Ah tradition – the little recurrences that free us from the burden of decision making. What will we eat for this important meal? What we always eat for that important meal! How do we mark the anniversary of someone’s birth? Cake and song, of course! What will I write about on my blog at the beginning of the year? My favorite things from last year – like I always do. As do so many others.
Now, do I keep all traditions holy? Like writing about something for Christmas? Or even just writing on a regular schedule (twice a week, twice a month, once a month, etc.)? Sigh. No, not remotely. 2024 was not a good year for blogular regularity (this blog needs more insoluble fiber). I started off strong, but life intervened, and well, you do what you can. And today, after a long delay, is the long awaited day of said doing.
So, as the year turns, I like to look back at the one previous and take a moment to praise those works I saw for the first time and really loved, but just didn’t get around to writing about on this here blog. Some I really thought I would have written about by now, and maybe I still will someday – I reserve the right to return to these – they wouldn’t be on this list if not for some element contained within that stands out as really special. I’m making no claims that these are the “best” films of the year. Most are older movies and they might not even be “good” (whatever that means), but each had something that really sparked with me and has lingered in my mind as the months came and went.
So, in no particular order (scratch that – this is the order in which I saw them), let’s dig in to my top ten new to me in 2024…
Death Game (1974)
As I understand it, this was a very contentious set with a tremendous amount of conflict between first time director, Peter S. Traynor, and both the actors and other creative staff. But you wouldn’t know it to look at it. I went into this one completely blind, just because the poster on Shudder was intriguing, and it is a gorgeous, rich, confounding, and addictively watchable piece of work (probably thanks largely to the efforts of its outstanding cast and abovementioned creative staff, most notably cinematographer, David Worth – it is beautiful to look at).
George is a middle class, middle age “normal guy” whose wife is called away on an emergency and is thus home alone one rainy night when two young, attractive girls show up on his doorstep, asking to use the phone. He invites them in, and though he initially hesitates (but doesn’t put up much of a fight), ends up having a sexual tryst with both of them in his fancy hot tub. And then they refuse to go away and subsequently lay waste to his entire life. If it sounds familiar, it’s because Eli Roth’s Knock Knock (2015) is a recent remake (I’ve heard good things about it, particularly the performances of Lorenza Izzo and Ana de Armas, but haven’t checked it out yet). It is a classic tale of a character making one mistake and never being able to climb back from it. It is tense and wild, weird and erotically charged, socio-politically deeply ambivalent and searingly angry. It is full of extremes bouncing off of each other – on one level an effective, engaging feminist diatribe against male privilege and on another, a cautionary tale about how women are crazy and dangerous. It is scary and joyful, and most interestingly, it is the same things that both frighten and delight.
If that sounds confusing, I think it’s probably because the film doesn’t really know what it’s trying to “say,” if it’s actually trying to say anything at all, but that makes it all the more effective – its ideas and feelings can all live freely, in dialogue with each other, and they are more vibrant for their life-like messiness. It’s a film of ideas, but one without a “message” (which I feel is often more effective – if what you really want is to communicate a message, then the best medium is a banner). And as a horror movie, it is genuinely discomforting and exciting, eliciting a wide range of reactions from me throughout. The two girls, who give the names Jackson and Donna (Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp, respectively) are downright terrifying agents of grotesque chaos and violent destruction whose truth is utterly impenetrable to both George and the viewer – we are not given tools to understand what their true intentions or actual backstories might be, and it makes them fearful – dangerous and menacing. But they are also awesome, and it is hard not to cheer on their bizarre, playful chaos and devastation, and not just as punishment for George transgressing in terms of his infidelity, but in the sense that his whole life represents a mendacious, iniquitous, privileged power structure – in terms of gender, but also class, education, capital, and politics, that assumes a respect and authority, but is built on lies and deserves to be shattered. Jackson and Donna feel like avatars of some primal trickster energy – impossible to contain or control – here to violate the bullshit of a respectability which only serves to maintain hierarchies of gender and class.
They are the villains, but also the heroes. We support them and we want them and we fear them and we vicariously get off on their often ridiculous, cruel, baffling actions. The film is simultaneously alluring and confusing and weird and wonderful. I really, really dug it! Now, as everyone who worked on it seemingly hated the director and felt he had no idea what he was doing, it seems that the movie’s strength could have been somewhat accidental, but watching it 50 years later, who cares? Good is good, intentional or not.
