Hallo-Universal-Watch: The Invisible Man (1933)

Watched:  10/18/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  James Whale

We watched this one with some folks.  

I always enjoy that this movie is essentially about a guy who injects himself with a serum that, yes, makes him invisible - but it also makes him an incredible a-hole.  It's a real take.

But Jamie and I discussed this in what turned out to be the penultimate episode of The Signal Watch PodCast.

Anyway, you can listen to our thoughts on it!

How can you not like a movie where the main character declares the moon is afraid of him (and means it!)

HalloDocWatch: Haxan (1922)

surely someone remade this as an album cover in the 80's

Watched:  10/19/2024

Format:  Criterion

Viewing:  First

Director:  Benjamin Christensen

What an incredible film.  

I mean, obviously.  This is a silent film that has thrived well into the modern era, so I'm no genius for noticing that it's pretty good.

Essentially a documentary/ presentation about the history of what we consider witches and witchcraft, the film feels a wee bit like an early Powerpoint at first, but it has a lot of territory to cover - like explaining how people a few hundred years ago thought the universe was constructed and the way in which that informed their entire worldview. If you literally believe Earth is the center of all things, flat, and God is sitting beyond line of sight directing celestial bodies for fun and profit, and Satan literally sits in a spot in a hole in a firey hole in the Earth, then you're going to be willing to believe he's also in your neighbor's house making it with the old lady who lives there.

The film doesn't just have fascinatingly well-constructed arguments, it's a prime example of the imagination, visual artistry and astounding craft of film by 1922.  If you ever think silent film was primitive - my dudes...  The movie creates scene after scene with unbelievable art and set design, costuming, lighting, optical and practical FX... many positively surreal.  They show the cosmos at work from a Christian cosmology perspective, what people imagined was happening at Black Sabbaths, complete with the devil in many forms and troupes of demons alongside him, recreate scenarios for how a witch hunt could begin...  And they also show very practical demonstrations of torture devices, etc...  

It's hard to explain how incredible these visuals are, so...

The movie is scary, but not in the "ooOOOooo...  witches!" way.  Instead, it's a reminder that humans are terrible, the world is drowning in abuse of power and misogyny, and religion is used as an excuse to do all sorts of things your deity of choice would really frown at, especially done in His/ Her/ Their name.  Basically, the film is about how we decide to abuse power, mostly for no reason, other than that we have a hard time seeing certain kids of people *as* people, and we fucking love to punch down.  

They also discuss how the very world that people lived in, and the rules they believed they lived by - ie: Satan could just pop up, sex you, and now you're evil (I don't know, man) likely had profound psychological impact on people and led to all sorts of weirdness in the Middle Ages (for an example, we can look at Ken Russel's film The Devils, based on a true story).  And led to nonsense like Salem.

Not so curiously, by the film's end, they leap to the modern era (of 1922) and rather than say "but we're so advanced now", they say "look, this is how we do the same shit now, only we dressed it up for polite society" by showing similar treatment of women in the modern era.  Remember - 1922 is also when we'd, like, lock up our wife in an asylum for getting sick of our shit and talking back.  And while there are plenty of 2024 examples, these are the good old days a whole lot of people think they want back because their context of the past are glimpses of old TV shows.*

Anyway, reality is a hellscape of terrors inflicted on each other for reasons that don't seem to make much more sense than believing our  omnipotent friends would have us do that, and/ or we're really sickos who found ourselves in a position where we could abuse the shit out of people and make money doing it.

Never trust anyone who desires power.

Happy Halloween!

*the past mostly sucked, and the desire to go back to any period before a Star Trek future makes absolutely no sense to me.  Unless you get to have a candlelit dinner with Myrna Loy.  Then it makes sense.

HalloWatch: The Vampire Happening (1971)

Watched:  10/16/2024

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Freddie Francis

Imagine a movie written entirely with the same vibe as one panel comics from mid-Century Playboy.  That's the entire vibe of this "movie".  

