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So as I go through these Great Movies lists, there are three kinds of movies: 1) movies that are obviously great, where it’s just immediately clear why people would love them; 2) movies whose charms are lost on me^[1]; and then 3) the secret third thing, movies where I genuinely don’t know what I think.

This is the last, and I’ve let it sit for a few weeks to give my opinion more time to cohere, but it stubbornly refuses to.

Superficially, it’s got a lot in common with Resnais’ own Hiroshima Mon Amour. It’s about two lovers(?) meeting up, and it’s about memory and its fallibility. But it’s not really like that at all.

The entire movie seemingly takes place in a grand old hotel. Much of it is told in voiceover narration, often over static shots of the hotel, or of people standing with unnatural stillness. A man is talking to a woman, relaying a story of how they met a year ago, which she claims not to remember.

Is he lying? Is she? What is the movie doing with time? Is this a ghost story? Is it a love story?

I’m writing an entry with a lot of question marks, because I don’t have any actual answers. And according to this Ebert review, maybe there aren’t answers.

This is the kind of meaninglessness that sometimes drives me nuts (see my review of Mulholland Drive, for instance), but here it doesn’t. It really does seem to work as a movie that just hints at a story, rather than revealing it. And as Ebert notes, Resnais has absolute mastery of the movie’s tone — when I’ve forgotten everything else, I’ll remember how it feels.

But is that enough for me to love it unreservedly? I’m not sure. I think probably not, but… honestly, check back in a few years. This one’s gonna need some time to digest. It’s probably a good sign that even as I’m sitting here writing this up, I’m thinking that I should rewatch it.

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1. I used to react with some contempt to these, but after my opinion shifted on a bunch of them, I tend these days to assume it’s more of a me thing than the movie actually being terrible. I don’t think there are many legitimately awful movies that are actually super-beloved by knowledgeable critics. (Except for the Marx Brothers.) ↩︎

All right, let’s go through our next box set of forgotten gialli.

First up, Death Carries a Cane. The first thing I want to say about this movie is that if you translate the Italian title literally, it’s “Dance Steps on the Edge of a Razor.” I understand why you might want to switch titles between regions, but why would you go from such a cool title to such a boring-sounding one?

In this case, perhaps it’s to make the excitement level of the title match up better with the actual boring content of the movie. The opening premise here is that a woman is looking through one of those little pay-a-quarter tourist telescopes, and while looking in the window of a random house^[1], sees a murder.

She goes to the cops with this, and if you have ever seen a giallo, you will not be surprised when the cops basically blow off her murder report. Ladies, always getting hysterical and saying they saw a murder, amirite. After they find a woman’s dead body, they get more interested, and come back with more questions. They then do the second most characteristic giallo cop thing: Suspect the first guy they happen to see, in this case her boyfriend. He has no connection at all to the dead woman, and it would be an incredible coincidence if a woman randomly saw a murder and then it turned out to be committed by her boyfriend, but hey, you want to arrest someone, gotta solve these crimes.

But the absolute best Italian cop thing happens later in the movie, when they’re doing a sting to catch the killer by having the protagonist dress up and pose as a prostitute. When a guy finally pulls her into his car, they move in to arrest him… and then are embarrassed when it turns out he’s the head of the police, and was just out picking up hookers, I guess.

Anyway, the mystery is eventually solved, thanks as usual to civilians, and it’s extremely undermotivated; the whole plot feels like it falls apart near the end, and it wasn’t doing so great before that. Below-average giallo.

Next up is Naked You Die. This sounds like a salacious title, so you’d expect it to be a very typical giallo, maybe on the sleazier side. But no: It’s actually this kind of borderline wholesome proto-giallo. It takes place at a girls’ school, but (despite the title!) there is zero nudity and zero bloody kills — when people get murdered, it’s via strangulation or offscreen happenings.

The vibe of it is also weirdly peppy. The protagonist is one of the teen girls, who’s a bubbly Nancy Drew figure; the main musical theme is reminiscent of the Batman TV show’s; they do a James Bond joke at one point; it’s all just borderline silly.

Here, I think it’s important to know what you’re getting. I was annoyed at first because it wasn’t delivering giallo realness; but turns out (as a little special feature on the disc explained) that this is from early enough in cinematic history — 1968, a few years before Argento’s Bird with the Crystal Plumage — that it isn’t so much part of the giallo genre, as part of the vague cloud of horror/mystery-adjacent stuff that would eventually cohere into the genre. And if I forgive it for the impossible sin of not following the genre tropes that hadn’t yet calcified, it’s a mildly entertaining little romp. Even with that generosity, though, it’s not more than that.

Last up is The Bloodstained Shadow. The plot of this one is convoluted enough that I’ll not even attempt to outline it, other than to say that the Wikipedia rundown talks about “a gambler, a pedophilic count, a fake medium, and an illegal abortionist,” and if that group of characters walks into a bar, you’ve got an amazing joke setup.

Anyway, bunch of murders, bunch of suspects (though fewer suspects as the murders continue), and a total rando who has to investigate because the police are useless. It’s a classic giallo in a lot of ways, though it’s on the slower and more sedate side for the genre — it’s nearly two hours long, where most of these are a brisk ninety minutes, and it does not earn that extra runtime. But overall, it’s a basically fine replacement-level giallo.

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1. On the one hand, feels weird to have a little tourist voyeur telescope; on the other hand… it’s Italy in the ’70s, sure, why not. ↩︎

This is an extremely aughts movie, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. It’s this terrible combination of post-Scream irony, second-gen affection for deep franchise backstory, and turn-of-the-century hemispherical fake boobs.

The basic concept of it is… well, let’s be honest: The basic concept is studio executives jamming two franchises together like a toddler with toy trucks. The execution of this concept is that Freddy wants to make everyone remember him again, and he manipulates Jason into going to Elm Street and doing some vaguely Freddy-style murders so that the adults who tried to suppress the memory of him will end up speculating about whether he’s back, and by doing so, summon him back.

This is silly (like, it involves a drug called Hypnocil^[1] that keeps people from dreaming, just as a background setup fact), and is also slooooow, as the action is interrupted with scene after scene of tedious infodump.

But it gets even worse later, when Jason turns on Freddy and they fight. Because both franchises need their full complement of touchstones, this means that they go to Crystal Lake for the big climactic showdown, which of course makes no real sense, but hey, gotta check the boxes. So this showdown is what the movie’s been building to, and… it’s just kinda dumb. The fundamental problem is that Freddy is a magical dreamlord and Jason is a big lug, and the filmmakers need to figure out how that fight makes sense. It’s basically the same problem they had with Godzilla vs. Kong, except that here they didn’t have the luxury of retconning Jason (more than the Friday the 13th movies already do) to make him more powerful, like they did there.

If you love both Jason and Freddy, you’re gonna watch this no matter what. (Well, given how old it is, you’ve probably already seen it, perhaps decades ago.) But if you are a normal person, it is thoroughly skippable, even if you do want to watch the more essential installments of these franchises.

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1. There’s no “I” in Hypnocil, at least not where you’d think ↩︎

So this is actually not a giallo, even though it is an Italian horror movie by Andrea Bianchi, who you will of course remember from Strip Nude for Your Killer. This is mostly because it’s from 1989, well after the heyday of giallo, but also because it’s actually got a supernatural element to it.

The premise is that we’ve got a killer who’s murdering prostitutes, and meanwhile we also have a crew making a horror movie. (Given that Strip Nude for Your Killer was on the Criterion Channel, and that cinephiles looooooove movies about movies, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this on there as well at some point, except for how it’s not very good.)

And so the director of our movie within a movie decides that he wants to do a seance for reasons that I forget; the seance seems to go badly, with the spirit of Jack the Ripper, that famous Italian killer, being summoned up inadvertently.

The problem for the movie is that the way it handles this scene makes it extremely clear that this is what happened, as well as who Jack possesses. It’s like, okay, so this guy is now possessed by a Bob and will be doing the killings from here on out, got it.

And if the movie were committed to being a slasher, that’d be fine. We’d now watch this guy make his inexorable kills until we get down to the final girl. But no: The movie is still influenced by its giallo heritage, and it wants to remain a mystery, so we keep following people around as they try to solve the puzzle of the killer’s identity.

And it’s so obviously this guy that you’re like… well, maybe it’s a mislead. Maybe there’s something else going on, and the supernatural element was fake all along, and this is a twisty-plotted giallo? But no. The killer is exactly who it seemed to be, and he is in fact possessed by Jack the Ripper just like we thought. The movie gives this to us as a big reveal, but it’s a reveal that we saw coming the whole time.