Red Rooms (2023)
This was a really uncomfortable but captivating watch – an often quiet, tense emotional piece, and one with a real mystery of character at its cold heart. It is chilling and unsettling in all the best ways – Juliette Gariépy is Kelly-Anne, a Montreal model fixated on the high profile trial of a man accused of kidnapping, torturing, and murdering three young girls in a “Red Room,” broadcasting his crimes on the dark web to the highest bidders. She does freelance modelling work, but earns most of her money playing high stakes on-line poker, which funds her expensive, well-curated, and almost entirely solitary lifestyle. Unhampered by other human connections, Kelly-Anne is free to rise before dawn every day so that she can get to the court early, thus earning a public seat for the much publicized trial.
For almost the whole movie, she is a magnetic cypher – a fascinatingly opaque central presence. What is her interest in this case, in this man? Is she a groupie for this soft spoken accused killer the way that many women were for Ted Bundy? Is she a former victim, plotting her revenge? Is she a true crime fanatic, addicted to the most salacious details of this horrific case? Are any of these mutually exclusive? The fact that, though she is probably in every scene of the film, we are locked out from her inner life and will never know what truly lives behind her eyes, pulled me in, the experience of the film becoming an intriguing, sometimes disturbing meditation on our interest in darkness, our fascination with the worst things imaginable.
By all genre classifications, this would be normally be considered a drama or a thriller, but this exploration of that draw to see the worst, to not look away, to possibly even love it, and to have to reckon with how you feel about that, this is absolutely the stuff of horror.
The only clues we really get as to her actual intentions are in the form of contrast with another daily viewer of the trial – Clémentine, a young woman convinced that “he couldn’t have done it,” who has hitchhiked to Montreal and is living in a homeless shelter so that she can come to trial every day and support the man she’s fallen for. Whereas Kelly-Anne is cold, distant, unknowable, Clémentine wears her big heart on her sleeve, coming across as quite sweet but also naively deluded. But there is a kind of kinship there and Kelly-Anne, in her way, befriends her for a time, but as things develop, we come to see how different they truly are, and the friendship cannot survive this.
This is one of the tensest, chilliest, most intense viewings I’ve had in quite a while – if I saw enough new movies to make such a list, it would definitely be in “best of the year” territory. And while the film lives and dies by Gariépy’s performance, it also must be said that as a piece of filmmaking, it is tight as a drum and impeccably filmed (notably, one very long take in the first courtroom scene really wows – by the end of that, I was hooked and really excited about the film I had chosen to watch). This is the third feature of writer-director, Pascal Plante – I’m not at all familiar with his other work, but on the strength of this, I’m certainly keen to check it out.
At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964)
This is an interesting curio more than I can exactly say that I loved it, but I must admit, it was very, very interesting. Apparently the first Brazilian horror film, director José Mojica Marins’s first entry in the Coffin Joe series (in which he also stars as the titular character – later, he served as a late night horror host in the persona) is a bombastic, atmospheric, idiosyncratic, and taboo breaking exploration of the nexus of egoistic, self-serving evil, heroic individualism, Nietzschean will to power, Byronic romanticism, and exploitation cinema, all within a totally culturally specific, ultra-Catholic Brazilian context. There’s a lot there to dig into.
We follow Joe (or, more precisely, Zé), a black clad little man in a cape and a top hat with long, sharp fingernails who has the town in which he lives fearfully under his thumb. He scoffs at religion, morality, and emotion, caring only about his own status, power, and the continuation of his bloodline through a male heir. He beats (and eventually kills) his wife, he drowns his friend and rapes his wife, he bullies the townspeople, forcing them to do shocking things (like eat meat on Good Friday – I mentioned it was really Catholic), he pokes a guy’s eyes out, he murders and abuses and tortures and humiliates any and everyone who crosses his path. He’s the worst.
