movies instead of 15 or whatever.

(16:43):
But number three, well, I don't have that much to say about number three.
It's the fun house, the Tobe Hooper.
I say version, I don't know.
I think there's a newer movie called the fun house that I've seen on streaming services
here and there.
I don't know if it has anything to do with the old one or not.
But this one is from Tobe Hooper.
And it's kind of a slasher movie.

(17:04):
It's early enough in the cycle that it doesn't feel the need to fill in all the tropes.
And man, I did not like this movie.
In fact, I would go so far as to say it might be my least favorite movie that I watched
this month.
And I was surprised because I can't say that I always loved Tobe Hooper.

(17:26):
But of the movies of his that I've seen, which of course is Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I've
seen Life Force, I've seen Eatin' Alive.
I probably saw one of his Master of Horrors episode.
I'll look it up.
But I'm not gonna.
But I'd say I usually at least find him interesting.
Even if I don't think that the work is necessarily great.

(17:49):
And the fun house is just I can't really describe it as anything other than it's just a really
ugly movie.
Like it's ugly to look at visually.
The characters, personalities are not that appealing.
The depiction of the universe that is creating is well, here's the just by way of an illustration,

(18:14):
the opening scene is like a long fake out with a sort of a Halloween style POV shot
of the killer putting on a mask and grabbing a knife and walking through a house and coming
upon a woman in the shower and you know, opening the shower curtain and stabbing her, quote
stabbing her.
And then the twist is like, oh, this wasn't actually a killer.

(18:36):
It was just the girl in the showers younger brother playing a prank on her with like a
rubber knife basically, just to scare her.
And it just leaves you with a feeling of like, oh, I feel dirty after watching.
It's like creepo little brother sneaking in to watch his sister shower.

(18:57):
I mean, essentially to play a prank on her.
But I don't know, like I grew up in a household with a sister.
We did not have that level of intimacy where you could just go in where somebody was taking
a shower like once you're past the age of, you know, four or whatever.

(19:19):
So the whole movie just feels really grimy and disgusting.
And I hated every minute of it.
Sorry, I told you, I know some people consider it a classic.
There are moments when it's like, I see the potential like with the monster and the final
showdown, but it's not only is it ugly, but it also is really, really, really slowly paced.
Like nothing happens.

(19:39):
Anyway, that's enough about that.
The fourth movie was at midnight.
I'll take your soul from Brazil.
1964 coffin Joe.
And when I did talk to Jose about some of these movies, not all of them.
And he said that the interesting thing about the whole coffin Joe character is the fact
that he's not he's like a horrible, horrible villain in terms of the things that he does.

(20:04):
But he's not necessarily evil.
He's just a moral, you know, like, he just kind of does what he has to do gets what he
wants.
And he takes glee in it, but he's not doing evil things specifically just for the sake
of doing evil things.
It's all like, they do serve practical purposes.
And so the his whole thing is that he really wants to an offspring, I guess, which is sort

(20:28):
of like the one element of humanity.
Like at one point, he sees a father beating his child and he goes over and reprimands
the father like this is precious.
This is your legacy.
You can't treat him this way.
So it's sort of this weird fixation that he has.
And that's the only thing that and that's essentially what seems to motivate him is
like he's just trying to find a wife to worthy of bearing his child.

(20:54):
And you know, anything that you could think of that was taboo in the 60s, especially in.
I don't know.
I don't want to misspeak.
Like, I know, Kath, Mexico is primarily seen as like a Catholic country or certainly it
was at that time.
Is that the same for Brazil?
I don't know.
But there's plenty of like the characters like really like blasphemous, the things that

(21:19):
he says and the observation, the rituals that he refuses to participate in and then he mocks
other people for putting any stock in.
He doesn't seem to care all that much about religion and there's, you know, murder and
like abusing women and just being a horrible guy in general.

(21:42):
But it's all done with this sense of of glee, like the sadistic glee that sort of turns
it into camp.
So it's like you can't really feel all that bad about what he's doing because it's just
like, well, he seems to be having fun, I guess.
And that was the first of three Cuffin Joe films.
And I think I've seen the second one, which is I think called This Night I'll Possess

(22:06):
Your Corpse.
I remember not liking that one at all, like thinking that it just felt very slow moving
and kind of pretentious in a way like this, this villain who just monologues all the time
and doesn't necessarily have anything that interesting to say.
I'm not sure if that was just because I saw it so long ago.

(22:27):
Maybe I would have a different perspective on it now.
But at midnight, I'll take your soul.
I think leavens that speechifying with a bit more can't be, you know, over the top theatrical
villainy mustache twirling type stuff.
Number five is 1922, which was made in 2017.

(22:51):
That's the adaptation of what was honestly my favorite of all of the novellas in Full
Dark No Stars.
Although I think the ones that were more celebrated was, well, the one that was called The Good
Husband, I think it was, which was inspired by the BTK killer.
And it's about the woman who discovers that her husband has been a serial killer since

(23:14):
before they met and married and now they have kids.
I think that's the one that kind of got the most attention from this collection.
I thought it was kind of just okay.
Like it felt like kind of a superficial examination of really, you know, like that's a pretty
powerful thing that happened to you.
And I remember feeling like the novella just kind of dealt with it almost in like a practical

(23:37):
kind of way where the woman, the wife is just sort of like, well, better stop him from doing
this or whatever.
I don't know.
I don't remember feeling like there's a lot of complexity to it.
1922 was actually my favorite novella from that.
And that's about the psychological and material in a lot of ways, devastation that follows

(24:03):
in the wake of a man convincing his son to help him murder the son's mother, the man's
wife, because she technically she's the one who owns this farm.
1922 so it's and it's take place in rural America.

