The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

  Ah, my old friend Queer Subtext!  I've missed you.  Content warning:  some gore (mostly just dismembered body parts), possibly a drowned puppy (it's fine in the next scene but old-timey movies straight DGAF about animal abuse)

Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) tries to beat a murder rap by confessing to the local priest (Alex Gallier) that he had made a Creature (Christopher Lee) who was actually responsible for the killing.

This is one of the loosest adaptations I've seen.  It barely keeps the character names and basically throws two-thirds of the book out.  Also, incredibly gay.  Honestly, that's the best part of the movie.  Victor and his husband/best friend/tutor try to make their own "child" but quarrel when Victor insists on bringing his cousin Elizabeth (Hazel Court) as a beard.  If only Hammer Horror had the nerve to make that movie in 1957.  

Peter Cushing has never looked young.  The man was born 72-years-old.  Wild.  Christopher Lee is barely in this but he did his best.  Both men would go on to have long careers in horror, specifically with this studio, and make a number of pictures together, so it's worth watching just for that.  As a Frankenstein adaptation, it's not my favorite but it was really entertaining to watch.  It's streaming for free with ads on Tubi.

Blackenstein (1973)

  Here's another entry from the blaxploitation era.  Not a spoof like Black Dynamite, but the real thing.  Content warning:  blood, some gore

Eddie (Joe De Sue) is a quadruple amputee after stepping on a landmine in Vietnam.  Fortunately, his fiancée, Dr. Winifred Walker (Ivory Stone), knows a Nobel-winning geneticist who has been working on reattaching limbs with DNA therapy.  Dr. Stein (John Hart) is hopeful that they can give Eddie a new lease on life, but his assistant/manservant Malcomb (Roosevelt Jackson) sabotages the formula because he's angry that Winifred rejected his advances.  Eddie is turned into a violent killer who rampages night after night.

This is one for the "unintentional comedy" files.  I can't find photos of the writer, Frank Saletri, but my money says he and the director, William Levey, were both white men trying to capitalize on the blaxploitation movement.  The movie feels profoundly racist, specifically in Eddie's choice of victims, the continual references to being primitive, using animal RNA in the serum, amidst a general vibe.  It's poorly shot, poorly acted, and poorly written.  That being said, if you get a group of friends together, this movie is hilarious.  It's so bad on so many levels that it circles back to being a crowd-pleaser.  Amazing.  It's streaming on Amazon Prime and on Shudder.

Frankenstein (2025)

  Del Toro is back with more monsters, everyone!  Content warning:  blood, gore, child abuse, dead animals (CGI deer, CGI wolves, sheep)

A narcissist (Oscar Isaac) tells a polar explorer (Lars Mikkelsen) his tale of woe about being a shitty father to the creature (Jacob Elordi) he made from the parts of dead men he got from a war profiteer (Christoph Waltz).  

Are you one of those people that wish you had read the classics but can't seem to find your way out of the Paranormal Romance section of Barnes & Noble?  Good news!  Del Toro won't let you down, monster-fuckers!  This isn't a super faithful adaptation of the book, but most versions aren't.  This is, however, a very faithful Guillermo del Toro movie.  It is filled with hot men being sad and a beautifully dressed, distant, possibly slightly concussed woman who gently berates them and then dies (twice!).  There's a war happening somewhere in the background of which the Monster is completely innocent, because he is a gentle child-like soul that's treated as both asexual and extremely fuckable.  (The rare gender-swapped Born Sexy Yesterday trope.)

Isaac and Waltz are always good.  They're constant as the stars.  This was my first Elordi performance, I believe, and he was phenomenal.  I don't know if Mia Goth can act.  Presumably, yes, but she's basically wallpaper in this.  The movie fleshes out the character of Elizabeth more than the book does, but that means almost nothing.  The Arctic captain has more emotional range and he's just in the framing device.  Visually, it's stunning.  The costumes, the sets, the production design.  Flawless.  I understand the CGI animals and I approve in theory, but they look very fake still and it did take me out a little.

I liked it.  Did I like it enough to buy it?  I don't know yet.  It will depend on how I feel as I recall it.  I don't know if it will hold up to a rewatch.  Most of GDT's movies do, so we'll see.  It's streaming on Netflix and it might still be in theaters.

