Duel Monsters doesn’t function like an actual trading card game, it functions like the half-understood schoolyard version of it. Rumours and speculation read from a magazine and spoken of like myth and prophecy from a holy tome. Except in this world that’s how everyone treats it, not just the small children. An old woman, more a fortune teller than the shopkeeper of a games shop, speaks of playing the Red-Eyes Black Dragon card with the tone usually reserved for speaking of the hero destined to save mankind from darkness.

Shōgo’s reaction to this hits the same register. He is terrified of playing and losing, terrified to put his life on the line, but he must learn that you need to face your fear and play a trading card game, even if that means losing at a trading card game. Of course he never actually has to face the prospect of losing in the film either as it’s actually Yugi who duels Kaiba and he wins so I am not really sure that Shōgo learnt the right lesson here.

Speaking of the duel, the version of the duel disc here makes Kaiba and Yugi’s match look like an actual wizard battle. It is honestly cool but also where do the actual cards go when they throw them to the air to create a hologram? Does Kaiba have some sort of big hoover in the ceiling sucking them up? Also why do the holographic projects support making the backs of cards? And it reacts to people in the audience shouting things? Makes about as much sense as anything in this series.

Kaiba being introduced still spying on Yugi directly with security cameras in the games shop he opened specifically to spy on duellists is also really funny, though it’s a shame that he doesn’t have green hair and pronouns any more.

This movie feels like the the Platonic ideal of 1990s action movies. Dumb and fun as hell.

They are really banking on puppeteering the corpse being shocking and taboo and three decades of jokes about the movie are really fighting against that. Completely directionless.

I mean I just can’t have you accused of murder on the wrong evidence.

Here’s my boy!

It is not a particularly original observation to point out that this is not quite Columbo yet. He’s too clean, he’s too mean, he’s too much of a cop. It’s a little jarring and it makes me think of Columbo like a slasher movie villain. His relentless, friendly pursuit is of course always justified and always correct. The audience knows for a fact that the insufferable, rich socialite of the week did it, how they did it, and that they deserve to get caught. But seeing him screaming at Joan, reducing her to tears and seeing her still holding herself together and tell him “No” I cannot help but think: What if he was wrong? What if he was just a cop with a prejudice he calls a hunch and he was hounding you day after day, trying to dig up anything he can, playing nice and then promising to break you. Which is of course has not really been a hypothetical for many people in the world. I am really just asking what if Columbo was actually a cop.

Everyone who gets access to time travel becomes immediately completely incompetent which is maybe a sign of why you generally shouldn’t introduce time travel powers into a setting. It is far too much of a escalation in terms of power creep.

The actual fifth series finale might have resonated emotionally a bit more if they had had these scenes with Nathalie in them after Monarch was defeated instead of a random press conference with the mayor but also they really did not need to recap the series finale at the start when they were literally going to show it again via time travel in the middle of this.

Fujino in that hallway absolutely crushed me.

Perhaps I would not have had such a wonderful time with this film if not for the particular atmosphere and group of friends that I watched it with. They were part of the recipe that made this such a wonderful dining experience. Dresses itself up with high-concept plating and then delivers a delicious cheeseburger of a movie.

Duellists, rise up!

Oh fuck I am twelve again. Absolutely perfect way to come back to a childhood show and see these characters again. Just as ridiculous as ever. I guess Dungeon Dice Monsters didn’t work out considering that Duke runs a food truck now but Joey still gets to live his puppygirl dreams with him.

I am very glad that the English dub was done in the style of the 4kids show to the point of even getting a remix of Kaiba’s theme in there.

And oh fuck I do love Seto Kaiba. He is still a complete and utter maniac and this is his movie. He finally accepts magic is real and deals with it by simply inventing an anti-magic field and adding it to his duel disc, then builds a space portal to the afterlife so he can finally have a rematch with his ancient Egyptian pharaoh boyfriend. It is incredible how much he is in love with Atem in this movie. I love Kaiba so much she should transition.

This is the most College Humour-ass thing I have seen in my life. Pretty fun movie.

Watching in Japanese all the way through for the first time and this film is even better than I remembered, honestly. Even more details to pick out on a rewatch, things friends pointed out in passing as funny that I didn’t even notice and have such thought and significance to them when you know what’s coming after. I am not completely happy with the film’s attitude towards family and parents but I am more than happy to overlook it in service to rest of the movie.

A bit strange to have the extended “Furuhata is back!” section when the SMAP special came out a few months before this one. Perhaps some production issue messed with the ordering? Everyone wanking him off for being so cool also goes on far too long.

But it’s a very fun case! Clever and logical (which is to say, I figured out where it was going in advance and was able to happily pat myself on the back for doing so) and plays with the format in a cute ways.

There are two different moments when they stop playing with a different genre and start the “normal” Furuhata episode: First when he agrees to take the case and they drop the self-serious pretending that Furuhata is some kind of thriller protagonist that they are recruiting from a prison cell and the second time when the first actual murder happens and he goes from having to put together clues like a normal detective and gets to step into his Columbo shoes and circle his prey.

