I have a ton of nostalgic value attached to “Silver Bullet” as it’s one of the first hardcore horror movies I ever remember sitting down to watch, and it’s one of the first werewolf movies I ever saw, too. I fondly remember watching it as a kid with my uncle who’d moved in with us for a while and brought along his Beta tape player and a bunch of his Beta tapes to watch. Along with “The Final Chapter” and “The Making of Thriller” we must have begged him to watch “Silver Bullet” a thousand times, ad nauseum.
Tag Archives: Adaptation
Elevator Game (2023)
“The Elevator Game” is a really creepy urban legend and one that works by virtue of word of mouth. I really wish we’d gotten a great horror movie out of it, because “Elevator Game” just isn’t it. It’s tough to imagine such a great urban legend being fumbled as bad as it is, but Rebekah McKendry doesn’t do much to add on to the lore. She instead opts for a painfully silly and boring horror film involving contorting ghosts, and what feel like obvious allusions to “Stranger Things” and “The Grudge.”
Merry Little Batman (2023)
Now Streaming Exclusively on Amazon Prime.
Color me shocked when I found out that Warner were not only releasing a Batman animated movie this year, but a Christmas themed one at that. The way they’ve been run lately, it’s not entirely shocking that this one snuck under my radar, I guess. “Merry Little Batman” is unlike any Batman animated movie I’ve ever seen. The animation style is wild, somewhat in the vein of “Chowder,” and focuses on a completely separate non-canonical narrative.
Blackberry (2023)
For the life of me, I’ll never be able to figure out the glut of product biographies being unleashed on audiences. We can’t be so bereft of material that we have to have a biographical film about the development of a hand held computer. I mean, the Blackberry was important and granted, a documentary would be great, but “Blackberry” on its own is just another stale drama that tries to enhance the mundanity of the development of Blackberry and transform it in to this “Wall Street” meets Aaron Sorkin suspense film about capitalism and the cut throat industries that battled to get ahead in the tech market.
Leave the World Behind (2023)
“Lady, people aren’t chocolates. D’you know what they are mostly? Bastards. Bastard–coated bastards with a bastard filling.” – Scrubs
Director Sam Esmail’s “Leave the World Behind” is a mean, nasty, and cynical apocalyptic parable that stages the quintessential end of the world scenario but also takes a magnifying glass to humanity and the inherent paranoia that transforms a scenario from working together to survive, to survival of the fittest. While some of the symbolism is a bit clunky in some spots, “Leave the World Behind” is a very volatile and relevant take on how we’re more likely to pick at each other’s bones and fight for scraps when resources become finite. While that does feel like old hat post apocalyptic fodder, “Leave the World Behind” is refreshingly complex and quite horrifying.
Barbarella (1968): Arrow Video Limited Edition [Blu-Ray]
Now that Hollywood is once again considering a remake of “Barbarella,” it’s that perfect time to re-visit Roger Vadim’s wonky science fiction mind fuck. Jane Fonda fresh off of beginning her Oscar caliber career took a break to headline what is one of the trippiest science fiction adventure films ever produced. Decades later it’s shocking how much “Barbarella” was a precursor to magazines like “Heavy Metal” allowing the writers to build a world and an engaging heroine, while also fully embracing the inherent sexuality of the narrative.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (Saules aveugles, femme endormie’) (2023)
Director Pierre Földes is not an artist prone to just giving us something that’s easily digestible and worthy of leaving us dangling. “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” is probably one of the most uncommercial movies of the year, and the fact that it’s fully animated also works in its favor. The animation style that is used along with the often intentional drabness of it all allows for an almost ethereal aesthetic; it’s one that feels so dream like. It’s almost like someone just ripped random imagery from someone’s subconscious and manifested it through some pretty good rotoscoping and 3D animation.