I thought I had seen this movie already, but after watching last night, I realize I must only have seen the trailer, or maybe caught snippets of it on TV, because I didn’t remember any of it and believe me, the one thing I think everyone can agree on about Videodrome is that it is memorable.
This film is unlike most of the others I’ve watched this month, in that it belongs to a category of horror I’m not a fan of. Body Horror. I don’t enjoy movies like Hostel, Saw, The Human Centipede or others of that genre, but Videodrome is different.
*SPOILERS BELOW*
The premise of Videodrome is this. Max Renn (played by James Woods) owns a small TV station in Toronto, and he’s always looking for something he can air that will push the boundaries of what’s acceptable to broadcast, in an effort to draw viewers. His technical specialist shows him snippets he was able to de-scramble of an encrypted satellite broadcast of people being tortured. He tells him it’s called Videodrome and Max starts to become obsessed with it. Then Max starts hallucinating, and the movie really takes off.
It’s not the bizarre imagery and special effects that make Videodrome interesting to me, it’s the incomprehensibility of it. I complained a lot about Possession being weird and not making sense, so it may seem contradictory that I liked those qualities of Videodrome, but the difference is that here, it all fits in the context of the story. See, the thing is, we don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. The film is shot solely around James Woods’ character. We are never given anyone else’s perspective or point of view and once we know that not everything he sees or experiences is real, how can we trust ANY of the things we see?
In literature, he would be called an unreliable narrator. He isn’t lying, it’s just that he can’t distinguish what between what is real and what isn’t, so we the viewers can no longer trust what we see. I don’t mind weird, I like weird, and even when things don’t really make sense, I okay with it, if the not making sense is an organic part of the story and characters. In those cases, it’s actually great, because it leads to discussion among the audience. Is Nicki really dead? We don’t know for sure, just because we don’t see her again doesn’t mean she is. Especially since it turns out the videos weren’t really being broadcast from Pittsburg at all… or were they? Was the conversation with Peter real? At what point did Max break from reality? Is the Videodrome signal even a real thing, or did Max suffer a psychotic break?
The movie has probably been discussed to death in film classes around the world where smarter people than me can break down it’s commentary on popular culture and our addiction to screens or something, but I just think it was a wild journey about a mans fading grip on sanity.
You can watch Videodrome on Amazon Prime if you have a subscription, I think I’m going to find a bluray copy with director’s commentary to watch it again. This is a film I’d really love to hear “making of” stories about.
I had never heard of this movie before reading an article on a blog called Longbox of Darkness. The premise sounded interesting. A trio of female reporters find themselves staying overnight in a house occupied by a hostile being lurking in the basement. I really liked that The Howling had reporters as the main characters, and this movie stays Barbara Bach, who I only knew from her role in The Spy Who Loved me. Also in this film are Sydney Lassick, a terrific character actor who’s face is instantly recognizable, even if you don’t remember his name, and Stephen Furst, that most will know as Flounder from Animal House, but as a lifelong Babylon 5 fan, he’ll always be Vir to me.
Even though they share many similarities, this movie fixes a lot of what I didn’t like about The People Under the Stairs. It’s hard to discuss what I really enjoyed without spoiling some things so continue reading only if that doesn’t bother you, or you have a short memory.
*SPOILERS BELOW*
The pacing and structure is great and the movie subverts your expectations at almost every turn. You start off thinking it may be about a stalker ex boyfriend, then maybe about the creepy owner of a museum, then maybe a ghost, or something else. It keeps you guessing, so it keeps you interested.
I also loved that the killer, didn’t turn out to be the actual monster, but another victim of the true villain of the story. The more I sit here thinking about it, the more things I find I liked. The violence isn’t overdone. There are no over the top killings with fountains of blood, everything is realistic and believable, especially once we find that the killer is more of a developmentally stunted man than a monster intentionally setting out to hurt people.
I’m surprised this movie isn’t better known, or better rated. It may be the lack of a high body count or extreme gore factor that prevents it from penetrating the consciousness of fans of this genre, but I find all of that works in it’s favour, in the context of the story.
