Really outdoing myself with how much later I’m posting this than what I intended to. I’m still busy, but I feel like I tend to intend to write more for this blog than I actually do writing lately. Not included here, but these last couple of months I’ve also watched Squid Game (which I enjoyed, but I’m not sure a second season makes sense), Night of the Living Dead (1968) (which was more progressive with what the ending acknowledged that I expected), Venom: Let There Be Carnage (It helped having low expectations. It could have been grittier and had a more cool vibe to it in that sense, but it was still a fun movie), and more.
Cathy’s Curse (1977)
Young Cathy discovers an old doll accompanied by a picture of her late aunt. As the people around her notice how enamoured by this old doll Cathy has become, the doll possesses her with her aunt’s spirit. A psychic has a vision of the car crash that Cathy’s aunt Laura died in. Cathy acquires telekinetic powers from this possession and is compelled to kill numerous people. I liked the set design and creativity of it. I feel like it’s an underrated movie. It was compared to The Exorcist, having followed its release, but it’s not that kind of a film. The dialogue isn’t delivered the best. The film definitely isn’t perfect, but it’s not bad by any means. The effects and visuals give their own charms.
The Amusement Park (1975/2021)
The Amusement Park is a film that was initially made to be released in 1975, but went unreleased for years until this year. The Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania commissioned Romero to make this film warning against elder abuse, but the film was shelved. His wife states that she believes it was because that film was too edgy for their tastes. The movie uses an amusement park as a setting to explore the different ways in which older people can be inconvenienced, taken advantage of, discriminated against and abused.
I heard of this film due to its status as being considered missing and then rediscovered and coming out with the reputation of being too edgy for its intended purpose, but the theme of elder abuse didn’t always tug at my heartstrings the way it was intended to. All the different scenes are intended to represent different things that make the lives of older people more difficult to varying degrees, and I’m not saying they don’t. For example, the scene where the old man tries to talk to children he doesn’t know and is yelled at for it and where he is reading to a child and the child’s parent takes her away, now I can only receive this scene from the perspective of someone living in 2021, but being old doesn’t mean strangers should be obligated to trust you with their children.
Censor (2021)
Enid (played by Niamh Algar) works as a film censor in 1980s Britain at the peak of the video nasties scare. Enid watches movie after movie featuring any number of violent occurrences without batting an eyelid, doing her job. When a film she approved the release of is blamed by the media following a brutal murder as being the inspiration for the crime, she is named and shamed with the public in uproar. Already under extra pressure from this negative attention, she comes across a film that brings her memories of a traumatic childhood experience that led to her sister’s disappearance to the forefront and calls into question the reality of what happened and is now happening. The ending was effectively shocking. I liked the aesthetic of the time period and how it was presented, the cinematography,
The Conjuring 2 (2016)
Ed and Lorraine Warren (played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Famiga) come out of a break from their paranormal investigations to travel to London and take a look at a house which mother of four, Peggy, claims is being haunted. Simply being asked to give a verdict as to whether it’s a real haunting or not, they agree to check the place out. The middle child, Janet, even claims to experience possession by an old man who has been proven to be a past tenant of the house. Ed and Lorraine’s portrayal of a healthy straight relationship in horror movies is refreshing. James Wan directed the movie to have scares that balance tension and show the root of the fear and the monster that you’re supposed to be afraid of instead of letting it be all mental.
Sleepy Hollow (1999)
Sleepy Hollow is a Tim Burton film starring Johnny Depp (of course) as the main character. It was one I hadn’t heard of before until I actively sought out something Halloween-y to watch back at the end of October. Ichabod Crane has been assigned to go to Sleepy Hallow and solve a crime they’ve been struggling with so that his boss gets him out of his hair. When he gets there, he soon realises that the locals of the town believe the murders to be a product of the headless horseman. Not believing their fairy tales, Ichabod initially dismisses this and investigates others, but the more he stays in the town, the more he realises why they feel the way they do and who is the cause of the whole thing. I watched this on Halloween and it was a really nice way to spend the evening since I had no plans. Felt like a comforting Halloween spooky that’s not scary but still very much in the spirit of things.
The Ring Virus (1999)
The Ring Virus is the Korean film adaptation of the Koji Suzuki book also famously adapted into Japanese the year prior by Hideo Nakata. Kim Dong-bin’s adaptation is possibly the most loyal to the book, also changing the protagonist to be female, like many other adaptations, but remaining true to some details that most adaptations either gloss over or leave out entirely. This movie isn’t very innovative. It doesn’t try to put its own spin on it or include new details, but I feel that trying to do that is one of the ways in which the more recent adaptations have gone astray and become disappointing. It’s good at staying true to the investigative elements of the storytelling process.
I like that they included the bit about Eun-suh (Sadako) being intersex and incorporated it into the story even with storytelling. I haven’t seen many movies with it as a component, so I’d like to see some intersex people’s thoughts on how that aspect of her character is portrayed in this movie and the book, especially considering the way in which the film chooses to foreshadow this part of her character from the beginning.
The Last Duel (2021)
synopsis: The Last Duel, directed by Ridley Scott, is a film about Frances last court duel stemming from an accusation of rape. The story is broken up into three perspectives. First, the husband, Jean de Carrouges played by Matt Damon, which emphasizes his bravery. Second, the accused, Jacques Le Gris, played by Adam Driver, which emphasizes how charismatic he believes himself to be and how he feels that women think of him. And lastly, the victim, played by Jodie Comer, from her perspective we see a more balanced view of the personalities of the two men as well as the differing ways in which they wronged her.
takeaways: I was unsure about going to see such a long period drama at the cinema without having seen much about it to know whether it would be worth it, but I read someone compare it’s structure and storytelling to Rashomon, which works well for the movie and makes its length a non-issue for this period drama. It doesn’t drag anywhere, which is what I was mainly concerned about at first.
Sleeping Beauty (2011)
Starring Emily Browning and set in Sydney, Sleeping Beauty is about a university student named Lucy. To appease her flatmates, Lucy takes on another job to get more money for rent and ends up initially working as an erotic waitress for some upper class clientele. She then gets the opportunity to sleep nude for money while men pay to see and interact with her while she’s asleep.
I ended up rating this two stars on Letterboxd. I was on the fence about it at different points but didn’t end up feeling like the elements I liked made up for where I felt it was lacking. While I did like how it’s a movie set in Sydney and feels like it, as much as I want to watch more Australian made movies that feel like they’re Australian, that doesn’t mean the bar should be this low. We are offered a great insight into the reasoning behind why the men are coming to the establishment where she’s working, we don’t learn enough about why the protagonist is. We end up knowing more about a male customer’s motivations than the leading female character.
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