He’s also free in a way no one else is. He does what he pleases and takes what he wants. As already mentioned, he is diminutive in stature, but that doesn’t prevent him from terrorizing and dominating the whole town. Besides his claw like fingernails and the tendency of his eyes to go all bloodshot when he’s angry, he has no supernatural abilities, and yet he is stronger than everyone else simply by virtue of his lack of morality; his willingness to do wrong is his power. That power is exciting, and for all that he is a terrible, hateful, cruel, petty person, it’s hard not to vibe on his defiant commitment to his own interests, as in a later scene when he gets a wild monologue like something out of the climax of Marlow’s Faust, as the lightning crashes, the bells chime, and midnight draws nearer – he is initially cowed and fearful, but as his dark fate creeps towards him, he rallies, spitting in the face of god and all that is good, tearing a cross off the wall and throwing it to the ground – how do we not read that as heroic? Admirable? Awesome?
It is an interesting viewing experience start to finish. We have no ‘nicer’ character to lean on – we only have Zé, and he is monstrous – an awful person to spend time with, but he’s also never not the most interesting guy in the room, and there is a point at which his evil crosses the line into allure. As a film, the style is varied, creative, and while sometimes less than “Hollywood-professional,” it is always full of energy and ideas. I really found it engrossing and intriguing, especially as it hails from a culture with which I’ve had particularly little contact. Really glad to have seen it.
Ghostwatch (1992)
I often have a problem as a horror fan and blogger. When someone finds out that I like horror, they frequently want a recommendation for a good horror movie, by which they often mean a “scary” movie. And that is just hard. Different things scare different people, and also as I have watched so many horror movies at this point, it is really rare that one can succeed in freaking me out in that “scary” way. Many are just comfort food repetition of familiar elements. Some might disturb me. Others might unsettle in delicious fashion, or give me a taste of that sweet dramatic tension inherent to horror. But they don’t often keep me up at night.
Well, I’m happy to say that Ghostwatch really got under my skin – it was the scariest first time watch I’ve had in years, and after it was done, I had to go around my apartment turning on all the lights – always a good sign. First aired on BBC1 on Halloween night in 1992, it shares DNA with works such as The WNUF Halloween Special, Orson Wells’s War of the Worlds radio broadcast, and the recent Late Night with the Devil. But for my money, it’s much scarier then all of them.
There are twists, turns, and revelations that I wouldn’t want to spoil, but the essential premise is that a TV crew (all played by known real-life TV journalists and presenters) is investigating a haunted house on Halloween night in a live broadcast. Without going into detail, the deeper they dig, the more disturbing it all becomes, and by the end, it goes big, at the very least, nation-wide – much more so than I might have expected. It is all very well done, and until late in the game, evidence that anything supernatural is really happening is kept to a minimum, contributing to a really effective sense of reality and possibility, which must have been greatly aided by the inclusion of known TV presenters as the investigating crew. As I understand, though it was advertised and aired in a “drama” slot, many people who bumped into it while channel surfing did not realize it was a work of fiction and, ala War of the Worlds, believed this to be a work of documentary reportage. People went crazy.
For good reason – I thought it was properly terrifying – really realistic in its exploration of an uncanny experience, that is probably not supernatural, until it definitely is. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if you believed you were actually watching the news. Wow… Ok – no more details –if you get a chance, go watch it, and try to imagine you know all the characters as real TV news presenters – It’s something else!
Dressed to Kill (1980)
Where had Brian De Palma’s problematic masterpiece been all my life? Sitting on the shelf at the video store I guess, but I finally got around to checking it out back in the spring, and it blew me away. Any criticisms of it are fair. Its ‘homage’ to Psycho could easily be taken as a rip off. It taps into the unfortunate, deeply harmful trope of the ‘trans killer,’ and its representational issues don’t end there – see the discomforting and rather rapey black street gang in the otherwise top shelf subway chase scene (it would be nice if, other than the deeply unhelpful subway cop, they weren’t seemingly the only other black characters in all of NYC). It is sleazy and exploitative and it cheats by having the killer played by a different performer from the one who will later be revealed. But in spite of all that, Dressed to Kill towers above just about any other thriller I’ve ever seen, and it is impossible for me not to love it. Sexy, scary, cinematically playful, with a protagonist I enjoy hanging out with (a charming Nancy Allen as an independent, proactive, stock-exchanging, murder-investigating prostitute), Michael Caine giving an interesting, nuanced performance, and a movie cop leading the murder investigation who’s really, really fun to hate (Dennis Franz, later known from NYPD Blue – golly, what a schmuck – the character – I know nothing about Franz as a real person), this might be one of the most enjoyable movies of any genre I’ve seen.