During the darkest days of COVID lockdown, I would scroll Amazon Prime for movies to Watch Party, and at some point, The Vampire Happening (1971) came up, and I laughed at the title and checked it out, deemed it far too boob-tacular to make it into the queue, and moved on.  But Amazon Prime was not done with me.  And so - for whatever reason only the algorithm knows, this movie always found it's way into my line-up of offerings.

It's a goofy comedy that works by 1970's European erotic movie rules, so you kind of have to just roll with it.  But the basic story is that a Hollywood actress inherits a castle in Transylvania.  She looks just like an ancestor who was some sort of vampire.  Her arrival means her relative rises from the grave again, and while Betty romances a strapping young man, her double is out there making new vampires.

Eventually there's a vampire party, or, as us hep cats said in the late 1960's - a vampire happening - complete with the arrival of Dracula.  

Italian produced, written by Germans and shot in Germany by an English director, and starring a ragtag pile of Euro-talent and staying just on this side of softcore, it's truly an artifact of its time.

Basically, the movie was a weird excuse for the Italian producer to put his wife on film, and have a big party in a castle.  I can only imagine what was going on behind the scenes.  But in watching this movie, there's a distinct feeling you're watching the product of someone's scheme to have a very adult good time on someone else's dollar.  As such, it's not... good.  It's not funny or particularly sexy and feels interminable for the first 2/3rds.  It had one line I found laugh out loud funny right at the end of the movie, and I did like the winky end to the film.  And Dracula is kind of funny.

The star, Pia Dagermark - wife of the producer - had won awards at Cannes in 1967, and I think this movie was what more or less ended the movie business for her.  It happens.  

Just go watch a Hammer vampire movie instead.

HalloWatch: Puppet Master (1989)

Watched:  10/15/2024

Format:  Peacock

Viewing:  First

Director:  David Schmoeller

It's important to note the budget for some of these movies.  

Puppet Master (1989) has a reported budget of $400,000.  That's about $1.12 million in 2024 dollars for a whole movie - or, roughly, the cost of bagels on an Avengers movie.  And, people still watch this thing.  So hopefully residuals are still making their way to folks who worked for cheap.

This movie is like someone took a bunch of ideas, threw them in a hat and then pulled them out whilst blind-folded.  And that isn't necessarily a complaint.  It's weird to see so many ideas in one movie, but they do work together.

The rough idea - for some reason a Puppet Master (William Hickey!) is tracked down at a hotel in the 1930's by Nazis?  He kills himself rather than give them the secret of how to imbue puppets with life.  

In the late 1980's, four psychics are summoned to the fancy hotel by a former colleague, Gallagher.  To be honest, I do not know why he summoned them as he then kills himself before they arrive.  One is sort of an everyman psychic, one is a fortune teller who gets glimpses of the future, and two seem to channel sex into their research, which is at least kind of novel.  Meanwhile, Gallagher's widow is hanging about.

There are spirit visions and glimpses of people's deaths yet to come.  A lot of rolling around on a bed.  And nobody seems to have liked Gallagher.  

Soon, the puppets who once were Hickey's pals are running around picking off the psychics.  And each puppet kind of has their thing.

It's probably telling that the stars of this movie mostly don't have many credits.  Hickey is a cameo and our star is really Paul Le Mat, who you'll keep squinting at, trying to remember what you know him from.  I put the movie on because it said it had Barbara Crampton, but she's in it for 30 seconds as a favor to someone, and it managed to sucker me into watching it, so... well done, film producers from 1988 or so.

The puppets are kind of neat.  It's all just... puppetry, but to its credit, it works.  The Pinhead fellow with human hands, Leach Girl, Blade...  just good ideas.  

But there's oddly almost no... feel to the movie.  They have this stunning location of the hotel, but seems like they had a few rooms somewhere, and decided to just light everything like a late 1980's TV show - ie: there are no shadows.  It's sort of weird, visually, in 2024 to see something speaking in TV-language of the era.  

The movie is just weird enough, by virtue of throwing ideas at you left and right, that it's not boring or repetitive.  But it can feel like someone was just writing things down with no clear goal where it was going.  And that's okay.  I just don't think there's anything remotely scary about this movie.  It's more... kind of interesting.  Some really oddball stuff out there winds up drumming up multiple sequels and a fanbase.

