Oops! All Horror - Day 20 - Stranger Things season 5 (2025)

  Content warning:  blood, child endangerment, some gore, eldritch monstrosities, mangled limbs

The town of Hawkins, Indiana is under martial law, quarantined after the confrontation with Vecna/Henry Creel (Jamie Campbell Bower) split the town into four sections.  A resistance network has formed, with Hopper (David Harbour) and the boys leading crawls into the tunnel network under the town, connecting with the Upside Down in an attempt to locate Henry, while Eleven/Jane (Millie Bobby Brown) trains her psychic powers for a final confrontation.

We are ending a lot of things this year.  I didn't get into the fandom around this show but I enjoyed it for what it was.  I know the finale got a lot of flack from people but I think any ending is going to be divisive.  It went pretty much the way I expected.  A two-hour run time is crazy, though.  

There are probably easier ways to get kids to play Dungeons & Dragons, but it's streaming on Netflix.

Oops! All Horror - Day 16 - In the Tall Grass (2019)

  Content warning:  blood, mild gore, animal death (crow, dog)

Becky (Laysla De Oliveira) and her brother, Cal (Avery Whitted), are on a cross-country trip to San Diego.  They stop by a field of tall grass so pregnant Becky can throw up and hear a boy (Will Blue, Jr.) calling for help inside.  Cal rushes in and Becky reluctantly follows.  The siblings soon discover that the field is seemingly endless, able to shift distances and sound, even time itself.

A good chunk of this movie is characters yelling each others' names, which very quickly got boring, but then Patrick Wilson showed up and improved it immensely.  It's kind of like Children of the Corn, if there wasn't even anything to eat.  Like, sure, you have a murderous cult but at least you weren't going to starve.  Wilson is obviously the standout here.  I love him in everything, but he is never better than when he is unhinged.  Fans of the show Lioness will recognize De Oliveira but the film doesn't really give her a lot to do other than be pregnant and yell.

It's fine.  There's some decent horror imagery, some straight out of a Renaissance triptych.  Vicenzo Natali is a solid director.  I just think the material is a little weak and relies too heavily on religious symbolism.  But it checks the box for Environmental Horror and it's streaming on Netflix, so at least it's convenient.  

Oops! All Horror - Day 14 - Nope (2022)

  Content warning: blood, animal death (chimp, horses (off-screen))

After the death of their father (Keith David), siblings O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald (Keke Palmer) are struggling to keep up their family business of horse wrangling for Hollywood productions.  O.J. has even resorted to selling off stock to the rodeo/amusement park next door, run by former child actor, Jupe Park (Steven Yuen).  Jupe has been touting a new attraction, only available in the evenings, and O.J. realizes that Jupe has been courting a predatory force hiding in the clouds, luring it in with the horses.  He and Emerald decide to film the creature, hoping for fame and fortune.

This is the weakest film I've seen from Jordan Peele, but it's still not bad.  It's a little unfocused for my tastes, but it's at least an original sci-fi horror story with an impeccable cast, including the late Michael Wincott, who was one of my favorite character actors.  

I'm not mad at it; I just didn't love it.  It's currently streaming on Netflix.

Oops! All Horror - Day 13 - Interview with the Vampire season 1 (2022)

  Normally, it's way too hard to watch an entire season of a horror TV show, but I've been watching this the past few weeks with my neighbor and we finished in time for this list, so it's getting included.  Content warning:  racism, gore, blood, dead animals (rats), injured animals (pigeons), suicide

Twenty years after publishing a best-seller featuring an interview with a real vampire, journalist Daniel Malloy (Eric Bogosian) is flown out to Dubai to have the record set straight.  Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) regrets some of the editorial choices made in his previous recollections and is willing to grant unprecedented access to his home and his memories, no matter how painful.

The show makes some departures from the book, moving up the timeline to the 1920s and adding new characters.  Purists will no doubt have an issue with this, but I think these are improvements.  Anderson has so much more agency with this new backstory and made Louis so much more entertaining for me, because you know how much a self-hating vampire irritates me.  I still can't watch the 1994 film because Brad Pitt's version was such a whiner.  Also, Sam Reid is electrifying as Lestat.  A truly excellent portrayal.  