It is a thriller that genuinely thrills (see the above mentioned gasp-inducing subway scene), with multiple sequences that found me holding my breath, so expertly did they play with ratcheting up and releasing tension. And not only scary ones. An early centerpiece of the film finds Angie Dickinson’s dissatisfied housewife in a wordless sequence of seduction, cat and mouse eroticism, and life affirming sexual satisfaction, all before things go way south for her in a wide variety of ways and the film is off to the races. For about 22 minutes, barely a word is uttered and it is cinematic perfection, as she follows an unknown man around an art museum before going home with him, where an unpleasant penny will drop. It is pure visual storytelling, totally captivating, erotic, funny, scary, stressful, sad, moving, and ultimately shocking. Just a perfect, perfect example of what a movie can be (on the strength of this, I also dove into other De Palma films of the era – there’s a lot there to love, but nothing surpassed this for me), an exhilarating exercise in matching the inner experience of its viewpoint character to cinematic technique.
This is one of those blurry genre flicks – people who like it, who don’t like horror, will call it a “thriller” and people who love horror claim it as our own (we are the genre of blade wielding maniacs, are we not?). But I think this underlines the ultimate pointlessness of genre classification, largely a marketing tool to help producers reach audiences. Does it really matter what it’s called? It has scares and jumps and unsettling qualities a plenty, all tied up in an unselfconsciously pulpy, lurid package. Past that, it offers a variety of cinematic pleasures, stylistic in a way that exceeds base realism, which I feel is often characteristic of the horror genre more than any other – it is one of the very things I come to horror movies for. So I think it’s ours. It is a mood – rich and sensual, even in parts that have little to do with sex. The camera stalks its characters in a lusty way that excites and puts on edge in equal measure. There is a playfulness with the darkest thematic material, resulting in this tale of madness and sex and death and despair being a real hoot. I think that’s a horror thing. But I would.
(Also, I won’t go into them now, but if you like this, do check out Blow Out (1981) (for my money, far more enjoyable than the Antonioni film it references) and Body Double (1984) – which together with Dressed to Kill see De Palma celebrating what can be done with the camera and sound and editing, all in the form of sleazy, fun, highly entertaining thrillers – all art, no pretention.) Other movies in his oeuvre are great too, such as Carrie (1976), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), or Sisters (1972), but Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and Body Double all feel of a piece somehow.
Maxxxine (2024)
It was actually the trailer for Maxxxine that sent me to De Palma back in the spring. When it dropped, I just got so excited for its promise of seedy, 80s, neon-lit murder vibes, that I found myself on an eighties pop kick on Spotify and seeking out classic (and not-so-classic) films of the era that I’d previously missed.
I loooove X (2022), and I rather liked Pearl (2022), so I was eager to take in the third film in Ti West’s Mia Goth led trilogy (one of these days I will finally write about the rich tension in these three films between the beauty of individualism and the ugliness of egoistic greed which feels so specifically “American,” but today is not that day). I can’t say that this was the strongest of the three, and in all actuality, it is probably the weakest, but I still experienced such pleasure watching it, that it stands out as a top film of the year for me.
Now, my appreciation of Maxxxine is doubtlessly flavored by circumstances that had nothing to do with the film itself. It came out last summer when I had been having a tough time of it – there were stresses having to do with family health concerns, I was tremendously busy, and I was just feeling burned down. But finally, after a hard run of fielding heavy responsibilities (which I was happy to be able to do, but it’s a lot), I was able to give myself a day for myself. I went to the beach for a half an hour, I got a coffee milkshake (my favorite), and I drove 45 minutes to a town where I could finally see this movie that I’d really been looking forward to for months, and I just had the best time.
It is, admittedly, not the strongest movie. After a promising opening, the third act suffers, failing to pay off early character promise, and resolving its story in a fairly obvious fashion. Characters make choices that are sometimes hard to follow, and most damningly, Maxine, in my judgment, hasn’t changed in a particularly interesting way by the end of the film (Goth’s journey doesn’t feel as significant as it had in the two previous films). But I generally don’t care – I really dug it anyway.