I do wonder if this was made because someone say 1987's Dolls, a movie by Stuart Gordon of Re-Animator fame.  Dolls worked for me when I saw it on HBO or something in probably 1989.*  But Dolls was pretty creepy, if memory serves.  

Anyway - it was fine.  One more to check off the list.

*I wound up watching this with a good friend's mom.  I was at his house spending the night, and she'd wandered into the room as the movie started, and my pal fell asleep, and so I wound up watching this goofy movie in a super awkward context, as she was clearly watching it and I didn't know if I could just go to sleep or turn off the TV or what.  She also would go to movies with us and sit by herself so she could see, like, Dirty Harry: The Dead Pool.

HalloWatch: Night of the Demons (1988)

Watched:  10/15/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Kevin Tenney

This is usually the kind of movie I take in after Jamie's gone to bed, but she was, like "whatever you want to watch, man", and... ha ha.  

An intentionally trashy horror flick, I think they spent more time worrying about the opening animation than they did the content of the actual movie.  It's... fine?  It's just very in love with not being good, but isn't quite trashy enough to be as entertaining in that regard as it imagines.  It also becomes critic proof if you keep saying "it's supposed to be bad!  It's supposed to be trashy!"  

And yet.  

No, really, the movie is in on it's own joke of just being what it is.  I'm not sure if that's enough for me in 2024 at age 49, but I also know that was not the intention in 1988 when they were essentially making a party movie for teens and 20-somethings.  I just don't think there's enough here and don't quite get why the movie seems to be a thing (which is why I watched it).  

It had about four good things in a 90 minute movie, and that's not nothing!  But I also couldn't tell if some of the acting was just bad or a brilliant portrayal of bad acting.  That only Linnea Quigley really kept working after this for any length of time may be the tell.  That said - I liked Amelia Kinkade in a horro-movie Patricia Morrison kind of way.*  

It's just a very thin movie, and that's okay, but won't go down as the great discovery of 2024 for me.  This is several years after Evil Dead 1 and 2 at this point, and I think this movie could have been a lot more fun.  And given literally anyone a motivation.

*Kinkade went on to be a sort of animal psychic, and I salute anyone who makes a living chilling with animals, from zooloogist to psychic

Superman 2025: Krypto, The Superdog

You can follow our posts on Superman at this link, and our posts on the new movie, Superman (2025) at this link.

Today, James Gunn announced that, yes - after a year of playing hide-the-ball with the issue - Superman's canine companion, Krypto, will appear in 2025's Superman.  

Full disclosure - a full subset of my Super comics and paraphernalia collection is Krypto-related.  My house is littered with white dogs in capes.  There's like 7 of them in the room I'm in right now.  I am also a grown man who spends 45% of his waking time talking to a 128 pound dog with zero manners.

If you think a Super Dog is a dumb thing and superheroes can't have pets... I would like to introduce you to DC Comics' longstanding tradition of Super-Pets and related animals.  Krypto was a mid-1950's addition to the Superman canon, showing up less than twenty years after Superman first showed up in 1938.  But after the insertion of Rex the Wonder-Dog into DC's world of action-adventure, sometimes in military comics.  Batman has Ace the Bathound.  Wonder Woman has had a variety of pals, but Jumpa, her kangaroo, is probably most famous for nerds.  Robin has a Batcow.  Here's an encyclopedia of them.

It's important to remember that one of the biggest stars in movies through the late 1920's was Rin-Tin-Tin, a German Shepard. Rin-Tin-Tin and Lassie enjoyed stardom in movies and television through the 1990's.  Dogs as characters just wasn't a weird idea to people in media.  And especially when you're trying to rope in a younger audience, as comics were intended through the 1980's.

Late-80's Hallo-Watch: Pumpkinhead (1988)

Watched:  10/13/2024

Format:  Amazon 

Viewing:  First

Director:  Stan Winston

I wasn't expecting Pumpkinhead (1988) to be good.  