(24:23):
I don't know, probably Nebraska.
I'm just making that up.
I don't remember where it takes place.
And then yeah, the boy goes on a crime.
I don't know.
I shouldn't.
How much should I spoil?
It doesn't turn out well for either character.
And I thought that the movie it has Thomas Jane, who I think is probably most well known

(24:44):
for another Stephen King adaptation, The Mist.
I thought he did a pretty good job.
I mean, the movie was mediocre, you know.
And sometimes we say mediocre, people think that means bad.
But really, it just means to me it's like unambitious.
Like, you know, to me, I think mediocrity is just like setting a setting a middling

(25:10):
easy to achieve goal for yourself and then achieving it and not really trying to go any
further.
Like I would say that this movie, which I think is a Netflix original was like handsomely
produced.
The end.
Next up is Possessor, which is a movie way back when I think his name is Brandon Cronenberg,

(25:32):
right?
The younger the younger Cronenberg, he kind of came onto the scene with a movie called
Anti Viral, which was a very high concept movie about basically like selling, reproducing
and selling like strains of viruses in that, you know, had infected celebrities, like taking

(25:54):
it from their blood and like reselling that so people could like infect themselves with
the same virus that their favorite celebrity had suffered from, I guess.
And since then, Brandon Cronenberg has gone on to do Possessor and his most recent one
is Infinity Pool, which I haven't seen yet.
But I did finally get around to seeing Possessor and it was good.

(26:20):
Very art housey.
If you like art house, this is your house of art.
And I, you know, I think always a little bit more forgiving of maybe, let's say, unsatisfying
story choices in art house versus unsatisfying story choices in something that's meant to

(26:41):
be mainstream.
Because if you have a, you know, a Marvel movie or whatever, which is meant to appeal
to a mass audience, then like kind of all you have is your story choices, because that's,
I think, at least presumably the thinking would be that's why people go to movies, you
know, like average, ordinary people who are not into art house stuff is like, it's about

(27:06):
story and character for me, which I don't value as much because I think cinema can do
a lot more than that.
But you know, let's say you're making a movie that you want to have a mass appeal.
Really your best bet is to just make it a good story with compelling characters.

(27:26):
And possessor is an art house movie, which is trying to do something probably more towards,
I guess I would say atmosphere and ideas, you know, it's a science fiction movie.
And the premise is that there's this like shadowy corporation, or maybe it's a government
entity, I'm not really sure what they have the ability to like, they have an assassin

(27:48):
that they drop her consciousness into a person who is, you know, like a trusted person by
a person whom who got I cannot talk talking extemporaneously on mic is like, I feel like
I have a gun to my head and I'm trying to get these sentences.
I don't know why it's making me so nervous.

(28:08):
I'm just alone in a room.
But there's like a pressure to like to be entertaining.
But you know, this is a bonus.
If not entertained by it, don't listen to it.
I don't know.
That's the adversary also our own audience.
But you know, they the assassins consciousness is dropped into and takes over the body of

(28:31):
a person that the target trusts.
So like in the opening scene, it's a person who is at a work event with this, the guy
who's the target.
And so this woman goes into this room and seemingly apropos of nothing just like stabs
him to death and that sets up your story and which is kind of difficult to talk about because

(28:51):
again, it's a movie that really is more concerned with imagery and feeling and tone than really
trying to move a plot forward.
And I dug it on that level.
I think Brandon Cronenberg really tries to do a lot with practical visuals.
Like there's a lot of that lens flare, what am I trying to think of?

(29:15):
But like there's a lot of like image blur, like a lot of stuff that seems to be shot
with like sort of like a tilt shift lens or something.
So that like selective areas of the image are out of focus and there's just a very shallow
portion of the image in focus that you can actually make out what it is.
There's a lot of that kind of stuff like impressionistically trying to convey the internal world of the

(29:40):
of the characters with with, you know, lens techniques and the way it's shot and edited
and stuff.
And it's very slowly paced and very methodical in the way that it presents its story.
And it's quite good, but it will definitely be tiring, I think, for people who don't really

(30:02):
care about the potential goals of an arthouse film.
Next up Meg To The Trench.
I said The Fun House is my least favorite movie that I've watched so far.
Meg To might be even it's a better movie in a lot of ways, but it's maybe even more
pass worthy than The Fun House because at least The Fun House had a certain kind of

(30:27):
personality and Meg To, which ironically enough is the first Ben Wheatley movie I've seen.
You know, I say I have a lot of blind spots, which is why I do this October challenge.
And that's one of my blind spots is I have not seen.
I've seen Kill List or Sightseers or Field in England or, you know, any of the movies
that Ben Wheatley actually made actually made an impact with in the horror scene.

(30:51):
You know, I skip all those.
And then the first one of his that I see is Meg To.
But in my defense, I didn't know that he directed it.
And B, I like the first Meg when it came out in theaters five years ago.
That was a surprise to learn that it was five full years ago that the first Meg came out.
And I don't know.

(31:12):
I can't even say that I remember the first one well enough to tell you who's recurring
in Meg To and who is missing.
I'm pretty sure that the Jason Statham's love interest from the first movie, whoever that
even was, is not here this time.
And I thought and for a moment, I thought that the premise of Meg To was going to be

(31:35):
for some reason, they have to take their little submersibles down into the trench, the titular
trench that's like full of Megalodons.
And then, you know, accident happens or whether it's sabotage and they have to evacuate from
their little submersibles and like walk across the bottom of the ocean back to their home

(31:59):
base.
And so when that happened, I thought like, oh, that's going to be like the full premise
of the movie is it's going to be like, I thought it was all going to be like just this very
high, high concept of like, we're trapped at the bottom of the ocean and we have to
walk back to like almost like the towering inferno or those disaster movies from the
70s where it's just like you focus on like one event, which is, oh, this yacht is flipping

(32:26):
over and we all have to get out of it and survive.
I thought it was going to be like that on the bottom of the ocean floor.
And I was pretty excited about that.
Like they just encounter all these obstacles along the way.
Like, oh, no, this eel is eating my face off.
Ah, but then that portion of the movie wraps up within probably like 20 minutes and then

(32:48):
it's on to all the other dumb plot stuff that nobody cares about.
And Jurassic World is popular.
So we'll have these little dinosaurs running around like these little lizard hybrid things,
you know, eating people on land to keep that exciting or whatever.
I don't know.
It was sort of a lack of entertainment, I would say.