Part of me thinks they could have fixed this problem by just filming that seance scene differently, so that what happened was less obvious. But then, if we got to the end of a giallo-esque movie and the big shocking reveal was that actually Jack the Ripper had possessed this guy and he was the killer, that’d be infuriating too. So I think the movie ultimately just has some structural problems that would need a whole rewrite to fix.

Still, even if it falls short of the satisfying trash baseline that I look for in obscure horror, it’s not a terrible movie. It is lurid and Italian, and it has some absolutely bonkers musical choices — these bright, cheery, bouncy videogame-style themes at completely inappropriate times — and it’s interesting enough that I don’t regret watching it. But there are at least twenty Italian horror movies I’d recommend above it, so not really recommended.

An attentive reader will have noticed that I’ve watched a few gialli here and there. But it all started when I watched Suspiria in 2021, and the first handful of gialli I watched were all Argento’s.

It’s surprising in a sense that I’ve never watched this movie before, but the explanation here is simple: I totally thought I had. We bought it on disc at the same time as the others, and up until I built this site to be searchable and indexable by director/country/etc., I would have sworn that I’d watched it. Whoops!

So the fun thing is coming back to Argento after spending years watching gialli from lesser talents. Because immediately it is clear that this dude is just working at a whole other level. The imagery is amazing, the Goblin soundtrack is great, the camerawork is dynamic, the locations perfect. You can just sit back and appreciate watching a master do his thing.

But it’s also clear that this master is maybe not entirely right in the head, because what this shares with these lesser gialli (and also Argento’s other work) is that the plot is completely bonkers, the character motivations absurd, and the twists and turns incredible. I say all of that as praise, to be clear. It’s a giallo! This is what a giallo should be. If I were looking for low-key realism, I’d watch some other movie, you know?

I actually think this might be a good movie to watch as your intro to giallo. I like Suspiria better, but it’s less of a classic giallo; Tenebrae is in the quality ballpark, but I think this one is just a little more over-the-top fun. Either way, it’s an easy recommend to anyone who isn’t allergic to the genre — this is one of the best working at the peak of his powers.

So Robert Bresson is one of those directors who I just kinda don’t get. Intellectually, I can read about how he wanted his actors to be emotionless and act mechanically, and think it’s a neat idea; intellectually, I can see that his movies about terrible people acting terribly and then achieving a kind of grace tie into his religious worldview. But emotionally, it just leaves me cold.

But… this movie is something of an exception to that. So either it’s his objectively best movie or else I’m starting to vibe with him a bit more.

The setup in this one is that a teenager begs his dad for an advance on his allowance to pay back some money he owes. The dad refuses, so the kid goes to a friend of his, who’s all “oh man, I’ve got some counterfeit money here, we just need to pass this off and get some change, and we’re set.” So they go to a photography store and buy a frame with a big bill. The clerk is suspicious, but can’t prove that the bill is fake, so gives them the frame and their change.

When the owner is going through the money later, he realizes instantly that it’s a fake bill, and is upset that the clerk took it. But rather than go to the cops, he uses it to pay a delivery guy. The delivery guy then uses it to pay at a restaurant; the restaurant accuses him of counterfeiting and keeps his fake bill. He’s outraged, and gets into a fight.

From here — and really, even before here — the movie is about what people do when put into a situation that challenges their morality. When the delivery guy goes back to the photography store, will they admit that they passed on a fake bill? How is this delivery guy going to deal with being in the criminal justice system (as no matter what happens with this bill, he did start an altercation at that cafe)? What about that shit-ass kid who started all this mess?

It’s Bresson, so you should not expect it to go well. This is the dude who made a movie about torturing a donkey, after all. But watching it spiral out is absorbing, and Bresson’s characteristic coldness works well here. I walk away not only liking this movie, but thinking that there’s a reasonable chance this isn’t his objectively best movie, and that maybe I was unfair to his other movies.

As a nerd of a certain age, I am of course familiar with all the nerd icons of the ’80s, and when it comes to cartoons, this is probably the big one. But unlike most nerds my age, I actually hated most of the ’80s nerd movies. I can’t stand Spaceballs, I dislike all the Muppet fantasy movies, and I’d never seen this. But some time ago, there was a sale on 4K discs that made this like $5 or something, and okay, I guess at some point I owe it to myself to watch it just for cultural literacy, if nothing else.

So expectations going in weren’t high, but I came out of it impressed.

The opening of the movie is the strongest part. It starts off in the ’70s with some kind of apparent nuclear explosion before jumping to the impossibly remote future of, uh, 2019. We’re in Neo-Tokyo, which is of course a cyberpunk world full of drugs and cool biker gangs and whatnot. It is such a retro-future, and I love it. We get to see our bunch of loser street punk kids get mixed up with some army stuff that’s really above their pay grade, complete with zombie kids with superpowers.

This takes us into a surprisingly nuanced (and unsurprisingly complex) political plot, with a military coup that plays out as more genuinely ambiguous than storybook good/evil — the colonel staging this coup isn’t a straight-up bad guy, and his reasons aren’t completely wrong… but it is a military coup, you know? This also all ties in to some light mysticism around how those kids got their superpowers, and a forbidden military research project. The political stuff works better than I expected it to; the mystical stuff works rather less well.

And that’s ultimately the part where the movie goes from potentially great to merely pretty good: The movie ends up devolving into some kind of Dragonball-ass fight that then segues into grandiose philosophizing. The pretentiousness is basically the failure mode of this kind of content — stuff aimed at teens who imagine that this is what Serious Literary Fiction is like (there are also some random cartoon boobs in there, presumably meant to similarly make the movie feel more adult).

Still, if the ending lets it down, there’s a lot of good stuff along the way; I can easily see why this was a major cultural touchstone for a generation of nerds.

So whereas Blow Out was Brian De Palma’s remake of Blow-Up, this is his remake of… well, it’s not really a strict remake of anything, but if you could somehow remake Rear Window and Vertigo at the same time, this is basically what you’d get. Or at least, it’s what you’d get if you also did it in a sleazy De Palma register, which he does.

We start off with a down-on-his-luck guy who’s been given a house-sitting job at this really cool UFO-looking house on top of a hill. Which also has a peeping-tom telescope that he uses to watch this one lady strip and do a dance every night. Which means that he’s also watching when he sees a crime happen over at her place, which gets him mixed up in the middle of things.

And I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that everything is not what it seems at first — what he’s mixed up in is more complicated and weirder than he first imagined, which is where the Vertigo part comes into play. He ends up following people all over town, to beaches and shopping malls and seedy porn shoots (where the movie briefly turns into a literal Frankie Goes to Hollywood music video).

The movie isn’t fully successful. The plot is nonsense, the characters are implausible, and the vibe really is genuinely sleazy. But it’s unabashedly itself, and it’s not afraid to go over the top, and that has to count for something.

Two more Joe Bobs, from one of the last(?) quarterly specials.

The first is Rawhead Rex. It’s an English countryside folkloric monster movie — some guys in a field move a stone, unleashing an ancient evil, which then goes around killing people. Meanwhile, there’s a church that seems to have some clues for how to defeat the monster, because sure, why not put your opaque monster-killing clues into a stained-glass window. Does the monster get defeated in the end? Does it kill a lot of people along the way? You know the answers to these questions.

There’s nothing especially good about this movie, but also nothing particularly bad about it. It does what it sets out to do in a basically competent way.

More impressive is Oddity. So this movie starts out with a woman home alone at night in a big rural house that she and her husband are renovating. It’s unfinished and dark, and she’s been staying in a tent on the vast first floor. At some point, she goes out to her car to get something; after she returns to the house, there’s a knock on the door. Through the peephole^[1], she sees a crazy-looking guy, who — it transpires — has escaped from the insane asylum her husband runs. So, y’know, that’s creepy. But then the really creepy thing is that he warns her that a guy snuck inside the house while she was getting stuff from the car, and he’s in there with her right now.

I’m going into such detail here because this is the point at which we stopped the movie not once, but twice. It’s fucking creepy as hell! I mean, it’s a horror movie and setting up a mood of dread is clearly what it’s trying to do, so mission accomplished. But this actually made me realize how little I want actual scariness from horror movies. And so yeah, it was just too intense and not at all the mood that I was looking for on a Friday night, and so we almost just gave up after two attempts at the movie, but gave it a third shot.

And here’s the irony: Like 30 seconds later, that scene ends, and we cut to the credits and a totally different, much less intense, vibe. (It’s reminiscent of a particular moment in Barbarian, actually; if you’ve seen that movie, you know what I’m talking about — just as it’s getting too tense to be borne, suddenly we’re in a very different mood.)

But to be clear: While the movie does relieve that tension, it also sets up plenty of later tension. This is a movie with jump scares and a frequent sense of creeping dread. It’s effective at being scary because it’s just generally a well-done movie all around. The plot is complex, but makes sense, and the characters work well enough. Particularly recommended to those who like their horror on the scary side.

