Rat Toss

Ms. Spenser is a bit of a rat lover - you might remember us trying to sneak them into and out of hotels on our last big trips to FL. She has always wanted to watch Willard (1971), but the closest we got was the 2003 Crispin Glover remake. Now we've seen the original.

Bruce Davison plays Willard, a wimpy young man who is a clerk at a manufacturing company. He goes home to a small mansion where his sickly mother, Elsa Lanchester, is throwing him a surprise birthday party, attending by only her older friends. We learn that his father built the company that he works for, and his tyrant boss, Ernest Borgnine, took the company over, possibly leading to the father's death. His mother smothers him with affection, but demands that he spend more time doing maintenance on the house.

One of his chores is to take care of the rats in the backyard. He prepares to drown them, but at the last minute leads them to safety down in the basement. He begins talking to them and training them. His favorites are a little white rate he calls Socrates and a big brown rat he calls Ben.

But he stat to consider Ben a troublemaker, maybe taking his frustrations out on him.

At work, he gets an assistant, Sandra Locke, who is sympathetic. She sees him humiliated by Borgnine, when he makes Davison send out invitations. to a party without inviting him. Davison's reaction is to get his rat army to attack the party, leading to chaos. A very Three Stooges scene. 

One day, Borgnine lets him go home on time - he had a call that morning, something about his mother. When he gets home, he finds out that his mother has died. All alone in the world now, he takes refuge with his rats. He takes Locke out for a little date, but comes back to find that the feds are threatening to take his house for back taxes. So when he hears that a salesman is withdrawing a large sum of cash, he sends his rat army to scare him at night, so he can rob the guy. 

But Davison has been taking Socrates and Ben to work, and someone spots Ben in the storeroom. Borgnine kills Socrates with a stick while Davison looks on in horror. So now he decides to let his rats kill Borgnine.

Ms. Spenser was not as happy with this as I had hoped. She liked the rats, but all the humans were awful. Of course everyone around Willard is awful, but he's no innocent. Besides his casual attempts to drown the rats, he does seem to give Ben a hard time, while pampering Socrates. In the end, Ben does turn evil, but is that nature or nurture?

In conclusion, many of the rat swarm attacks feature rats flying through the air. The difference between a rat leaping on someone and being tossed on them is very obvious. 

Nothing from Nothing

 OK, I guess enough time has gone by: Of the "up to ten discs" that Netflix was going to send out on the last day of shipping, we got - ZERO.

We did keep the last two normally shipped, because we wanted to. So we have Bringing Up Baby (1935) (because it is the best movie ever made) and PlayTime (1967) - Jacques Tati's masterpiece. Want to see what I was hoping to get? Here's my list:

1. The Lady Eve (1941)
2. Carlos Saura's Flamenco Trilogy: El Amor Brujo (1986) 
3. Love Happy (1949)
4. Black Dynamite (2009)
5. Spies (1928)
6. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1929)
7. The Killer (1989)
8. The Magnificent Seven (1960)
9. A Poem Is a Naked Person (1974)
10. Le Deuxième Souffle (1966)
11. Frankenstein / Bride of Frankenstein: The Legacy Collection (1931)
12. Before I Hang / The Boogie Man Will Get You (1940)

A mix of classics that we've seen and that we haven't but I suspect we would bve glad to own. The last two were in case they didn't send some of the movies above - they are classic Universal horror or horror comedies with Karloff and/or Lugosi. 

Oh well. Nothing was promised, nothing was delivered. You get what you pay for and all that. Goodbye Netflix DVDs.

Confidentially, we did get a Netflix streaming sub, but only for The Great British Baking Show. Any good movies we should be catching? 

Shanghai Drift

Watching silent films while Ms. Spenser is on a Zoom call is working out well. This time I watched Todd Browning's Asian opium tale Drifting (1923).

It stars Priscilla Dean, an expat living in Shanghai. It starts in media res, explaining that Dean was a big opium dealer, but had to team up with her biggest rival, Wallace Beery. She bought a lot of nice dresses on credit, then her last deal went sideways, and she needs money fast. But now she is getting fed u with the biz. She has a best friend, Edna Tichenor, who has started smoking the stuff, and she needs to get them back to the states before she's too far gone. 

It all ends up with her and Beery needing to go to the Chinese village where the stuff is grown. A westerner has shown up in town, Matt Moore, claiming to be an engineer, looking at re-opening a mine. But the opium gang suspects that he is actually a cop. (They are right.) So they want Dean to vamp him and find out if he's legit. That will get her out of her financial troubles.

Of course, she falls in love with him, but so does the village headman's daughter - played by Anna May Wong. She flirts with him outrageously, because she's fifteen. But considering how gorgeous she is, it must have been pretty tempting. 

It all ends with a big fight that's kind of great.