(33:14):
Next up is Twins of Evil from 1971.
Speaking of Hammer, this was, well, A, another dose of Peter Cushing.
I mean, you know, it's never bad to have two doses of Peter Cushing in one month.
And the first and I think only Hammer movie that I will be watching this month, I tried
out there are certain little like templates or standards or sub genres that I try to hit

(33:38):
every month because A, I enjoy them and B, there's just so many of them that you can
like parse them out over the course of one, you know, one October every year and just
let that last until you die.
And this one is Hammer, 70s Hammer is not my favorite because a lot of times you can

(33:58):
really feel the lack of budget like the very last, is it called the Satanic Rites of Dracula?
I think, which is, you know, the second of the Dracula movies that takes place in, you
know, contemporary London.
I just remember that one just being abysmal.
Like it just felt like nobody cared about what they were doing.

(34:22):
Apart from, you know, some of the actors, but the filmmakers themselves were just totally
phoning it in by numbers and just like, well, if we throw in this, you know, X amount of
gore and X amount of nudity, then that's an entertaining movie that'll make X amount of
dollars at the box office.
You know, like it just became like a pure calculation at that point.

(34:44):
And that's kind of what a lot of 70s Hammer's movies feel to me.
When you hear, when you watch the making of or like the documentaries about Hammer, it's
always like actors saying like, oh yeah, we got to the house and we were like excited
to see all the other locations we were going to be working at.
And then the film, the producers were just like, no, this is it.

(35:04):
This house is the whole thing.
And how they would like, they would like shoot two movies on the same set.
So like, you know, you can just sort of imagine what a factory was becoming at that point,
you know, where some producer is telling a telling a screenwriter like, hey, can you
in the course of, you know, five days, can you write a script that utilizes this set

(35:25):
that we're using for this other movie just to maximize our dollar?
And then we could like release it on a double bill or whatever.
Anyway, having said all that, I did like Twins of Evil.
I thought it was a pretty good example of what Hammer was capable of in the 70s.
My favorite probably is Captain Kronos because that one's a lot of fun, like introducing

(35:47):
swashbuckling.
But Twins of Evil is about a pair of twins in, you know, the witch burning era of England,
whatever.
I don't know if they explicitly say what time period it is, but let's say, you know,
late 1600s, I guess.
And Peter Cushing is a, you know, Bible thumper or like a, I guess a priest.

(36:11):
And maybe he's a bishop.
Maybe he's more important than just a priest or whatever.
But running around on horseback with his gang of other priests trying to find women to burn
because they think they're immoral or whatever.
And then there's a count who is looks a lot like Jimmy Fallon, the actor who plays him.

(36:33):
I was continually distracted by that.
He's this count who's like hedonistic and just wants to live a life that is pleasurable
for him no matter what it costs anybody else.
And he is messing about with some occult rites and sacrifices, accidentally winds up resurrecting,
I guess one of his former lovers maybe, I'm not sure, but a dead woman who's a vampire

(36:59):
turns him into a vampire.
He goes after these two twins, one of whom is virtuous and upright and Christian and
the other of whom is a bit of a wild child.
And so, you know, she deserves her terrible fate of getting turned into a vampire and
staked through the heart.
And yeah, the thing about it that actually makes it sort of, I guess, good is Peter Cushing's

(37:23):
character is he's, as the course of the movie goes on, he seems to be a bit more complex
psychologically than you initially realize and, you know, as the fun moment of like,
oh, God, what have I become kind of thing, which, you know, I kind of thought that he
was just going to be an asshole the whole time.

(37:44):
And you know, I mean, there's not a lot of excuses that I can really forgive you for
burning up a bunch of innocent young women just because, you know, you decided that they're
too promiscuous or whatever.
But in a film character, it's like it is a relief that there was actually some amount
of depth in there.

(38:06):
The end.
And then let's see, number nine is Destiny.
Destiny is a silent film by Fritz Lang, preceding Metropolis.
I feel like I have a real nasal twang when I say Fritz Lang.
As you would say if you were German, I guess, I don't know.

(38:30):
But it's about a woman who is, I think they're visitors in a small town or maybe they just
live there.
I really don't remember.
But she's in an inn in like a small town in, I don't know, the 1700s or whatever with
her husband and then a very gaunt looking man comes and sits down at their table and

(38:51):
then when the woman is not paying attention, the man leaves with her husband and turns
out that man was death.
Oh no.
So she goes and tracks him down, tracks down death via the local cemetery and he's in a
room full of candles and he's talking about how like I'm not against God.

(39:12):
In fact, I'm doing God's will.
This is the stuff that I'm supposed to do.
I'm getting pretty tired of it actually because nobody likes me.
All I do is show up to take their loved ones away.
People get all mad at me.
But I'm just serving my function in the universe.
Sorry.
And then speaking of anthology films, as we were earlier, then he just tells I think three

(39:37):
different stories of like times throughout the ages when people died basically.
And there's like an Arabian Nights type story and then there's the one that takes place
in like ancient China where there's like a magician and you know, just various things
like that.

(39:57):
And I think I really liked I love fairy tales and folk tales.
So the element of the woman tracking down death himself after he, you know, quote stole
her husband away from her was my favorite part.
But that does wind up just being the wraparound segment.
And all of the other segments are just about like ill fated lovers across the years, one

(40:21):
of whom lost the other to death.
Those were not so interesting to me.
But you know, if you love silent films, it's at least it's well shot.
Number 10 was Skin of a Rink, which apparently is a Canadian film.
Did not realize until after I watched it.