Don’t get me wrong the film looks incredible and those moody, lingering shots are absolutely gorgeous and haunting, but it feels like at some point in painstakingly animating all of this they forgot to make the rest of the film. What I thought felt like the midpoint of the plot thrusts straight into the the ending.

There are a lot of ways to read this movie and what it might say about the people who built, run and visit this park and what becomes of them when their machines turn on them, but there is a surprising lack of direct raising of philosophical ideas in the film. No muses on the potential interiority of the robots, on why this is happening outside of a purely mechanical level. One could read this film as asking nothing more than “Wouldn’t it be fucked if robots killed a load of people?” and just on that level it is a pretty damn enjoyable movie. The gunman makes for a good slasher villain.

I cannot stop thinking about the guns though. Our protagonist learns from his more experienced friend that the park is made safe via the a system built into the guns that detects the temperature of the target and refuses to fire at anything warm, thus keeping the human guests safe while allowing wanton violence against the lifeless, cold machines that populate the park as N.P.C.s. After learning this information they head to a brothel, turning down the opportunity to do something as everyday as taking part in a bank robbery so that they can enjoy that sweet, refreshing, room-temperature pussy and the caresses of the cold, knobbly, robot hands that the park engineers just can’t get right yet.

This idea that the park is safe because of this safety mechanism hangs over so much of the movie and makes it so sillier. Guests take part in fistfights and sword duels, trash entire buildings. Sure, the robots are meant to pull their punches but what mechanism is there to stop guests accidentally stabbing another guest, or for that matter themselves, while doing all of this?

Even charging $1,000 a day in 1970s money it’s hard to see how anyone could have thought it would be a good idea to let guests constantly shoot their expensive robots with real bullets and blow up the walls of buildings (with them inside) to simulate a fun little jailbreak and then pay teams of people to put it all back together every night. No wonder everything is falling apart and they can’t even properly maintain their control room that was built airtight for no apparent reason.

Anyway that was fun as hell.

Surprisingly lack of a central gimmick or draw for a special. Maybe the guest star was very famous? Still a nice extra-long episode.

I can’t believe that Furuhata Ninzaburō solved Fermat’s last theorem.

Having a cross-promotional episode and just making the boy band the murderers in inspired.

I watched the 1956 and 1978 adaptations last year and meant to catch this at the same time but have only just got around to it now. I genuinely cannot decide how to rank each version of this story. I enjoy them all a lot and they are all so interestingly of their time with the ’90s version of course angling it as about conformity and family control. The narration feels like it’s trying to copy Terminator 2 a little but I won’t hold that against it.

Bernadette I love you please stop being racist.

I like the ideas its playing with with regards to the different ways people react to and try to explore, contain and control the human body, about how anything different or new is treated as subversive in and of itself, but it failed to really emotionally connect with me at all. I think a large part of this is really just a failure of aesthetics. The bio-mechanical props move ridiculously, everyone is wearing fairly normal clothes other than Viggo Mortensen who looks like he is dressed like a ninja in a Syfy original movie and everything is just shot in a very dull way.

Interesting to see how Cronenberg tries to engage in body horror concepts when he does not yet have the budget to actually depict them.

They looked a lot better when they were evil.

It is kind of fascinating to take the premise of an existing show and make a Disney movie version of it. The plot beats, the pacing, the songs; it all feels so much like an imitation of Disney. They even have the standard issue green fire and fog for the villain song. Even visually it’s taking the basic designs from the show but animating them like Pixar. I can’t say I love the result—I like the show for how messy it is—but it was interesting to watch and especially to hear the same voice cast doing different takes on the same characters. Chloe especially feels very different at first to the point where I thought it might have been a different actor, sounding much more like a normal person up until she gets angry and then starts sounding like her television self.

The way I have settled on trying to explain this film is that it’s a horror movie edited like a child­ren’s edu­tain­ment pro­gramme. It is con­stant­ly trying to grab your attention with the way it uses images on the screen.

There are two scenes I think about a lot in particular. The first is the black and white silent flash back sequence where the girls are talking over it as if they are watching it with us, which ends with a wedding photo being taken where the flashbulb is juxtaposed with a montage of nuclear bomb detonations.

The second is when Kung Fug, Prof, Melody and Fanta and guiding Gorgeous down the stairs and it cuts to a low framerate, handheld, first person shot with the girls looking at and talking directly to the camera, even though all five girls are in frame and the camera’s perspective could not possibly represent any of them. It reminds of, of all things, We Know the Devil and its use of “we” in the narration while not being from the perspective of any one individual character.

Also Kung Fu is cool as hell.

I love Splatoon.

🤘🏻Love has no borders, nationalities, or genders🤘🏻

So much fun and energy in this movie. It rules. It feels like it was edited by someone’s cousin. Every once in a while the aliens show up to remind you that, oh right, there are aliens in this film.

Why is the dean from Community one of the superheroes?