I thought this was fun but a little odd. Dean is beautiful, but in a very old-fashioned way. She has a strong chin, which makes her look somehow Gay 90s, Gibson Girl-ish. Then there's the missing setup, and the best buddy/junkie who just disappears. Too bad, because Tichenor, with dark makeup around her eyes, languishing in bed with a pipe, looks great. Beery is a great villain, but it's weird to see him so young. Still, there's a lot less yellowface than you might expect - say 50% Chinese playing Chinese. And the final fight is worth watching. Maybe it's more of an oddity, but I was glad to watch it.

Cubed

I was going to say we'd never seen any David Fincher, because I forgot about Mank. Well now we've seen Alien³ (1992), his first feature. 

When we left Sigourney Weaver, she was escaping from a xenomorph-infested planet with a damaged android, a surviving soldier, and little girl Newt. This movie starts with a xenomorph showing up on the ship, killing everyone but Weaver. The crew pod gets jettisoned and sent to the nearest inhabited planet.

That is a prison planet, with most of the prisoners gone. It's run by warden Brian Glover. but inmate Charles S. Dutton has become the spiritual leader for the prisoners, now all celibate penitentials. Weaver is woken up by Charles Dance, the medical officer. She finds out that everyone else from the last movie is dead. She insists on autopsying Newt, and is relieved to find out the she is not infected with Xenomorphs. Too bad she didn't know that a face hugger survived and got into a dog, birthing a doggy/xenomorph.

Now, pretty much everyone wants Weaver gone, because she is upsetting the balance of this prison/monastery. When people start dying, they don't put much faith in her explanation. They have contacted Weyland-Yutani, and Weaver tries to convince them that they will only protect the xenomorph. Only Charles Dance seems to believer her, and they are sleeping together.

When the xenomorph attacks a party Weaver is in, she finds that it won't kill her - the famous still of the creature getting right in her face. She realizes that this means she is carrying a chest burster, and worse, it's a queen. But it does give her protection.

There are a lot of cool things going on here. Weaver gets her head shaved right off, and that's a cool look. The range of classic character actors, like Dutton, Dance, Glover, Peter Postlethwaite and even Lance Henriksen is impressive. The setting, the semi-abandoned industrial prison with its band of spiritual murderers and rapists, plus a few bureaucrats and a doctor, is interesting. And Fincher's brutality of killing (and autopsying) Newt is chilling. But I didn't think this one really held together very well. We watched the "Assembly" (longer) cut; maybe the theatrical would have felt tighter.

I also didn't see much of a distinctive "look" - If I didn't know about Fincher, I'd guess he was just some journeyman director. So, not my first or even second favorite Alien movie. And even though Ripley dies at the end, there's still one more.

Monstrous Regiment of Woman

We thought we'd start Octoboo with some Frankenstein - The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster (2023). OK, we actually watched Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein first, but that's just our usual kick-off (we own on DVD). 

It stars young Laya DeLeon Hayes as Vicaria, the titular black girl. Her mother died by police violence, her brother died in a gang, and she sees a problem: Death. She decides that, since death is a disease, it must have a cure. And she will be the one to find it. So she goes to school where she antagonizes the teacher (her father comes in and tells the teacher to open her mind and "TEACH!"), inspires a little girl in the neighborhood to learn science, gets called Mad Scientist by everyone, and tries to stay clear of the local gang, run by Denzel Whitaker. She also spends time in the lab she has set up in an abandoned factory, where she has dragged her brother's corpse.

She also spends time with her family - her older sister (-in-law), who has a little daughter and is pregnant with another baby, and her father, a righteous man having trouble coping with the loss of his wifew and son. He's been hitting the crack again, supplied by Whitaker's gang. 

So Hayes finally re-animates her brother, they raid the crack stash. A gang member catches them, and the creature does his thing. Later, the gang comes after Hayes, demanding to know who her big friend was. She doesn't tell, and they force her to work in their drug lab. But somehow, she's lost track of the creature.

You kind of want some kind of revenge fantasy, where Hayes and her re-animated brother start killing gang members, maybe some white cops, teachers, etc. But that isn't this movie. It's a more realistic look at life in a small black community. The violence and danger are part of a system, a system that's too big to handle with a monster. It requires a cure - for death.

It's also about Hayes' character, Vicaria. She's smart and serous, but also a little girl. She doesn't say "It's alive!" when her re-animation is successful. But she laughs a mad scientist laugh that's also a little girl's giggle. 

Site for Sore Eyes

As we enter Spooktober, I try to find more scary movies for Ms. Spenser. I thought Black Site (2018) looked interesting, mixing John Carpenter with Lovecraftian horror. In fact, it starts with some narration, explaining that humanity was troubled by entities called the Elder Gods, but found a way to "deport" them to a dungeon dimension. These days, that function is provided by a black site called Project Artemis.