It's available on both AMC+ and Netflix but the AMC+ version has behind-the-scenes commentary where there would be commercial breaks.  Fine if you're doing a rewatch but I wouldn't recommend it for first-time viewing.  The Netflix version is just the show.  

Jane Austen's Period Drama (2025)/The Singers (2025)/Two People Exchanging Saliva (2025)/A Friend of Dorothy (2025)

Nominated for Best Live Action Short    For expediency's sake, I'm lumping all the shorts together.

Jane Austen's Period Drama - Kanopy - a very funny short that people online have likened to a better class of SNL skit.  I think that's setting the bar too low but I don't like SNL.  

Miss Estrognia Talbot (Julia Aks) is in the middle of being proposed to by handsome bachelor Mr. Dickley (Ta'imua) when she unexpectedly gets her period.  Confused and alarmed, Dickley rushes her home where she argues with her sisters over how much she should educate him on women's biology.

Honestly, it's 2026.  If we cannot as a society be over the "ew, girls have cooties" factor about periods, what are we even doing?

The Singers - Netflix-  almost the polar opposite of Jane Austen, this doesn't have a single woman on screen and is four times as emotional.

A bar full of men is energized by a late-night bet:  whoever is the best singer wins a free beer and $100.

Absolutely magical performances.

Two People Exchanging Saliva - YouTube - what if Carol had been directed by Yorgos Lanthimos?

A shopgirl (Luàna Bajrami) and a wealthy housewife (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) try to suppress their desire in a world that criminalizes kissing as disgusting.

Only the French would think that the fastest way to show a dystopia is to make kissing illegal.  The garlic gum is going to give me nightmares, though.

A Friend of Dorothy - Kanopy - And we're back to being wholesome and cute.

A teen (Alistair Nwachukwu) trying to retrieve an errant soccer ball from a garden befriends an elderly lady named Dorothy (Miriam Margolyes) who encourages him to pursue his dreams.  All of them.

So sweet.  

The Perfect Neighbor (2025)

Nominated for Best Documentary Feature  Content warning:  racial slurs, gun violence

Susan Lorencs described herself as a perfect neighbor in one of her numerous nuisance calls to police.  She constantly complained about the neighbor kids playing near her apartment, escalating her verbal rhetoric over the course of a year until it reached an inevitably violent end, documented painstakingly through body cam footage of the police responding to her calls.

This was absolutely infuriating to watch.  It is a portrait of entitlement and racism.  Like, I get being an antisocial curmudgeon.  The sound of children's laughter also grates on my nerves.  Do I feel like the Grinch looking down over Whoville every time children scream with joy as they sled down the embankment behind my house?  Yes.  Do I go out and threaten them or yell racial slurs?  No.  Because I am an adult who recognizes that they are CHILDREN and that it is a fucking privilege to have them feel safe enough to play.  And this bitch destroyed a group of children's safety because they were Playing While Black.

This is streaming on Netflix but I am honestly cautioning you if you are sensitive to children being threatened.  It felt a little exploitative when it lingered on the grieving relatives, but I get it.  They're trying to show the extent of the impact.

Blue Moon (2025)

Nominated for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay    Lyracist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) prepares to congratulate his former writing partner, Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), on the latter's smash success on Broadway.  

I was really skeptical but this might be Hawke's best performance in 30 years.  This is everything Maestro tried to be and couldn't.  Hawke is pitch-perfect as Hart, desperate to be loved but terrified of being seen, hiding his aching vulnerabilities under a mask of sarcasm and flippancy.  There are other people in the movie, sure, but none of them hold a candle.   As much as I would love to see Michael B. Jordan win, if there's any justice in the world, Best Actor goes to Hawke.  

I think there are stronger contenders for Original Screenplay but I'm not on the Academy.

Production design is great, but the costumes do most of the work establishing a setting and time period.  Especially good is the way they used forced perspective and set design to make 5'10" Hawke into 5'0" Hart.  Best of all, most of it looked practical.

This is not going to be for everyone.  There's a weird Venn diagram of theater diehards and Linklater fans.  But if that's your bag, you are in for a phenomenal performance.  It's currently streaming on Netflix.

