Tag: movies

Recently watched: Death of a Unicorn (2025)

Posted on By caracabe

Let’s see, we have the widowed father, a corporate lawyer so busy providing for his daughter that he’s lost touch with who she is as a person. We have the daughter, with her two-colored hair and nose ring, cartoonishly progressive, but the only character whose moral compass is working. (At least in the early part of the movie, but we wonder: will the father’s slumbering conscience be reawakened? Who can say? It defies prediction!) We have the dying business tycoon who wants someone beside his bumbling family to carry on his legacy. We have the tycoon’s wife, who just got off the phone with the foundation, and good news about the refugees, we’re relocating them! — Or are we vaccinating them? We have the rich couple’s spoiled son, jack of all hobbies and master of none, who surely will not turn out to be a greedy, manipulative person. We have the rich couple’s servants, who seem to be former special ops. And we have two of the tycoon’s scientists (Asian, naturally), who for some reason work out of his home.

Despite the presence of cell phones and the internet, this movie feels like it was made in the 1980s. Anti-oligarch, but that’s not enough to make it a good movie. Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega are wasted on flat characters in a story with few surprises. A couple of amusing moments. Would not recommend.

Watching

Recently devoured horror

Posted on By caracabe

Recently read

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones. This unusual vampire tale takes the form of a story within a story within a story. The embedded narratives span more than a century, but they are all one story, beautifully told. (I noticed one period vocabulary slip-up, but it’s something only a pedant like me would care about.) The characters are complex, and the dueling vampires might not be the most evil among them, not even when they feed on children. Jones creates his own vampire lore, similar to what we know from Stoker and Hollywood but also alien. The Blackfeet terms were challenging for me to keep track of, but that’s not a bad thing. Blackfeet history and culture are central to the story. A tense, eerie, tragic novel, not without wit and humor.

Recently viewed

Tomie (1998 movie, directed by Ataru Oikawa). I haven’t read the manga series this is adapted from, but if I didn’t know it was Junji Ito, I would have known it was Junji Ito. Being friends with Tomie is like being friends with Hannibal Lecter: you don’t know why you’ve been singled out, and you might not want to eat everything you’re served. But Lecter probably won’t manipulate you into killing him, and if you do kill him he’ll stay dead. This movie does an excellent job of maintaining tension and mystery throughout.

Reading, Watching

Recently viewed: Longlegs (2024)

Posted on By caracabe

Longlegs (2024), directed and written by Osgood Perkins.

Nicolas Cage gives the kind of high-amplitude performance you hire Nic Cage for. The movie is visually unsettling, and the script has intriguing elements. But the big twists are obvious ahead of time, and Longlegs doesn’t commit to its craziness. It tries to make sense, when it should embrace the nightmarish irrationality at its heart. If it did that, I might accept Carrie Anne’s odd dialect without wondering why she’s adding all those S’s to words. Entertaining enough to watch once, but not to rewatch.

Watching

Recently watched: Poison for the Fairies

Posted on By caracabe

Recently watched: Poison for the Fairies (Veneno para las hadas), 1984; Spanish with English subtitles.

Horror in the same way that Heavenly Creatures is horror, and it reminds me a little of that movie, without the overt sexuality.

Orphaned Veronica lives with her invalid grandmother and a caretaker. Flavia, the daughter of rich, intellectually sophisticated parents, is a new arrival at Veronica’s school. Veronica pretends to be (or perhaps believes she is) a witch. Helped along by a coincidence or two, she convinces Flavia, and proceeds to manipulate her in increasingly sinister ways.

The main characters are children, and while adults play significant roles in the story, we rarely see their faces: they’re shown from behind, or from below the neck, or as silhouettes in the dark. The few exceptions are for effect, as when we see the face of Flavia’s piano teacher only after she dies.

I don’t know that I’d call this movie scary, but it is interesting, and worth a watch.

Watching

Update 2022-07-15

Posted on By caracabe

With only two issues of tiny frights a year, I figured I should put out the occasional interim update.

Horror reads since Walpurgis night

One or more of these might be reviewed in the upcoming issue.

  • Dark Country by Monique Snyman, a horror detective novel.
  • Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from Women of the Weird, edited by Mike Ashley.
  • Manhunt, a dystopian near-future novel by Gretchen Felker-Martin.
  • What Can You Say Against a Death Machine? a collection of absurdist short stories by Marty Shambles.
  • Your Body is Not Your Body: A New Weird Horror Anthology to Benefit Trans Youth in Texas, edited by Alex Woodroe and Matt Blairstone.
  • Coyote Songs: a barrio noir, a novel by Gabino Iglesias.
  • The Curious Case of H.P. Lovecraft, a biography of the influential horror writer and notorious bigot, by Paul Roland.

My recent horror viewing

  • I watched all four seasons of Hannibal. No disrespect to Anthony Hopkins, but Mads Mikkelson plays the part better. (But then, he had a larger canvas to work on.) I appreciated the importance of William Blake in the 4th season.
  • Blake’s work and thought also played a part in the psychological horror movie Saint Maud.
  • Brand New Cherry Flavor — this miniseries kept me watching to the end, but I’m still not sure what I think of it.
  • I was disappointed by the final season of Stranger Things.
  • I rectified a grievous omission in my education by finally watching Get Out, and I’m glad I did.
  • Ditto The Shape of Water.
  • Watching the series Midnight Mass was time well spent, but it could have been even better.
  • I continue to watch my way through Wynonna Earp, but it’s starting to remind me of Supernatural.

Miscellaneous spookiness

My wife and I spent a couple of nights at The Elms Hotel & Resort, and I went on the paranormal tour. There were a few tales of apparitions, but most unexplained occurrences seemed to fall under the heading of poltergeist phenomena, or maybe just mischievous spirits moving things. We experienced nothing eerie during our stay.

The Halloween 2022 issue

The next issue is starting to take shape, with art, poetry and fiction by the likes of Kathy Allen, Jerome Berglund, Alex Bestwick, Linda M. Crate, Mort Duffy, Nolcha Fox, Madison McSweeney, Jennifer Rodrigues, and your humble editor. If you’d like to join this illustrious roster, the deadline for submissions is September 30th. See the submission guidelines for details.

Updates