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1. Not sure if “peephole” is really the right word: It’s like a sliding bar that covers up a hole in the door, like they use to give food to prisoners in movies. ↩︎

All right, three more gialli!

A weirdly common way for gialli to begin is for some complete rando to get killed by some other complete rando, right before we jump to our main cast of characters. And every time this happens, I end up forgetting about it — I didn’t have any connection to those people, I don’t care that some rando died — until later in the movie, it turns out to be totally significant, at which point I’m like oh right, that first murder, got it.

And so A White Dress for Marialé starts off exactly like that, with a double-murder/suicide (as a guy kills his wife and her lover in flagrante delicto), at which point we now cut to this castle, where a bunch of people start arriving for the world’s most suspicious dinner party. Every single person involved in this party is deeply weird and is obviously concealing some secret, and they’re all behaving in bizarre, borderline insane ways. You will be shocked to learn that the party devolves into murder and sex, and that psychosexual trauma underlies characters’ actions. I hope I didn’t spoil it too hard.

As gialli go, it’s… fine, I guess, but the part where it’s set in a weird isolated castle makes it feel not quite right, almost more gothic than giallo.

Nine Guests for a Crime also starts with a murder; a couple in flagrante delicto is interrupted for the dude to be brutally killed. But only one death here, so it’s comparatively a very gentle and mild giallo, right.

We then cut to a boat taking a family of terrible, terrible people to an island. They’re a rich family, and so help me god, all I could think about for this whole movie was the Bluths, because they give extremely Arrested Development vibes. But with a giallo twist, which means that most of them are sleeping with each other’s wives, they all have terrible secrets, and oh yeah, there are about to be some killings.

So this whole movie is also set in a single isolated setting — early on, the killer kills the yacht crew and sends it away, stranding everyone on the island — but it doesn’t feel as gothic, because it’s a very stylish midcentury house (with so very many Sharper Image executive desk toys), not an ancient castle. I can’t say this is an especially above-average giallo, but it’s a good solid one, and the ending has some fun energy.

And finally, there’s Tropic of Cancer, an Italian movie about Haiti, with all the cultural sensitivity that you’d expect from a giallo. (But honestly, it’s not bad! I mean, they go hard at voodoo, but that’s almost just baseline Haiti horror content.)

The setting does make it feel unique, with fun tropical vibes, despite the horrific giant spiders. The plot is absolute nonsense, centered around a scientist who invented some kind of aphrodisiac that is tempting everyone to murder; but a bit of light nonsensicality is pretty much the giallo price of admission, so. I think that, like the other two, this one lands at good but not great.

Ultimately all of these are mostly recommended for giallo fans, but considering that they came from volume five of the Forgotten Gialli series of Blu-ray box sets, you’ll forgive me for imagining that giallo fans are pretty much the only likely audience anyway.

Next up on the S&S 2022 list is this Jonathan Glazer quasi-SF quasi-horror film.

So when I first saw this on the list, I was surprised, because I thought it was like… idk, a slightly upscale Species — a movie where Scarlett Johansson is an alien who goes around seducing men and then stealing their precious bodily fluids or whatever. A sort of light-feminist SF horror thing.

And that’s not completely wrong, but after seeing the movie, it’s also not entirely right; and now that I know what this actually is, I get why it’s on the list. This isn’t really a horror movie in any conventional sense — it’s slow and ambiguous in that arthouse style, and what’s going on is never really spelled out by the movie.

I’m going to talk about this more concretely behind the spoiler cut.

Spoilers

So what we’ve got is a very alien, very cold Scarlett cruising Scotland and looking for men to pick up. (Many of the men speak in accents that are incomprehensible to me; I’m never sure with things like that if the incomprehensibility is intentional, if this is supposed to be a heavy accent that disorients the viewer and keeps them a little unsure what’s being said… or if I’m just bad at understanding Scottish people.)

When she picks them up, she brings them into a building, to allegedly have sex with them. They undress (and to my surprise, at least one was sporting a boner; I didn’t think movies could do that, but apparently they can), and then… sink into the floor as they walk, to be trapped in a… um, metaphorical fluid space? See above re “ambiguous.”

But so the real core of the movie is that as Scarlett picks up these men, she becomes more human, eventually seeming to feel emotions and to be more aware of her body and to feel like something’s wrong. Is this some kind of absorbed humanity overlaying her actual alien being? Is it the personality of the human she’s been possessing? Is it the point of her activities? Is it an error in them?

The movie could be setting that up as a mystery, but it’s not. It’s never going to tell you, and it arguably doesn’t care. The point is simply that it’s happening, for whatever reason.

What it will do, though, is use this inversion as a source of pointed commentary. Because as Scarlett becomes more human, she suddenly goes from predator to prey: A dude who she meets on a trail doubles back to assault her, and for the first time in the movie she’s vulnerable.

But this tbh felt a little weird as some kind of feminist statement, because… okay, yes, I get what you’re going for here, movie, but at the same time, this guy is fighting against an alien that has been killing a bunch of people. Yes, he’s also terrible, but it’s hard to read this situation cleanly. But maybe that’s the point, too?

Ultimately, for all that the story and its character progression do matter, for me what stands out is the atmosphere of the thing, the mood it evokes. It’s about the solitude of this person, sometimes set against the loneliness and desperation of other people, sometimes contrasting with the vibrancy and life of a party, and sometimes just existing in an inhuman liminal space.

For my part, there’s not quite enough substance in the movie to even consider it for a top ten all-time list. But it is absorbing, and I see why it made some people’s lists.

Two more gialli, and they’re both weird in different ways.

The Killer Is Still Among Us starts off with a very non-giallo killing: People are murdered with guns. It’s almost shocking to see a murder weapon so callous and modern and impersonal. Whatever happened to tradition, to the black gloves and the straight razor? Truly tragic.

But so our hero for this movie is a criminology student, who is studying… this serial killer, I guess? Feels a little weird. Anyway, she starts investigating, and this investigation gets her following a gynecologist who is also a voyeur (which is probably just a whole thing for male gynecologists in Italy at this time, tbh); she follows him to a “voyeur bar,” which sure, that’s a thing. This leads her to the local lover’s lane, where roving gangs of voyeurs are spying on couples banging in their cars. Yadda yadda, there’s a murder, and then there’s a psychic who prophesies more graphic murders, which then occur (with some more traditional knife stuff going on, including cutting off a nipple because why not).

But the really wild part is the ending. This is, I guess, a spoiler, but c’mon: They do not catch the killer. Instead, she goes into a movie theater at the end, and watches what turns out to be this very movie. The End. It is bizarre and meta and it would be kinda arthouse-y if I thought the filmmakers had any real intention behind it other than trying to be surprising. (It then ends with a public service announcement about helping the police find killers, because turns out this is based on real-life serial killings that had happened recently when this was made, and they thought they should be tasteful about it. I mean, other than the nipple slicing, I guess.)

Arabella: Black Angel, meanwhile, is probably the giallo that gets closest to being actually porn. And that’s counting The Sister of Ursula, the previous most-porny giallo I’d seen.

As the movie starts, a woman goes to a sex party at what seems to be an abandoned building outside of town. Sex party-style activities ensue, up until the cops come. The cops break things up, but also engage in a little light rape, because I guess Italy. Later, a cop goes to this woman’s home to a) apologize for raping her, and b) blackmail her for more sex, activities which seem a little at odds with each other. When he ends up dead, it’s hard to really be broken up about it.

And this is all the normal part of the movie, before the really weird shit with her paralyzed husband, tragic family murders in the backstory, near-fatal blowjobs, and a bunch of castration.

The whole point of gialli is to abandon good taste and give in to absurd excess, so it feels a little hypocritical to criticize these two movies for absurd excess. And ultimately they’re not bad, they do in fact deliver weird giallo vibes, for the most part. But they’re also just a little bit off, and I think would be better if they dialed it back to 11.

So here’s another Luis Buñuel movie. I had started off unimpressed with Buñuel — he seemed like an edgelord who was more interested in shocking people than making interesting movies — but between Los Olvidados and this, I’m warming up to him.

So this movie is about rich people hosting a dinner party. It starts out with a kind of weirdly ominous feeling, as servants leave in advance of guests arriving, for no obvious reason. When the guests do arrive, there are strange moments where events repeat — someone walks into a hall that they just walked into, that kind of thing. And then the party is weird in mundane ways that can only be described as “rich people shit.” There’s a bear, for instance. The food is weird. There are some genuinely insane conversations. After dinner, everyone withdraws to the living room, and the party continues until the wee hours of the morning, and people start falling asleep in the living room.