Despite how the poster looks, this is not p[art of the Mad Max franchise, it is the second movie written and directed by Wes Craven, and it is much better than some of his later works *cough*peopleunderthestairs*cough*. To set your expectations though, this is a low budget grindhouse film. It doesn’t have the polish of A Nightmare on Elm Street, but it still works.
There’s probably a name for this category of film where people are preyed upon by a family of cannibals. It’s not unique and there’s probably a name for it on TV tropes, I’m just too lazy to go look it up. I don’t want to go into too many details, the story is pretty thin, and we aren’t given much in the way of backstory for most of the characters, so almost anything I write would be a spoiler. I’ll just say, I liked the fact that more than one person survives the ordeal, the action is well paced and surprising and once the stranded family figures out what’s happening to them, they get smarter and don’t all fall apart.
It’s not award winning by any stretch, but it’s a fun popcorn movie. It’s surprisingly less graphic than I would have expected for a movie like this, but maybe they cut it down to avoid an X rating. This is one case where I would be interested in seeing the re-make. Maybe that can be the theme for next year.
My wife watched the first thirty minutes of the film with me, then she stood up and declared “This is a bad movie” and went to bed. I’m not going to go that far. People have different likes and dislikes and it’s unfair to make statements like that based on your own personal tastes. I’m not going to disagree with her though, simply because of who made the film and that I have seen much, much better from Wes Craven.
I’ve gotta check IMDB, but this may have been his first stab at a horror/comedy and the comedy side of it is kind of weak, I didn’t laugh much and the villains were more cartoonish than menacing. The dog was the scariest antagonist and the biggest threat the hero faces. You know what the movie is like? It’s like Home Alone, but they make the kid the burglar and then they mashed it with the X-Files episode “Home”. I’m also not a fan of stories where the villains only motivation is ‘They’re crazy because they’re inbred’. That’s lazy writing in my opinion.
So far this month I have watched 25 horror movies, and without even realizing it, 99.9% of the cast in these movies have been white people. The only people of colour I can remember are the Native Americans in Prophecy and a single black man in The Ninth Gate, who had I think had only one line. When people talk about unconscious biases, this is an example, so it’s awesome that Brandon Quintin Adams was cast as the hero in the movie, but less awesome that the script leans so strong into bad stereotypes. His sister is a prostitute, Ving Rhames’ character is a burgler, they are so poor that this brilliant child sees no way of helping his family except to turn to crime… like seriously, none of the other movies I’ve watched this month have the hero start out by committing crimes and THIS is the one with the black star?
It’s ranked well on Rotten Tomatoes, and I’ve seen many comments about it being an underrated classic. I’m not one of them. I had never watched it before last night and will most likely never watch it again, unless my memory fails as I get older and forget I watched it, but hopefully I remember my blog entry exists and I can re-read this. If I’m in the mood for a Wes Craven film, I’ll stick with Nightmare, or New Nightmare or Scream. I have never watched The Hills Have Eyes, so maybe…
As of 2025 Johnny Depp has been in over 70 movies and has a net worth of approximate $150 million dollars and it all started with A Nightmare on Elm Street. He’s not even the star of this movie, Heather Langenkamp is, although, it could be argued it’s really Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger.
It’s interesting what scares us when we’re younger. My mother made a big production of getting my brother and me to watch the movie that scared her the most when she was younger. The Exorcist. We thought it was okay, but nowhere near as frightening as she seemed to find it. Wes Craven’s tale of a serial killing pedophile that stalks you in your dreams however, terrified me like no other movie ever has. After watching it, I slept on the floor in my brother’s room with a camping knife under my pillow, and not one word of that is an exaggeration.