Having survived the bloodbath of X, Maxine has established herself in LA as a tough, hard working, driven young woman, thriving in the adult film industry and doggedly pursuing crossover success in a horror movie. She is a creature of ambitions that will not be denied. Her straightforward, no-nonsense demeanor makes her a really enjoyable guide through West’s vision of mid-80s Hollywood, which is just as appealingly sordid and enticingly dangerous as the trailer had promised. We’ve got a killer stalking attractive women on the strip. We’ve got Satanic Panic up the wazzoo. We’ve got porno chic and bloody, excessive practical effects and a killer soundtrack. And it is a film of scenes, groovy and dark and sexy and violent and cool. Notably, I loved the run-in with the Buster-Keaton attired wannabee rapist in the dark alley – he never stood a chance, and the film’s evident glee in Maxine’s dealing with him (and boy is he dealt with) is gorily infectious.
And that glee is key to what makes this such a fun watch – it might not be the height of filmmaking, but it is a film that loves filmmaking, that loves style and genre and technical artistry. West et al. are clearly having great fun crafting scenes and set pieces, such that even if the film as a whole is no more than the sum of its parts, it has loads of great parts that, moment to moment, one can really savor. There is homage all over the place, but that’s superficial – I think the real heart of the movie is in its own excitement at building each moment, each look, each vibe. I rather loved it.
Plus, it was a really good milkshake.
P.S. Just to say, I did rewatch Maxxxine under other circumstances about a month ago and while the experience wasn’t as rapturous, I still really enjoyed it, so that seems like a good sign.
Love Lies Bleeding (2024)
Another new film, and another “thriller” that I’m including cause it taps into something of mood and atmosphere and style, elevating it above base realism to earn a place on my “horror” blog list (something to which I know all significant filmmakers aspire). Essentially an erotic-crime thriller, it has standout moments of compelling, visceral violence, and by the end, it takes a surprising turn into a kind of magical realism which I had not seen coming. It was easily one of the most gripping movies I saw last year, and I really hope to watch it again soon.
Lou (Kristen Stewart) is a standoffish gym manager, estranged from her crime boss father (a truly scary Ed Harris), just trying to keep to herself, when she meets Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a homeless runaway passing through town, chasing dreams of success on the female bodybuilding circuit. Lou is immediately smitten and as they strike up a volatile romance, she also starts supplying Jackie with steroids, which Jackie abuses, bulking her up, but also messing with her emotional stability. Eventually, a whole series of things go particularly wrong, they run afoul of Lou’s crime-boss dad, and everything hurtles towards a taught, intense conclusion. Really, this is crime thriller territory more than horror.
But it’s also really, really good. The crime/family drama story is emotionally gripping and I believe the dynamic between Harris and Stewart. The action/thriller stuff is exciting and sometimes brutal in its execution (a horror gorehound would be satisfied with at least one scene that ends poorly for Dave Franco’s head). And most significantly, the erotic element really lands. There is only one sex scene per se, but the feeling of physical attraction between Lou and Jackie is palpable and encompassing and dangerous. There is a need of the body and of the psyche that makes demands and doesn’t care about the fallout. And notably, I really buy it – something that isn’t always exactly a given in romances. Bad decisions, murder, betrayal – life can be completely turned upside down and Eros cares not. Maybe there was something in that that made me feel a kinship with horror. I’ve written before about the similarities of horror and tragedy, and there is something of that tragic pinch here. Lou and Jackie are good for each other, but also bad for each other and they give each other life and are also catalysts for self-destructive behaviors.
Minor spoiler alert – though dramatic tragedy is present, it doesn’t end in the tragic, as the film stretches further and further from reality into something less obvious and more interesting, but that psycho-sexual-emotional-violent tightness is still there, and that feels like my genre of choice – to paraphrase a line which has nothing to do with this, it might not actually be horror at all, but perhaps it rhymes (with apologies to Mark Twain). It’s pretty special.