And when they wake up… they request breakfast in the living room. At some point, this starts feeling odd to people, and discussions break out about why nobody’s leaving. And with some experimentation, it turns out that they can’t leave. Every intention to do so just dissipates, and even as they start panicking about this situation, they are somehow stuck in this living room for no obvious reason.

I was actually expecting this to kind of be an unspoken subtext for a long time, but no: It turns out to be extremely spoken, and it’s the explicit driver of the movie very quickly, even down to the practicalities of the logistics. There is a toilet in the area they can use, thankfully, but there’s no food or water. They eventually break into the wall and get at a water pipe to solve the water problem, but food remains an issue as they are there for days. (To give a bit of a spoiler: they do not resort to cannibalism.)

At some point, as this movie is turning very claustrophobic, we get a view outside, to find out that the police and fire departments are trying to get in to rescue them, but can’t get in for the same reasons the people can’t leave: At every attempt, they lose their motivation and decide not to.

And so yeah, this is what the movie is about, this tense situation where all these party guests are trapped in a room together. There are various interpersonal dramas (unsurprisingly, some of the rich people are having affairs, and some of their polite friendships turn rather less polite when the situation becomes more stressful), there is the threat of violence, there are various illnesses and infirmities, and there is just the steadily increasing madness of a group of people trapped in a situation they inexplicably can’t leave.

There’s obviously a huge degree of social satire involved here, as Buñuel strips away the layers of sophistication and elegance that these rich people started the party with; but honestly, this is just a really solid pressure-cooker of a movie. (And it’s only ninety minutes, so while the guests may have outstayed their welcome, the movie doesn’t.)

All right. The final episode^[1] of Joe Bob has aired, and so I guess it’s time to write up all the movies I’ve seen on the show that I haven’t yet written up.

But so, here we go, in what I think is most-to-least recent order, but may be somewhat out of sync. (Really, it’s just the order that I have notes sitting here.)

Messiah of Evil: So this is clearly made as a kind of art house-adjacent horror movie, but it’s got a real amateur vibe to it, and amateur art-house comes off as pretentious and portentous. Wikipedia notes that it’s praised for its “surrealist, dreamlike tone and elliptical plot.” I agree that those are qualities it possesses; how much praise it deserves for them, well. (Honestly, it’s not a bad movie, but it so badly wants to be better than it is.)

House on Haunted Hill: This is a 1959 classic with Vincent Price. A bunch of semi-strangers are called together by an eccentric rich man, to spend a night in this house for the chance to get a pile of money. The house is charming, with such features as an acid pool in the basement, but everyone stays for one reason or another, and shockingly the night does not pass uneventfully. The movie doesn’t really make sense in a lot of ways — like, you can easily follow the plot, but when you stop to ask why something would be the way it is, the only answer is “because they thought it would be cool in the movie if it were that way.” But it’s got a spooky vibe, and is solid in a very classical way.

The Innkeepers: So this is a Ti West joint, but unlike his Pearl trilogy, it’s not a period piece. Or, well, it was released in 2011, so at this point it’s kind of inadvertently one, but it was set in the contemporary world of 2010. You’ve got a hotel with an absentee owner and very few customers that’s going to be closing down soon, and we’re really following two employees who are staying there for its last weekend. They’re kinda ghost-hunters, and the hotel is allegedly haunted, and the plot of the movie is seeing how true that “allegedly” is.

It’s slow, and not much happens, but I was enjoying the characters and atmosphere for most of the movie’s running length — but right at the end, one of the main characters starts making decisions that are deeply stupid and wildly out of character, for absolutely no reason other than that the plot demands them. If you’re going to have a movie with little action because it’s just focusing hard on characterization, then I demand that when the events do pick up, you don’t immediately abandon every drop of characterization you’ve established in service of the plot. This was so incredibly annoying that it essentially ruined the movie for me.

Iced: So a bunch of high school kids on a skiing trip do some dumb quasi-pranks that get a guy killed while skiing. Years later, they meet up as adults at a timeshare, and a) catch up on each other’s lives and who they are as adults (I feel like the makers of this movie really wished their title could be a Big Chill pun), and b) get killed by a mysterious murderer, who (spoiler alert) is tied to the opening tragedy, because obviously. There’s a lot of absurdities in this movie, and it gets weirdly intense at moments, but it’s not bad.

Curtains: This is more of a psychological horror, about actors. As it starts, we’re with an actress in an asylum, where she’s had herself committed with fake insanity to research a part where she’ll be playing a madwoman. But then the director comes to get her out and is like “oh btw, the part’s not really yours, I’m doing a casting call,” which is legitimate grounds for murder. But then also it turns out his “casting call” is inviting six women to his mansion to rehearse and audition over multiple days (weeks?) until he makes his pick. And he is absolutely going to try to sleep with them.

It’s not much of a spoiler to say that the pool dwindles over time as they get variously murdered off. This is mostly very conventional, until the ending, which is this whole elaborate chase scene seemingly imported from another movie, in a geography that makes no sense. It’s like the killer is chasing their final victim in a private version of the House on the Rock — just this gigantic warehouse full of weird stuff and mazes and tunnels, that I guess we’re supposed to believe was just in his backyard? Maybe not a good movie, but it is interesting.

Blood and Black Lace: So they had an episode of Joe-Bob where they showed a Dario Argento movie (which we’d already seen) along with this Mario Bava movie, and had a debate over which was the first giallo. My vote is for Argento, because this felt like a proto-giallo, with a kinda Gothic vibe. It’s mostly set in these old mansions full of carved wood and marble, and had a very dramatic style to it. It’s an enjoyable movie, but giallo? I see the argument for it, but ultimately, I come down on no.

Mute Witness: So this is not a Russian movie, but it’s set in Russia, where characters are making a movie in an old, abandoned studio. And so early on, everyone’s gone home except the woman who does the (physical) special effects; and she witnesses another crew come into the studio and make what seems at first like a porn movie… until the actress is killed, and it turns out it’s a snuff film.

The people making the film realize that she’s seen them, and the rest of the movie is a cat-and-mouse game where they’re trying to capture her and her friends, while they’re trying to get the criminals brought to justice. (Oh, also, she’s mute, hence the title.)

This feels more like a thriller than horror, but it’s a really good thriller. There are lots of twists and turns, the suspenseful sequences are genuinely suspenseful, and the abandoned studio (which is also an abandoned studio in real life) makes for a great setting.

This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse: This is maybe the weirdest movie out of this whole lot, which is saying something, given what I’ve already described. It’s a black and white Brazilian movie about a kind of philosopher murderer named “Coffin Joe.” He’s looking for a woman to be the “perfect mother” of his child, a concept he will monologue about at length.

So, lacking dating apps, he instead kidnaps a half-dozen women, and submits them all to various tortures. Five of them don’t make it through the tortures, and he kills them all for exhibiting fear or disgust at e.g. having a bunch of spiders crawling around on themselves. One makes it through, but then for reasons I forget, it doesn’t work out between them. But meanwhile another woman comes into the picture who is, implausibly, totally into him and who meets his criteria for being a perfect mother.

And at this point, it all gets somewhat metaphorical with visions of hell and skeletons coming up from the ground, and long story short, he does not end up with a happy family. Amusingly, the Brazilian censors made him put in a bit at the end where Coffin Joe repents of his sins and welcomes Jesus as his lord and savior, which, uh, does not really fit with the rest of the movie, and which the director super hates for basically good reasons.

Earth vs. the Spider: This is a movie from 1958, and the premise is: there’s a giant spider. That’s pretty much it! Some teens fight it in a cave and kill it. They then take its corpse to their school dance(?!?), where the rock ‘n’ roll music wakes it up, and then they need to fight it again as it rampages through town. It’s basically forgettable, but interesting as a time capsule of the ’50s.

Dog Soldiers: So this is the story of a bunch of army guys who deploy in the Scottish Highlands to investigate werewolves. The movie is kinda dark, with lots of betrayal and brooding; it takes itself very seriously. But also everyone in the movie is very stupid, the plot events are nonsensical, and it’s just generally hard to care about any of it. I think it’s trying to make A Social Point, but there are horror movies that make better points while also being more entertaining. This is from the aughts, and I sorta think the aughts just weren’t a good decade for horror — that edgelord vibe of the era leads horror movies to places that I don’t enjoy.

Bad Moon: This is also a werewolf movie, and I can’t say it’s better exactly, but I dislike it less. The conceit here is that a family that lives out in a rural house has a) a dog, and b) a visiting brother who is secretly a werewolf. When people start being viciously killed, local cops blame the dog, but the dog tries to solve the crime and point them at the werewolf brother. (That’s not quite accurate, but it gets across the vibe — like half of this movie is from the perspective of the dog.) It’s tonally a mess, veering between straight-up horror and Hallmark movie sentimentality in ways that don’t mesh at all, and the plot is basically nonsense. But at least it’s not grimdark.