Yet, I'd always meant to watch this movie.  I remember being 13 and the ad came on for "Pumpkinhead" and my brother and I looked at each other and laughed and laughed and laughed.  To this day, it sounds like naming a horror movie "Taters n' Gravy" to me.*

Pumpkinhead  looks good, but for Stan Winston's directorial debut, it's an awkward, tedious slog through flat characters and half-cooked ideas.  It's an 84 minute movie that has you looking at your watch and wondering when all of these people will be dispatched by the creature so you can finish the film.

The basic plot:  Lance Henriksen plays a guy in what I guess is maybe Appalachia? but is clearly the ranches outside of LA.  Some 20-somethings planning a weekend of riding dirtbikes(?) stop off at a fruit stand(?) and then go riding.  There's an accident and Henriksen's kid is killed by one of the bikers who jumps right into him.  

The guy who does the killing makes his group of 6 take-off where they have a sort of confrontation, and Jeff East - the guy who played young Clark Kent in Superman: The Movie! - and he squabble because the guy seems like he's going to kill everyone here to cover up the fact he killed the kid...  So the group more or less splinters.

Henriksen makes contact with a witch-type lady who has him bring forth Pumpkinhead, so he can get revenge.  And revenge it gets, generically picking people off, while the real idea is to slowly reveal more and more of the suit Stan Winston's team made, that is, in fact, pretty good.  By the last 1/5th of the film, we're seeing the suit in full glory, and it looks neat!

By this point, Jeff East and his girlfriend are obviously going to make it, and we've come to understand the cost of raising a Pumpkinhead is that you and it will be sort of symbiotic when it's convenient to the scene.

I don't know.  It's a slog and I didn't care for it.  But it's also not a movie people love - and yet, several sequels happened.  Stan Winston kept making cool effects but went on to direct A Gnome Named Gnorm, making children everywhere understand that sometimes God abandons you, and the evidence is everything about Gnorm the Gnome.  

*But the lasting legacy of the movie's title in my head is that...  my poor dad was in the room for the commercial at some point, and being shitty kids, we said "hey, that's your new name, Dad!  Pumpkinhead!"  And, lo, that lasted about a year before I became aware that deploying the name "Pumpkinhead" one more time guaranteed a foot connecting with my ass.

Hamilton HalloWatch: Children of the Corn (1984)

Watched:  10/13/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Fritz Kiersh

This movie is boring.  

That's my memory of Children of the Corn (1984) from watching it in high school, and it's how I feel now.  And so I watched it again thinking - hey, I barely remember it and it seems like it should be exciting.  People love this movie!  

It's based on a short story by King - that I never read - and I guess they needed a lot of filler.  It's mostly just Peter Horton and Hamilton wandering around so the characters can see what we already know.  Hamilton existing so Horton can explain what is happening.

That's terrible structure.  There's no suspense - we don't piece things together with the characters.  Instead, we're supposed to feel anxiety that they might get killed, which we know they won't until the last minute, if it's that kind of movie that decides we see the protagonists die at the end (it is not.  That's other folk-horror movies like Wicker Man).

The big twist is that there's a Lovecraftian horror living in the fields of corn, and - to be honest - that feels like a let-down rather than just insane Bible-thumping kids, while also feeling like a Disney Halloween movie gone off the rails.

People love this movie, but I think that's Gen-X Space Jam Fallacy.  As a kid - this is a pretty decent "my first Rated-R movie" horror as it's not exactly shocking, particularly bloody or scary.  But it does contain the idea that you, a powerless kid, could get wrapped up in a scary new dynamic under the Isaac's and Malachi's you know are out there.  As an adult, you can only think "these stupid kids would be dead inside a week when they realized they don't know how to eat on their own, what to do when they're sick, or when the snow comes down and there's no fuel.".

Also - surely someone would notice an entire town of people just stopped showing up.

Which is why Children of the Corn probably works as a short story, but not as a movie that gives you time to think about these things.

What it does have is Linda Hamilton.

the very corniness of this movie may be her undoing

Unfortunately, this is pre-James Cameron Linda Hamilton, so she's playing "lady/ girl" in this movie, and just has "victim/ hostage" written all over her as soon as the story really kicks in.  If I praised M3GAN for not shying away from a woman who is a childless robot-lady, then this movie is the opposite.  Hamilton is basically spending the whole movie convincing her already locked-in doctor boyfriend that he should be *more* her boyfriend.  And when she meets kids, you can hear the warming of her ovaries as she leaps into action being there for potentially murderous children.