I’ll cut to the chase. Yeah, it still holds up. This movie is so well made, it comes close to being called perfect. Okay, maybe perfect is pushing it, but watch the movie and look at those visuals. The makeup, the practical effects, they built an entire set that could rotate upside down for the scene where blood fountains out of the bed. They squeezed that $1.1 million budget for every penny and it shows on screen. This was all in the days before CGI was commonplace, everything was handmade. A lot of times when you watch a blue-ray copy of an older movie, the HD transfer can highlight some of the trickery filmmakers use, greenscreen in particular often stands out, but not here. My cheap BD collectors set looks amazing and even scenes like Freddy passing through the bars of the jail cell, are visually seamless.
The premise of the film itself is a perfect canvas for this genre. Everyone has had a nightmare at some point in their life, it’s part of being human, so we can all immediately relate to Tina’s sense of terror and relief upon waking, right from the start. Also, the way our brains just accept the strange and nonsensical while dreaming gives the effects people freedom to do what they want. Another aspect of dreams that aided tremendously, is not knowing when they’ve ended. The uncertainty of what’s real and what isn’t throughout just heightens then tension.
The film is structured well, it grips you from the opening scene and even the quieter parts aren’t dull enough to make your attention wander. The scene with Glen calling his mom on the phone still makes me laugh. Not having watched Psycho yet, this was also my first experience with a movie tricking you into thinking someone was the main character.
Since we’re on the subject of main characters, can we talk about Nancy Thompson? Personally, I think she ranks right up there with Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor in the world of badass cinema heroines. While most “final girls” in a horror movie get the title simply by being the last one standing, Nancy does research, she makes a plan and seeks Freddy out in an attempt to end his murder spree.
Maybe I’m gushing too much about a movie that made such an early impression on me, but it’s refreshing to find one that still looks and feels so good even when re-watched 40 years later.
If you’ve never seen A Nightmare on Elm Street before, then I apologize for the spoilers, but I promise, you’ll most likely forget everything I’ve said within the first few minutes of pressing start.
There are sequels. A lot of sequels, one re-make and a TV series, but I’m not going to review them this month. They’re not bad, personally I think the 2nd movie gets more hate than it deserves, but there aren’t a lot of nights left before Halloween and I’m in the mood for more variety before our time runs out.
Remember how I said Stephen King didn’t like Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining? Yeah, that’s mild compared to how Allan Moore feels about ALL of the movies based on his works. Given how often people have taken his ideas and characters and stripped all the meaning out of his graphic novels, I’m not surprised by his reaction, and From Hell is no exception, but it is a really good Jack The Ripper story.
This is probably the most beautiful serial killer movie I’ve ever watched, and I mean beautiful in the filthiest way. This film looks, sounds and feels exactly the way I imagine London’s East End did in 1888. It’s obvious how much time and care went into the costuming, set design and all the extras to make Whitechapel look like the densely populated slum it was. It all makes the city look alive and real, but do NOT mistake this tale for historical re-telling of the world most famous serial killer.
This is more of a Hollywood telling of a conspiracy theory than a serious attempt to portray the facts of the killings. A lot is omitted and many ‘facts’ are fabricated entirely. It’s a good story, and is entertaining, but it probably pissed off serious true crime aficionados almost as much as it did Moore. I’m not sure how I feel about that, personally. On the one hand, it’s a movie, it should be looked at purely as fiction, but when it’s told so well, you KNOW there is a significant percentage of the population that is going to believe everything in it is true, like so many people who’s beliefs about the Kennedy assassination were informed entirely by the Oliver Stone movie.
The acting is great. Johnny Depp, Heather Graham, Robbie Coltrane (I always love when he’s in a movie and will not watch anything HP related if he isn’t playing Hagrid), Ian Richardson, Sir Ian Holm (there are scenes were you can see the foreshadowing of a ring influenced Bilbo at the end), the cast is absolutely stacked and everyone does a great job, but Heather Graham is seriously mis-cast. Don’t get me wrong, she did a great job, and I think she’s a wonderful actress, she just didn’t fit the setting and the character. I know why they cast her, when they decided to fabricate a love story between Inspector Abberline and Mary Kelly, they needed an actor as beautiful as Johnny Depp to pair him with, it’s just that she doesn’t blend in with the other victims, or even the city itself. I’ll let the actual Brits comment on how convincing her and Depp’s accents are.
