Sorry this is a little late! In my defense, I’ve spent the past two weeks moving cross-country. I am now officially tucked up in a cute little apartment in DC, the cats are good (after a few questionable activities), and I am mid-job search. But you’re not here for that. On to the films!
I don’t know if this is horror so much as action/sci fi but I feel like it belongs here. In the middle of ???? (it was filmed in Norway, though!) is a big ol’ secret gorge. For years, the West and the East have sent folks up to man each side. It’s like a lighthouse keeper deal: you stay by yourself for a year, you watch the gorge, then you’re relieved of duty. But this time around, our two gorge-ites decided to befriend each other (which, you know, strictly verboten) and they both fall in love and discover the secret of the gorge. It was a fun watch. I might have figured out the secret pretty easy and kept pointing out plot holes during the watch but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have fun watching it! Plus, Miles Teller and Anya Taylor Joy have good chemistry. It’s a good, fun “there’s nothing else to watch” movie.
I was not a fan of Longlegs but the trailer for this had such a different tone that I was cautiously optimistic. And I was right to be! The first five minutes of this movie are better than the entirity of Longlegs. Twin boys find a wind up monkey in their absent (missing?) father’s things and discover quickly that turning its key causes someone around them to die a truly bizarre, accidental-seeming death. The first bit of the movie follows the boys in their early teens and then it moves forward twenty-five years to find the twins estranged and one of them trying to spend a week with the son he rarely sees when the monkey shows its face again. This movie has the kind of vibe like if Edgar Wright made a Final Destination movie. It’s got the Rube Goldberg deaths, very graphic and almost silly half the time, along with a sensibility that’s incredible silliness taken very seriously. It had good vibes. I’d recommend it.
Companion is fun. I don’t want to say too much because it’s definitely more fun if you go into it pretty blind. I’ll just say that a couple is on their way to a weekend away in the middle of nowhere with two other couple friends when things go wrong. The acting, the directing, the casting. Everything is great. It’s diabolical, it’s laugh out loud funny at times, and you’re cheering by the end. I’ve watched it a couple times now and it hits each time. Really, really enjoyed this film.
Instead of watching the Oscars this year, I finally watched The Substance. It had so much hype and you know I’m always pro horror movies getting main stream acceptance. What I should have thought of before, though, was that the movies that get main stream acceptance? Usually don’t hit with me so much. I loved what The Substance had to say, I loved Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley’s performances but it was just too on the nose for me. I think I preferred Grafted which I reviewed last month. This was just not quite my cup of tea.
I have a vague memory of being told The Pact was good back in like .. 2011, trying to watch it, and falling asleep. But I needed a movie to watch with my dad and it was new on Shudder so I pulled it up. I was clearly not in the right mood ten years ago because The Pact is fun. After their mother’s death, one sister goes to clear out the house and when the second sister shows up, first sister is missing. The house seems to be haunted, there’s some sort of family secret to uncover, and while the movie is low budget, it does a lot with the little it has. I loved the way it ended and while it has a sequel, the sequel is bad. Just stick with the first one.
Have you ever wanted to see John Lithgow torture Geoffrey Rush in a nursing home? Then have I got a film for you. Set in New Zealand, Geoffrey Rush is a judge who is sent to stay in a care home after he has a stroke at court. Said care home is secretly under the tyrannical rule of John Lithgow, who is going full bonkers in this role, who plays with the residents as he sees fit. This is a movie about losing your sense of identity, aging, and the fear of your body betraying you as you are suddenly not the person that you used to be. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel the need to see it again but I did enjoy it while I watched it. It also ended and the man seated behind Glitch and I felt the need to tell us how he felt about the ending which I think is a sign of a movie doing what it’s meant to do.
Hello from the East Coast! I landed here in early March and am doing my best to fit in! I have a cute little apartment, I have wonderful friends who have already helped me more than I expected them to, and my mother came with for the first week to help me get things/put furniture together/settle in. I love my little apartment so much.
It has been slightly hectic, though. The first day I left the cats alone in the apartment while I ran errands, I came back to find them nowhere. It’s a small apartment and there’s not many places to hide so I was devestated, convinced they’d somehow gotten out. Well, there is a gap between the washer dryer and the wall. Do you see where I’m going? Less than 24 hours after landing in DC, I had to call the local fire department to rescue Rosie (Jamie had, meanwhile, just gotten himself stuck in a cabinet).
This is also how I met one of my upstairs neighbors, a twentysomething named Garrett who did his best. His roommate, another twentysomething named Patrick, is an Irish musician so sometimes I’m reading books on the couch and am serenaded by banjo music. They full on had a session the other night and because they’re all pros, it was actually super fun.
I’m still job-less at the moment (fingers are super crossed waiting to hear back from a good interview I had last week, though!) so again, if you’d like to subscribe for $35/year or $5/month, you will be doing me a big ol’ solid. AND you get to pick a book for me to read and dedicate a full issue to. The first one of those should be coming up soon as I believe the pub date for my first request is this month. Keep an eye out for it!
And, of course, enjoy the rest of March, all you lovely readers. I’ll see you in the April showers.
Go Adventurer Molly!