The Last Tycoon (1976)

  This has an incredible pedigree to be as mid as it is.  Content warning:  homophobia

Monroe Stahr (Robert de Niro) is a hotshot Golden Age Hollywood studio executive.  Everything he touches seems to succeed but he is haunted by the death of his wife.  An earthquake causes damage to the studio sets, and while supervising, Stahr sees a young woman who looks exactly like his late wife.  Kathleen (Ingrid Boulting) keeps telling him no but he pursues her anyway.

If you are in the right mood, this is probably a really lovely film about the price of success versus happiness.  If you're not, this is a nothing-burger about a man who experiences one (1) rejection and torpedoes his career.  Guess which one I was in.

The cast is stacked with Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis, and De Niro, and with cameos/bit roles from Donald Pleasance, Ray Milland, John Carradine, Anjelica Huston, and Jack Nicholson.  It was directed by Elia Kazan from a screenplay by Harold Pinter, based on an unfinished F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.  Which I think is the problem.  If you kept one of those elements and nixed the rest, it probably would have made for a better movie.  

It's streaming on Kanopy but there are much better films out there.

The Burbs (1989)

  Movie Club is closing out October with The Burbs, a not-quite horror comedy.

Ray (Tom Hanks) is trying to have a relaxing stay-cation but he is drawn into increasingly unhinged conspiracies about the reclusive new neighbors who are only seen at night, digging holes in the backyard, and having mysterious lights and noises from their basement windows.  

This holds up pretty well, better than I was afraid it would, because most of the humor is physical gags.  Hanks has always been a natural comedian and is unsurprisingly good here.  I wish they had given Carrie Fisher more to do and Corey Feldman less, but that's me.  Also a shout-out to the late Henry Gibson for playing the creepy neighbor with just the right amount of plausible deniability.  

It's only available to rent, unfortunately, unless you want to watch it in 5-minute increments as a YouTube playlist.  (It gets the job done but it's not pretty.)  It is considered a cult classic that I think gets overshadowed by Hanks' other suburban disaster movie, The Money Pit.  Give it a shot if you can.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004)

  

Detective Togusa (Kōichi Yamadera) is assigned to work with cybernetically-enhanced Batou (Akio Ōtsuka) to investigate a series of murders.  Female sex-bots are killing their owners and then self-destructing.  The cops trace the bots back to a company called Locus Solus which may have ties to organized crime.

This continues the what-is-a-soul-and-who-gets-to-have-one philosophizing from the first movie.  I found it a little hard to follow, but that could be because I was expecting more plot.  I kept waiting for it to be something more, but it's pretty straightforward as a crime story because it would rather ask questions about morals and ethics when dealing with consciousness.  That's fine.  It's a choice.  Batou is a less interesting character than Major Kusanagi was and the movie suffers a little from her absence, if only because he clearly hasn't moved on.  

Also, and this is purely personal, I hate the term "gynoid."  I understand that it is technically correct, since the robots are female and the andro in android means male but I don't like it.  Probably because it's too close to a dumber version used by incels.  It just set my teeth on edge every time they said it in the movie.

This is streaming in its entirety on YouTube but I could only find the dubbed version, not the original Japanese audio.  

The Thursday Murder Club (2025)

  I thought this was a series.  Even when I saw the runtime was an hour and a half long, all I thought was "oh, a British series."  Nope.  It's a movie.  

Joyce (Celia Imrie) is very enthused about moving into the Coopers Chase retirement community.  Even more so when she gets invited to be a provisional member of the Thursday Murder Club, a group of retirees of varying backgrounds who solve cold cases.  As a former nurse, Joyce brings a wealth of medical knowledge to the team, which includes Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley), a psychiatrist; Ron (Pierce Brosnan), a union organizer and general blue-collar guy; and Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) who did shady Cold War shit that she can't talk about.  The group finds itself sidetracked by a much more recent murder, however, when one of the owners of Coopers Chase winds up dead while the surviving partner (David Tennant) plans to sell the property and kick all the old folks out.  Now they have to solve the case before they lose their home.

This is ridiculously cute.  Everyone involved is phenomenal and it is a breezy, cozy murder romp.  If the Great British Baking Show hunted Paul Hollywood for sport, this is what it would look like.  Cannot recommend enough.  It's streaming on Netflix.