(40:44):
It came from Canada last year and has made a lot of waves.
Not necessarily in the positive direction.
This is the kind of movie that when I told Jose that I watched it, he was like, oh, yeah,
I have a feeling that I would like it and I've been meaning to check it out.
But I so much of what I've heard about it is people just absolutely hating it.

(41:09):
And yes, I could 100% seeing it being a divisive I think is I remember his exact phrase, but
he was saying like, people either think it's like the most obnoxious thing that cinema
has ever created or like the next coming of Christ in terms of like horror movies.
And there's not really a middle ground.
But I'm going to tell you that I am kind of in the middle ground, although I gave it a

(41:32):
I have little ratings in my sheet where I keep track of my Halloween viewings.
I gave it a seven out of 10.
So I guess that's more towards the side of liking it.
But you know, it's the type of movie that some people I think will be satisfied and
get everything that they need out of it just by watching the two minute trailer.

(41:55):
Because it's it is primarily like I was saying with possessor, you know, art house film more
concerned with atmosphere than with story and character.
And possessor at least gives you some characters to hold on to even if it's not developing
them at the pace that you would maybe want if you're like, you know, somebody who enjoys

(42:19):
mainstream films more than art house films.
But at least it's it's got something there for you to grab on to and Skin of Mourning
is really just an hour and 40 minutes of shots of the inside of the house, basically.
And it's very grainy.
I really initially thought that it was shot on Super 8, but apparently it was shot digitally.

(42:41):
And I'm guessing all the grain and the low lighting and everything, the low lighting
effects were just achieved in post production, I assume.
Because, you know, if you're shooting on digital in 2022, like with bodies, bodies, bodies,
you really don't need that much illumination for a clear image.
You can just turn your ISO up really high.

(43:02):
And Skin of Mourning is supposed to look like I don't know what it's supposed to look like.
It's supposed to take place in the mid 90s or the early 90s.
So it's got it's extremely low light photography where a lot of shots are basically just lit
by, you know, the TV in the background or whatever.
And it's about two kids who wake up in the middle of the night to discover that their

(43:25):
father is missing.
And then as the movie goes on, you know, there's a lot of them just sitting around whispering
to each other while cartoons play on the TV in the background.
And the shot, the way that the film is composed is like, I think you only see one of the kids
faces.
Oh, no, that's not true.
You see both kids faces.

(43:46):
One of them is a little more frightening than the other.
But you see like if you see anything, you might see like their feet walking through
the frame.
You might see the shadows on the carpet.
You might see like the back of their heads.
But a lot of shots in the movies are in the movies just like, you know, the cameras tilt
it up towards like the corner of a room.

(44:07):
And you might like hear something going on in the background while there's like a very
dim flickering light on the ceiling.
And it is designed to be a very unnerving experience where you're never quite sure exactly
what you're looking at.
And there's like very low sound.
The only music I'm pretty sure in the entire movie is just the music that's playing incidentally

(44:32):
on these cartoons in the background.
But yes, I did like it.
I thought it achieved a good effect.
Even as somebody who thinks who agrees with the idea that it probably could have been
cut down.
Some of the reviews in IMDB were saying like, oh, this should have been like a 40 minute
short film at most.

(44:53):
I don't know if I go that far, but I do think it probably could have been cut down to under
90 minutes because there is a lot of just kind of hanging around.
And I don't know.
I just thought that it achieved the atmosphere really well and gives you almost nothing,

(45:13):
but it gives you just enough to kind of come up with ideas or theories about exactly what's
happening.
Like at one point, the daughter, I think, walks into the bedroom, the really dark bedroom
and sees a woman sitting on the bed, a woman facing away from her, facing toward the wall
and just whispering and saying things like, your father and I love you very much.

(45:39):
Just creepily talking in a whisper and the whole because of the fact that you don't see
her face and she's just talking in this unnatural whisper.
That alone is enough to make you go like, oh, so like, she dead?
Did the dad kill the mom?
Or is it more banal than that?

(46:00):
Because the mom is not there from the very beginning, but you don't know where she is.
And I think the kids have exchanged some cryptic lines here and there about like when the father
disappears, I think one of them says something a lot of times like, do you think daddy went
where mommy is or something like that?
So you're like, is she dead?
Or were they just divorced?

(46:21):
Or is she just out of town?
It could be like a completely wholesome explanation or something really sinister might have happened.
So you kind of just have to piece a lot of that together yourself, which for me is satisfying
and works really well.
Especially it's hard to talk about spoilers with a movie like this because like, what
does it even mean to spoil a movie like this?

(46:42):
Like the whole movie is just these kids in a strange version of their house that might
be in another dimension with a monster running around inside whispering to them.
How do you spoil that?
The premise is the whole movie.
But there's like a shot at the end where you that sort of repeats the same moment over
and over again.

(47:03):
And just from that, you're sort of like, okay, is this like a Groundhog Day type scenario
where they're just living the same night over and over again?
But there's a monster potentially in the house that is very much affecting their reality
just based on its whims.
But it could be like, I'm talking way too much about this, but I did find it kind of

(47:24):
fascinating.
There's a shot early on where the dad is talking on the phone and he says something
about like, oh yeah, he fell and hit his head.
I think he might need stitches or something like that.
So it's like, is this just like a fever dream from this kid who hit his head or is he like
in a coma or a concussion or whatever?