Lifeforce (1985)
Wow! This one is a hoot and a holler. Right around the time I was writing up The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for its 50th anniversary, I went on a bit of a run of Tobe Hooper movies, including both this and also the next on the list (among others that didn’t make the cut – I’m looking at you, Invaders from Mars – oof!). I’d always heard this was a weird flick (naked, body-swapping energy vampires from outer space!), but I had no idea just how much fun it was going to be.
Written by Dan O’Bannon (writer of Alien (1979) and Return of the Living Dead (1985), among many, many others), this was a critically panned box office flop on release. And I can understand why. It is a pretty strange flick with an outlandish story that somehow makes 25 million bucks look cheap. But I think it has rightfully found its audience over the years. The key for me is that it is just pure, unadulterated, non-ironic sci-fi/horror pulp, and it is glorious, crazy, top-shelf pulp at that. Every idea, plus a couple of kitchen sinks, is thrown at the screen, and it tries to do so much that its pretty decent budget is simply stretched too thin. We’ve got sequences in space, as a crew investigates the organic, cavernous ship they find hidden within the coma of Halley’s comet, filled with giant, dead bat creatures and a few naked folks encased in space crystals. We’ve got fun revisionist folk lore, positing that all of humanity’s stories of vampires are rooted in these peculiar alien beings that like hopping from body to body, leaving desiccated husks in their wake, but are apparently allergic to pants. We’ve got every pulpy attraction on offer – sex, violence, lasers, monsters, gratuitous nudity, goopy blood rising out of a barely believable (if you squint) Patrick Stewart mask and forming a floating, bloody, expository naked girl, exploding zombies, mid 80s visual effects zapping all over the screen, a spot of sci-fi gothic, and oodles of pop-psychology mythic resonance. And while the movie is clearly having a blast with every incongruous element that it packs in, I also think it actually takes itself seriously and is really trying to spin a great adventure yarn, full of wild stuff.
While the story could be criticized (and it was) as pretty peculiar (true), it also really cooks. This is not a boring movie – we race from one surprising scenario to the next, and I was there for it. Sure, it’s odd, but it’s not formulaic – not something I’ve seen a thousand times before. It is a movie in which, somehow, everything happens, and generally, it worked for me. I think we don’t get too many things this big and weird and not even remotely boring, and it’s worth celebrating them when we do.
Salem’s Lot (1979)
So I know some folks grew up with this one and that it’s much beloved, but when I first gave it a try a few years back, it just didn’t do it for me. Something about the pacing or its late 70s aesthetic (there’s a lot of brown and tan) just put me off and I didn’t finish. But a couple months back, I was working my way through the Hooper filmography and this showed up on Shudder, and now I am sold. It’s great.
A 2-part CBS miniseries, Hooper’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about vampirism spreading plague-like through a small New England town takes on some of the vibes of an old EC horror comic (Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, etc.), something also true of Hooper’s earlier, weirder Eaten Alive (1976), with creeping blue lit fog and monsters lurching through the muck and dramatic lighting and framing and color. If that style doesn’t do anything for you, neither will this, but I love it. And I’ve gotta say, for something shown on primetime TV, this gets really spooky and scary – it’s perfect Halloween season viewing – mixing comfort food atmospherics, enjoyably era-specific (now charmingly kitschy) fashion and personas, and legitimate old-fashioned, skin-crawling creep-outs.
As with so much of Stephen King’s work, this is a work of character over plot. A who’s who of late seventies talent populates the town with nuance, emotion, and specificity. I was only one year old when this came out, so I can’t claim to know them all, but I was constantly going, “hey, that guy!” This is of course a tale of vampirism, but it is also one of base human venality – bullies, drunks, philanderers, abusive spouses, cheats, and cowards – all humanely rendered (and well-drawn) as real people with their own foibles, haunted by their sizable failings.
But on top of that, there is a rousing story of one of the creepiest cinematic vampires (clearly indebted to Nosferatu), Kurt Barlow, coming to a small town and utterly laying waste to it, of course resulting in all underlying tensions exploding to the surface. It is a kind of story that King has told many times, and while there are significant departures from the source material, I feel it does very well by the spirit of his work. And it gets scary. No one is safe (the first victim is an innocent child, and he’s not the last). It has some top notch horror set pieces, such as poor, dead Ralphie Glick scratching at his older brother’s second story window, asking to be let in, and if you can settle in for its unhurried 2-part TV movie pacing, I think it builds tension really well and delivers some successful terrors.
