Film

Words and Such

I haven’t really been in the writing mood too much as of late. I know, not a great business model for a blogger, but also… I do this for fun, not for glory.

In an effort to post something, here’s a point-form list of things that I maybe would have written more about in another timeline and that may be of moderate interest. I may still write about some of them at length, but probably not.

I’ve been playing the new Ys game in short bursts since it released a couple weeks ago. As you may know, I’m a big, big fan of the Ys series, and Ys X: Nordics is not disappointing so far. The first few chapters were a bit slow, but it’s taking off now, and I really like the two-member party system. It’s very unique, if a bit limited in options.
Work has been kind of insanely busy lately. Which is a good thing, because it helps to keep me on task. Also, it’s becoming more and more apparent to me how well-respected (and maybe even well-liked) I am within the organization. As someone who’s had low self-esteem for basically his whole life, it’s really quite nice to feel confident and dependable.
I bought a stupidly expensive alarm clock from Nintendo recently, and I don’t regret a penny of it. I never expected such a weird thing could bring me such joy. Will likely do more words about this at some point.
Went to see Venom: The Last Dance recently. I’m still not sure exactly how I feel about it or why (I haven’t given it all that much consideration), but I may have been kinda bored for most of the runtime? Definitely the least enjoyable of the trilogy, in my opinion, even though the climax and epilogue were satisfying.
After years of sleeping on the couch with the TV on just about every night, I’ve been sleeping in my bed like a normal-ass person over the last week. I’m not really sleeping much better (still waking up at least once a night), but I am feeling a little more well-rested, and my back is definitely thanking me.
A couple of co-workers have been singing the praises of the roguelike poker game, Balatro, so I decided to give it a whirl on their recommendations. I’m trying my best, but I don’t know if it’s right for me. Even the tutorial felt overwhelming. And here I was thinking that I was getting over my fear of roguelikes.
I was going to put a link to a relevant post in the paragraph above, but it turns out that I never published it. I guess that’s something I probably should do, seems silly to have written out a full 2000-plus-word post that’s just sitting in limbo. Actually, there are at least two of those…
Taking a more proactive role in managing both my eating and exercise regimens throughout the year has done wonders for my health, both physical and mental. It’s been a long road, but I’ve far surpassed my weight loss goal and I’ve been feeling fantastic. It would be nice to have someone, you know, notice, but oh well! External validation is for chumps, anyway.
I went on a short vacation with my family at the end of September. I don’t think I wrote a single word about it, but it was awesome. Nothing terribly exciting, but it was great to simply get away and be somewhere different for a while. And also to have that QT with the people who are closest to me, of course. That’s always good.

Shudder Film Review Double Feature

More movies have been watched. As Halloween season is rapidly approaching, I feel even more like I need to be writing about them. Both of the films reviewed below are Shudder originals, as you can plainly see on the posters. Preamble complete.

~ Deadstream ~

This one is about a livestreamer who goes to spend a night in a “haunted house” as something of a stunt to entertain his following. This premise is absolutely as cringey as it sounds, at least until about 15 minutes in and you realize that it’s actually a comedy. Kind of like Evil Dead 2 but with a modern twist.

That said, I had to watch Deadstream in two sessions, because it scared the absolute crap out of me the first time around. Early on in the film, our “hero” Shawn enters the house and starts recounting the tales of why it’s haunted, and he tells a story about a ghost called the Corner Man. If you weren’t already aware, I have a strong irrational fear of ghosts. Having all the lights turned off and watching movies about ghosts alone never ends well for me. I tried my best to remain rational, but I very quickly had to turn off the movie and turn on the lights, because my brain immediately started thinking it was seeing things in my peripheral vision. There aren’t a lot of things that genuinely terrify me, but my overactive imagination is definitely high on the list.

A couple night later, my fears had receded, and I decided to push through. This time with the lights on. As it turns out, after that singular scene, the movie’s tone changes dramatically, and it goes from horror-comedy to pretty much just straight comedy.

Three Fun-Size Film Reviews

Some movies, I can very easily ramble on and on about. Others don’t capture my attention/imagination quite as strongly, and I find it difficult to write about them. The following three films are of the latter variety.

~ Arcadian ~

It kind of seems like this one was marketed as whatever the movie equivalent of a “killer app” is for Shudder. I got a lot of emails promoting it! Although, it is a Shudder original, so maybe they just pushed it harder because it’s theirs. Anyway, it’s somewhat similar to A Quiet Place but with Nic Cage. Also, it’s not stupid due to major plot holes and braindead characters, but rather because stupid is just kind of the vibe it’s going for, which I can appreciate.