(47:45):
So anyway, I like Skin of Mareek if you can't tell from all the rambling I did about it.
Okay, number 11, the stepfather, the original from 1987, the year of my birth.
Starring Terry O'Quinn.
And one of my kind of favorite things in horror movies, I think, is when you see a performance
that like on the surface kind of seems like a bad performance, but then as the movie goes

(48:10):
on, you realize like, oh no, it's this way on purpose.
That's what Terry O'Quinn is doing in this movie.
As a guy who, and this is not a spoiler because this is literally the opening sequence of
the movie, is he's like, you know, whistling as he gets ready for his morning routine in
his like suburban house to go out and presumably go to work like the breadwinner of this idyllic

(48:36):
American dream suburbia.
But then as he's walking out the door, you see that his whole family, including, you
know, children, are all lying there in a bloody heap on the carpet.
So you piece together from that that he killed his whole family piece together.

(48:57):
And then the movie picks up a year later with him being, I don't remember if they're already
married or if he's just, but he's living with another family, a woman, his husband died.
And you know, the mom is head over heels for this guy, daughter, doesn't quite trust him.
And you realize that the reason that this guy is acting this way is because he is so

(49:22):
invested in the idea of a very, I guess I would say, conservative vision of the American
dream, you know, the settling down in the house with a family and a pet, having a job
and just everything being perfect.
You know, like I think the movie references a few times, like these 1950s, you know, perfect

(49:48):
utopian suburban visions like Leave It to Beaver, you know, the daughter's young friend
compares the dad to like Ward Cleaver and that kind of thing.
So it's clear that like, the reason that Terry El Quinn's acting often seems very cheesy
is because he is putting on a mask.

(50:08):
He's a guy who's trying to sell himself this idea, which is clearly very important to him,
that like a nuclear family and a house in the suburbs and a man who can say that this
property is his, you know, all of these ideas that I think conservative politicians are
still really invested in the power of, or certainly in selling the power of back to

(50:31):
their constituencies, like this idea of everything being perfect and chasing after this false,
what turns out to be a false and unattainable idea of a perfect, you know, house with a
white picket fence type of existence.
And whenever it falls apart, it so threatens Terry El Quinn's character that he becomes

(50:52):
unhinged.
So it's really interesting character study in that way.
And I think the music, which is something I remarked about to Jose, who I think has
seen this one, as I said, like, yeah, the music is kind of annoying and it's like synthy,
like upbeat happiness of like, you know, the shot of the first shot of the doctor, the

(51:15):
daughter riding down the street on her bicycle with this big cheesy smile on her face.
And then the other synthesizer music that's selling you this idea of how happy it is.
But you realize that it is all kind of an expression of Terry El Quinn's particular
psychosis of this just need to have everything be really ordered and no loose ends.

(51:36):
You know, everything has to be exactly the way that I need it to be.
And that means everybody being happy, even if it is a false or fictitious idea of happiness.
Anyway, it's a really interesting movie and it has a pretty good reputation and that I
think it has earned anyway.

(51:56):
Number 12, House on Haunted Hill.
This is the one from the 90s and the cast list of this one is very fun, but also like
probably I'm not sure if you could assemble a more late 90s cast if you tried.
It's got Jeffrey Rush in the Vincent Price role as I forget his name.

(52:21):
I think it is like something King because I feel like they keep referring to him as
like the King of Amusement or something like that.
And he's like, I don't remember what Vincent Price character does in the original movie,
but in this movie, this version, Jeffrey Rush is like an amusement park mogul, you know,

(52:42):
so it opens up with him getting interviewed by James Marsters as the cameraman, Spike
from Buffy for just this one sequence.
He's getting interviewed in this basically Tower of Terror type ride and then pretending
everything goes wrong.

(53:03):
So it's Jeffrey Rush and then his wife is played by, I'm not sure how you pronounce
it, but I think it's Famke Jensen, Jean Grey from the original X-Men movies plays his wife
who they clearly hate each other, which is always fun.
I think rich couples who hate each other and have nothing to do all day because they're

(53:23):
just rich, but just like lounged around in their gigantic opulent house and just hate
each other is really fun.
I guess there's a reason that a lot of soap operas have that element.
It's just really fun about the acid that they have for each other.
And then the main woman, so it's, you know, all these people are getting invited to this

(53:45):
and the original was just a house.
And this one, it's like an abandoned, or not abandoned, but a mental asylum with a tragic
and terrible history where the doctor did unorthodox experiments on the patients and
had free reign because, you know, who cared about mental health back in the forties or

(54:09):
whatever it's supposed to take place, which leads to a lot of fun set pieces.
It is very 13 ghosts esque in terms of, you know, these apparitions showing up that have
particular makeup jobs that allow you to imagine what might have happened to them in the past,
their particular stories.

(54:29):
But the main woman is Allie Larder, probably most well known, I guess, for the final destination
movies a year later.
And Taye Diggs is the love interest.
Bridgette Wilson is a movie nowadays, she would be like a social media influencer or
something, but I think she's some kind of like TV host who's here trying to capture

(54:54):
ghosts on camera so she can like sell the footage for like a pilot that she would host
about haunted places or something.
And oh, and of course, Chris Catan is the what's what's his name?
What's Watson Pritchett or whatever, the guy who knows about the house that nobody else

(55:14):
knows and it's freaked out the whole time like, oh, we're all going to die here.
It's Chris Catan doing is usually not great.
I mean, you know, I think it is tough maybe to because even somebody like Robin Williams
or sometimes Jim Carrey, you know, you see them in these movies where it's very clear
that the director was just like, all right, rolling cameras and go, you know, and they

(55:38):
clearly just want that I had this actor to improvise and, you know, save their movie
by whole cloth by just, I don't know, improvising their way through it.
And a lot of times it just doesn't work, you know, I don't think you can just sort of plug
in an actor, no matter how talented they are and be like, all right, let's go just make

(56:00):
our movie for us, do the writing for us.
You know, I think they have to have a little bit more structure than that.
So Chris Catan doesn't really have a lot of notes to hit outside of just being like, I'm
having a nervous breakdown because we're all going to die in here.
Oh, and you know, that's only funny for so long.
But you know, he gives it his all.