The only reason to watch this is to do a double feature of it with the sequel as a prank on your friends.

This film is so much funnier than I remember. Half of it is just footage of the first film and then most of the rest is more flashbacks and it briefly turns into In the Mouth of Madness when Ricky goes on a date to the cinema where they are also playing footage of the first movie.

Nitpicking in the extreme: The reused footage has a strangely inconsistent quality and seems to often be much darker than the original film actually was, at least in the copies we watched, but they do at least colour-correct the slow motion shot from the end of the first film that had a jarringly different colour temperature to the rest of the shots surrounding it. I was also very glad that they removed the extremely harsh white flashing that accompanies flashbacks in the original movie that we are flashing back to here.

What elevates the reused footage is Eric Freeman’s narration. He is trying to be sinister throughout the movie but delivers every single line with the exact same menace and weight that would be comedic in and of itself but as it becomes a monotone across the entire picture just gets funnier and funnier as it goes on. Also, despite a huge portion of the film being reused from the first film Ricky’s narration manages to get some of the plot details wrong. When we finally leave the flashbacks his physical acting is iconic, constantly waggling his eyebrows like someone rigged his animation skeleton incorrectly and tied them directly to his lip movements.

There is someone named Samurai Retz in credits listed as playing himself and I have no idea who in the film that is meant to be and there does not seem to be any information about him online other than the fact that he is listed in the credits of this film.

Happy Friday the 13th these films are very boring. I like how the A in the middle of the line in the poster looks like it’s an arrow pointing to where in the text that the writing that you’ve scribbled in the margins is intended to be inserted so you could read it as Friday the new beginning 13th Part V.

It is hard to do grotesquerie without coming across as ableist or classist and I do not think the movie succeeds at that at all and it is frequently gory and nasty to the point of absurdity but I think that Skye actually has some surprising depth to her. She is mean, she lashes out, she alienates people, but it is clear that every time she does it is to try and arrest any control over her life back.

Grabbing and jerking the steering wheel of a moving car is obviously self-destructive but it is also the clearest illustration of that need to grab any power she can in a life where she is controlled, dictated and used as a marketing tool at all times. When a teleprompter fails her she spirals, unable to function when given any freedom because she has not been allowed to have any.

The curse turns the horror of her life up to eleven, forcing her to act and seemly claw back agency as she is pushed to the brink, only to reveal that it has just had her dancing on strings the whole time. That is kind of a double-edged sword for the movie to wield, though, as the big knife-twist at the end also makes it seem like at least the last third of the story just didn’t actually happen which comes off as a bit cheap to me.

I will admit that 90% of my love of this film is the last fifteen minutes but I do adore Ryu mastering the instant transition and wakizashi-in-heels techniques and the rest of the movie is still good. Nana straightforwardly taking over a newly reinvigorated clan as the new boss at the end does not really make sense but it rules.

Absolutely fantastic. I wish I had know even less about it going in that I did.

Very fun movie. The original animation is extremely charming and the dub is hilarious. The metafictional jokes and obvious “censorship” are really fun to pick out and the acting is great with some absolutely wonderful, abrupt, line deliveries that had me in stitches. “Now get in the box!”

A beautiful film and I love how it ties together struggles of indigenous culture and minority language with that of queerness. I don’t love the obligatory scene of a hurt, queer child apologising to a shitty parent for taking measures to protect himself.

Happy Piccolo Day! To celebrate I watched the best Dragon Ball movie with some friends. Saw this for the first time last year and I was shocked by how good it was. I had never watched Super, the last Dragon Ball I had seen was Battle of the Gods and thought it was awful and thought that I had just outgrown the series, but this movie is everything good about Dragon Ball. It’s charming, funny and cool as hell.

Some highlights: Pan is really cute and the interplay Piccolo and her and the rest of Gohan’s family is great. Some people genuinely and reasonably believing a sinister conspiracy theory around Bulma, Capsule Corp. and all the aliens hanging around with her. Badman shirt cameo. Hedo being vaccinated against bullets. Piccolo having just forgotten that one of his powers is getting big and having to be reminded as well as him not even realising that he turned orange as as new super form and then not really caring about it and just naming it “Orange Piccolo.”

This is a fun one, in between Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. We still have fight scenes where everyone isn’t just flying, Goku still using his staff and Piccolo still positioned as an antagonist who only has a temporary truce with the Goku. The Garlic Junior arc was my favourite in the show a kid so I have a fondness for him even if he’s not particularly interesting here.

Happy Piccolo Day! To celebrate I watched the closest thing to a Dragon Ball movie where King Piccolo is the bad guy with some friends. It’s the same as pretty much every other Dragon Ball Z movie. It’s fine.

Actually pretty fun! Venom and Eddie Brock’s relationship and banter is surprisingly a highlight of the movie.

It‘s so strange to watch Theroux calmly hold a conversation with people extolling such unfiltered, vile evil. All he has to do is let them talk and, of course, not push them back.

