Mainlining Christmas

I'll grant it'd be a stretch to call this a Christmas movie. Only the last fifteen minutes or so are set at Christmas (and even then there's a little ambiguity surrounding the timeline), but that sequence is both thematically rich and interesting as a case study in how the holidays were viewed in the 1920s. More than that, if you think I'm above grasping at any opportunity to discuss a movie made by F. W. Murnau, the director of Nosferatu, through the prism of holiday media, you're seriously mistaken. In some ways, Faust is an even more impressive accomplishment than Nosferatu. The design and composition of some of these shots is incredible. Make up effects, set decoration, lighting, and camera angles are used to create some gorgeous sequences that - in the expressionist tradition - warp reality into something new. There were moments when actors almost looked more like stop-motion marionettes or animated figures than real people. Likewise, the balance between shadow...

Let's kick this off with a disclaimer. In fact, let's do a slew of disclaimers. I haven't seen the first Maniac Cop movie, nor have I seen the 1980 movie, Maniac (which I understand to be a different series, but I'm guessing there's some sort of tenuous thematic or conceptual connection, given both were directed by William Lustig). More than that, the Maniac Cop movies are drifting either into or adjacent to the exploitation genre, an area where my experience is limited. If you're a fan of that stuff, you're probably not going to think much of my opinion (though, for what it's worth, I do have a few nice things to say about aspects of this movie). But the corollary of that is if you're not a fan - or especially if you have no idea what I'm talking about or who William Lustig is - you're probably better off taking my advice and steering clear of this. For the most part, I found this boring, which is a surprising complaint given this movie is a...

Of the four Christmas or New Year's themed installments in the Blumhouse/Hulu "Into the Dark" series of holiday movies, this was my least favorite, though I should qualify that by acknowledging I'm not the target audience for this either way you slice its hybrid queer slasher genres. That said, skimming the Letterboxd reviews implies this was divisive among that audience, with some loving the exploitation angle and some finding the story and characters dull. Hopefully some context will help you determine where you'd fall in that continuum. At least according to my reading, the point of Midnight Kiss is metatextual, which is to say what the movie is  is more significant to understanding it than what it's about. The movie is essentially using the classic slasher formula, framing, and perhaps most importantly gaze to tell a story about gay men. Rather than exploiting female bodies for a predominantly straight male audience, Midnight Kiss focuses on male bodies fo...

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...

I think the worst way to watch The Oracle is to go in blind, the way I did, without knowing anything about the background or filmography of director Roberta Findlay. Granted the second-worst way to watch it would probably be after reading up on Findlay's history, but I wanted to provide a bit of context before saying I spent the first hour of this movie utterly baffled by what I was watching, or at least why it was made. The acting and direction are bad to the point I found myself wondering if it was intended as satire or parody, the pacing is glacial, and there's little internal logic to the plot. The good news is one of those elements - the pacing - improves significantly in the last half hour, at which point the movie does sort of coalesce into something semi-coherent (at least from a genre standpoint). I wouldn't call the final film good , but it turns into something of substance. Let's back up. Roberta Findlay helped her then-husband, Michael Findlay, develop the g...

A low-budget throwback to old creature-features, The Brain is the sort of cheesy horror movie that aims for mediocrity and mostly hits its mark. Conceptually, it's notably similar to the cult classic, They Live, released the exact same day in 1988, but of course lacking Carpenter's skill. That's not to say The Brain is entirely without merit. As a cheesy, monster/alien invasion flick it has some fun puppetry, and the movie leans into the style of '50s drive-in movies so hard I found myself wishing they'd shot this in black & white. This wasn't made to be taken seriously, so if you're looking for something along those lines, well... honestly, you're still probably better off with They Live, Little Shop of Horrors, or just selecting something from the era this is emulating. The movie's premise concerns a televised psychologist, Blake (secretly an alien, played by David Gale), who's working with a psychic alien (this one a giant brain puppet wit...

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 came across Terror Train while looking through the Wikipedia page for New Year's Evil. A quote referenced Terror Train as the better of the two New Year's Eve slashers released in 1980. I agree, with the stipulation it's a very low bar, and if said bar were placed much higher Terror Train would have driven into it: "better" does not mean "good," at least in my opinion. That said, this movie certainly has its defenders, and I can appreciate at least some of what they see in it. The movie has some solid lighting and cinematography (particularly early on, when we're presented with some gorgeously atmospheric shots of the exterior of the titular train). It also features a young David Copperfield in a surprisingly significant role as a magician. The real star, however, is Jamie Lee Curtis, whose casting makes it pretty obvious what movie this is attempting to replicate. For what it's worth, producer Daniel Grodnik received permission from John Carpe...

This one's been on my radar for years. It was made as part of "Into the Dark," an anthology television series produced by Blumhouse featuring standalone horror movies each built around a different holiday. Well, they were all different in season one - season two reuses holidays, which means there are a couple Christmas and a couple New Year's movies altogether. But none of that really matters - both installments I've seen to date have felt like (for lack of a better term) real  movies, not TV episodes. I'm not saying this would necessarily have been huge if opened in theaters, but I've seen worse horror movies that were successful. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean Pooka! is great, either. It has elements that are, starting with Nyasha Hatendi's performance as Wilson, an actor hired to inhabit what's essentially a cross between a Teletubby and Furby as the mascot for a toy its company hopes will be a big Christmas release. In addition to Hatendi...

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 learned about this while looking at the fifth volume of The Valancourt Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, which includes the lyrics to a popular British song written by Thomas Haynes Bayly dating back to 1829 about a young woman who seemingly vanishes during a game of hide-and-seek and whose skeleton is found in a chest years later. The underlying story is even older - Wikipedia credits Samuel Rogers with the earliest written version, a poem titled, "Ginevra", published seven years earlier, with the caveat the narrative was most likely folklore before either Bayly or Rogers wrote it down. Apparently, there are numerous old manors throughout England claiming to have been the site of the supposed tragedy inspiring the story. One difference that's hard to miss between Bayly's "The Mistletoe Bough" and Roger's "Ginevra" is that the earlier poem wasn't set at Christmas. Bayly's song, as the name implies, absolutely is - at least until the ti...

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 ...