(56:21):
It's a really fun movie.
It has a lot of fun set pieces, a lot of high energy.
The filmmaking is that like late 90s, early 2000s, you know, everything is edgy all the
time.
I think they even use the Marilyn Manson cover of Sweet Dreams are made of these just to
sell like, guess what era it is.

(56:45):
The biggest problem with it is the ending has this like CGI ghost monster type thing
just is like, man, I'm not anti CGI, but you cannot rely on CGI for atmosphere in a horror
movie.
It just doesn't work.
It just really sucks all the air out of the room.
So it is unfortunate that the movie, which I think is a lot of fun up until this point,

(57:08):
like the last 15 minutes are just like running away from this many tendril many ghosted creature.
That's just like, that was no fun.
Number 13, the Skeleton of Mrs. Morales from Mexico in 1960.

(57:31):
One of the two, I normally like to have a lot more black and white movies in rotation,
but the problem is that every year there are just fewer and fewer old movies to see or
to choose from.
At least if you want to avoid doing the stuff that's like, this was only good for like

(57:51):
mystery science theater or whatever, which I'm not always necessarily opposed to watching
that.
But Skeleton of Mrs. Morales is a Mexican sort of a satire of culture of the time that
kind of gets slotted, I think into the horror conversation because of the fact that it does

(58:14):
involve a murder, but it's not really ever trying to be scary.
It's not a guy who's a taxidermist who lives in his house with the woman who hates him.
He would much rather be off living in the city with a nice apartment, living an eventful

(58:35):
life.
Instead, he's stuck in this small Mexican town with all these, I talked about the Catholicism
of Mexico, especially in the 1960s, all these religious kind of puritanical people all around
him who are just constantly telling him that he shouldn't be having fun or smiling about
anything and he just wants to go out.

(58:59):
Poor guy just wants to go out drinking with his buddies.
His wife is really frigid, doesn't really seem to want him around her, but also won't
let him get a divorce because that's his sin.
Doesn't like him do any of the stuff that he has fun doing, hates his job, which he
takes a lot of pride in.
Just a horrible person to be around.

(59:20):
So eventually he comes up with a plan to kill her and then the movie is about like, does
he get away with it or not?
And it is a really fun movie.
Again, not really scary, but has a lot of nice moody atmospheric 1960s black and white
cinematography, a lot of shadows.

(59:40):
Obviously in a room where there's all these taxidermy animals that this guy created that
gives a cinematographer a lot of license to do some moody lighting and shots of this surreal
environment.
And yeah, like I said, it really is more of a dark comedy than anything else, but it's
fun.

(01:00:00):
It's worth watching.
Number 14, The Strangers, the original from USA in 2008.
From the USA, not the television network.
And this is one that I avoided for a while because I was worried.
It came out in the late aughts.
I thought that it might be leaning too hard into just being sadistic for the sake of sadism,

(01:00:28):
because that's kind of the extreme length to which horror was at that time because of
saw and hostile and all that stuff.
And I like the first saw movie and I like the first hostile movie.
So it's not that I don't think extreme horror can have anything to say or any value, but
sometimes movies that come out in the wake of that, they only see the shock value and

(01:00:50):
they don't see the style or the thematic concerns of the movie.
So they just want to amp up the violence and the sadism.
And it didn't really wind up being that.
It is a pretty harrowing movie, certainly at the beginning and the end.

(01:01:11):
But it's basically just, if you haven't seen it, it's just a home invasion movie.
Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman are in this house, basically in the middle of nowhere.
And one night somebody knocks on their door and is asking for, I think she says like Tamra
or something.
And a voice on the other side of the door keeps asking if this person is there that

(01:01:33):
they've never heard of.
And they're like, no.
And she goes away.
But it leaves them a little bit on their like, who was that?
And she was talking a little bit strangely.
Do you suppose there's something a little off kilter about her?
And then, of course, as the night goes on, somebody comes back, he's knocking on the

(01:01:53):
doors.
And they go out and see people at the windows and then they realize, oh, our car has been
destroyed.
I wonder if these people have some bad intentions for us.
And then the cell phone winds up in the fire and all that stuff.
And it feels like a couple of different movies going on here, two of which I thought were

(01:02:15):
really good and one of which was a bit of a waste of time just to kind of pad out the
movie to movie length of 80 something minutes or whatever it winds up being.
But the opening sequences, I think, are really well done just using sound and stillness to

(01:02:37):
create that sense of unease to make you feel like how anybody feels, I think, when they're
home and it's night out and maybe you hear a noise outside, creating that sense of mystery,
never letting you know exactly where strangers are, are they inside the house, are they outside,
are they waiting in the shadows over there?
I think it does that kind of building really well.

(01:03:00):
And then probably about half an hour in, once they've got the ball rolling, then you kind
of have to go through a lot of the motions that you go through in horror movies like
why can't they call for help?
Why can't they run to a neighbor's house?
Do they have a gun?
Why can't they use the gun to get out of this?

(01:03:21):
You know, just kind of setting up a list of questions and like what would your protagonist
do in this situation in real life that might save them and then kind of answering like
here's why that doesn't save them.
And I guess I sort of understand why the screenplay needs to do that.
But at the same time, it just feels so by rote that you sort of are kind of just going

(01:03:45):
like, can't we just get to the actual meat of it?
Meat is a strange word.
But anyway, the most interesting part of the movie to me was the ending.
And I can't really talk about it because it's the ending.
I mean, you can't really say what's good or bad about a movie by describing how it ends

(01:04:07):
because then there's no reason for anybody to see it.
I thought that the way that it dealt with, I guess I would just say the strangers, the
group of three who are trying to break into the house sensibly for no other purpose than
to murder the inhabitants.
There's a way at the end where it really seems to want to deflate the mythos of serial killers.