Watched immediately after the feature film. Fun little idea with a cute central joke. I prefer the dynamic between Lucy and Amy in this than the the feature film, but what works for a quick gag in a short is not the same as what works for an hour and a half-long rom-com.

I enjoy how immediately it gets to the point, not just with the goofy spy stuff but also with the open lesbianism. Only having a very vague idea of the plot going in I would have imagined it would follow some new trainee learning about D.E.B.S. in time with the audience and a drawn out series of innuendo and coming to terms with repressed feelings before a big lesbian reveal, but no. The movie swiftly establishes the setting and has characters who are unabashedly, openly and casually gay. And it’s just camp fun, sci-fi espionage on the level of Spy Kids with lesbians in stripper mock school uniforms. A shame that it has the supervillain going straight (well, in one sense of the word) rather than the cop going rogue, though.

Interesting counterpart to Project Eden, going back to the spy thriller well again but with a much more serious tone. I don’t have that much in the way of thoughts about it but it was a good close to the series.

Good film to watch the day a psychiatrist agreed to prescribe me ADHD medication. Very fun film. Love the cardboard sets and props. Some of the characters can be a bit annoying, I don’t like the film crew much and I think the documentary parts ever really work, but the movie is more than charming enough to look past that.

Fei has a red streak in her hair which basically makes her Shadow the Hedghog.

The avant-garde “unfinished” special effects were a bold artistic choice but not enough to save it.

Sadako and Kayako do end up in a Yuri situation with each other at the end if you think about it.

This series, when it worked, was carried by the atmosphere carefully crafted by Takashi Shimizu’s careful direction. Without that and with the most bland Hollywood script imaginable—let’s invent a new family member for Kayako again!—there is no substance at all left.

While the Ju-On films do feature overlapping nonlinear vignettes this just feels like three different short movies in a trench coat. In the most boring and straightforward we have Amber Tamblyn as Sarah Michelle Gellar’s cheaper replacement sister uncovering new Lore that makes no difference to anything, in the school we have basically nothing of any substance, and finally in Chicago we have some decent but familiar scenes of families succumbing to the curse as it spreads. Also in the scene with the milk you can see someone holding a cloth at the bottom of the frame to catch any that falls.

I really didn’t need to watch this.

This short manages to achieve the ideal form of the Hollywood Grudge movies: Not a single Japanese person in sight 😌

Bringing in Kobayashi’s story from The Curse into The Grudge makes a lot of sense for the remake but I can’t say I’m fond of the rest of the changes. The plot is more linear now and much more focused on having a central protagonist in a way that makes everything unfolding much less interesting and everyone in Tokyo other than the Saeki family is a white American now. I understand that Hollywood thinks that audiences are terrified of subtitles but the degree to which almost everyone with a speaking role is made white is incredible.

Even though it’s still nonlinear this one feels a bit more focused and straightforward than the others, to start with at least. There are some sillier moments as they experiment with different ways Kayako can appear—these movies are good at building tension but never seem quite sure what to do that tension breaks and the ghost violence starts—but it does generally feel like this is trying to move the series forward when it has been stuck doing the same basic thing for three movies now. I also really enjoy how it plays with the nonlinear structure by having Chiharu herself also experiencing events out of order, building on Izumi and Toyama’s shared visions of each other in the previous movie.

The ending is silly but it at least is doing something different and it would have been interesting to see what the series could have done with that if it had continued.

Does a better job of recapturing the creeping dread of the original than The Curse 2 did and also executes on the concept of Kayako forcing her victims to relive her trauma and become like her much better. The strange beauty of Toyama seeing a vision of his daughter, and her of her father, across time is also and how it is a cursed blessing that leads to their deaths is also wonderful. I don’t think having a higher budget than its predecessors did the film much favours though, with the special effects being distracting and looking much worse than the simple makeup the ghosts have in most scenes.

This gets off to a bad start, with the start of the movie just being the end of the first one. Starting with a climax the film then has to try to escalate in some way from the first one and depicts the curse spreading so quickly that subsequent movies have to ignore it in order to work at all.

While there’s not all that much to the story in the end the slow buildup of tension across the overlapping vignettes is excellent and climaxes with something suitably horrific. Like many horror series the first (non-short) film really nails what its going for in a way that its sequels never manage.

I prefer this one a little bit to In a Corner if only for the weirdness of the cat noises thing, which the Ju-On series just decided to run with forever afterwards. Like In a Corner it’s undercut a bit by a funny final shot.

A prototype for Ju-On that doesn’t really land for me. Kind of highlights how thin the series is in general and how much it relies on building that atmosphere that this short doesn’t have time to build up or execute well. There is also something strangely comical about the fade to black at the end as Hisayo grips her obviously inadequate weapon. Also why are they wearing their school uniforms just to call in to check on the rabbits when they’re on summer holidays.

I love the contrast between the ridiculous, camp, doll house of the camp and the grungy, more realistic gay bar. The attempts at forced heterosexuality are silly, wrong and off-putting when they are not just being accidentally queer.

