All right, now let’s talk about some horror.

First up, via Joe Bob, is The Phantom of the Opera — the 1925 Lon Chaney one. What’s funny about this movie is that it’s actually a total mess, with character relationships that don’t make sense, and a random guy in a fez who’s lurking around a lot and then is just a police officer. And turns out that this is because it was a deeply messy production, where they effectively rewrote the movie multiple times, completely shifting the tone and plot (so the fez guy was originally not a cop at all).

I never really thought about it, but turns out it’s a lot easier to rewrite a silent film, because you can just completely recontextualize your footage with different intertitles, and don’t even need to ADR any dialogue or anything. Anyway, while it’s a mess, it’s an interesting mess. Lon Chaney is great as the Phantom (and his makeup is of course one of the iconic early makeup jobs in movie history). Also, there was color in this movie, through two different technical mechanisms; I had no idea this was possible back then, so huh.

Next up, also from Joe Bob, is Intruder. This is a movie set entirely in a grocery store, apparently in West Bloomfield where we live, oddly. The idea of setting a movie in a grocery store is sorta great — it’s a very claustrophobic movie, one of those movies where the setting is as important as the characters. But also, it’s sorta silly: It’s actually very hard to hide in a grocery store, and the idea that they couldn’t find the killer in a search defies credulity. The movie has some very gruesome kills, and it feels a lot like a Sam Raimi movie. Which it is and isn’t: It’s directed by Scott Spiegel, but Raimi (and his brother Ted) are both stars in the movie, and Spiegel is apparently part of their posse. It’s not a particularly good movie, but it has some charms.

Next, Joe Bob gives us Ringu, the Japanese movie about a haunted VHS tape. So this is nominally horror, but it felt more like a mystery movie. There’s so much investigation in it, with a reporter doing a ton of research, including unearthing information about an elaborate historical backstory (which is both too complex, and doesn’t matter enough to the story). This kinda felt like the FMV components to an adventure game from that era, like Gabriel Knight 2 or Phantasmagoria or something. Which isn’t really praise, to be clear. I’m a little baffled that this hit big, but I guess viral video was a lot more rare in the twencen.

The Killer Reserved Nine Seats is not a Joe Bob movie, it’s the latest out of the giallo boxed sets. So the setup here is that a group of frenemies leaves a party to go to the sealed-up old castle/theatre (that is, the stage type of theatre, not a movie theatre) that one of the rich guys in the group owns. Every person in this group has a deeply complex relationship to the other people in the group, and about half of them plausibly have a motive to kill half of the others. Which becomes relevant when they start dying, and accusations start flying.

This is also when the movie’s essential weakness starts to pop up, because one person in the group is a guy that nobody knows, like literally everyone is all “I thought he was your friend,” and he’s been giving ominous speeches here and then also disappeared once the killing begins. So obviously he’s the killer, right? Maybe so obviously that he’s a mislead and someone else actually is?

Turns out that the answer is going to be “sort of!” Because the movie really can’t decide what it wants to be. There’s a bunch of supernatural stuff happening… except also they find mundane explanations for it… but actually some of it might be supernatural? And the resolution is deeply confusing and unsatisfying, and I think doesn’t even make sense on its own terms, even if we buy a pile of nonsense first.

But I still rated this one more highly than the previous two just because it has incredible vibes. Its abandoned castle/theatre, its dissolute Italian rich people, its air of tension and danger, it’s all perfect. Sure, it doesn’t make a lick of sense; just let it wash over you.

“It doesn’t make sense, but the vibes are great” is also a capsule description of the last movie, another Joe Bob showing called Dark Match. The premise is that a wrestling group goes to a remote private compound to perform in an untelevised (aka “dark”) match.

But as you’d expect from the word “compound,” there’s a cult here… sort of? The movie can’t decide if they’re a real cult, if they’re just a profiteering group making snuff films, or if this is all a basically-fake elaborate revenge plot (as the Leader of the cult had his wrestling career ended by one of the wrestlers in this group). Joe Bob actually had the director on, and was like “so what’s the deal here? What are they trying to do?” and the director made it clear through his answers that he also had no idea, and talked about how the actors kept asking him, too. I don’t think he quite realized that it’s widely considered a good thing if everyone can understand the core story of your movie, and what people’s motives are.

The wrestling stuff is cool, and the style is impressively ’80s-ish (the movie was made in 2024, but I genuinely would have thought that it dated back to the twencen if I hadn’t been told that), but ultimately this one is still not very good.