Piranha: One of many Jaws rip-offs, the conceit here is that a bunch of mutant piranhas are kept in a pool at a military complex, and then accidentally released into a river. Hijinks ensue, culminating in a summer camp where so many people are swimming as the piranhas move through. Is it good? No. But is it fun? Enh, not really; it’s one of those inoffensive, but not-even-mediocre movies.

Crocodile: So this is also a Jaws rip-off, but it’s Thai, and a lot more interesting. Or at least it is for most of its length. It starts off with the crocodile engaging in some beach murders, in true Jaws-like fashion; but then at some point a much larger crocodile is destroying a whole village before being a normal size again — as far as I can tell, it’s not supposed to be a magical size-changing crocodile, it’s just kinda inconsistent film-making.

But so anyway, this early part is fun and interesting, and then we get to the part where they’re out on the water to hunt the crocodile — it’s very faithful to the Jaws template — and it just slows down to a crawl. Like, suddenly we go from this fast-paced creature feature into a languid arthouse movie where nothing happens for seemingly hours. (It can’t actually be that long, but it felt like it.) By the end of the movie, it had exhausted a lot of my earlier goodwill, but at least there was goodwill to exhaust?

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1. Sort of? Shudder’s cancelled the regular series, but apparently there are going to be four more specials this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do more specials in the future, either, but… well, maybe not. If not, I’ll be sad, because I’ve really loved watching this show, both as a fun Friday night activity and as the thing that (along with my wife, of course) got me into horror as a genre. ↩︎

So still tied at #169, this is a movie about post-revolutionary Cuba, made in Cuba in 1968. The obvious question I had was: Is there like a censorship board in Cuba at the time, such that this movie has to be a giant propaganda piece? And the answer is: yes, there is. And what’s more, the guy who directed this movie, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, was one of the people who founded it. So, okay, this is going to be a huge propaganda piece, right? Well, yes and no.

The movie opens in 1961, after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion; a bunch of Cuba’s old elite is fleeing for Miami, including our protagonist’s parents and (now ex-)wife. He’s staying behind because… well, not for any real reason, exactly. He’s not a committed revolutionary, he’s not some ultra-patriotic Cuban, he just doesn’t seem to want to leave. (And, it becomes clear over the course of the movie, his relationship with his wife was rocky, so their separation is a feature, not a bug, for him.)

So we’re going to live with this remnant of the pre-revolutionary elite as he piggles aimlessly around. He’s currently living off the income from rents on property his family owns (a fact that will not be true by the end of the movie, after government officials have an interview with him about this), but he tells himself that he wants to be a writer, and now that his wife is gone, he can get serious about his writing. He never really does, though.

What he mostly does is get horny about nearly every woman he sees. He has a whole elaborate fantasy about his house-cleaner, he narrates about how hot (or not) various women on the street are, and eventually he picks up a young woman who wants to get into movies, promising to introduce her to a friend of his who works in the studio. They make their way back to his apartment, and have another of those confusingly-consensual sex scenes, where she’s literally running away from him and squirming out of his grasp… but also laughing about it, and teasing him playfully, so I guess it’s just a game?

Anyway, they have sex, and then it turns out that while this was just a fun little diversion for him, she’s taking it seriously — it’s not clear if she was a virgin before, but she’s young and inexperienced and this is still (apparently, sorta — it seems like there’s a cosmopolitan elite culture and a more traditional culture of the regular people) one of those societies in which a woman can be “ruined” by having casual sex with a random guy.

So okay, he grudgingly makes her his girlfriend. We then see them go on some dates (including to Hemingway’s house, now a museum) where he voice-over narrates his contempt for her, and ultimately just ditches her.

We then have a bit of flashback to his first love; I actually didn’t realize that it was a flashback at first, so when he’s picking her up outside a high school, I was just like… yikes, dude, that’s creepy even for you. But oh right, his hair isn’t gray here, he’s also in high school, okay. This memory causes him to consider in maudlin fashion how his life might have gone differently if he hadn’t focused on his career instead of this girl, and how he imagines that he might now be happy with her. (He wouldn’t be, of course; he’s an inherently miserable person.)

Anyway, the girlfriend he ditched? Now her brother comes to his house to threaten him, for luring her back to his apartment and taking her virginity like a cad. This escalates into a sit-down with the girl’s whole family, who try to persuade him to marry her, wailing and moaning about how she’s ruined otherwise, and threatening him with the law if he doesn’t.

But he won’t — he just got out of one miserable marriage and doesn’t want to start another — and so we end up in court, where he is now being accused of rape. Since we saw this scene, we’re pretty sure he’s innocent of that crime, but also we now find out that this girl is like seventeen, so I guess he was metaphorically hanging around outside the high school at his current age. He’s convinced in narration that he’s going to lose this case, because everyone hates elites now and he’s clearly unsympathetic. But in fact, he wins… which sets him off on more self-recriminations, because he knows he’s been a shit, and sort of feels like he should have been punished even if he’s not actually a rapist.

The next crisis of the movie is a larger one, the missile crisis of 1962. And here we get a lot of newsy stuff, and ominous build-ups of weaponry — one of his creepy habits earlier in the movie was to use a telescope to check out sunbathing women by the pool, but now he uses that telescope to look at missile launchers that are being wheeled into place. The tension builds, and… THE END.

So okay, this seems to be pretty straightforwardly propagandistic, right? This guy represents the old elites, and he’s just a garbage-tier human? Yes, but the thing is that Alea is too good to make such a simple movie. Throughout the film, he’s also meeting up with his other, more sympathetic, rich friends; he also narrates about how Cuba has changed since the revolution, and there really is a sense of loss, of something that was beautiful having disappeared from the world.

Even a revolutionary could watch this movie and feel like the revolution was not an uncomplicatedly good thing, and that a kind of sophistication and openness that used to mark Cuba had disappeared. The guy’s an asshole, but he’s not wrong about this.

(And also, the movie opens with a street festival, wherein government officials shoot down a guy for unclear reasons. I think from context, he’s supposed to be a counter-revolutionary, but anytime your movie has government officials shooting a guy at a street festival, it’s fair to say that it’s not fully doing propaganda for that government, even if you work at the propaganda department.)

The end result is a movie that ends up feeling like a portrait not just of this one shitty dude, but of this time and place, Havana after the revolution. It’s interesting and complex, and comes from a perspective that I, at least, haven’t seen too much of. It feels like it would have landed very differently in 1968 (when the events it’s depicting were about as far away as COVID is for us) than it does now as a document of history; but I suspect it works in both the present and the past tense. Either way, from where we are today, it’s easy to see why this made top ten lists.

So this is a Mike Nichols movie from 1971 that’s basically a think-piece on gender relations and (as it was then styled) “male chauvinism,” as examined through a couple of basically shitty guys (a young Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel, who I didn’t even know had ever acted).

As the story begins, they’re in college, and Art ends up dating a young Candice Bergen. She thinks he’s a nice guy, but doesn’t seem to be particularly attracted to him; but she engages in a pity makeout, and ends up pity dating him. And then Jack, who is Art’s roommate and best friend, tracks her down and seduces her — yes, she knows that he’s Art’s friend, but she sleeps with him anyway. And then she ends up sleeping with Art basically out of guilt for cheating on him, and now he’s even more locked-in on her.

And so Jack and Candice continue their affair, and Jack tells Art all about what they get up to, giving her a pseudonym in his stories so that Art doesn’t suspect they’re stories about his own girlfriend. Yadda yadda, Jack gives her an ultimatum, and they angrily break up.

Now we cut to years later. Art is married to Candice, but we only know that because he tells us so, while explaining that he’s dating/having an affair with this new girl (who he’s just brought to Jack’s apartment) because their sex life is terrible. Meanwhile, Jack is dating Ann-Margret, with whom he has a tempestuous relationship — she wants to get married, he doesn’t even seem to really like her that much.

Art proposes a partner swap to Jack, who is happy to go along with it (he seems to have the hots for Art’s girls pretty consistently); Art’s girlfriend rebuffs him… but suggests that if he comes by her place alone later, she’d be up for it. Meanwhile, when Art goes in to try persuading Ann-Margret, he finds that she’s swallowed a bunch of pills in a suicide attempt and is unconscious, so he calls the hospital.

Now we cut to years later again. Art seems to still be married, but he’s got a new, teenaged girlfriend (Carol Kane!). They’ve gone together to visit Jack, who is now divorced from Ann-Margret (so her recovery and their entire marriage basically happened offscreen), and has curdled into super-hating women — which he demonstrates by showing Art and his woman a slideshow called “Ball-Busters on Parade,” of all the women he’s slept with over the years, explaining why each of them is terrible. This gets a little awkward when the slide of Candice Bergen comes up; he skips past it very quickly, but Art notices. Carol Kane eventually gets upset about this parade of misogyny and storms off.

