Mainlining Christmas

Some of my least favorite reviews to write are low-budget, independent horror flicks. They're ambitious, they're low budget, they almost always have interesting premises, and - of course - they're almost always pretty bad. Silent Bite, a movie about a group of bank robbers who find themselves hiding out in a mostly abandoned hotel on Christmas Eve alongside a family of hungry vampire dominatrixes, is no exception. Despite some above-average performances and a couple unexpectedly good comedic sequences, the movie leaves you far more bored than you'd think possible given a 90-minute runtime and that premise.  I should note that I have only tidbits of information about this production. There's no Wikipedia page for the film, and a cursory internet search didn't reveal any in depth articles or interviews. This was made by a small production company that appears to specialize in this sort of thing. It was produced and written by Simon Phillips (who also plays one of ...

30 Days of Night is a high-concept vampire survival movie with the gimmick of being set in a town so far north a single winter night lasts for thirty days. That last part is real, or at least real enough: the closer you get to the North Pole, the longer winter nights become (the North Pole itself has one night and one day a year, a detail I wish more movies about Santa would incorporate). The town where this is set is also real - it's the northernmost location in Alaska, now called Utqiagvik, though it went by Barrow in 2007 when this movie was made. I should note that 30 Days of Night never mentions Christmas, nor are there any major holiday decorations (there are some white string lights early on, but it's not clear whether these are meant to reference Christmas or simply decorative). In short, there's nothing in the dialogue or on screen suggesting this is set at or about Christmas in any way. So why am I talking about it? The answer, of course, is built into the premise...

I always love stumbling across a Christmas movie while catching up on genre fare I missed. Is that weird? Most likely, but then so is this movie, so that's appropriate. I should acknowledge this is one of those times viewers of the film are likely going to be surprised to hear it described as a Christmas movie, as references to the season are relatively sparse. However, the timing is unambiguous and noted on multiple occasions - in fact, the movie goes out of its way a few times to keep Christmas present. There's no reason that Orlok's familiar needed to be captured in the Christmas market, for example, but the movie drops in that detail. The second half of the film is explicitly set during the holidays (possibly the 24th through 28th, though I'm making a few assumptions to get that specific), which is plenty to cement this as a Christmas movie, albeit a subtle one. Backing up, Nosferatu is a remake of F. W. Murnau's 1922 silent horror film, which in turn was an uno...

Fair warning: this is the first installment in this franchise I've seen, so if there's context in the first movie that provides depth or meaning to its sequel, or if subsequent films build off the ideas or characters introduced here, I honestly don't give a damn. That was harsh. Let's back up. The Conjuring is a series of interconnected movies that, depending on how you define the term, may constitute a shared cinematic universe. I'm a little reluctant to use the designation, because - to my way of thinking - a shared universe is a phenomenon generated when multiple franchises share a single setting more expansive than any single component. The Conjuring movies, as I understand them, are built around the characters of Ed and Lorraine Warren, with a handful of spin-offs following associated characters (or entities, if you prefer) introduced in the core movies. Since the spin-offs are offshoots of the core franchise, this is still a contained series, at least in my op...

This 2023 Canadian movie is difficult to categorize. For purposes of marketing, it appears to be getting classified as some sort of horror/comedy or comedy/thriller, but - aside from a couple brief shots that feel as if they were wedged in as an excuse to connect it to the popular horror genre - this is really more a Christmas comedic fantasy. It's admittedly in the grey area between genres, but it's closer to something like The Bishop's Wife  or even last year's Dear Santa than It's a Wonderful Knife . The nebulous genre isn't an issue; the fact it's not all that good, however, is. That's also unfortunate, because the movie has a lot of potential. The premise is bonkers in the best way possible, and there are a handful of twists and concepts that are brilliantly inspired. Sadly, the pacing is off throughout, the ending is underwhelming, and whatever lore is supposed to be underlying this fails to coalesce. In addition, the movie is light on the sort of...