Train Dreams (2025)

Nominated for:  Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Song   Content warning:  racist violence, animal death (elk)

Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) searches his life for meaning in the face of tragedies while working as a logger in the late 19th century Pacific Northwest.

On paper, this is not a film I thought I would enjoy.  It's paced very deliberately, the characters are bare sketches, and the cinematography centers on nature.  I hated Tree of Life for less.  But Train Dreams resonated in a way none of Terence Malick's films ever have.  Maybe Clint Bradley is just a better director for me.  

It is slow and incredibly sad, interspersed with sudden violence.  Bit like life, really.  Edgerton doesn't have a lot of lines but he does a lot of emoting.  It is heavily Vibes-based and will not be for everyone.  I recently had a death in the family so that may have been a factor in how well I responded to it.  It's probably my second choice for Best Picture but I seriously doubt it's actually going to win.  I don't think it will get anything, honestly.  It's too quiet and unassuming.  I will say that I absolutely hated the Nick Cave song at the end.  It felt so jarring tonally and did not work for me at all.  

It is streaming on Netflix.

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 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.

Horror Watch 2025 - Day 25 - Creep (2014)

  I'm counting this as Women's Horror.  There's no blood, no gore, only one violent scene, but if you're a woman, this might still be pretty triggering.  Proceed with caution.

Aaron (Patrick Brice) gets hired to do a day of videography for Josef (Mark Duplass), who has terminal cancer and wants to record a video diary for his unborn son.  As the day progresses, Aaron gets more and more uncomfortable with Josef's overly affectionate behavior, weirdly intimate questions, and sudden attempts to startle and scare.  

This is just a horrible blind date.  If you are a woman attracted to straight guys, you have likely had a fairly similar experience at some point in your life of a dude being overly familiar, unwilling to accept the word "no," and disrespecting your boundaries while claiming everything is a joke.  If you were very, very unlucky (a little more than 1 in 100,000), it ended exactly like this.  So this movie will feel exhausting.  If you are a dude, this is what you look like when you do this shit.  Stop.  No one likes it.

It's not found footage, technically, but there is a lot of shaky-cam and we all know how I feel about that.  Duplass and Brice are solid performers; I just didn't care for this at all.  It's streaming on Netflix.

Horror Watch 2025 - Day 20 - I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

  I am starting to despise the term "legacyquel".  Content warning:  blood, gore

A group of friends accidentally cause the death of a stranger on the 4th of July and decide to cover it up instead of coming clean.  A year later, one (Madelyn Cline) receives an anonymous note stating that someone knows about their indiscretion.  Guilty and afraid, the group digs into the past of their town, discovering that a similar incident took place in 1997, where a vigilante in a fisherman's coat carved up that year's hot twenty-somethings.  They reach out to a survivor (Jennifer Love Hewitt) for advice before the bodies start piling even higher.

I never watched the original or any of the sequels so some of this was probably wasted on me.  It's still pretty decent.  I was a little annoyed at how indiscriminate the killings seemed to be but the Evil Monologue actually tied it all together, so I will give it points for that.  Overall, a solid enough slasher.  It's currently streaming on Netflix.

Horror Watch 2025 - Day 12 - Host (2020)

  Okay, the first thing you need to know is that this poster is wildly overselling this movie.  It is not the scariest film of the past decade.  Not even close.  Content warning:  blood, violence

Bored in quarantine, six friends get together on a Zoom call to have a seance.  Only Haley (Haley Bishop) is a true believer; the rest are just there for a good time.  But when Jemma's (Jemma Moore) joking angers an entity, all the participants are suddenly fighting for their lives.

Before I delve too deeply, let me say that I enjoyed watching this.  It's not a bad movie.  Better than Paranormal Activity but not quite as good as Unfriended.  Maybe because I saw Unfriended first.  I had to get my praise in early, because the rest of this is probably going to sound super negative.  

This was filmed during the pandemic and it is not subtle.  All of the characters are isolated, forced to watch their friends suffering, unable to help or even help themselves as an invisible force invades their homes and kills them.  It is 56 minutes long, so it barely even qualifies as a feature-length film but that works to its advantage.  There's no time to really establish them as characters unless you have been part of a similar kind of friend group.  Then you can do some mental shortcuts.  Should they have spent more time fleshing them out?  Eh.  I was good with just the bare bones, especially since that meant there was more time to focus on the supernatural shit happening.  If anything, I would have put extra into the ending, since that did feel very rushed and unsatisfying.  Can't hate the hustle, though!  It's currently streaming on Netflix.

