Mainlining Christmas

This is the third movie I've seen that was produced as part of the Blumhouse/Hulu collaboration Into the Dark, a holiday-themed streaming series of horror movies. The other two, both set at Christmas, were pretty good (and more importantly interesting), and this maintains that trend. "New Year, New You" is a thriller co-written and directed by Sophia Takal, who'd go on to make the 2019  Black Christmas remake (also produced by Blumhouse) the following year. This also maintains the trend of feeling like it may have been reworked into a holiday movie, rather than originally envisioned as one. I'm not sure that was actually the case with any or all of these, but the holiday elements keep feeling somewhat peripheral to the stories and primary themes. To be clear, this is in no way a complaint; only an observation. I'll also add that if I'm right and some of these were existing scripts adjusted to work with the holidays, they justified the alteration by making...

This is one of a few comedy/horror movies about a mislabeled letter to Santa invoking the Prince of Darkness instead that got on my radar after I saw the 2024 Jack Black vehicle, Dear Santa . I found myself in the minority in that I mostly liked that one, but of course I wanted to see other takes on the premise. This... actually isn't really that. Or rather, it is on the most simplistic of levels. Both movies feature a similar inciting incident with the protagonist writing to Satan by accident, but aside from that this is much closer to the second Adult Swim Yule Log , which is to say the horror is largely being leveraged as a counterpoint to a romcom framework playing off tropes parodying Hallmark Christmas movies. To its credit, Letters to Satan Claus did it first, though Adult Swim Yule Log 2: Branchin' Out did it better. That's not to say this is awful or even bad. The pieces here are all actually pretty decent: Karen Knox understands the movie she's in and has a bl...

I'm going to lean into the reality in which this is a movie, as opposed to the reality we actually inhabit in which it's an episode in a Blumhouse-produced holiday horror anthology television series called "Into the Dark," since Hulu seems to have unbundled these at some point and now presents them as standalone movies. But over in that alternate universe, this was part of the second season of Into the Dark, which means there's at least three other installments relevant to our interests (another Christmas and two New Year's). And after my experience with A Nasty Piece of Work, I'm interested in checking those out. This isn't a life-changing experience or some kind of hidden masterpiece, but I was entertained, which is as good a description of what this is setting out to do as any. To put this another way, while this is technically horror/comedy, it leans so far towards to the latter as to read almost more like dark comedy. That's neither intended a...

I don't even want to touch the premise of this movie until I explain a few things, because anything I tell you about what's going on in this bizarre horror flick would spoil stuff I wouldn't want to spoil. Normally, opening a review (or whatever it is I do here) that way implies I'm recommending a movie, but even that's going to be complicated. This is a movie calibrated towards a very particular kind of viewer, and even then there's a catch. The last few minutes of the film squander the goodwill it built over the previous hour and a half by pivoting in a different direction that left me rolling my eyes. Still, the experience the movie offers up until that point is so weird and fun, I'm hesitant to give too much away upfront. So instead I'm going to start this with an attempt at describing that experience, as well as who might be interested in checking this out. As always, if at any point you start to expect you fall into that bucket, I encourage you to ...

Well. That wasn't remotely what I was expecting. And, just so we're on the same page, that's a very good thing. I should probably get used to this subgenre (or in this case movies marketed within the subgenre) surprising me, particularly since I kind of predicted the turn said subgenre was due to take a few years ago. But, yeah, based on the initial teaser, I was ready to write this off as an overly-nostalgic homage to a horror film that I have... let's go with "mixed feelings" about. That's being generous, by the way - I didn't enjoy the 1984 film at all , though I see the appeal. There's some smart stuff going on in that movie if you can look past the misogynistic exploitation, the slow pacing, and the nihilistic cloud hanging over the whole thing. I certainly preferred the original to  the 2012 remake , which basically turned up the volume on everything distasteful about the original while dumbing down the premise and themes to the point there w...

