Mainlining Christmas

I try not to be overly dismissive of movies in genres I'm not entirely familiar with, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to find anything in "Last Stop on the Night Train" (or whatever they're calling it these days) that justifies it being made. I should note I haven't seen either "The Last House on the Left" or "The Virgin Spring," the movies this is apparently emulating ("Second House on The Left" is one of many titles this was released under in English). I take some solace in the fact that the consensus among genre fans seems to lean towards this being a cheap knock-off, rather than existing in conversation with its predecessors in any kind of interesting way I'm missing. That's not to say "Last Stop on the Night Train" isn't saying anything - it has themes and was competently filmed. But an extended series of sexual assaults overtakes the film in a way that feels grossly exploitative and leaves you with ...

I actually wasn't going to write this one up. My initial reaction was this film had some interesting moments set at Christmas, but for a number of reasons neither qualified as a "Christmas movie" (at least by my definitions) or leveraged the holidays in ways that were thematically noteworthy enough to count. Obviously neither of those reactions reflect on the movie itself, which is a fantastic (albeit disturbing) entry in the Italian Giallo movement, a sort of quasi-genre that paved the way for the modern slasher and has influenced countless films across virtually every genre. But the movie got me wondering whether there were any Giallos that used the holidays in a more sustained manner, so I did a simple web search for "Giallo Christmas movie" to see if anything popped up. And the only thing that did was Deep Red. While I didn't (and still don't) really consider this a Christmas movie, articles on Collider and Slash Film  were more generous in their la...

La Befana Vien di Notte is a live-action Italian fantasy/superhero/comedy/adventure/children's movie about Befana. I probably shouldn't assume everyone reading this is familiar with Befana: she's a legendary witch who delivers gifts to the kids of Italy on Epiphany Eve (January 5th). The easy explanation is she's "like Santa," which isn't inaccurate, but feels reductive. There's a lot of debate over just how old the legends are and where they come from: I'm not going to get into any of that here. What's important is this idea isn't invented for the movie, and in Italy this would come across like a big-budget Santa Claus movie. The problem we ran into trying to watch La Befana Vien di Notte is that this isn't Italy, and the film hasn't received a proper US release. Amazon has a version up, but the language options are limited. There's of course a dubbed English track, but... Okay, side note. I'm pretty firmly entrenched on th...