2025 Horror Watch - Day 4 - CAM (2018)

  I do think it's very funny that so far I've been alternating between 2025 and 2018.  I don't know why it worked out like that but I'm not mad about it.  Content warning:  suicides (gun, knife), blood

Alice (Madeline Brewer) works as a camgirl.  As Lola, her popularity is rising, especially as she does more extreme shows, but she can't quite break into the top ranks.  One day, she opens her computer to see that her channel has been stolen by someone who looks exactly like her.  IT support is useless, the cops are worse, and Alice is growing increasingly concerned that she's not the only one being replaced.

When this came out, it was probably really interesting as a concept but now we have Tilly Norwood so the horror of real life has once again eclipsed the horror of imagination.  This future is stupid.  It doesn't ever come out and say what or who is behind the fake account, but we know.

I feel terrible saying it but Brewer will forever be Janine from Handmaid's Tale to me.  The whole time I was watching this, I was like "mmm-hmm, this is why Aunt Lydia hated you."  But bless her, she was very game, considering the entire movie rested on her performance.  

The movie is pretty positive towards the cam performers, which I am not well-versed enough in to know if it's an accurate portrayal of the industry.  Some shit seems pretty universal, though.  It's more of a thriller than straight horror.  There's no jump scares or supernatural flourishes.  If that's your bag, you'll probably enjoy this.  It's streaming on Netflix.

Barbarian (2022)

  For my birthday week, I got to pick the selections for Movie Club and I picked The Adventures of Prince Achmed and Barbarian.  Didn't have a theme in mind, but they worked pretty well together anyway.  Content warning:  sexual assault (off-screen), violence, some gore

Tess (Georgina Campbell) booked an AirB&B in Detroit for her job interview, but when she arrives, she finds that it has been double-booked and a strange man (Bill Skarsgaard) is inside.  A tense night is made worse by strange occurrences in the house, leading to the discovery of a hidden door in the basement.

I laughed so hard during this movie.  I don't want to spoil anything for you but this was one of the most delightful movies I've seen this year.  Wildly entertaining.  It has a triptych-style story with tonally jarring edits at the breaks that could have felt like being bludgeoned but if you just go with it, I promise it's worth the whiplash.  Cannot wait to inflict this on everyone I know.  

It's currently streaming on Netflix but they are taking it off at the end of the month (31 Aug) so hurry or you'll miss your chance.

Divines (2016)

  This is a super cute female friendship movie right up until the Trauma.  Content warning:  sexual assault, violence

Dounia (Oulaya Amamra) and Maimouna (Déborah Lukumuena) are best friends in the Paris projects.  They idolize Rebecca (Jisca Kalvanda), a hardcore girlboss drug dealer, for her flashy lifestyle and badass demeanor.  Dounia especially sees Rebecca as a stand-in maternal figure and becomes ever more desperate for her approval.  

I have straight up not been having a good time this month so the whole time I was watching this, I kept anticipating something bad happening to one or both girls but I didn't guess the specific thing which still sucker punched me.  I'm not going to do spoilers but FYI, not a happy ending.  It definitely lessened my enjoyment of the film, which sucks because the three actresses were phenomenal.  Kalvanda was menacing and charismatic and Lukumuena's face was so expressive.  I hope both have incredible careers ahead.  But this was Amamra's movie and she took every scene.  A tiny powerhouse.  

So if you're in the mood for a depressing, feel-bad character drama, Divines is streaming on Netflix.

Kpop Demon Hunters (2025)

  This movie is so fun.  Even if you're not into K-Pop.  

Huntr/x are pop stars by day and demon slayers by night, the latest in a long line of singers that maintain a magical web keeping the Demon King, Gwi-Ma (Lee Byung-hun), from stealing the souls of mortals.  But Gwi-Ma has a plan to destroy the girls before the web becomes permanent.  He sends Jinu (Ahn Hyo-seop), a human turned demon, to form a rival boy-band to steal all of Huntr\x's fans.  Lead singer Rumi (Arden Cho) is pissed but believes there's still some good in Jinu, especially after he refrains from revealing her own terrible secret.  