The show did a lot of different tones and pastiches, and for a bigger budget movie the choice to go for a cyberpunk James Bond with some Geiger influences was a solid one. It does feel like the show turned up to eleven. I laughed out loud at the Wattsman theme song but I think it does overdo the 80s pop segments a bit and it indulges in some tired anime sex comedy that the show managed to avoid most of the time.

A hateful portrayal of the mental illness deformity that is pretty par for course as horror movies go. That aside, a fun time through a serious of baffling choices. This movie has both a monkey butler and completely out of place Iron Maiden tracks on top of its serial killer plot and a sleepwalking protagonist who can talk to insects.

If there is a utterly dogshit movie in the movie night poll it is what everyone will vote for. Everyone knows that this film is bad but it is something to behold how completely the personality of Dragon Ball is ripped out of this movie to replace with a deluge of Hollywood clichés.

While there are some noticeable differences between this film’s take on the characters and that of the show it’s not different enough to be particularly interesting and just feels like a thirty minute episode padded out to a full hour.

I watched this because I had seen a clip of the Street Fighter scene and I had no idea how long it was going to take for that to actually arrive. A lot of the silliness is quite fun but I think its attempts to translate cartoon physical gags into live action fall flat most of the time and it has a lot of humour based around the protagonist just being a lech, which I always hate.

I decided to watch this after seeing some clips of Cynthia Khan looking incredible while kicking people’s arses and this movie absolutely delivers on getting to see more of Cynthia Khan looking incredible while kicking people’s arses and with such frequency and frenetic forward momentum that it is kind of tiring to watch. Often quite funny as well and I always appreciate the United States government being the bad guy in a movie.

Every scene and subplot feels very disconnected from each other, each location and set of costumes feel like it came from a different production from the one before, and most of them not really coming across as fully formed. It would have taken a much larger budget to make it properly work but it also would be a lot less charming and the end result is just so much fun.

Some of that is just in the script, though. There is a pretty simple main plot and a lot of the runtime is spent throwing extra obstacles at Johnny that were not part of the original short story, which don’t tend to overlap with each other much. In the climax every antagonist lines to be neatly dealt with one by one.

I watched a fan edit which like many such edits cuts in a lot of deleted scenes and extra footage from other versions of the movie at much worse quality that mostly fail to add much of anything other than padding the runtime but does include Ice-T making sure we know that the dolphin is addicted to heroin and also has the least-transphobic joke of any Hollywood movie from 1995 and it’s very important to me to keep those bits in.

Also shoutout to my friend Tigris, who on seeing Takeshi credited in the opening titles joked that Takeshi from Takeshi’s Castle was in the movie, not knowing who Beat Takeshi was and not realising that she was actually correct.

Much is said about the choice of elaborate, comic book-inspired transitions but what made me scream at my television was the soundtrack blaring Middle Eastern-themed music every single time we get a shot of the Utah desert.

I quite enjoyed the occasional comic relief of Herbie and Joseph discussing the perfect murder and the general sitcom vibes of the family completely oblivious to and disconnected to what’s going on with the Charlies. The resolution did seem a is a bit sudden.

A gorgeous film and (a point I am stealing from a friend) one that finds beauty in things that are normally considered disgusting: Fungus and insects. It makes those the centre of its environmentalism, not just giving us the usual imagery of flowers, rainforests and charismatic megafauna.

The animation in this film in stunning and I love how it wears its artifice on its sleeve. The visible rough lines, the geometricity and lack of perspective on the backgrounds, Cartoon Saloon’s art looks like drawings come to life in a way that most animation doesn’t. It’s absolutely gorgeous.

I need to stop watching bad movies just for the bit. There is shockingly little dog playing basketball in the movie about the dog playing basketball.

Despite the manic pixie dream girl of it all and dark turns of this I couldn’t help but be charmed by it. Bae Doona’s physical acting is great and I loved watching her performance evolve through the film.

The film can’t really help replicating the ideas its critiquing with glamourising the sexualisation of young women and marking ageing as something monstrous—despite the utter lack of any subtlety I could see, à la Fight Club, people coming out of this just thinking that Sue is hot and being old sucks—but it goes so damn hard with what it does that I cannot just get swept up in it.

It may be that I was just in a bad mood watching this but I could not find much enjoyment in it and it just went on and on. Perhaps the theatrical cut rather than the extended cut might have tried my patience less, but just two and a half hours of it rather than nearly three would still have felt far too much. Going back over everything after the twists felt like it just dragged on far more than was needed for showing new angles on what was happening.

The sexual aspects of mostly felt very sleazy, especially when going over the horrific grooming aspect of it, and not in a way that felt like it was trying to be deliberately offputting. Though I think it has really helped to confirm to myself that I am pretty asexual these days.

What the fuck is this movie’s problem with women?

Rachel and Aiden trying to flee to suburbia and hide from the consequences of their actions by trying to be a Normal Family and put on brave faces for each other is a strong start. Things like Aiden’s photography hobby seeming innocent until you realise that it’s a way to check people’s faces for signs of the curse or Rachel’s severe insecurity at not being the archetypical mother figure as a way to make her son feel safe.