The last scene of the movie is Jack going to visit Rita Moreno, a prostitute with whom he apparently is a regular. She’s got a whole script that he needs her to go through verbatim — when she deviates once, he’s furious at her — because apparently that’s the only way ol’ Jack can get it up anymore. The end.

This is not a very pleasant movie; there are parts of the early college bits that are fun (and this is the biggest part of the movie), but the later parts are just super bitter.

And okay, it doesn’t need to be fun — after all, it should be a dramatic actors’ showcase with all the talent that’s in it; but it ends up feeling flat, because the characters are all so thinly drawn. Jack kinda just hates women and hides it behind aggression; Art just kinda hates women and hides it behind passivity. Neither of them changes much throughout the film, so they’re doing the same shit in their forties that they were doing as teenagers, only crankier and more bitter. None of the women are on-screen long enough to develop their characters very far.

Ultimately, this feels like one of those very seventies movies, the kind of thing that thought it was saying something really novel and interesting about relationships, but which today reads as a portrait of a Type of Guy that was apparently common back then, but isn’t often seen in as pure a form now. It’s not a bad movie — there’s too much talent involved for that — but it’s not an especially good one, either.

Next up in this zillion-way tie at #169 on the S&S list is this movie from Michelangelo Antonioni, who you may remember from such films as L’avventura and L’eclisse. Like those, this one stars Monica Vitti; unlike those, this one is in color.

Like a lot of directors making their first color movie, he really uses the colors; but being the kind of arch mid-century intellectual he is, he uses it to a large extent to make his shots as maximally drab and monochromatic as possible. Some of this is natural — the movie takes place in and around a bunch of factories, which have some inherent grayness — but some of it is pure artifice, most notably when all the fruit on a fruit cart has been painted gray. (Apparently they also painted a forest gray — this movie was made before environmentalism, as we’ll talk about — but then ended up not using it because the light was wrong.)

So this movie is really about two things. The first is those industrial landscapes. Antonioni was apparently inspired by the postwar development of Ravenna into an industrial town, and what that meant for the area around it. To the extent that any of the landscapes in this movie are real, it is fucking bleak, because this looks like a hellscape. There’s a dead lake, there are areas full of soot and ash, there are smokestacks belching bright yellow smoke that a character calmly notes is lethal to birds.

But he’s not making an environmentalist film that decries this despoliation of nature. It’s clear in how the movie is shot that he thinks this is all beautiful in its own way.^[1] And it is! The shots are gorgeous in this, whether the palettes of a scene are monochromatic or with pops of color. His previous movies looked good, but this one looks incredible.

So that’s one thing. The second thing the movie is about is Monica Vitti’s character. She plays the wife of a factory owner, and she is… well, Antonioni says “neurotic,” but no, she’s straight up mentally ill, like she seems to have difficulty sometimes telling what’s real or behaving in appropriate ways.

And so her husband early in the film introduces her to a fellow industrialist, and the guy immediately develops a crush on her, and finds an excuse to go seek her out to flirt with her. His flirting doesn’t really go well at first, because she’s too trippy to even understand that he’s flirting, but he is not dissuaded and keeps following her around places.

Later, there’s a super weird scene where she’s with her husband, another couple, this guy, and a woman (who I think is supposed to be a sex worker, but maybe not?) at this shack on the riverside, and they all crawl into this weird bed-room^[2] and engage in a bunch of innuendo-laden talk and touching that seems on the verge of turning into an orgy, but never quite does.

Later still, a bunch of shit has happened to Vitti’s character to make her even more distraught and to make her hold on reality more tenuous. She seeks out this guy for comfort, and he pretty much just straight up ignores how distraught she is and tries to seduce her. Although, “seduce” might not be exactly the right word. Wikipedia’s description of this scene says “Initially she resists Corrado’s advances, but they eventually have sex.” And I feel like it’s written in that passive-voice neutral tone, because it is genuinely difficult to tell how consensual this sex is intended to be.

To some extent, this is a common problem with Italian movies of this era; the way the culture of that time handled consent is basically illegible to me. Multiple times, I’ve watched scenes in Antonioni and Fellini movies (and gialli for that matter) that I thought were depicting sexual assault until it became clear that they were passionate consensual acts. This scene, though, I think actually is intended to be an assault, but I’m not 100% sure about that, which is a weird place to be.

Either way, at best it’s a cruel seduction, because sex is not what she needs right then, and this is super-obvious to him, and he just doesn’t care. As a result, she falls deeper into isolation and alienation, and tries to leave on a ship, but fails when a sailor doesn’t even speak her language, really driving home the whole isolation/alienation theme harder.

And that’s basically the movie. If this doesn’t sound very plot-heavy to you, welcome to Antonioni. For my part, this is a film that I liked a great deal, and whose virtues are clear — it really is super-gorgeous, Vitti is a great actress, the movie is never dull even without strong narrative to drive it forward. But, unlike the critics who put it on their top ten lists, I didn’t really love it. But hey, here we are, down at #169, so that feels like a fair placement (and still pretty high praise for a movie, tbh).

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1. (After I wrote this, I felt like it was a bold enough claim that I ought to at least make sure I wasn’t saying something that was directly against the critical consensus; I’d feel like an idiot if I wrote that it wasn’t an environmentalist film and then actually it was some huge key movie in the Italian environmental movement. But amazingly, I found Antonioni saying precisely what I thought the movie was saying: “It’s too simplistic to say—as many people have done—that I am condemning the inhuman industrial world which oppresses the individuals and leads them to neurosis. My intention … was to translate the poetry of the world, in which even factories can be beautiful. The line and curves of factories and their chimneys can be more beautiful than the outline of trees, which we are already too accustomed to seeing.”) ↩︎

2. Like, it’s a room the size of a bed, of which effectively the “floor” is the bed, with walls on all sides. ↩︎

Two more gialli off the Forgotten Gialli discs.

Murder Mansion is — ugh — another Spanish one. I’ve said before that Spanish gialli just don’t hit right, and this didn’t change my mind at all. It doesn’t feel especially giallo-esque, as it takes place in a seemingly-haunted mansion in the countryside, complete with seeming undead in the graveyard.

I’m using the word “seeming” here because — I’m okay spoiling this for you — it’s a Scooby-Doo movie, where all the seemingly supernatural stuff is just a scheme that a couple of people are doing for reasons that I don’t remember, and which tbh probably didn’t make sense anyway. It’s not necessarily a terrible movie, but it’s just not a giallo. That’s not a giallo setting, that’s not a giallo plot, and it doesn’t have giallo vibes. (For one thing, it’s weirdly prudish in its salaciousness — I suspect that Spain actually had censorship laws about nudity in a way that Italy didn’t have, based on this pattern repeating so durably.)

I’m actually wondering at this point if maybe the real problem with these Spanish movies is simply their inclusion in this collection; if there was a “Spanish Countryside Horror” collection, I could see these movies all belonging to it in a way that would make sense, and wouldn’t annoy me with the tonal mislead so much. Maybe I should be blaming these Vinegar Syndrome curators rather than the Spanish filmmakers.

Crazy Desires of a Murderer, on the other hand, is a true Italian giallo and it absolutely works as one. It is wildly over the top, featuring all of:

1. a car being pushed off a cliff and exploding, 2) a crazy kid secretly locked up in a basement for years, 3) a killer who plucks out the victims’ eyeballs, and perhaps most unforgettably 4) a sex scene where a dude molds a candle into a dildo to his partner’s delight.

Its plot about drug smugglers who glom onto a rich girl in her travels doesn’t necessarily make sense, but the vibes are legit, and it’s fun, and that’s enough.

So I described this movie to my wife as “a French romantic tragedy, probably.” I said that knowing nothing about it other than a) the title, and b) that Max Ophuls also directed The Earrings of Madame de…, which (as I alluded to in my write-up of Charulata), is a rich person relationship drama/tragedy.

As it happens, I was two-thirds right about this movie: It is a romance, it is a tragedy, but it’s not French. Turns out that Ophuls (whose real name is Oppenheimer; no relation) was originally German, but for some reason left Germany in 1933 to go make movies in France and then for some reason left France to go make movies in the United States before returning to France in 1950. So this is actually a Hollywood movie in English. (But it’s set in Europe (specifically Austria), and it feels European. It may be a Hollywood movie, but it definitely feels like it gets in on a technicality.)

As for calling it a tragedy, you may be thinking that this is a spoiler, but no: As the movie opens, a man is talking about a duel he has scheduled for the following morning, where he expects to die. He promises a couple of men that he’ll be there bright and early… right before telling his servant that it’s time to pack up, as they’re leaving in the night.