As a movie, I loved it. As someone deeply interested in the Ripper murders, there are more accurate tellings out there. I’m on a Johnny Depp kick, should I watch Sleepy Hollow next? Probably not, I don’t remember enjoying it. Maybe Sweeney Todd? Does a movie from 2007 fit within the time-frame of the challenge? Oh wait, I know the perfect movie…
If you’re not in the mood for movies and have a group of friends over, might I suggest some themed games appropriate for Halloween?
Zombies!
Judging by the number of Walking Dead spinoffs, zombies are still popular (George Romero’s daughter has a zombie movie coming out that I’m looking forward to) and board games are not immune to this.
Dead of Winter – If you’re a fan of The Walking Dead then you’ll love Dead of Winter. It is a cooperative (maybe) game where the players take control of survivors in a zombie apocalypse. In addition to the main objective (which is chosen at random from a stack, so the game is different each time) each of the 2-5 players will be given a secret objective of their own. Some of the secret objectives may be in direct opposition to the main objective, making one or more of the players a secret traitor. The game makes use of Plaid Hat Games Crossroad mechanic, where a story card is drawn after each player’s turn, requiring them to make a choice with good or bad consequences. The random objectives, paranoia inducing hidden traitor and story driven Crossroad cards make this one of my favorite games.
Dead of Winter Flick ’em Up! – It’s Dead of Winter, but it swaps out the dice rolling for combat that has the players actually ‘flicking’ tokens at plastic zombies and barriers to knock them down. You still have random objectives chosen at the start, but no Crossroads cards. Also gone is the hidden traitor, instead the game can be played cooperatively or as teams of opposing factions. It is less story focused and is instead a physical dexterity game. Great for younger players, but keep away any pets that may want to eat a plastic token if it flies off the table.
Tiny Epic Zombies – It’s like Dead of Winter lite. Still a great game, slightly less story as there is no Crossroads system and no hidden traitor. It is faster paced than Dead of Winter and despite the smaller package and lower price-tag, it packs a lot of quality and value in the box, as most of the Tiny Epic line does. Unlike Dead of Winter, this game also has a solo mode if your (up to 5) friends are not available. It can be played cooperatively, free-for-all, or with a player controlling the zombies.
Zombie Labyrinth – Probably the most ‘traditional’ board game on this list, with the players rolling dice and moving tokens around a board. It’s not my favorite, but is great with younger players as the rating is for ages 5 and up.
Zombie Dice – Not pictured here because I can’t find my copy of it, Zombie Dice is super simple. You have a cup of coloured dice that have symbols for feet, brains and shotgun blasts. You are the zombies and you are trying to roll brains without getting blasted by the shotguns. It’s fast and easy to learn, but the rattling dice may drive anyone not playing crazy.
Gamers love Lovecraft
Elder Sign – One of the first games I bought when I started getting into modern board games and still one of my favorites. A museum in Arkham has accumulated so much weird stuff that the gates to beyond are starting to break. You and your team of investigators have to stop the weird and find enough Elder Signs to seal the breach and prevent one of the Ancients Ones from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos from coming through. If you’ve ever played Yahtzee, you can play Elder Sign. You roll dice to match symbols to cards to earn rewards, using items you collect and your chosen investigator’s unique ability to manipulate the dice.
A Study in Emerald – Based on Neil Gaiman’s fanfic mashup of Lovecraft and Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Emerald is what happens if you LOSE at Elder Sign. Players are given secret identities at the start. Loyalists who are happy with the status quo and Restorationists are those who don’t want to live in a world that has been subjugated by a mad space god. We’d probably call those people ‘woke’ today. It’s a fun combination of worker placement and deck building with one of the oddest point systems I’ve ever played with. It’s almost impossible to tell who’s going to win until it’s all over.