As is customary in these situations, I'll start by stating the obvious: One Battle After Another is a movie with Christmas-related elements, but it's not something I'd describe as a Christmas movie. The elements in question are interesting, unusual, and initially confusing, as is the movie itself. To a degree, I think that's intentional - One Battle After Another exists in a world similar to ours but more exaggerated, one where both the right and left sides of the political spectrum are sort of caricatures of their real-life counterparts, as imagined by their opponents. Or at least I think that's what Paul Thomas Anderson intended while writing and directing the film, only reality sort of intervened in ways that leave you feeling as though his movie wasn't just set in a different universe but was imported from one, as well. The revolutionaries of the film are essentially the lawless renegades described by Fox News when they warn their viewers about armed Antifa ...

I remember watching this anthology at least a few times back in the '90s - while it didn't have much of a theatrical run, it was weird enough to be a popular VHS rental (at least in circles I hung out with) back when that was a thing. The gimmick here is the movie tells four stories, one after the other, about four bizarre experiences a new bellhop has on New Year's Eve, with each of the four stories set in separate rooms and written and directed by different filmmakers: Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino. The two names in that list you recognize are the two whose segments work, though it's not at all clear which way the causal relationship goes there. Apparently there were some major cuts required by the producer, and those came from Anders's and Rockwell's segments (the "producer" in question was Harvey Weinstein, in case you needed more reason to empathize with those directors). Since the uncut versions were ...

As someone old enough to remember the kind of movies Y2K is an homage to, this one's kind of difficult to rate objectively. Because on one hand, this is a damn near perfect recreation of a type of late '90s genre/comedy hybrid that permeated the era. Aside from the genre-pivot (which feels like it's reverse-engineered from Krampus ) and some of the gore effects being a little too advanced, this is more or less exactly what this movie would have looked and felt like had it been released in 1999. And making fun of Y2K paranoia was absolutely a popular pastiche as the millennium approached, so this wouldn't have felt out of place in theaters. Hell, I half suspect the only reason something with this exact premise wasn't released was studios, which relied much more on DVD sales and TV rights at the time, would have assumed there wouldn't be any interest in the film after January 1st, 2000. So on one hand, this is the movie it sets out to be, which should be a win. On...

This was a nice surprise. I'm not talking about the quality - I expected this to be good - but I'd more or less given up hope of ever getting a third season of this show. The first two installments streamed in 2019 and 2020 , so I assumed the promised finale was yet another victim of the pandemic. But it turns out this was either popular enough or those involved were invested, because the show's back after a five-year hiatus. That break does affect the tone, as well as the story and characters. This is no longer about a woman in her early 30s trying to sort out adulthood - when we catch up with Johanne (Ida Elise Broch), we find she's matured quite a bit in the intervening time. Well, okay, when we're first  reintroduced to her, it's en medias res , she's dressed as a giant rat, and she's frozen in place on a stage surrounded by kids. But once that teaser's done and we back up to the start of December, we find she's grown quite a bit between sea...

We reviewed this twelve years ago and at the time more or less agreed with the consensus that it's a good movie, slapped a recommendation on it, and moved on. We never mentioned The Three Godfathers, because at the time we'd never seen a single adaptation or read the book ( we've rectified that since ). At some point, I picked up a copy of the film on blu-ray and dropped it in the "rewatch this soon" pile of discs sitting beside my television. That was probably three or four years ago. Last night I popped it in, hit play, and discovered a few things. First, I discovered my memories of the movies were comically inaccurate. If you'd asked me to give you a brief rundown of the plot, I'd have given you a synopsis bearing absolutely no resemblance to anything after the first ten or fifteen minutes of this movie. Second - and related - I discovered it is not, in any meaningful way, an adaptation of The Three Godfathers, but rather inspired by that story (or m...

This is another in a long line of films straddling the line between "Christmas movie" and "has Christmas in it," to the point I'm torn which bucket to drop it in. The holiday sequences don't take up a significant portion of the runtime, and seasonal elements don't really permeate the movie in ways that make it feel particularly seasonable - I probably wouldn't recommend this specifically for holiday viewing, though I would recommend it as a movie. However, the holidays are referenced enough to signal the filmmakers considered them significant, and I have some thoughts on why that might be. In fact, the use of the holidays might be the one subtle thing in an otherwise fairly unsubtle dramedy. To clarify, I'm not describing the bulk of About a Boy as unsubtle as a criticism - I liked it quite a bit. But the movie as a whole is fairly upfront about the points it's making and the ideas it's playing with. For example, it's clear from the s...