Plot is as such: About fifteen years after humanity falls to… something, Nic Cage lives on a farm with his two teenage sons. Every night, they maintain a stoic vigil to protect their home from attempted invasions. Obviously, the sons are polar opposites: one a hot-blooded tough guy, the other a quiet inventor. Their inability to reconcile their desires (girls vs learning) ends up ruining the balance that they’ve maintained for years and puts everyone’s life in danger. Because of course it does. Teenagers, am I right?

Hunter Hunter: A TE Film Review

After the big win that was Loop Track, I was ready for another good random horror movie, and let me tell you that I struck gold. A little bit of searching around on Google and Reddit for recommendations of similar films yielded the most perfect result I could have asked for: Hunter Hunter.

Just by the name alone I was intrigued. Hunter Hunter, eh? So it’s going to be a movie about a hunter becoming the hunted, in some way or another. But then the very vague description given, “a thriller that goes full-on horror in the last 10 minutes” sounded like precisely what I was in the mood for. So I plugged in my Apple TV for the first time in months and watched a movie on Shudder for the first time since I initially subscribed to it three years ago. I’m good at money :p

Now, I’ll be honest here, I’ve been struggling with trying to figure out exactly what I want to write about this film. I have been thinking about it almost non-stop since I watched it, and I just can’t get a good mental picture of what I want to put in this review. That’s why I don’t do this professionally. So I’m just writing. I guess we’ll just do the synopsis thing and see where it goes.

Hunter Hunter is (at least at the beginning) about a fur trapper named Joe, his wife Anne, and their teenage daughter Renee. They live in the wilderness outside of Winnipeg, Manitoba (I, uh… I like this setting) and lead a very simple life. Joe is the kind of man who is set in his ways and is training Renee to follow in his footsteps, but Anne is starting to notice that their way of life is becoming unsustainable and wants to move into a town so that she can get a job and Renee can go to school.

Loop Track: A TE Film Review

I happened to catch a glimpse of a very distressing illustration while clearing my Facebook notifications the other day. But like, distressing in a good way. In the way that, when I learned that said image was inspired by a film called Loop Track, I immediately looked up the most convenient way to watch it (Tubi). And then I proceeded to watch it that very same evening.

Loop Track is a horror/suspense movie about a weird, little guy that goes on a hike through a New Zealand forest. New Zealish? New Zealandian? I don’t know. It’s irrelevant and this bit works better in VO. Anyway, off the bat, we learn that this guy is very on edge and isn’t terribly interested in any sort of human interaction. He’s also poorly equipped for the expedition: he starts off the hike in a sweatshirt and jeans, and is visibly winded once he reaches the first trail marker, which is only 10 minutes from the parking lot. In fairness, he does at least have a big ol’ pack of supplies with him and apparently the nights get very cold, but still… I can’t help but think that you’d be so much better off without that sweatshirt, man.

After barely managing to avoid coming into contact with a couple other hikers on the trail twice, our hero is accosted by an excessively friendly man named Nicky. Nicky seems like a nice enough dude, but completely fails to catch the hint that our main character would rather hike alone and insists that they continue on together. At this point, about 20 minutes in, we finally learn that the main character’s name is Ian.

Immaculate: A TE Film Review

I went to see Immaculate with my mom, brother, and sister-in-law yesterday afternoon. I wasn’t terribly interested in it, but they invited me along and I figured I might as well. I hadn’t watched any movies in probably about a month – it was time.

For a movie that I was expecting to be less than enthused by, I ended up enjoying it somewhat. Not that I think it’s a great film or anything, but it was perfectly watchable. I was never bored and it moved along at a good clip – I was more than a little surprised at how quick it seemed to go by.

Immaculate is the story of a young American nun who joins a convent in Italy. Some odd/spooky things happen, and then she mysteriously ends up pregnant despite being a virgin. That’s really as much as I can say without spoiling the rest of the plot, though it’s not particularly shocking. There’s some very clear foreshadowing, and I can think of at least a couple other movies with quite similar denouements. I’m not accusing Immaculate of being derivative, it’s just that a lot of movies exist and wholly original plots might not even be possible anymore. Well, I say that, but also Poor Things exists, so… I don’t know.

If it wasn’t already clear, this is a horror movie. But what sold it for me was that a couple cursory Google results told me that it’s actually an art film with horror elements. Which is not especially true, but Immaculate is a little bit above your typical horror schlock. A little bit. In some ways. That is to say, it’s more suspenseful than stabby. I guess. Look, it’s been a while since I’ve written something, okay?

I want to say that there were two main things that I disliked about Immaculate. Firstly, a woman dies by falling off a second-story roof at one point. This scene bothered me because we get to see the post-impact body and it is smashed all the way to Hell. There’s simply no way that such a short fall would cause anywhere near that much damage. I honestly only buy that she died because she fell head-first. The second problem was that there are a couple of really cheap jumpscares, which felt out of place in this movie and were probably only there because… that’s how you make modern horror movies? The most egregious one is when the main character is telling the story of how she nearly drowned in a frozen river, and there’s this smash cut to a frame of her under the ice, backed by an ear-piercing scream. It was maybe one full second long, and came in the middle of an otherwise quiet conversation. It felt so artificial, forced, paint-by-numbers… Just didn’t need to be there at all.