Miskatonic University – Another quick and easy to learn game it’s essentially a card game with set collection that lasts only 5 rounds. Not as fun or thematic as the others on this list, but also not as complicated.
Cthulhu Fluxx – After Zombie Dice, this is probably the smallest and least expensive game in the list, but also one of the most fun. If you’ve never played a Fluxx game, the rules are simple. Draw a card. Play a card. At least that’s how it starts. As you play, both the rules and the win conditions change and keep changing. The Fluxx games are wild and unpredictable and that’s what makes them so fun to play.
Something different
Gloom – If you are a fan of The Addams Family, or Tim Burton’s new show Wednesday, then Gloom is for you. The objective of Gloom is to draw transparent cards from a deck and lay them on top of others to modify them and make your family of characters as miserable as possible, before bumping them off one by one to score points, or use the cards to improve the lives of your opponents. It’s a fun and funny 2-5 player game that is best enjoyed with friends who love telling stories about the tragedies that befall their family members
Ultimate Werewolf – The box says it is good with up to 75 players. It’s perfect for parties because there is no board, no game pieces, no dice to roll and you don’t need to be at a table to play it. Players are villagers, trying to figure out who is a werewolf before they get eaten, or werewolves trying to avoid suspicion so they can eat the villagers, the fun all depends on how into it the players get, and maybe how much alcohol they’ve consumed.
Betrayal at House on the Hill – I love this game so much. You are a group of friends exploring a haunted house, but you build the house as you play, tile by tile, so the layout is never the same twice. At one point in the game, a player will trigger “The Haunt”, which will reveal what is going on in the house, and turning one of the players into the villain. There are 50 scenarios in the book, combined with the randomness of the board creation giving Betrayal HUGE replay value. I have yet to play a game that wasn’t memorable. Just last week, I had people over to play, and the ‘Haunt’ player managed to kill himself the very first turn after the haunt was revealed, but he STILL won the game because our team was split up and our strongest character got lost in the basement (also, I was suffering from the Wil Wheaton curse of terrible dice rolling)
Mysterium – Everybody has played Clue at least once in their life, right? Now imagine one the players gets to be the ghost of the murder victim. That’s Mysterium. Up to 6 people take on the roles of psychic detectives while one player tries to direct them to the who, what, where of their murder, by sending visions in their dreams. It’s so much more fun than Clue.
That’s not all
There are more, many more, some I want but don’t have like Last Night on Earth where you play as survivors in a zombie apocalypse who are just trying to make it out alive, or Fury of Dracula, an asymmetric hunt game where one player is the titular vampire lord and the rest are hunters trying to track him down across Europe. It’s a fantastic game, but I don’t own it because my friend does.
This movie is surprisingly ahead of it’s time. It’s about an AI that takes control of a smart home and kidnaps the woman who lives there, and it was made almost 50 years ago. Although, people back then obviously thought we’d be further along technologically than we actually are. This smart home was making drinks for people and opening doors, while I still can’t get Alexa to just remove the picture-in-picture on my Fire TV after my Blink doorbell rings (all three are Amazon products by the way).
At it’s heart, Demon Seed is a mad scientist/monster story a la Frankenstein, set in the budding computer age. I loved the initial robot body that Proteus builds for itself. It shows imagination on the part of the writers to not go the obvious humanoid route, and instead a collection of interconnected triangles that allowed it to re-configure it’s shape. TARS from Interstellar reminds me of it in a way.
The movie was well done and I enjoyed it, but I didn’t love it. I’m not sure why exactly, but I didn’t get as strong a feeling of menace from the AI as I should. Many of the scenes are disturbing, but… I don’t know. I can think of other films with computer villains that felt far more unsettling and creepy, like HAL from 2001 or GERTY from Moon. Maybe it was the lighting, the editing, pacing, the voice acting? Maybe all of it. It wasn’t bad, don’t get the wrong impression, I just felt, in comparison to other movies I’ve seen, it could have been stronger.
Demon Seed is currently streaming for free on Tubi in Canada, so you can check it out for yourself if you feel like it.
