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The Exterminator (1980)
The Exterminator is basically a vetsploitation take on the slasher; “vetsploitation” being a sub-genre of the exploitation film wherein Vietnam veterans and their experiences/traumas were used as material for screenplays. Just like in a slasher, a cold open informs what follows before the story structures itself around a series of murders carried out by its…
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Conclave (2024)
I just saw Conclave and it was great. Based on a novel by Robert Harris, it deals with the sequestering period in the Catholic Church when a pope dies and the cardinals must elect their successor. Ralph Fiennes plays the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Thomas Lawrence, a stoic and serious man caught up…
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Heretic (2024)
“Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?” This quote from Edgar Allan Poe opens John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980), but is arguably more applicable to Heretic, the new horror film for Halloween 2024, starring Hugh Grant as an oddball who hosts a couple of young Mormon missionaries straight out…
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The Coffee Table (2022)
A husband, Jesus (pronounced Hey-Zeus, played by David Pareja), and wife, Maria (Estefanía de los Santos), with their newborn baby, are looking to buy a coffee table. The table is composed of two nude women in faux-gold trim supporting a glass top. Clearly, it belongs in a bachelor pad as opposed to a young couple’s…
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Terrifier 3
The basic appeal of the Terrifier films is that they’re of the same crude simplicity as the Friday the 13th franchise (1980 to 2009, as of Halloween 2024) and other Golden Age slashers, but with much more gore that you couldn’t get away with back then. It’s amusing to think of how slashers of yore were pilloried…
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Halloween Pick ‘n’ Mix: Shocker (1989) and The Blood Beast Terror (1968)
Surprisingly cheesy and dull Wes Craven thriller, Shocker is nowhere near as good as The People Under the Stairs, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and his other classics. It’s about a young man pursued by a serial killer, Horace Pinker, who kills most of his adopted family, his girlfriend, and sundry other people in…
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Megalopolis (2024)
I just saw Megalopolis and although it’s not cool to say so, I enjoyed it. It’s an eccentric satirical and symbolic piece filled with characters with names like Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), and inspired by the Catilinarian conspiracy of Ancient Rome. Set in the city of New Rome (New York in our world, retaining the…
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The Substance (2024)
“Pretty girls should ALWAYS smile!” So says Harvey (last name not revealed, but you can guess what it might be), a sleazy producer played by Dennis Quaid in The Substance, which I just saw yet am willing to crawl out on a limb to say is the best new horror film I’ve seen in the…
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Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
I just saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and really enjoyed it. The plot is a little busy and overcomplicated, but it’s delivered at such a level of whimsy and love of tongue-in-cheek macabre storytelling that it works, from a scene of a dismembered succubus nail-gunning herself together while “Tragedy” plays, to a literal soul train and a…
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Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)
The Star Wars prequels have recently undergone a slight recovery in reputation given how disappointing the sequels turned out to be, and in my opinion, they deserve it. Perhaps I’m buying into a conspiracy theory here, though at this point I feel that the backlash was really just fanboys who watched the original films as…
I Just Saw
Telling you about movies I just saw