Oh, I thought of probably the worst part of the movie: the characters are all super flat. I think they all max out at about two personality traits. Even the main character! Who we’re supposed to be empathizing with! But I literally could not tell you anything about her other than she almost died and then because a nun because she believed that it was God who saved her. Otherwise, she’s kinda boring and just does what the plot needs her to do. But I guess you could generally say that about nuns? At least the stereotypical nun. I’m sure there are plenty of real-life nuns out there who have lived rich and interesting lives.

So one of the things that I did like about the movie is the score! I’m not a big movie score kind of person, but I liked a lot of when there was actual music set to a scene. The spookier scenes generally had by-the-book horror ambiance, but the actual music was surprisingly good. Good enough that I really paid attention to it, which I almost never do.

I’d like to pretend for a moment that I’m a person who actually knows anything about filmmaking and criticism, but I’m just not that good at bullshitting. I think that despite the flat characters, the acting was generally quite good. Sydney Sweeney really gave it her all, and I found Alvaro Morte to be quite charming even at his most sinister. I like to think that the camerawork was also quite good – there were a lot of shots that I felt were interesting, at least. Something about framing and symmetry? I don’t know. I know absolutely nothing about cinematography except for words that I’ve heard actual film critics say.

The violence in Immaculate was also quite notable! For one, it was much gorier than I had expected, with some really gnarly shots. What really really surprised me, though, was the number of scenes that I had to avert my eyes from. I’ve watched a heck of a lot of horror movies in my time; I’ve seen it all and am highly desensitized to violence. So you’ve gotta hurt a character in a very specific way to turn my stomach, and Immaculate managed to accomplish that three times. I’m impressed!

At the end of the day, I don’t think I’d ever really recommend Immaculate. If it sounds like something that you would appreciate, then by all means, give it a shot! But it’s not particularly special in any way. It was fun, and I did really appreciate how brisk it felt, but it didn’t leave a mark. I’m going to forget it completely by the end of the week. I certainly don’t regret the time I invested into this movie, but if you wanted my opinion, there are a lot of better ways to spend those 89 minutes.

The FNAF Movie Review

I did it! I saw the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie!

Writing it that way… kind of makes it sound like an accomplishment. Which it’s not. Anyone can go see a movie. But this movie has been in production hell for the better part of a decade, so I had a lot of pent-up hype that needed to be let out somehow.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: yes, I had an absolute blast watching this movie. It was so tailor-made for insane fanboys like myself that I don’t think I could have disliked it if I wanted to. And on that note: I am an insane FNAF fanboy, so I understand if you won’t just take my word for it. I went into this with a heavy, heavy bias.

All that is to say, I couldn’t tell you if the average person would like Five Nights at Freddy’s. The review aggregates are mixed, and I’m sure that a good portion of the negative reviews are people who just hate horror movies of any type. So, like, most professional movie critics. And my dad.

It’s noteworthy that I’m writing this immediately after getting home from my screening, so the movie is still quite fresh in my mind and I haven’t taken the time to let my thoughts really gel. This is knee-jerk reaction at it’s finest, baby!

So first an foremost, I would like to go over the one thing that I absolutely did not like. There’s a very iconic line in the video games, “I always come back.” It’s spoken by the most iconic character in the series, and gives me a little shiver every time I hear it. Almost every time. It’s not used particularly well in the movie, unfortunately. It feels very forced, and honestly I think it would have been much better omitted and saved for the sequel. It made me a little sad for it to be wasted the way that it was.

But everything else was so good! From top to bottom, Five Nights at Freddy’s the movie is fanservice. Maybe even moreso than The Super Mario Bros Movie, which I feel like is saying a lot because that movie was 90% fanservice by volume. Even better is that all of the fanservice (save the quote mentioned above) was used very well. Well, mostly, anyway. One could argue that “It’s Me” could have been used a little better. Maybe more. But you know what, I was just happy the see it. I giggled like a little girl. In fact, very much like the little girl who was sitting two seats over from me. She was very audibly a big FNAF fan like me, and was very excited to tell her mom every time she saw something she recognized from the games. It would have been annoying if it wasn’t so goddamn adorable. Also, I feel like you can’t really get mad at little kids who talk in a movie anyway. They’re kids. Give ’em a break.

The other thing that I appreciated greatly is that Five Night at Freddy’s was made almost entirely with practical effects. There was a little bit of CG zazz, but most of it was real. And it looked excellent. The animatronics were so big and beautiful and oh, it’s wild to think that I was once terrified of them. The one and only downside is that giant robots aren’t exactly the most mobile at our current technology level, so much to my dismay, Freddy and friends didn’t do a ton of moving. The damn cupcake got an awful lot of screen time, though. Which is weird because it’s largely a non-entity in the games. I’m also not the biggest fan of the Springtrap suit’s design, but again, it looks the way it does out of mechanical necessity, so I get it.