But before he can go, he gets — yes — a letter from an unknown woman, which starts off with the woman telling him that she may already be dead by the time he reads this. So we’re now five minutes into the movie, and there are already two (2) deaths hanging over our head.

And so this is just a framing story; the remainder of the movie is taking place in the past — telling us about how this woman knows this guy, and how he means so much to her despite her being an unknown woman to him.

I won’t spoil it from here, but — like Earrings or Charulata — it’s a movie where the events are pure melodrama, but the acting and characters are so naturalistic and dead-on that it feels grounded and realistic. The movie follows these characters across decades of their lives, and at every point they feel right^[1] — yes, this is how she would act as a young woman; and yes, that’s how she’d act as a more worldly older woman. Even when she’s behaving in silly ways, we can see that it’s because the woman is still, in important ways, that girl on the inside.

There’s a lot to like here, and the ending is one that will stick with me. I can easily see how this would make someone’s personal top ten list, and I think it might be my favorite of the two Ophuls movies that I’ve seen.

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1. The one thing that’s not quite right is her physical appearance at all ages. When we first see her, she’s supposed to be a teenager, but she looks like she’s at least in her mid-twenties, probably because the actress is actually in her thirties. She acts convincingly like a teenager, but it takes some willful suspension of disbelief to see her as one. But short of casting another actress for this part (which would have worked less well) or using digital de-aging (a technology which was not yet as advanced in 1948 as it is today), there’s not much to be done about this. ↩︎

Next up at a big tie at #169 on our Great Movies list, we get to this movie from Satyajit Ray. So this is not a neorealist movie set in a poor village; our protagonists are rich people, and they are going to have rich people relationship problems.

The titular Charulata is a bored housewife. Her husband is wealthy and is running a hobby newspaper — it’s an extremely political newspaper, and he clearly believes strongly in its mission, but it’s definitely one of those “make a small fortune” endeavors, not one that he really expects to be traditionally successful.

And so now family comes into the picture in two ways: One is that Charulata’s brother is apparently not doing so well (from context he seems to be something of a ne’er-do-well of long-standing); her husband offers him a job to come work on the paper. The other is that the husband’s cousin just graduated college and is coming to live with them while he gets his feet under himself.

The core of the movie is about a budding relationship between the cousin and Charulata. He’s young and feckless, but also funny and charming and — importantly — literary, in a way that appeals to Charulata. (Her husband is one of those extremely practical guys who has no use for literature and views it as a feminine eccentricity of hers to be humored; he’s nice about it, but in a condescending way.)

Spoilers

And so he keeps her company throughout her bored days, and when he gets published in a literary journal, she also writes a piece for a competing journal and gets it published. There’s this whole thing where they have a relationship that isn’t really sexual, and tbh not even precisely romantic, and yet: It’s clearly a deep emotional relationship that the husband would feel betrayed by if he understood it.

And oh, btw, remember her ne’er-do-well brother? Well, after the husband has given him an important job, entrusting him with the newspaper’s finances purely out of his own sense of decency to family, that brother ends up betraying him and stealing a bunch of money. The husband is rich enough for this not to really be a money problem, but it really just guts him, the idea that you could fully trust someone — your own family! — and they could betray you like that.

And he gives a whole speech along these lines to his cousin, who is overcome by guilt. And so he does the decent thing and leaves, with plans to get engaged to this other woman he’d been set up with. Which would be the end of it, except his departure triggers Charulata to be upset and cry about it, which tips the husband off as to the dynamics he’d been missing, and now he’s got this quasi-betrayal to deal with too. He takes off in his carriage.

Will they reconcile, or is this a fatal blow to their relationship? Well, the movie suggests an ending, but very deliberately does not commit to it.

As movies about rich people with relationship problems go, this is a good one. The characters are well-acted, the emotions are subtle, and the conflicts make sense with who these people are and the situations in which they find themselves. It’s Indian instead of French, but it reminds me a lot of The Earrings of Madame de…, which is about to be a huge coincidence, considering what’s coming up next on this list.

So I’d heard good things about this even before it got Oscar-nominated, and the nomination was my cue to watch it. I hadn’t really paid attention to what it was — I honestly thought it was some kind of meditative quasi-documentary on the theme of trains — and so was surprised to discover that it’s a period piece that’s essentially telling the story of a guy’s life.

We start in… well, I was going to say “the late 19th century,” because that’s what it feels like; but that chronology doesn’t really line up with the later parts of the movie, and turns out that actually it’s 1917. But it’s not a 1917 that’s full of jazz or world wars or whatever. We’re in the wilderness in the Pacific Northwest, and there are horses and trains and hand-built log cabins and dudes cutting down trees with long saws.

Anyway, we start with our protagonist as a young, aimless man, and then proceed to follow his life through various ups and downs and twists and turns through the long decades. This is a brand new movie, so I’m not going to spoil the plot, but I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that the movie has a very biographical shape to it — it’s not about any particular big narrative arc, it’s a bunch of things that happen, some of which are just little moments and some of which resonate for decades. There are moments when it feels like the movie is about to lean into more of a narrative-driven shape, but it consistently refuses to.

It’s a gorgeous movie, with its Pacific Northwest landscapes; arguably too gorgeous. It feels at points like a golden hour cottagecore fantasy rather than a realistic movie. But then, it also has a bunch of shocking and semi-random violence in it, and periods of random misfortune, too, so maybe I shouldn’t begrudge it those dream-like happy moments.

But that too-pretty feeling is closely related to the tonal problem the movie has: It’s constantly teetering on the edge of sappy, manipulative sentimentality (exacerbated by the movie having a narrator who just outright verbalizes meaning as Max Richter-adjacent music plays). For me, at least, it didn’t go over the edge, and so it mostly worked. Even if some of the emotion the film is trying to evoke didn’t quite hit, the movie overall landed at very good (though not great). But I can fully understand both the viewer who’s entirely bought in and deeply moved by the movie, and the viewer who finds it all a little overwrought and silly.

(Also: The movie is honestly not that much like First Cow, but at the same time, c’mon: It’s a historical PacNW movie with lush outdoor landscapes in a 4:3 aspect ratio, which opens with a framing device of something found in the woods that portends a sad story in the past. It practically begs for the comparison.)

Okay, so… it’s been a minute here on the S&S list. I actually started watching this movie roughly a year ago. Why did it take so long to watch? Well, because as the movie starts:

1. It is showing us documentary footage of smelting plants in China. There is no particular action happening here, there aren’t really any notable characters. It’s just… a smelting plant. Lots of hot metal, lots of tanks of things. Workers walking around and banging on things and having lunch in the breakroom, etc. Not really super-compelling, you know?
2. The video quality is terrible. The movie was, I think, filmed on video cameras (it’s a documentary from the turn of the century), and the only place it’s available is on YouTube^[1], where it’s a rip of a French DVD with English subtitles. The rip is awful, with lots of combing artifacts from de-interlacing, even leaving aside the lousy video quality inherent to the video medium.
3. It is over nine hours long.

So every time I would sit down for a stint of watching it, I’d get 15-30 minutes in, watching ugly images of raw tedium, and realize that I still had like 8+ hours to go. It’s hard to keep going in that situation, and it’s even harder to make yourself get back to it. Or maybe it’s easy for you, but it was hard for me. And so for a long time I just didn’t. Without ever quite admitting it’s what I was doing, I put this whole project of watching through the S&S list on hold, and watched a bunch of other stuff — a half dozen movies out of that Ingmar Bergman boxed set, for instance.

But when I was looking back at 2025 and realized that I’d been procrastinating on this movie for literally a whole year, well, come on. That’s ridiculous. Time to get ‘er done. And turns out once I committed to it, I was annoyed that I’d put it off that long.

Not because that factory footage suddenly transmuted into being fascinating, to be clear. I am still annoyed by all the factory footage. But because at some point, the movie starts being about people, and it’s not just nine hours of factories. The movie is actually structured, it turns out, as three parts.

The first part (“Rust”) is the part where I was stuck for a year. It’s all about the factories: They’re going to be closing down soon. We don’t actually know this as the movie opens, but there are continual rumors about it, and workers aren’t getting their pay, and so forth. So this part of the movie is all about the last days of these plants, as increasingly desperate workers suffer through increasingly bad conditions, with no future for their jobs.

It’s four hours long, and does not earn its run time. Yes, the movie wants us to be absorbed into this atmosphere and to feel what it’s like in these places, I get it. But still: It could have told this story effectively — more effectively, I’d argue — in two hours.

Even this part of the movie has some good stuff, though. At one point after they’ve closed the lead smelting factory, we follow all the workers to a hospital where they are having their blood chelated to help fix all the lead poisoning they’ve gotten, and here we get to see the workers as people, rather than just as objects of desperation. They play games, they joke around, they tell bawdy stories, they try fishing in the pond behind the hospital (to unfortunate effect in one case), etc. This is maybe the last hour of “Rust” and was the first time that I wasn’t tempted to just set the thing to 2x to get it over with.