But they can’t keep pretending they’ve done nothing wrong when the consequences of the curse they’ve spread start to reach their safe haven.

But as the plot goes on it’s just all a bit... whatever. Samara’s new motivation seems at odds with the first film while her new backstory feels like a retread of it but with a bonus Catholicism. The idea of Rachel not fitting the typical image of motherhood is not resolved by her breaking away from that but just by fulfilling it in a different way by being a big, boring mamma bear hero.

Genuinely one of my favourite films in the series, certainly my favourite of the American ones. It has a simple premise but manages to squeeze a good bit out of it in its short runtime.

I really enjoy it imagining social consequences of the tape spreading which is something that most sequels in this series lack. The way it becomes this underground subculture onto itself, these kids trying to understand what they are experiencing but not having a clue how to investigate or interrogate it, sharing stories and recording videos of themselves, how how nasty that turns.

I think this was good but it seemed like it was smoothing out almost all of the edges from the original book in lots of different ways and also I took an edible that was far too strong and ended up in mind prison ten thousand years for the second half so I might need to rewatch it.

The idea of running the Santa operation like a hyper-competent thriller spy agency is cute (if you don’t think about it too much). I was worried that the movie would have that as basically its only joke but it’s allowed to fade into the background without constant lampshade hanging or winking at the camera over it.

I was similarly worried that Arthur’s steadfast belief in the true spirit of Christmas would be a bit overbearing but his earnestness is cute without going totally overboard and the egos and cynicism of the other Santas have a groundedness that ties the silly antics into a plot that manages to feel real and touching despite my own inherit cynicism to stories about Christmas.

I believe that I watched this last year as part of a movie night thing and trashed it. I was feeling extremely cynical about it and just couldn’t get over the idea of someone who talks about getting rid of the “surplus population” being so easily convinced towards being the most generous man in the world (and even at the end of the movie he still indulges in playing with the power he holds over the Cratchits before being nice to them).

This year I watched it with my partner who is a bit more into sentimental Christmas movies than I am and let the politics melt aside to enjoy it and had a genuinely lovely time. I don’t think I need to sing the praises too much, that the puppetry is great and that Michael Caine’s Scrooge being a perfect foil for it is a given. The songs are fun and yes of course I cried at Tiny Tim dying.

But to put on my cynic hat one last time the framing device with Rizzo and Gonzo could really be cut it consistently fails to be funny.

This film could maybe be salvaged but cutting out twenty minutes of Jim Carrey’s screentime and all the tone-ruining pop culture reference-based quips. That would remove most of the humour but also there is only one joke in the entire film that made me laugh so it wouldn’t be much of a loss.

That said, the dialogue and editing of this movie is already jarring enough as it is. Conversations do not flow at all, people spout things that have little relation to what was just said or have extended gag reactions that kill the pace of conversation before just being completely ignored. Actually, cutting those would probably also help.

The exception to this is when Jim Carrey is acting off Jim Carrey, which they seem to have put remarkably more effort into making feel natural and flowing with the characters interacting, hugging and playing off each other in a way that really sells physical presence despite it being the same guy twice, something that is not extended as much to the CGI animal characters who will very often not appear in frame with the people they are talking to at all. It’s a kind of maddening how much it feels like so much more effort was put into Jim Carrey sucking himself off.

On the bright side, more than the previous films we do get just Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Shadow amongst themselves without having to have human characters around and that broadly works! I could have done with, again, less pop culture quips from Sonic and less generic Klingon from Knuckles but these characters are generally fun, they look good, and the action is often cool. This part of the movie actually works and Shadow’s storyline, simple as it is, hits, and the choices made to make Shadow and Sonic parallel each other more works quite well.

The climax would have been pretty great if we could have stayed with it for longer than thirty seconds of a Live & Learn riff at at time before cutting back to Jim Carrey playing generic Jim Carrey character talking to generic Jim Carrey character for several minutes, alas!

Hopefully if they make another one Carrey will not come back out of retirement again.

Has any slasher movie every actually been good? Is this entire genre a prank?

At least it has the Maniac Cop Rap.

Damn this movie actually has colour in it. I thought that was illegal for Hollywood to still do. Genuinely I was predisposed to enjoy this film more simply for it not being allergic to saturation. And Mia Goth is phenomenal in it. I loved watching her acting throughout.

They all suck shit and they’re all the same, basically.

My friend Ruby on the Friday the 13th movies, one of which she streams every Friday the 13th.

A pretty boring slasher. It seems fairly critical of the police at first with the polices’ reaction to the murders to try and shut down any internal investigation and some vox pops showing the public’s complete lack of surprise of a serial killer in uniform but this is quickly dropped for a more standard story of our good cop taking the fall and having to clear his name.

The version I watched was not helped by the editing in of some additional scenes that were apparently filmed for a Japanese TV broadcast version of the movie that help to kill the pacing and spoil any mystery on top of being a jarring stepdown in direction and video resolution.