But I would be remiss if I didn’t go into one performance. I’d long known the name James Mason, but I hadn’t really been familiar with his work. Ye gods, he is so freaking good in this movie! He plays Richard Straker, the vampire Kurt Barlow’s “partner” (technically business partner – they travel from town to town, opening antique shops, Straker always arriving first and laying the ground for Barlow to arrive and feed – but as is often the case in these kinds of stories, the gay coding is strong in this one – two elderly men who live together, running their New England antique shop – and Mason is just so villainously silky smooth – which also feels like classic coding). Mason’s Straker is just the best kind of delicious bad guy in the tradition of a mustache twirling Vincent Price (who may have never actually twirled a mustache, but you get what I mean). There is a wonderful scene in which the local sheriff is questioning him about recent unexplained deaths and, all in subtext, Straker, with a sinister, mischievous twinkle in his eye, communicates, “yes, you know I’m bad, but you have no idea how I’m bad, or how bad I am, and also, you have nothing on me and I’m going to walk out of here and continue to be worse than you could possibly imagine – and on top of it all, you will do my dry cleaning!” He is an absolute wicked delight. Just gleefully evil and dominating, but so polite and civil. Perfection.
So, yeah, I’m a convert – this was spooky-ooky, old fashioned horror gold – I might have to watch it again next October. For a certain kind of old-school, big-vibes horror, I’d put this up there with something like John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980), high praise indeed.
The Majorettes (1986)
As I near the end of this annual round up, I notice how heavily horror-adjacent “thrillers” have featured on the list this time, and my last entry is no exception. To some extent, that is a result of the Maxxxine trailer leading me on an 80s sleazy thriller kick, which deposited me down a De Palma rabbit hole where Tubi noticed what I’d been watching and offered more of the same. And to some extent, I think it’s just a coincidence. I watched plenty of other stuff that I loved last year, but some of it already got its own post, or at least a passing mention (e.g., The Substance, Immaculate, Infinity Pool, or the Spanish language Dracula). The borders of genre are permeable and inconsistent. There is such little significant formal difference between a “slasher” about a masked-stalker picking off teens, a “giallo” about a black-gloved madman dispatching stylish, beautiful Europeans, or a grimy NYC or LA set “thriller” about police hunting a psycho who’s murdering, for example, workers at a phone sex line (it didn’t make the cut, but I rather enjoyed Out of the Dark (1988) in which a clown-masked maniac does exactly this). Sure, there are identifying markers – masks, gloves, police, but any of those could easily (and often do) surface in any of the other genres. Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975), clearly a giallo, features a murderer in a motorcycle helmet which feels like a slasher mask; Killer Workout (1987), an enjoyably absurd slasher, rather turns on the police investigation (which feels like a thriller thing); and the above-praised Dressed to Kill, a thriller, has a killer with black giallo gloves. In all cases, there is a confluence of generally human killers, psycho-sexual death drive, a sense of iterative tropes/procedure, multiple stalk/chase/kill set pieces, and a lurid, sensationalistic mood.
Which, finally, brings be to The Majorettes. This was a random watch on Tubi while stranded on a recent layover – I knew nothing about it going in, and this genre busting film really delivered. This could easily be taken as a low quality effort, a cheap hack job of a flick that can’t figure out what genre it’s in and has little new to offer, but boy oh boy, did I enjoy it (I’d thought I might devote a post all to it, but then decided that I was already late with this year-in-review post – I mean, it’s almost the end of January already, geez – and that I should therefore just include it here). Is it cheesy? Yep. Are there jaw dropping moments of what-the-hell-am-I-watching? Oh yeah! Do many of the performances strain credulity? You better believe it! But this was also one of the most consistently enjoyable movies I watched all year, fun both as a gloriously campy curiosity and surprisingly effective as a twisting, turning mystery that made choices I had not seen coming. Given how some aspects feel, let’s say, “less than professional,” I’m shocked at what a tight little flick it is, with an ending that packs a chilling, icky punch.