Still, we're never mad about Linda Hamilton showing up.

The one line that made my ears perk up was Peter Horton rightfully pointing out that religion isn't bunk, but any religion that's devoid of love is a terrible idea.  Like... deep thoughts in the middle of a pretty silly movie.

Whether I like this movie or not, the legacy of this movie is probably pretty deep.  Us city-folk do not like driving through big empty places with the occasional human dotting the landscape, and this movie does not help (nor does getting stink-eye at the gas station in the middle of nowhere).  But it also maybe helped set the table not just for the ten sequels of this movie, but a lot of "city people are terrified of the country" movies that litter our horror movie landscape.

  

HalloWatch: Death Becomes Her (1992)

Watched:  10/12/2024

Format:  Peacock

Viewing: First

Director:  Robert Zemeckis

Selection:  Jamie

No, I'd never seen Death Becomes Her (1992).  My guess is that I didn't think this would be actually funny, and - as it turns out - I was wrong about that.  This movie is funny as hell.

I guess maybe 1992 me couldn't process that Meryl Streep is funny, too, on top of everything else.  I also used to avoid movies where I thought people were working outside their lane in general, and that's a dumb, dumb thing to do.  But, give me a break, I was 17.  I thought this was going to be one of those movies polite adults in the 1980's and 90's laughed at, but wasn't actually laugh-out-loud good.  But - I admit I laughed a lot finally seeing it.

The movie has a long, but terrific set-up that lets the leads all play it to the hilt - and that's really what's so fun about the movie.  It's a small cast, but getting to see Goldie Hawn at the height of her comedic powers play the many versions of her character, and Meryl Streep playing the hot platinum blonde terrified of aging is a delight.  And while I read Kevin Kline was considered for Bruce Willis' part (and I can imagine him in it, very easily), Willis was good.

The plot is windy, involves actual magic, and Isabella Rossellini as a sort of mystic who can provide people with a potion to make them young and beautiful forever.  Half of the movie is about setting up a scenario in which we understand how and why Streep would do this - a plastic surgery addict terrified of what's happening to her.  And Hawn as a woman bent on romantic revenge for Streep stealing all of her men - leading up to stealing and marrying her fiance, Willis.

The gag, then, is that this potion doesn't just grant eternal youth and beauty, it makes you the undead, essentially.  You can't feel pain.  You can't die, no matter what happens to your body.  

It's a wicked critique of Hollywood/ society's obsession with youthful appearances - especially in women, and the insanity that many people in the public eye will go through in order to delay the time when they can't play the young sex bomb and move into other roles.  But, also, familiar to all of us (I say as I near 50, looking like 10 miles of bad road).  Still - I know the pinch is harder for women, and can't imagine the pressure on women in the spotlight.  

What I thought was going to just be a goofy movie about people physically abusing each other because they can't die becomes something else entirely, about how we're tied together, what it means to age gracefully, and the insanity of trying to remain relevant, and the inevitable self-destruction we do trying to fight nature.  

Would I have gotten the gags at 17?  I mean, on paper... yes.  In reality, it lands a whole lot better now.  It's not an abstraction.  And, the actresses I crushed on as a youth are now in their 60's and 70's and watching that curve is.. curious.  Let alone watching actresses more in line with my own generation occasionally just defy youth, Lisa Kudrow.

At the time the movie came out, the FX were considered mind-boggling, and - you know what?  They hold up really, really well for 1992.  There's bits I really don't know how they did them in the era - and because they were done with such care and to fit in with the look of movies of the time, they hold up just shockingly well, not hidden behind darkness or anything, and with no obvious matte-ing or anything.  Today's FX folks could stand to look at this wonder from the era - including how they use practical make-up for lots of bits.