I decided to watch this in between the second and third series of Chucky. The voodoo serial killer angle has been entirely expunged—which is not surprising for a film released in 2019—and instead Chucky is now a doll with artificial intelligence who is meant to learn as you play with him.

It initially seems like the film is going to do something with this. The first victim in the story is a Vietnamese man who commits suicide after being fired from his job assembling products for a giant American tech corporation named Kaslan. One might expect the movie to then frame the Kaslan Corporation as the ultimate villains of the story, but the Foxconn-inspired death is quickly forgotten and the only bearing this has on the rest of the film is that Chucky can magically control any and all electronics around him with his glowing E.T. finger, up to and including a self-driving car.

I don’t find A.I. Chucky very interesting. The original Chucky was never a particularly deep character but he is fun where robo-Chucky is just predictable. Every step of his journey from damaged, innocent doll to serial killer is fairly obvious in advance.

Also why did they make the doll look like James Woods.

At last we finally know the origin story of a woman who was invented two minutes before the end of a show for a cliffhanger that was never resolved 😌

The inciting incident of this movie is a petty disgraced noble extrajudicially massacring a fifteen men who wandered into a restricted area. To stem any potential backlash a false story of tiger attacks is spread.

Some of the deads’ countrymen come to investigate this just as, by sheer coincidence, a zombie tiger just happens to go on a rampage and kill a shitload of people.

When they finally kill the undead tiger, the world’s most sceptical man cuts open its stomach and finds nothing but rotten flesh inside it, not the remains of anything identifiable, even the two dozen men he has just seen it kill and declares that seeing as the bones of his friends aren’t present in its stomach then the monster tiger story is clearly bullshit.

The world’s most sceptical yet gullible man is then convinced it was actually this innocent group of people by an official telling him “Oh yeah the tiger was a lie but we found this conveniently identifiable box from a tribe you’re related to next the bodies I guess it was them” so they kill the entire village where they make those styles of boxes.

The only survivor of this massacre is a young girl who decides to become the Joker of zombies.

I will admit that people with mental health issues being preyed on and disbelieved is a very natural progression from the previous film but this is a Hollywood horror movie so how people with mental health issues is handled is not good.

It does pull of neat tricks with keeping you guessing which doll is the real Chucky before undermining that that even matters at all, with the puzzling question of how Chucky gets from being a head in Andy Barclay’s safe into the asylum acting as a hint to that.

But other than providing that hint Andy is entirely superfluous to the story. You could lift everything involving him out of the movie and it would work fine and his presence just messes up the pacing, especially in the climax which seems to pause just to wrap up his part.

And now I am caught up with the TV show having gone through a series of seven films that struggle to rise above “okay”. I still enjoyed this and it will hopefully give context for whatever the show pulls in the second and third series. Glen[da] surely has to come into it at least.

The series pivots back to horror and actually does a decent job of it. In particular I keep turning the treatment of Nica over in my head. A part of the threat in the earlier films is Chucky targetting children who have very limited agency and whose concerns people do not take seriously and this movie replicates that with an adult through the sheer ableism that Nica faces from her family and the world, though there is a few plot contrivances to make it work and the way it ties her paraplegia into the series lore is a bit ridiculous.

The lore is also a bit of an elephant in the room. The movie felt almost like a soft reboot at the start before it starts to dump more and more of that in. This is something I kind of liked in the television series but that has a lot more room to let that seep in over time to allow the show to evolve, while here it feels more like it’s bulldozing an otherwise tight plot.

And if the series is going to keep bringing up previous stories so much it should probably try to actually have it make sense as a whole. The backstory stuff here does not feel like it fits with either the original movie or the other retconned versions of it.

Definitely an improvement over Bride of Chucky, fully embracing absolutely nonsense and grotesque comedy, but also possibly the one that has aged the most poorly out of all of these so far.

The movie’s tone is a bit all over the place and I found the more light hearted parts a bit hokey but when it’s serious it works for me and the climax is absolutely glorious. I love Ryu and Nana.

It’s the late nineties, Scream came out two years ago and we think horror movies are cringe unless veiled with an layer of irony. The Child’s Play series over and now it’s time for the Chucky franchise.

Okay the move into horror comedy does make sense, really. This is a series about a serial killer children’s doll. And I think this film has a lot going for it. Tiffany is great and Chuck’s new design is pretty cool and stops it from repeating the schtick of the last three films of pretending to be a cute cuddly doll who fools children.

The movie makes up a magic amulet so that this doesn’t have to be a fourth film in a row of him chasing Andy Barclay, but road trip to get the MacGuffin is a pretty boring setup too and I don’t think making Chucky and Tiff the main characters instead of his victims was a great move. Chucky is fun but he’s very one-note. Tiff is great but doesn’t have that much more depth. Jade and Jesse are just boring and I do not care about them at all. And the general 90s-ness of it grates against me.

Still, the series has reinvented itself now and I know it does eventually find its footing by the time it gets to the TV show at least, I just hope it actually did it in one of the movies before that too.