What I think would qualify as a huge win is that Blumhouse did the franchise justice. There was very obviously so much respect for the source material put into the making of this movie, and it’s all the better for it. While this adaptation does, of course, take some creative liberties, it kind of had to. The storytelling in the games is very light and mysterious by design, and that kind of thing doesn’t typically work in mainstream movies. So we get a rough re-telling of the lore from the first three FNAF games (with some sprinkles of FNAF 4), and even with all the changes, it really feels like it’s telling that story from the games. It never feels like someone had a crappy script and then dressed it in a popular franchise to move tickets, like so many other video game movies do.

Also, it was really funny! Which is weird to say about a horror movie that definitely isn’t a horror comedy. But it worked!

So yeah, I liked it. I liked it a lot. Favourite movie of the year? Nah, Across the Spider-Verse was too good. But it’s absolutely a movie that I will buy on blu-ray in the near future, because I already can’t wait to watch it again. And then a third time to go over each individual frame to look for references and easter eggs that I’d missed. And I know I said way up there that I wasn’t sure if non-fans would really get much out of it, but you know what? Go see it! I officially recommend the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie. If I had a seal of approval, I’d stamp it right here —>

Requiem for a Scream

It was ten days into October, and I hadn’t watched a single horror movie yet, good or bad. I was starting to worry that something might be wrong with me. So, I turned on my PS5, loaded up the Tubi app, and asked it to serve me its finest campy horror film.

What I got was Requiem for a Scream. A Tubi original. I didn’t even know they did original content, TBH. Anyway, I’m five minutes into this movie -which appears to be a fairly typical slasher- and I think I’ve got the killer figured out.

After the cold open where a couple is murdered by a masked killer, we get to meet our two heroines. As the girls are driving out to the stereotypical cabin in the middle of nowhere, a good part of their dialogue is devoted to them making fun of both men and horror tropes. More importantly, however, we are told that the lead’s sister was a successful singer, is dead, and had a propensity for getting into trouble.

I would say that I learned two things from this scene. One: this movie is going to be insufferable, and B: the killer is definitely going to be the sister who faked her death.

The Menu – Someone else’s movie review

One of my most anticipated movies of 2022 was The Menu. Now, that’s not saying much, because to be honest I don’t follow movies anymore and at this very moment I cannot name a single other movie that released last year. Based on that, you could probably even say that The Menu was my most anticipated movie of 2022.

So, I didn’t actually watch it until a couple months ago. And I’m not writing about it until a couple months after watching it. You would probably think that I didn’t like it all that much. Untrue! In fact, I thought that it was excellent! I just haven’t been a very good blogger in 2023.

I don’t know if the marketing for The Menu was bad, or purposely misleading, or I was just taking the wrong things from it, but the movie was not at all what I expected from commercials. In fact, one of the things that I liked most about it is that it actually kept me in suspense the entire time. Like, sure, it telegraphs some things, but for the most part I was very unsure of where it was going, and many of my preconceptions of how scenes would play out ended up being wrong.

That said, I’m actually going to continue being a poor blogger and not finish reviewing The Menu. No, rather I’m just going to embed an existing review by someone else. Because it’s right on point, and me trying to write my own review would quite likely amount to little more than me subconsciously regurgitating this one. Poorly. And that’s just as good as plagiarism.

I See You – A Movie Review?

Yesterday evening -or at least, at some point prior to this post going live- I watched a movie called I See You.

This was largely spurred on by the fact that I’ve spent too many nights watching let’s plays of horror games on YouTube over the last six years, and as such I’ve been completely desensitized to them. I decided that to slake my thirst for terror, I’d need to turn to professionally produced content, and so Netflix. I clicked on the first movie that seemed even vaguely interesting, and so I See You.

A 95-ish-minute-long film released in 2019, I See You is not a movie that I had so much as heard the title of previous to the evening in question. But, it was described as a dramatic film wherein a detective is investigating murders and spooky things begin happening, so I was like, yeah, okay, I can dig on this. Little did I know!

As I sit here typing, and pondering what I am about to type, my mind is weirdly overcome by the thought of how my ex-wife’s eyes would have lit up at that plot summary.

I am a sad fellow. But pay that no heed. This is a movie review!

I See You follows the story of a small, dysfunctional suburban family. The husband, a cop on the trail of a child abductor. The wife, a therapist (I think?) who has recently cheated on her spouse. The son, trying to cope with the breakdown of his parents’ marriage. We learn these details pretty much right out of the gate, and that’s basically all that that they are for the entire duration of the film.

I may have made a poor selection.