(01:04:36):
I think it's very easy with home invasion movies to give your killer a cool look and
a cool weapon, give him a cool mask, and then make it so the audience will cheer when they
kill an innocent person or whatever.
Because it's like, well, they seem pretty cool, especially if they have a tragic backstory

(01:05:00):
like Jason Voorhees or whatever.
And the way in which murderers are portrayed in horror movies is not always indicative
of the way that you would feel about a real life murderer, obviously, which is okay.
But I think the strangers has the director makes some really interesting choices in the

(01:05:24):
very last few moments of the movie that kind of take the strangers from feeling like the
Michael Myers almost supernatural, aware of every single thing that's happening, can't
be caught, can't be killed, just sort of too, I don't want to say too good to be true,

(01:05:45):
but too infallible to really be human almost.
And at the ending, it really just kind of makes it feel like, oh right, these are just
people, these are just people who have made a decision to enact this horrible violence
upon other people.

(01:06:06):
And maybe that's not like a sexy, glamorous, romanticized thing.
Maybe that's just mundane and banal and just ugly and cruel for the sake of ugliness and
cruelty.
And maybe we shouldn't be celebrating or worshiping these people just because they have

(01:06:27):
a cool mask or something.
I don't know.
I thought it was really interesting the way it ended.
Number 15, Shivers.
Speaking of Cronenbergs, here's the elder Cronenberg, David Cronenberg, with his inaugural
feature film, which obviously is weird.

(01:06:47):
I don't know.
David Cronenberg's work, especially his early work, it can feel a bit like it becomes strange
partially because there is not necessarily an internal logic to the way that the characters
behave.
And I think that can be a little bit difficult for me.

(01:07:09):
I think he probably has compared a lot to David Lynch because they both do quote weird
stuff.
But with David Lynch, people don't always act the way that they act in the real world
in a David Lynch movie, but there's an internal consistency and logic in his work that allows
you to buy into the world in which this exists and understand it on its own terms, if that

(01:07:33):
makes sense.
And by contrast, I feel like a lot of David Cronenberg's early work has characters acting
in ways that are just kind of weird.
Just because it's like sloppy screenwriting almost or something.
I don't know.
So I had a bit of a hard time with Shivers as I had a bit of a hard time with Scanners

(01:07:56):
when I watched that last year because I just don't believe these people, if that makes
sense.
And so I can't really get invested in them.
And I spend a lot of the movie wondering like, am I supposed to be laughing at this behavior
or like unnerved by it because people act weird enough, Kilter, even before the parasite,

(01:08:21):
which is the whole crux of the movie is that it's about this.
This is gradually revealed across the course of the movie, not dumped up front.
But the gist of it is that this scientist is experimenting with a genetically modified
parasite to use it like basically like a leech, but instead of like bloodletting from the

(01:08:44):
outside, we stick it on your veins and then it like sucks out your blood to like purify.
It's like you put it inside a person and allow it to function as like an organ that might
be bad or, you know, like filtering the blood and from the inside of the person and like

(01:09:05):
subsisting on their body from the inside, but in a way that is like symbiotic, not parasitic.
So that like if you have a bad, you know, kidney or whatever, you can swap out your
kidney for this parasite.
That's the basic idea behind it.
But then of course things go wrong and it gets unleashed in this apartment complex,

(01:09:27):
like this high rise luxury apartment building, I guess, Toronto and starts passing from host
to host possibly via some nether region areas.
And the side effect of it infecting people is that they get really horny.
So it's basically a horny zombie movie.

(01:09:48):
And I respected the most the fact that David Cronenberg was willing to follow this premise
to its least moral conclusions, like any kind of sexual taboo that you can think of being
violated.
You know, you may not see it on screen, but it at least is alluded to that it's being

(01:10:12):
broken in this movie, like incest, you know, sexual assault, sexual relationships with
children, you know, as these as people become increasingly infected.
It's like, yeah, there's no regard for is this my daughter or whatever.

(01:10:32):
And I, it's weird to say I liked that, but I think it was brave of Cronenberg to at least
acknowledge that like, if this is your premise, if people are getting turned into mindless
sex zombies, then they're going to be enacting that in ways that are found upon in our society.

(01:10:53):
But the whole thing just feels so like so many points and I'm like, I don't know if
I was supposed to be laughing at this, like this editing, which feels really just awkward
and rushed.
Was that intentional as a way to make me laugh?
Or like at one point, all the sex zombies are like breaking into an apartment that has these

(01:11:15):
two like immigrants, like old immigrants.
I don't even remember where they were supposed to be from.
Probably like Poland or something.
But it's just this weird like shot of the zombies coming in through the door.
And then you hear not even really all that like urgently, as you would expect from somebody
whose apartment has just been invaded by zombies.

(01:11:38):
You hear the guy being like, hey, I live with my wife alone or something like that.
Like he just sounds like almost just like mildly indignant as opposed to like fearing
for his life or whatever.
And there's just so much of that stuff in the movie where I'm like, is this just sloppy
filmmaking or is this kind of like Cronenberg's almost like back door way into a comedy is

(01:12:02):
taking this premise and then just kind of playing it both seriously in terms of the
taboo nature of it, but also allowing it to be like kind of either over the top or under
the top, depending on the sequence in question.
I was never quite able to get a bead on exactly what tone it was going for.
So oh, but it does have that actress whose name I don't remember who was in the crazies,

(01:12:28):
who just has like, you know, kind of weird eyes.
That's probably sounds like an insult to say weird eyes, but I mean it in a kind way.
And if I guess I'll talk about one more.
If the premise of this is that I'm supposed to be watching 31, then number 16 would be
just past the halfway point.
So number 16 was we're all going to the World's Fair, which came out last year and which I

(01:12:55):
knew about because of the movie podcast I listened to.
It was pointed out as a as one to watch out for.
And it's about it's almost a found footage movie, but not quite because it does have
some shots that exist in an objective reality, not just that have been recorded, but very

(01:13:18):
minimal and it's mostly told from like webcams and phone cameras and stuff.
And it's about this young girl in New York.
I don't know if they say it's New York or not, but because it mostly is just her in
her attic bedroom making YouTube videos about this sort of they call it a.