The second part is “Remnants,” and this is the part where I could actually understand why someone would put this on a list of great movies. Because now the plants are closed, and we’re following the people who live in a nearby town, which is due to be razed. The government is going to relocate all of them, and if you understand how people work, you’ll know that nobody is super-thrilled at this idea.

And yet… their current living situation totally sucks. They are living in terrible, awful, no-good buildings. The idea of being resettled into newer buildings doesn’t seem like it’ll be a totally bad thing — but it’s going to uproot these people’s lives, mess with their community and their relationships and all that stuff.

And so we spend three hours (spanning months of real time) hanging here at the end of this place, mostly with young people. And… they’re just extremely normal, extremely young people. They’re dumbasses, they play pranks on each other, they tease each other. One of the guys has a crush on a girl who’s not interested in him and he has his friends review a love letter he writes her. They hang out in a store and talk about what kind of jobs they might get. But then also, around this and suffusing everything, is the reality that their town is going to be razed to the ground and they’re all going to have to move, despite all the “they can’t make me!” tough talk that so many of them spout at first.

This part is so fascinating, both as a portrait of this time and place, seeing China evolving from this kind of industrial poverty into what it will become, and how even that kind of positive change can be discomfiting and unpleasant for those living through it. (I also think seeing how a communist society deals with this kind of change, and how much human misery and suffering still falls out of the system, makes it clear that all the world’s ills cannot actually be blamed on capitalism.)

It’s also just incredible as a documentary. This is filmed with a handheld camera, and the director is just there in all these places — in people’s homes as they hang out with friends, in the store as they’re hanging out, on the streets as they’re walking around and getting into shit — and yet everyone is behaving incredibly naturally and as if the camera were invisible. I don’t know what he did to make his subjects feel so at ease, but it’s remarkable.

And then we come to the last third of the film, “Rails,” and it’s more of a mixed bag. On the one hand, there is a human story here, of an old man who has tried to stay behind with his two adult sons after everyone else has left the condemned homes. He’s here because of his job with the railroad — which seems not to be entirely official, but nevertheless has made him a known and respected local quantity, and seems to be core to his sense of worth. The idea of just leaving for a totally new place where he won’t be anyone at all clearly frightens him.

Still, the efforts to pressure him out ramp up, and at one point he’s arrested for stealing coal from the closed-down plants (which he uses to heat his house, in a little coal stove that’s also used for cooking). This really fucks up his eldest son, who is clearly not entirely well mentally, and who ends up having a public meltdown about his dad having been gone for a week.

So we’ve got their story to follow, to see what will happen here and how they’ll deal with it. (I know nobody is going to watch this, so I’ll go ahead and spoil it: He does eventually relocate, and it seems to go well; he has friends there and we see him enjoying himself at dinner with them in more pleasant surroundings than those he left.)

But we also get in this section a ton of train footage that’s doing the same stuff as the factory footage from the first part. It’s not as interminable here — we’ve only got two hours, and it is interspersed with the human story a lot more — but it’s still longer than would be ideal.

So in the end, I’m glad I didn’t just skip past this one; as you’d expect from a movie that people put in their personal top ten, there’s something genuinely interesting here. But if you’re not in it for completism, I tbh think you could just watch “Remnants” and get 90% of the great stuff in a third of the time.

Mostly, though, I’m just glad to get this out of the way, so I can get back to going through this list. This was the last of a zillion-way tie at #157 (aka: on 18 people’s top ten lists), and next up is an even larger tie at #169 (movies that are on 17 people’s lists).

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1. There was a brief window where it was available on Kanopy, in slightly better quality. In retrospect, I should have hunkered down and watched it while it was there, but it didn’t occur to me that they’d remove it. ↩︎

So I’ve really loved the Yorgos Lanthimos movies that I’ve seen — The Favourite was a refreshingly unusual period piece, and Poor Things was… indescribably what it is. And when the trailer for this movie came out, the general reaction was that it looked extremely weird, which is exactly what I want out of his movies.

So the disappointing thing is that it’s kinda… not that weird. The basic premise of it is that a conspiracy theory nut and his friend kidnap a local corporate executive because they think she’s an alien. And then the movie is about Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone acting at each other, as he has her locked up and is threatening/negotiating with her.

It’s all well-enough done, but it’s so slight. And it seems like Lanthimos means for the film to gain depth from the underlying disquieting question of… is this guy right? Is she an alien? (The trailers really played up this element.) The movie is coy about it for a very long time, doing that “omg wait… no nm” thing and raising suspicions that it subsequently dispels… or does it?

I’m not going to spoil you on how it resolves, but I will say that it really doesn’t matter. Nothing in the film rides on this question — certainly not in plot terms, not really in thematic terms, and barely in character terms. It’s a little mystery, you do get an answer, and it mostly evokes a shrug.

So it sounds like I’m down on this movie, but I’m really not. It was enjoyable, I’d recommend it. But it’s not up to the standards of his better movies, so go see those first, if you haven’t.

So after seeing the Oscar nominations, I finally sat down and watched some of the Oscar movies that I’d been meaning to get to forever.

The first is One Battle After Another. I’ve been a huge Paul Thomas Anderson fan since Magnolia — really, since Boogie Nights, but Magnolia is where I locked in — and the reviews for this one have been ecstatic, so it seemed like the most no-brainer of no-brainers that I’d absolutely adore this movie.

And so as I was watching it, I liked it. It was definitely good. The Jonny Greenwood score was excellent, the acting was great, and it was a lot of fun. But… it seemed overhyped.

To some extent this is predictable. If you watch a movie after everyone’s already raved about it, it’s impossible to be pleasantly surprised, and easy to be disappointed. Still, it’s not inevitable that you’ll be disappointed; sometimes the movie does actually meet high expectations. And while there was a lot to like here, it just wasn’t gelling for me. In fact, it didn’t ever gel as I watched it — it always felt a little tonally incoherent, like it was doing a very grounded realistic thing, and then throwing in massive absurdities that were impossible to take seriously. I just couldn’t quite get my head around it.

And again, this isn’t to say I didn’t like it. But I was going to rate it like 4/5 stars, which is awfully weak considering the general 5/5 critical reception and my own predisposition to PTA. So I went looking at those reviews to see what I was missing, and the very first one I read reminded me that, oh yeah, this is an adaptation of a Pynchon novel.

And that fact just unlocked the whole movie for me. Suddenly its tone made perfect sense, and what it was doing seemed obvious. The tonal shifts that had been so incoherent as I watched it instantly resolved into something clear, coherent, and elegant. And… okay, maybe it’s still not quite a 5/5 movie for me, but it’s at least 4.5/5.

(I probably won’t, but I actually want to watch it again now that I know what I’m looking at.)

So this is a weird movie in two ways.

The first way is that it’s unusually serious as a murder mystery — it’s probably the giallo that’s the most focused on detective work and trying to solve the crime, rather than the killer’s activities. The killer does kill, sure, but they’re doing so one step ahead of the detective, trying to thwart the investigation. Even the cop himself notes that if they hadn’t bothered to investigate the first murder, these other people would still be alive.

The second way is that it has a really obtrusive pedophilia subplot. The first murder is of a little girl and her father, who were kidnapped for ransom. In the course of the investigation, the detective talks to all the family members. Each of them has their own dark secret and motivations, and the movie really amps up the drama here. But then there’s the uncle who used to “spend a lot of time with” the girl, the servants say with significant glances.

I wasn’t sure if I was reading too much into this, but then when the detective goes to that guy’s house, at one point an actual naked little girl comes out, and the dude is all “uh, she’s a model for my paintings.” So first of all, a) what the fuck, how is it legal to put a naked kid in a movie?!? Even if it was legal in the ’70s in Italy, I’m genuinely shocked that it’d be legal to sell this movie in the US in the present. Extremely disconcerting. But also b) the cop doesn’t seem to believe this guy’s story (because it’s not believable), but also does literally nothing about this. Really really feels like there probably should have been an immediate arrest/investigation of that guy wholly separate from the murdering.

Wikipedia says of this:

[Director] Tonino Valerii said the pedophile uncle’s character was completely rewritten in the process. “It was a character that you could not tell what he was in the film for, so we told ourselves, ‘Either we take it out of the film or we develop it’. And we had the idea of the naked little girl that appears at the door of his studio during the commissioner’s visit…”

PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE JUST TAKEN IT OUT.

So yeah, on the one hand, this is an above-average murder mystery with great characters and lots of twists and turns. But then there’s this one giant element that — even though it’s very brief in the movie, and not incredibly significant to the story — just looms over it with a giant wtf.