Before the re-watch, I remembered I liked this movie, but I had forgotten how unsatisfying the ending was.
The film stars Johnny Depp as an amoral dealer in rare books. His character is kind of a dick and he plays it well. He’s hired by and even bigger dick (Frank Langella) to track down and compare two copies of a very rare book to his. The book is said to be able to summon the devil and Frank’s character thinks only one of the three is genuine.
The good. Johnny Depp, Frank Langella and Lena Olin. Great actors who do a fantastic job in this movie. I enjoyed that it plays out like a mystery and detective story all about books. I also liked the sense of dread and menace that runs through almost the entire film. From the moment Dean meets with Boris, the audience is made to feel suspicious, then anxious, nervous, paranoid, mimicking Johnny Depp’s character. The viewer never feels safe or relaxed. Even the lovemaking scenes are tense. You’re not aroused because you KNOW something is off about these women. It’s a masterfully told story.
The bad. Roman Polanski. I hate that such a terrible person still evades justice and continues to live his life free of consequences.
I’m also not a fan of the ending of the movie. Unless I missed a lot, it’s kind of ambiguous.
*Spoiler Time*
Who was The Girl? Was she a demon, an angel, Lucifer? Was the whole thing about leading Dean through the gate, Lucifer never wanted Boris in the first place? Were the Ceniza brothers part of the setup? Did the gate actually lead to hell? Was it SUPPOSED to be this confusing or did I miss signs while watching? Was this supposed to lead to a sequel? I don’t mind when a story doesn’t answer all our questions, or when the ambiguity leads to meaningful discussion among the viewers, but this was too many unanswered questions.
I’m kind of in the mood to watch From Hell now. Not sure if it fits this months theme or not.
In 1985 I watched the Michael J. Fox comedy Teen Wolf. I loved it and did for a long time. Ginger Snaps is like the anti-Teen Wolf and it is soooo much better. Both are coming of age movies about outcast teens that become werewolves. Both have scenes with sports in them and both movies star Canadians, That’s pretty much where the similarities end.
This is another film that I had heard mentioned a lot over the years, but never watched. I could say I don’t know why I avoided it, but the truth is probably misogyny. At it’s core this is a story about high-school, teen girls and menstruation and I didn’t think I wanted to watch a movie about any of those things. I was wrong, and I wished I had watched this sooner.
My favorite thing about Ginger Snaps is the realism. No, I don’t believe werewolves are real and this is an accurate depiction of them, I mean it feels like the filmmakers started with the premise, “If my sister and I are out walking at night and are attacked by a strange animal, how would we react?” and everything flows from that. Their actions, reactions, the way they talk and behave are all natural and believable. That’s a big pet peeve of mine, when I think characters aren’t behaving like a reasonable person would, it pulls me right out of the story, so at the start of the film, I didn’t think I was going to like it, because I didn’t like Ginger and Brigitte.
Why are they so angry? Why are they so mean to their parents? Why do they hate life so much when they don’t seem to have anything to complain about? But that’s an old person’s instinctual response to teenagers. I see it a lot in people my age. We’ve forgotten how it FELT to be that age. What seems trivial and unimportant to us now in hindsight is the entire world to them. When I think back to how my kids were in their teens, how my grand-kids are now, the Fitzgerald sisters are 100% believable.
For a low budget film, it looks fantastic. Google says the average studio movie in 2001 cost $47.7 million, Ginger Snaps had only 4.5 to work with, which is $1.4 million LESS than the GOAT of werewolf movies was given in 1981. A lot of that I think can be attributed to director John Fawcett choosing to go far all practical makeup and effects. If they had used CGI it would have either eaten up a lot of the budget, or they would have had to settle for less or poorer quality. Going practical and keeping things dark worked very well.
I shouldn’t have slept on this film for so long, and I think it’s a lesson to be more open minded. The question arises though, do I watch the sequel? I haven’t had a lot of luck with sequels this month, especially with movies I really enjoyed.
Late to the party, as usual 