(01:13:42):
MMORPG.
But it seems more it's like kind of an interactive creepy pasta almost where you take the World's
Fair challenge.
You say I think it's like I want to go to the World's Fair into the camera three times
and then record all of the strange things that happen to you as a result of you saying

(01:14:06):
that, which includes like hallucinations and bodily transformations and these kinds of
things.
But it's all, you know, like it's all expressed by people making YouTube videos, which could
obviously very easily be faked or them just saying things like one of the consequences

(01:14:29):
portrays this guy.
It's got like a one, you know, it's like a bad make, not a bad makeup job, but it's obviously
just makeup like prosthetic makeup on his arm.
That's like all scabs and stuff.
And then he reaches into the scab and pulls out a bunch of tickets for the World's Fair

(01:14:51):
and it's presented as like this is what happens to you when you all these strange things start
to happen.
And it's I guess the crux of the I keep saying crux, the impetus for what would make you
call this a horror movie is that the girl does start to undergo some strange behaviors

(01:15:18):
and it's sort of like almost doing that ambiguous thing of like, is she breaking down or is
she just seeking attention and or engaging in this online community game or is something
actually supernatural happening?
But it doesn't ever really push the supernatural angle that hard.

(01:15:39):
Like I don't think you're ever really supposed to.
I don't think there's a conceivable way in which to watch this film where you come away
from it thinking that anything supernatural happened because all of the effects of it
are like the girl, you know, the movie takes place in winter and she goes outside into
the forest and is recording herself on a phone and talking about like, I'm in short sleeves

(01:16:03):
right now because I don't even feel the cold right now.
And that's like, you know, one of the symptoms of the World's Fair.
I don't know, possession, disease, whatever you want to call it.
But it's like obviously she just went out into the woods wearing a shirt and like allowed
herself to be cold for a few minutes.
But she's saying, I don't even feel it, you know, or there's a shot of her like dancing

(01:16:27):
in a room and singing along to a song and then just like abruptly starting to scream
and then immediately going back into the dancing, like almost without transition.
And then throughout the whole thing, it's hard movie to describe because it's like kind
of nothing happens.
And I think it's like if you go into it, if somebody tells you it's like, oh, it's a horror
movie about a creepy pasta or something, you probably have a very specific idea of what

(01:16:51):
the tone and atmosphere of that movie is going to be.
And it's not that it's not like really creepy at all, really.
And nothing overtly supernatural happens in it.
Nothing overtly psychologically terrifying happens in it.

(01:17:12):
It's mainly just studying this very lonely girl spending most of her time in her bedroom
in the attic, exploring this role playing game.
And then there's also this guy, this much older guy, probably at least in his 40s when
they show him who is making videos of his own about the world's fair phenomenon.

(01:17:33):
And he gets in touch with her and sends her messages about like, I have to talk to you,
something really bad is going to happen.
I have to warn you about this stuff.
And so all of their conversations take place over Skype with him not showing his face.
And he's talking to her about these symptoms that she might experience and keep making
videos so I can make sure that you're okay and all this stuff.

(01:17:55):
And you never quite get a handle on what his whole deal is because he does really seem
to, it does seem that his relationship with this young girl is important to him.

(01:18:17):
But it's sort of like, is it important because she's just another player in this world's
fair thing that he's really into and he probably doesn't have any more quote regard for her
necessarily than with anybody else in that community, which would make it fairly harmless
the way that they talk.
Or is he concerned about her because he himself is not quite sure how seriously she's taking

(01:18:41):
this world's fair thing.
And maybe she has some mental troubles and maybe he wants to try and reach out to her
in a completely wholesome and platonic way because he had problems himself and he's not
quite sure how to do that or how she will be receptive to it, that kind of thing.
Or is he, you know, what I think a lot of people would assume, anytime a 40 or 50 something

(01:19:05):
guy reaches out to a 16 year old girl online, is he genuinely just a creep who thinks that
he's forging some kind of meaningful romantic relationship with her.
Any one of those could be true.
The movie doesn't really settle the question for you.

(01:19:27):
And that's kind of the idea of like where the horror comes in, the horror of the intersection
of probably generally untreated mental illness in young people and their inability to make
proactive or productive or healthy decisions for themselves, especially with this influx

(01:19:51):
of so many different stimuli vis-a-vis social media and this guy who may or may not be predatory
and the way in which all of these things kind of play together and interact with each other.
Which of these things is ultimately going to harm this girl first?
Or the suspense game of waiting for one of these things to harm her first?

(01:20:14):
Her own mental health issues or this guy or her parents who seem pretty checked out of
her own life.
So anyway, it's a hard movie to describe and as long as I went on about it, I don't think
I did a great job talking about it.
But I think it's really worth checking out if you keep in mind that it is probably a

(01:20:36):
lot more satisfying as kind of an ambiguous character study and don't go into it expecting
it to be Friday the 13th or horror of that caliber or intensity, some violence level,
gore level, whatever.

(01:20:57):
But in all honesty, so far it might be my favorite movie of the entire thing, of the
entire challenge, even though it's probably the least satisfying in a Halloween times
kind of sense.
That's it.
I feel like this was way longer and more boring than I intended it to be, but I don't know,

(01:21:18):
maybe you enjoyed hearing me talk about these movies.
And if you hated it, then don't download the next bonus episode I do where I talk about
other things.
Thanks for watching.