Well. I think this is one of those times you have a bad feeling early on, you choose to ignore it, and realize you ignored your own psychic power telling you from the future that you're going to regret spending almost 8 hours with a show.
Carrie (2026) seems like something everyone loves. To me, it was one of the dumbest, dullest ends to an eight-hour show I've seen in a long, long time. It truly sucked. Bad show.
This year for Noirvember I'm coming back to some classics of film noir. I've been so focused on watching movies I'd not previously seen, or seen only once, that it's been *years* since I've seen some of the biggest films in the genre.
And I didn't know where to start, so I just picked Laura (1944).
So, readers of this here site will know I'm not just a Godzilla stan, I'm particularly an evangelist for Godzilla Minus One, that first film. So, how did I feel about Godzilla Minus Zero (2026)? Right? That's what we're asking? Maybe?
Jamie and I have each seen the movie four times in the theater, and I think we saw it at home at least once, but I can't find the write-up. Anyway, there is plenty about this movie elsewhere on the site.
Godzilla Minus One (2023) wound up winning the Oscar for FX in 2024. And, in many ways, the movie likely earned the award for making what looks like a $200 million Hollywood movie on something like $15 million. But I think we all know - that movie really received an award for being a successful popular-style movie in the mode of a Steven Spielberg spectacular, and people who saw it mostly really liked it.
Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964) is 90 minutes that feels three times longer than that. I always forget that when I put it on.
Ostensibly the movie is about how King Ghidorah comes to Earth after devastating Venus, but the movie is 80% about a princess of a country where people dress like they raided a Shakespeare festival getting possessed by the ghost of a Venusian and the problems it causes. There's a cop who is supposed to help her and his goofy sister who works for a publication that is basically In Search of....
Godzilla doesn't make an appearance until about the 39th minute. And then disappears again for way too long. He is goofy and does a "my butt!" jump when Ghidorah stings his butt with Ghidorah-lightning. I am fine with this, but that's the sort of Godzilla we've got here.
Eventually we get Rodan, Godzilla, Mothra the Faeries, etc... but holy god is it a long walk to get there. I did enjoy this movie at one point, but I've seen it too many times, I guess.
We don't even really get how much fun King Ghidorah is as a boo-able villain until Invasion of Astro Monster, a plainly better and more entertaining movie.
Jamie reads. A lot. Like, tears through books at a clip I admire but also - I only know what she's reading maybe every 1/3rd book. This was an adaptation of a book she'd read, and she wanted to check it out - and already had.
As your foremost guy who will put on a Hallmark movie as background noise or to nap to, Jamie was curious about my reaction to what is a modern romcom that hits a lot of Hallmark tropes but allows its characters to exist in a world far closer to our own. People swear and take off their shirt to do sports. Gang, there is sex! With a butt in view!
I mostly know star and Executive Producer Lili Reinhart as the girl who played Betty Cooper on Riverdale on the CW. She plays Olive, a RomCom trope with legs. Olive is (a) brilliant but lacks confidence, and is (b) adorably clumsy for exactly one scene. She's (c) hot but not in a way that will threaten our primary audience (and Olive obviously doesn't know it and somehow no one seems to think so). Therefore, somehow (d) against all odds, no one seems to ask her out. But (e) of course she doesn't make enough time for herself, she's so dedicated to her work and has no time for love.
This isn't a criticism. This is like being surprised a cop in a 1980's movie is divorced, drinks too much, is a loose canon, and is partnered with their seeming opposite. It's how these movies work.
And it is here I am going to stop my discussion. This movie was essentially what you think it will be. It's safe to say, this is fine for streaming as part of the package I already have, but it was not theatrical ready. And it's good there's a home and market for romcoms that is not Hallmark.
I do think Reinhart was better than the material and she shows signs she could be a thing. I'd like to see her in some more interesting material.
It's been a while since I last watched this one. In fact, I am unclear on when I last saw it. It may have been in the 2010's. Give me some grace, there's a lot of Godzilla I've seen over the past few years.
Well, we managed to get in a viewing. It wasn't easy, but we did it.
Still top-tier for me, not as a sequel, but as a movie on its own.
I've been watching this movie for Halloween every year since at least 2015. Maybe earlier. I've lost track, and in ye olden days, this blog wasn't exactly a film-watching journal. So. I don't know beyond 2015. I do suspect I've seen this movie at least 20 times. More likely, something like 25-30 times. I don't believe I saw it until 2003 when Universal put out a crate of horror movies, so it's been a lot of catch-up.
As mentioned whilst discussing this year's viewing of Frankenstein, it felt like that movie left a lot of gaps in the conversation. Bride of Frankenstein picks up saying directly to the audience "oh, we weren't done. That's only half the story," and starts addressing those questions artfully and with pathos and a huge helping of humor.
James F. watched this and we had a bit of a convo about it in his comments, so I found myself watching Little Shop of Horrors (1986). Again.
I highly recommend checking out James' blog. Dude is crushing it over there, and had some interesting thoughts on this film. I don't always line up exactly (that would be boring), but I always get his point. Get over there and check him out.
So, read his post. My comments I'll limit. We've all seen the movie.
First, my crush on Audrey (if not Ellen Greene) continues on uninterrupted since a screening in 1986. Well done. We wrote about our crush 18 years ago at the old blog.