Another in a shockingly long line of high quality Shudder Christmas horror flicks, Brooklyn 45's premise, structure, and setting make it a bit of an outlier. The movie is set in real time during the evening of December 27, 1945, almost entirely within the confines of a locked room in a Park Slope brownstone. The cast functionally consists of six actors, all but one of whom is over 50. The movie is extremely well researched by writer/director Ted Geoghegan, who manages to deliver something that feels grounded without relying on cliches. The characters are written and performed like people, rather than stereotypes of how we imagine 1940s military personnel to speak or behave. At the same time, you can catch flourishes in the performances and direction borrowed from 1940s melodramas, enhancing the sense you're watching a fusion of past and present. The movie plays with this idea in the opening and closing, too: it begins in black and white, looking for all the world like it was sh...

This is, for better or worse (mostly worse), very much a product of its time, landing around the end of the X-Files, which this borrows from heavily. Elements also feel similar to Donnie Darko, though I'm skeptical this would have had the time or inclination to replicate anything about that film, which had bombed at the box office. Of course, all of this stuff is drawing inspiration from the work of David Lynch - some editing and effects choices in The Mothman Prophecies seem to be directly referencing Twin Peaks. Oh, and it's also based on a book I haven't read. The book purports to be non-fiction, with the caveat this stuff tends to strain the definition of that categorization. This is, after all, a story about extra-dimensional aliens prophesizing future catastrophes that cannot be prevented. Whether or not you believe that's possible, I assume anyone reading this is intelligent enough to have figured out by now the media built up around it is almost universally crea...

Lindsay and I wound up seeing this because our daughter has become fixated on Winne the Pooh. I believe we've now watched or re-watched all of the animated movies at least once; most more than that. Judging by her level of excitement while this was playing, I'm guessing we're going to watch this several more times, so I actually wanted to write it up before I become sick of the damn thing. "More sick" might be a more accurate description. Don't get me wrong: I'm a fan of the bear with very little brain and have been for a very long time. Hell, I used to wear a Winnie the Pooh pendant in college, and I'd take it out when asked about my religion. It was a joke, of course, but my affection for the character is genuine. I still love the original Disney shorts and the movie they were compiled into, and I was pleasantly surprised to find The Tigger Movie - something I'd last seen in theaters - holds up. The 2011 movie is pretty great, too. But as we'...

I found the key to unraveling this bizarre religious horror/action movie buried in its Wikipedia article: prior to falling in the hands of director Peter Hyams, End of Days was apparently offered to Sam Raimi and Guillermo del Toro, either of which would most likely have turned the seemingly bonkers premise of pitting Arnold Schwarzenegger against the devil into the amusingly bonkers farce it deserved to be. But they were both busy (or perhaps uninterested), resulting in Hyams taking over the project. To his credit, Hyams proves capable of delivering a sleek, visually impressive movie. The effects are solid, including some early CG that (mostly) avoids the pitfalls of looking cheesy or dated. But none of that means much, because he doesn't seem to be in on the joke here. Despite some objectively ridiculous dialogue, names lamp-shading campy origins (for Christ's sake, there's a priest named Thomas Aquinas), and - again - Schwarzenegger blasting the devil with enough firepow...

The Preacher's Wife has been on our watch list for years, but it's one of those movies that never seems to land on streaming services, or at least not ones we're subscribed to. Eventually I broke down and ordered a DVD, which then sat in a pile beside my TV for months. There it remained until someone commented on our 10 year old review of The Bishop's Wife  politely calling us out for not getting to the remake. Guess what we watched that night.  My first observation watching it was that I was going to need to rewatch the original if I wanted to have anything more substantive to say than, "yeah, this one's really good, too." Fortunately, the 1947 film is a lot easier to watch online than the remake, which is why you're getting a hybrid article covering both versions. Looking at them together has the unusual effect of making both seem even better. The films start with the same underlying premise but approach it in such radically different ways they feel ...