I found the animation a little off-putting.  There's just something about it that doesn't gel for me.  But the whole movie is so freakin' cute, I stopped caring about a third of the way in.  It is fizzy bubblegum for your brain.  Utterly charming.  And the soundtrack is phenomenal.  I'm not a big K-Pop person (I like BLACKPINK and that's about it) but I immediately bought this one.  So good.  It is streaming on Netflix.

Popstar: Never Stop Stopping (2016)

  Your enjoyment of this film will be directly related to how tolerable you find Andy Samberg and/or Lonely Island.

Conner (Andy Samberg) split from his boy band to go solo(-ish because he kept his buddy Owen (Jorma Taccome) on backup) and had a wildly successful debut.  But now, with his sophomore album, interest is waning and Conner is willing to do almost anything to stay in the spotlight.

It's not really a parody so much as it is a paint-by-numbers music biopic comedy.  It's basically an extended SNL skit with a massive budget.  If that is your jam, you've probably already seen this, honestly.  The original songs are fine.  I didn't find them super funny or interesting but that kind of works for the character, a paper-thin man-child on the edge of being a has-been at 22.  There are a ton of cameos from actual pop musicians, again lending to the SNL-ness of it all, and a surprisingly subdued performance from Sarah Silverman that kind of stole the show for me.

Seems like a good background movie for cooking or cleaning your house.  It's streaming on Netflix.

Heart Eyes (2025)

  I took a little hiatus from posting that turned into a much longer hiatus than I expected, but I'm back now.  And it seems fitting that the first post after an absence would be a horror rom-com.  My favorite and least favorite genres smashed together in defiance of God.  Content warning:  blood, gore, violence

Marketing executive Ally (Olivia Holt) created a morbid ad campaign for her boss's (Michaela Watkins) jewelry company because she was still reeling from a breakup.  Now she has to deal with the hotshot --emphasis on hot-- freelancer her boss brought in to make changes.  Jay (Mason Gooding) is a hopeless romantic and eager to get on Ally's good side, inviting her out on Valentine's Day to the most romantic restaurant in Seattle, and inadvertently making them a target for a serial killer.  The Heart-Eyes Killer has been moving from city to city, killing couples on V-Day in gruesome ways.  Ally and Jay are not a couple, but it's hard to explain the circumstances when you're running for your life from a crossbow-wielding anti-Cupid.

If you like horror and hate rom-coms, this is hilarious.  If you like horror and rom-coms, this is hilarious.  If you hate horror and like rom-coms, this might be too much.  If you hate both, why are you here?  Go back to watching sad character dramas, freak.

The ending does kind of drag on but the majority of this movie is a rollicking good time filled with excessive gore and every rom-com trope known to man.  And for my 90s kids, it's got supporting turns from Jordana Brewster and Devon Sawa.  It's streaming on Netflix.  

The Six Triple Eight (2024)

Nominated for Best Original Song    The women of the 6888 deserved better than this.  Content warning:  war violence, blood, racial slurs

Lena (Ebony Obsidian) decides to join the Women's Auxiliary Corps after her boyfriend (Gregg Sulkin) is killed during WWII.  As a Black woman, the only unit available is the Six Triple Eight, led by Major Charity Adams (Kerry Washington).  MAJ Adams has been training these women but never receiving any orders to actually do anything useful until General Holt (Dean Norris) assigns them to be the new postal battalion in the European theater.  It sounds like a meaningless job until MAJ Adams realizes that her battalion is meant to organize, sort, and deliver over 17 million pieces of mail in six months.  They were set up to fail but they persisted.

This is a remarkable story that deserved better than this vehicle.  It's schmaltzy, filled with montages, poor characterization, and abysmal dialogue.  Washington, Obsidian, and Milauna Jackson do their level best to rise above the material but this could have been a Hallmark special.  It's honestly insulting but it's also the only attempt made to bring this story to a wider audience.  That is a shame on behalf of the entire film industry.  It's streaming on Netflix.