The same basic plot again but this time in a military school. I might not be rating this so low if I wasn’t watching these back to back but I do think it is also a step down. We are getting a little sillier; Chucky gets some more abuse while pretending to be a doll and the kills are getting more elaborate or ironic. But we’re not fully into horror comedy yet and the result is neither tense nor particularly funny.

As horror sequels go it’s pretty decent but isn’t bringing much new to the table. Which Chucky now being an already established movie monster the film is not shy about showing him off from the get-go, so it lacks the first film’s sense of escalation. We do get to see a lot more puppetry though and it is very impressive work, though some lingering shots where Chucky’s face abruptly stops animating do break the illusion somewhat. In links to the TV show we have Kyle and also the theme music.

A great movie of the sort to watch with friends while making fun of it. Many problems play off each other in a such a way that I find it difficult to decide where to start with it.

A lot of this movie was clearly written with certain set pieces in mind without much thought as to how to get from A to B. It feels like after a certain amount of time in a given location a character will declare what might as well be “well we got all the special effects shots we wanted here done, let’s go to [next location]” with the flimsiest of justifications.

It’s hard to dwell on this in the moment though because it will jump to the next scene the moment someone finishes speaking without so much as an establishing shot to give some breathing room. In at least one case it seemed like it happened mid-sentence.

Almost as jarring as the editing is the acting, which feels unpractised to the point of giving the impression that there is a lot of ad libbing happening. That the actors are expecting to hear the director yell “cut” before realising that the scene is continuing as a single shot and they need to keep it going.

Characters are just baffling in other ways too. Mo’ and Chocolate Chip Charlie talk about going after “it” before they actually see The Stuff move and then barely react to punching people and seeing their faces slough off to reveal that they are hollow inside. They then split up and Charlie proceeds to then disappear from the movie for an hour. Mo’, meanwhile, sees a newspaper article about a boy knocking cartons of Stuff over at a supermarket and with possibly the most grim and serious line delivery he gives in the entire movie declares that he needs to meet this child.

Everyone being so off-kilter perhaps adds to the tension that they might be being affected by the titular substance. I kept expecting reveals of a character having been taken over that just don’t arrive. Certainly it feels like it should be happening when characters are shouting not to let it touch them as if a single drop would be fatal while repeatedly getting it all over their faces. There’s a scene where Andrea Marcovicci’s character is meant to be pretending to eat The Stuff that includes a wonderful shot of her grimacing and cringing with white fluff dangling off of her lips, apparently having been unable to resist the temptation on set to see what the prop actually tastes like and realising that it’s awful.

The special effects are, at least, consistently entertaining, though not consistent in any other regard. The threat The Stuff poses is completely arbitrary moment to moment with it being utterly passive for extended periods while suddenly lunging at our heroes or gushing forth in tidal waves as soon as an escape route opens for them.

In the end though, the looming and arbitrary threat of the The Stuff is no match for an openly racist conspiracy theorist radio host with his own private militia.

Smile dares to ask “What if It Follows had been good?”

If this film had been described in detail to me I probably would have thought it would sound terrible and going back and looking at the trailer now it does not look promising.

But it worked for me. Everything that in the trailer seems so trite gripped me in the moment while watching the full piece. It just all came together into a really tense and occasionally brutal movie.

My only real complaint is the fakeouts where we see the protagonist doing something that turns out to have been a dream or otherwise not real which I feel breaks the rules of how the visions of the smiler (I’m just going to call it that) otherwise work.

I’ve been watching the first series of the Chucky TV show while sick and enjoying it. It starts off slow and focused, its own-self contained thing, but then as it escalates and gets sillier it starts steadily dropping in characters and stories from the movies. I’ve never seen any of the Child’s Play or Chucky movies and decided to give them a go before starting the second series of the TV show.

It’s always interesting going back to the original of a long-running series and seeing how it compares. What of the primitive iconography goes all the way back to the start? What inconvenient plot details have been forgotten? How does the glimpse of Charles Lee Ray’s pre-doll life we see in this movie compare to the flashbacks from the TV show?

Certainly how the show frames murder as a part of Chucky and Tiffany’s relationship gives a retroactive and unintentional bisexual subtext to Eddie’s underdeveloped relationship with Charles in this.

But just taking the movie on its own merits: It’s pretty good! I really like the slow escalation. The doll evolves from object of tension to a stalking presence to a slapstick slasher to a gruesome monster.

There’s some bits I think could have been left on the table. Much of the voodoo stuff and the second scene with the homeless guy who sells the doll to Karen in particular, but they don’t drag the movie down enough to ruin it. It’s easy to see why this was a hit that resulted in so many sequels.

A man believes that he is promised the middle class American life of ownership of a suburban home, wife and 2½ children and cannot fathom why he does not have what he is owed. The person who sympathises with him the most in the movie is a Nazi and he is incapable of self-reflection over this or anything else, going to his grave not understanding how he became the bad guy.