Okay, so the season just wrapped up, so here’s short takes on the movies from weeks six through ten, because I’m lazy.

Amsterdamned: In addition to an amazing theme song (second only to “Fall Break” this season), this movie features a legitimately excellent boat chase — it’s honestly better than The French Connection’s famous car chase, and hard to believe it was all physical stunts. (Along which lines, I learned while watching this movie that Amsterdam is apparently full of a bunch of canals, which I did not previously know. Go figure.)

The central mystery of the movie (about an underwater serial killer) is handled poorly, with an absolutely absurd resolution that breaks every rule of storytelling, like “don’t invent new characters in the last five minutes of a movie to wrap up a mystery that everyone’s been trying to solve.” But the movie works as a picture of Amsterdam in the late ’80s, so it’s got that going for it.

Dark Night of the Scarecrow is apparently a TV movie, which means it feels weirdly PG rated as horror flicks go. Lots of “cut away before a kill” type stuff. Mostly, the movie involves watching a mailman go on a total power trip and be a genuinely horrible person, which like: The actor does a great job being effectively hateable, but if Taxi Driver didn’t make me start loving antiheroes, I’m sure not about to start here. Interestingly, the identity of the killer is a kind of reverse Scooby-Doo, where it really seems like there’s a mundane explanation for everything… until it suddenly becomes clear that there’s not.

Beyond the Door III is one of the weirder movies here, as it’s Yugoslavian folk horror (and despite the title, is not a sequel — there was a somewhat-successful movie named Beyond the Door, and so then two unrelated movies got tossed into being part of the “franchise.” There’s not even really a door in the movie). The storytelling is incredibly loose; like, at one point, a set of characters gets separated and has a whole separate adventure with lots of incidents… only to get run over by a ghost train randomly before ever meeting back up with their friends or doing anything that mattered. Just a completely pointless plot detour.

That ghost train is also carrying the other characters, and the geography of the movie makes zero sense — did the train travel in a circle that they ran over their friends who were walking away from the point where they couldn’t get on the train? But then, this isn’t the kind of movie you ask plot questions of, because nothing in it makes any sense at all, it’s just vibes. But it does have cool vibes, between the folk horror stuff and a demonic train, so if you lean back and don’t care too much, it’s enjoyable.

Perfect Blue was part of an animation night where the first movie was Mad God, which we’ve already seen and didn’t need to rewatch. The three notable things to me were 1) that it’s doing a lot of “what is even real” stuff, which man, that was just so in the air in the late-90s, wasn’t it? Between Dark City, The Matrix, and a bunch of others, this just slots right in. 2) I think Joe Bob mentioned at one point how this has been compared to giallo, and man, that’s exactly right. It is a giallo, just… from Japan… and animated. But if someone told me that this was an animated adaptation of a Dario Argento movie, I’d totally buy it. And 3) omg, the internet stuff! The protagonist gets a Performa, and installs old-fashioned Netscape Navigator, and there’s a whole scene where someone explains how web browsers work, it’s amazing. This is probably my favorite of the movies in this entry.

Alligator is apparently a Jaws knock-off, but — keeping in mind that I have yet to see Jaws — I thought it was pretty good. It’s mostly kinda light-hearted in the sense that the alligator eats a couple of who-cares victims, and then overwhelmingly dishes out movie justice by eating an asshole big game hunter and an asshole billionaire and so forth.

BUT there’s one really weird ultra-dark moment where the alligator is in a residential swimming pool, and two kids are going to go diving (not knowing it’s in there, just playing in the pool). Obviously it’s a tense scene, but at the last minute the first kid chickens out of diving, and the second kid is threatening to push him in… and you know how this scene is supposed to go, building tension until finally he doesn’t push him in, and they both walk away with an unknown narrow escape. EXCEPT: The second kid pushes him in, the first kid is brutally killed, and holy fuck, movie, you just made that one kid a murderer. Cut to the next scene of cops hunting the creature, and we’ll never see this kid again, as he goes off to live a life where he’s haunted forever by this childish prank that killed his brother. It’s such a heavy dark scene for an otherwise fluffy movie.

Grizzly is another Jaws knock-off, but this one is not good at all. The movie is aimless, with lots of pointless ambling around, and characters getting killed in ways that don’t really have any dramatic logic. It is redeemed somewhat by having an exploding bear, though.

Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue is apparently a film made (in Britain) by Spanish filmmakers during the Franco regime, and like most films of that time, is allegorically a critique of Franco. I would never, ever, ever have known this from watching (which I guess is pretty much the point for a filmmaker that has to get past government censors), but it is true that the main sheriff in the movie is just hilariously bad at his job, a giant shouty asshole who insists on nonsensical interpretations of events.

Anyway, this is a zombie movie from early on in the zombie phenomenon, and the main thing I dislike about it is that it has smart zombies, who e.g. work together to use tools in a coordinated way to accomplish shared goals. Zombies shouldn’t do that! But on the flip side, the ending is great, in that the protagonist kills all the zombies successfully, but then is killed by the sheriff before he can explain, and so it sure looks like he just went on a killing spree (and dragged some corpses out of the morgue for doubtless creepy reasons), and nobody in the movie will ever buy that zombies are a thing… for now.

(And speaking of absurdly named sequels, as we were above: Apparently in Italy, this was called Zombie 3, where the first Zombie movie was Night of the Living Dead, and the second was the Fulci zombie movie that started off this season. Three completely unrelated movies by directors who were doing their own things in different countries, all crammed into the same franchise, what a world.)

Day of the Dead is the final movie of the season. This is Romero’s third movie, and apparently considered the weakest of the three. (I haven’t seen Dawn of the Dead, but can confirm that it’s not nearly as good as Night of the Living Dead.) In its favor, it’s tense and claustrophobic, being set almost entirely in a post-zombie-apocalyptic cave with a dozen people trying desperately to survive. But most of the characters are so unpleasant that it’s hard not to think that it wouldn’t be much of a loss if this last little bunch of humanity did get wiped out by zombies. Like, by a mile the most likeable character is the helicopter pilot who says that they should give up on the weird low-budget mad science bullshit they’re doing down in the caves and just fly off to a desert island and chill on the beach. And ultimately everyone would have been happier if they’d just listened to him in the first place, which just goes to show.

(Also, one weird thing is that a character in the movie is named “Logan” and calls his pet zombie “Bub” and… this is 1985, so Wolverine definitely existed as a thing. This has to be on purpose, right?)