Uh... I have watched this movie a lot, and written about it a lot. We do watch this movie every Halloween, which happens almost every year, from what I'm told.
Think, me, think. What's our angle this time?
So, I think it's worth talking about the movie in non-poetic terms and just what actually happens.
Henry Frankenstein creates his human, and clearly shows why he should never be asked to raise a puppy. One, he mostly leaves his creation in the care of his helper, Fritz (you think his name is Igor. It's Fritz.) who is a malicious bastard and tortures the monster. Two, rather than initially being horrified, it seems Henry Frankenstein just gives up on the creature because he's too much work.
Prepare for a few generations of people to be really broken up about losing one of the bright stars of our firmament.
I had seen Stewart in one or two things before I came to know him as Captain Picard with the Star Trek: The Next Generation pilot, Encounter at Farpoint. I was, originally, a bit thrown. But, within a few episodes, I understood what Stewart was bringing to the screen.
By the time I left for college it was with a poster that was just Picard, and so it was that Patrick Stewart - in the form of Jean-Luc - watched over me my freshman year.
It turned out that Sir Patrick, out of character, was an immensely interesting person, who seemed to embrace life and the world around him with more warmth with each passing year. After Star Trek, he made a tremendously good version of A Christmas Carol, he became Professor Xavier - a character I held dear from my X-Men reading days, and helped create the comic book movie as it exists now - one that demands the material find a truth to it. And during COVID, he read us Shakespeare.
He was outspoken about gay rights, about equality domestic abuse and other causes, and seemed, above all, a good man.
Among his Star Trek comrades, he truly did seem to be the Captain - the British-trained actor who expected the most out of everyone, and the love the cast showed for him on and off screen was apparent. And I knew during that final season of Picard, we were seeing a terrific gift given to us by that cast and crew. One final mission for a man who was aging and meant much to all of them.
If you can find it, this coming Christmas season, either find his version of A Christmas Carol on television or the audiobook he narrated of Dickens' book.
Sorry to hear about the passing of acting Walter Koenig.
Whenever one of the cast of Star Trek passes, it feels like you're hearing someone you knew in high school or college has gone to their reward. And surely Koenig is no different.
As part of the main Star Trek crew who appeared across the series and into the movies, he's been a staple in my life since I was 9 years old. Of course seeing him appear outside of Star Trek was always welcome, but without his Chekov accent, it was always a little odd.
We don't have much of the original crew left. He'll be missed.
Sometimes I just want to know what the story is or was about a movie more than I care about the movie.
One day I'll do a full de-brief on Stuart Gordon's From Beyond, but the movie which is the subject of our post - Dolls (1986) - and From Beyond were apparently shot back-to-back re-using some of the same locations and sets. They certainly share some of the same producers and a Director of Photography, Mac Ahlberg.
I'm guessing Dolls was shot as a sure-fire money-maker - and it's worth noting one of the producers involved with Dolls wound up writing Puppetmaster - which has a cameo by our own Barbara Crampton, star of From Beyond.
One of the fun things about having Peter Cushing in so many Hammer and horror movies is that you can see how Hammer had specific ideas and Cushing absolutely crushes it when he plays both the absolutely vile Victor Frankenstein versus the obsessive but good Van Helsing.
Yes, of course, Christopher Lee shows his range as The Creature and Dracula - two *very* different roles. But Cushing goes from one of the most well-crafted concepts for a villain in cinema in the Frankenstein movies to one of the most driven/ obsessed heroes in Van Helsing. Good stuff.
We're still in the late 1940's with the release of The Woman on Pier 13 (1949), and there's still more of the grit in the movies that audiences felt reflected the post-war moment than we'd see five or six years later, even in noir.
A movie about the ruthlessness of American Communists and romance twisted to obsession into cruelty, the movie finds us alongside newlyweds Brad and Nan Collins (Robert Ryan and Laraine Day). Ryan plays a guy who came up the hard way, from a San Francisco stevedore to the newly appointed Vice President of a shipping company.
He's met Day as the decorator for his office and married her within two weeks - something that movies treated as fairly *normal* until the 1960's.* During their honeymoon, two things occur.
Credit where it's due. We don't get the last 30 years of vampire media without, first, Anne Rice's vampire novels and probably not without Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994). It's also hard to explain what a huge deal Anne Rice was in an era of B. Dalton book stores and a lack of access to somewhat transgressive fiction for suburban kids. You want quasi-queer fiction you can read at the lunch table? This was it. And, there is a line somewhere from Anne Rice's novels to Twilight to stuff like Vampire Academy and, absolutely, the current popularity of supernatural romance.
I should be clear - I'm more of a Bela Lugosi / Nosferatu / Sinners / Near Dark kind of vampire guy. I've never read any of Rice's books. And in 1994, I took a pass on the movie in the theaters, in part because I was busy with college, and in part because I thought Tom Cruise was a chode who had weaseled his way into the movie.
I finally watched Interview with the Vampire on VHS by myself at some point shortly after it hit the Blockbuster - but I couldn't tell you when. All I can tell you is that I was really, really bored.
Well, I have news about re-watching this movie in 2026.
Actor Tom Skerritt, fixture of five decades of film, has passed.
Skerritt was kind of amazing because you could just drop him in anywhere and he was buyable. Running a space ship hauler? Sure! Someone's dad in Wyoming. Why not? Sometimes the stalwart, sometimes the villain, we always got the assignment.