If, by the end of its opening credit sequence of twangy-zappy- synth groove overlaying old-school video toaster graphics of a florescent, animated twirling baton, ending in a bewigged, skeletal majorette behind the title card, you’re not already in love, turn back now – this movie is not for you. If, past that, the way too long sequence of high school majorettes lamely dancing in the gym for a photo session while a creepy janitor ogles them, setting him up as a possible suspect in the killings to come, doesn’t tickle your fancy as an lovably inessential ingredient of a kind of 80s slasher, you should really know better than to go on. But if this is, instead, comfort food for you like Thanksgiving leftovers, you are in for a treat.
The movie continues for a little less than an hour as a relatively normal slasher flick – mostly teen girls (some boys, but they’re not really the targets) being murdered by a masked man – necking in a car in the woods with a boy, in the school shower, in the pool, with a very ‘regional’ charm. This does not feel like a product of Hollywood, but something smaller, more personal, with some shaky performances to be sure, but like a piece where the filmmaker has some perspective on themes of religion, sex, youth, and violence, and is making his movie his way. The fact that nothing in that perspective is new doesn’t detract from the amiability of its expression in some editing and camera choices, not to mention a startlingly unpredictable script. It was directed by William Hinzman, who appeared in many George Romero films (he was the first zombie in the graveyard in Night of the Living Dead), and he brings something unique to what could have been a very routine outing (I guess he only directed one other film, Flesheater (1988), which now I have to check out).
Notably, less than an hour in, the movie sloughs off the skin of its genre trappings and reveals itself as something completely different. As we’ve been watching kids get killed, many possible red herrings have been set up as likely murderers, but then, out of the blue, one villainous character (who is not the killer) unmasks the slasher-killer shockingly early in the runtime and ropes him into her schemes to rip off and murder an old lady for her fortune. This twist felt kind of giallo to me – backstabbing backstabbers backstabbing each other with the narrative thrown into a kind of engaging instability.
But then, just when you think you know what kind of movie it has suddenly become, it flips again, and that whole giallo subplot is disrupted by the absurdly, laughably eeeeevil motorcycle gang (oh my, seriously) killing the wrong person – totally randomly. Once again, we have no idea what movie we’re watching – what is it even about now? And with the little time left, how will we ever resolve the plot about the masked killer, the kids targeted by him, and the police on his trail? Well, we sort of will, but first we need to go on a wild detour into revenge-action territory as a previously unremarkable kid Rambos it up, shirtlessly taking his assault rifle (yup) into the local woods to hunt down the abovementioned, hilariously bad-guy-ish gang of local drug dealing toughs. At least four different vehicles blow up, cause it was 1986, and (kind of a big spoiler coming here – so if you might want to check this out, skip the rest of this review – at the time of writing, it’s free to stream on both Tubi and Youtube) with the previous murders incorrectly attributed to the newly dead leader of the gang, the slasher-killer gets away with it all, the movie ending in honestly disturbing fashion with him watching a new, much younger group of girls having what seems like their first majorette training, not yet mature enough for their adolescent sexuality to trigger his repressive religious murder drive, but knowing that one day it will, and patient enough to wait for it. Damn.
This movie, sometimes so silly and weird and totally free with genre “rules,” slams shut so very, very hard. All the sub-plots are tied up in a neat little bow and just as it began with horror in its approximation of a pretty typical slasher, before going off on a wild journey through cop procedural thriller, giallo murder mystery, teen-gang drug drama, and finally, explosive action-revenge flick, in the final moments, it leaves a revolting, horrific taste in the mouth. The killer is free, unpunished, unsuspected, and will do it all again, to these innocent children in right front of him (and us) now. And no one will stop him – this will go on forever – this is the world. Ugh. Seriously, it hits hard – that is horror.
So yeah – I loved it – I watched it twice in a week, and while the twists and turns could no longer surprise on second viewing, its weird mix of exuberant camp, surprising narrative strength, personal thematic expression, and independent, regional boldness still shone brightly. If you can vibe with its early genre tropes (and they don’t turn you off), I really recommend it. Thanks Tubi!
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And that is that. Happy New Year everybody! The last week of January, and I’m finally wrapping up 2024. I hope this new year treats you well, and I hope to be back sooner rather than later with more…