As a Halloween movie, it works as it does involve the undead and horror of what they've done to themselves, but played for laughs.  It's hard not to look at Streep and Hawn in the last scene and think of some Golden Age actresses and their final years in film - and that they really did depend on each other even as they were ready to start slugging each other.

not for nothing, but I will never get how Isabella Rossellini was not a major sex symbol of the 80's and 90's

Hallo-ReWatch: M3GAN (2022)

Watched:  10/11/2024

Format: Amazon

Viewing:  Second

Director: Gerard Johnstone

So, this is my second viewing.  I picked it because I thought K would like it (The Dug's better half), and I believe that was a slam dunk.

It was fun to see with people, especially two folks who work at high-end IT companies losing their minds about the badly portrayed technology development process of the film.  Which, of course, would have ruined the film is anyone did their job correctly, so we can't have that.  Also - I hate to tell people working for real companies how things work everywhere else.*

Anyway, the idea for this viewing was:  a fun horror movie with folks who do not want to watch a current Rated-R horror movie because everyone needs to be able to sleep.  And M3GAN is PG-13 and fun, but I don't think anyone is going to get freaked out - one to watch with your middle-school-aged kids.

I still like Allison Williams in this.  Horror seems to be able to have main characters, or characters in general, that are not all sunshine and roses.  It's a subconscious tell that maybe our lead *could* get killed by movie's end, but, here, I think it gives her a viable arc from workaholic to seeing what she will need to do to be close to Cady (her niece) , but, also...  she's not unlikeable.  Do I find a person who mostly worries about their niche interest and doesn't want kids touching their stuff to be relatable?  MAYBE.  But... She just seems like someone who is way into their work, not a bad person. But...  (goofy voice) a woman? Who likes work over babies????

We wouldn't think twice about a male engineer being solely focused on their technology job in a movie - we'd expect it.  Here, it clashes with expectations of women to automagically be maternal, which is both a movie trope and something society sure thinks is real.  And Williams' character does not naturally have those tendencies, and, boy howdy, is there some low key judging of her by certain characters.  Not that she doesn't suddenly need those tendencies when life throws her a child to raise, but - as a childless cat-lady, I am deeply sympathetic to Williams' desire to outsource the child-rearing to a lifeless droid so I can do my thing.  Also, Williams' character has an objectively cool toy collection.

If you *did* watch this movie with your kids, I think some of this is worth unpacking.  Why is the social-worker in the movie such a B to Williams?  Why is Cady going so nuts at the 2/3rd mark?  Do you need a mishap with a killer android to figure out the power of family?

Maybe! 

But I also really appreciated the stuff in the film, like M3GAN singing to calm Cady, sort of weird, saccharine songs.  The goofy, horrifying fake, annoying-as-hell Furbies, and all the ways kids toys actually do work in someone's household - and the things people seem to want to do with them.  

Toys these days absolutely have the capacity to learn from as well as manipulate our kids.  The tots want screentime more than sugar, to disappear into oddball worlds of skibidi toilets and crafting of mines, and we're shocked they can't sit through a 90 minute movie.

As the toys are getting smarter, whose to say they won't "know" our kids as well or better than ourselves as parents.  When they can freestyle a convincing song about their particular trauma?  While also not understanding how kids grow and change thanks to non-comforting stimuli?

As Ian Malcolm would say:

and this is in real life, not the movie.

Dug rightly pointed out the movie raises a host of questions about AI and then leaves them all on the table.  And, there's a very interesting, grown up version of M3GAN (where James Wan is not allowed anywhere near it) and we get a chance to explore the ideas around AI in our lives, and our lives in AI's lives, and we should have that movie.  

Recently, I've been monkeying with CharacterAI and NotebookLM, and - we aren't ready for what we're making out there.  We're at the "peasants diving under tables because they're watching a film of a train coming" stage with this technology, and it's not just coming - it's here.  Right now humanoid robots are being made, while we're also improving AI on a minute-by-minute basis.  Someone is going to realize they can bluetooth their OmniBot to a thousand turks and we're all going to have a weirdo friend we didn't expect to have.  Let's see that film.

Anyway - M3GAN is not a great movie, but it does have things I like in it, and is a dire warning about ignoring your QA process. 

Sequel comes out next year.  We'll see what we get.

*they mostly get by on a wing and a prayer