We meet a couple in bed. She gets up to get some water, gets it from an unseen monster. He follows, telling their little daughter to stay in her bed, which is protected by sigils. He's quickly killed offscreen. The kid grows up to be Lauren Ashley Carter, an Artemis agent like her parents. 

She is heading to the black site with a "deportation agent", someone who has memorized the mantras that will send an Elder God away. He is kind of whiny - complains a lot that his girlfriend left him because he's boring. He is, and he talks too much. Carter puts his head in a bag to keep the black site a secret. (I think this is Mike Beckingham, Simon Pegg's brother, but don't quote me.)

Throughout, Carter has flashbacks of her parents being beamed up somewhere, a planet, and a murky image of a bat-winged tentacle creature. Premature SPOILER: we will see these same shots over and over, and that one image is all we'll see of the Elder Gods.

That's because life in the other dimension has eroded the gods' power. Now they can only exist in our world in the body of humans. That apparently means they can be tortured. So they are torturing this one guy before they deport him, and he turns out to be the god who grabbed Carter's parents. These scenes have the god making grandiloquent threats about puny humans, and the humans going "Ah, get fucked." kind of cute.

Until the site is overrun by Elder-God-affiliated cultists. So we get some fight scenes, and two interesting antagonists: One is a woman who pulls her turtleneck up over her mouth and fights with two samurai swords. Another might be the leader, who takes over the security setup and runs the fight from there. She looks like a college coed, which is sort of funny.

I'll skip over all the fights and drama to the end. The deportation agent says his chant, the Elder God goes away, everyone who is still alive goes, "Phew, that was rough. Not much rougher than usual, I guess. Oh well, Mondays, you know?" Which is kind of Carpenter, I guess.

Ms. Spenser was not happy with this offering. I thought it was pretty funny, but I guess she didn't ask for a comedy. The acting was generally pretty bad - like a woman walks into a fight with a joke: "You guys don't know where the girl's room is, do you?" Except she delivered it like, "You idiots don't even know where the girl's room is, do you?", not the faux-innocent "Excuse me, do you know where the girl's room is?" Is bad acting Carpenterian?

In conclusion, the 80s/90s feel was Carpenterian. So was the cheesy synth score.

Where We're At

Since I just finished posting the last Netflix DVD that I got in the mail and returned, I thought I'd check in to say where I'm at and what's up with this blog.

First of all, the blog will go on (yay?). I will keep watching movies, streaming and DVD/blu-ray. I will get them from streaming services, from the library, I'll buy some new and used, and so forth. From now on, I'll link only to Lettrboxd, because it's more or less stable and widely used. Links to my local library or even Movies Unlimited aren't that useful, I would guess. Although, I thought that Netflix links would last, and they will all be broken soon. (Wonder if I could fix that algorithmically.)

I've already gotten a few of the "up to ten" DVDs from Netflix that I do not have to send back. When I get the rest, I'll do a post on that. I picked a mix of classics that I have always wanted to own and a couple of unseen movies that I hope will be classics. 

I feel like losing Netflix is going to disrupt my orderly and enjoyable film watching. I had a process, a queue, and 2-3 DVDs delivered each week that I had to watch. Now, it's a lawless dystopia, scrambling every week to find movies to watch catch-as-catch-can. But I have learned (when Star Trek, the Original Series went off the air) that nothing lasts forever, and one must learn to accept and move on. 

Well, this blog might last forever, but I may need to change the masthead. 

Fallen and Can't Get Up

This will be the last review of the last DVD sent by Netflix in normal order. I kind of wish it had been better, but it could have been worse. Fallen (1998) is a supernatural thriller starring Denzel Washington.

It starts with police detective Washington viewing the execution of a mad killer. The killer is pretty cheerful about it all, cracking jokes, muttering in an occult language, signing Time is on My Side (not well). We inferred that he was being executed for Failure to Shut Up.

Back at the precinct, Lt. Donald Sutherland assigns Washington and his partner John Goodman to a case that looks like a copycat version of the guy who got the chamber. The investigation leads Washington to Embeth Davidtz. Her father, a policeman, was accused of a similar set of crimes, leading him to go up to his cabin by a lake and kill himself. Washington investigates the cabin and finds the name Azazel painted on the wall, and a big occult book.

Between the book and Davidtz, he works out the premise of the movie: The demon Azazel is possessing people and doing murders. Azazel can pass from person to person by touch, but can't possess Washington - unless his carrier is dead, then he can, even wothout a touch. But in that case, the person must be within 500 feet or something. Got that? Of course, these rules are reliable and ironclad, because they are in a book.

Once he knows what's going on, Azazel comes out to taunt him. Someone bumps into Goodman, and he starts singing Time is on My Side. He then touches someone else in the room, and that guy starts singing. As Washington tries to confront him, the demon passes from person to person, out of the station, into the street and mingles with the crowd. This is legit scary.

From reading the rules and remembering the suicide at the isolated cabin, I'm sure you can figure out the conclusion. You have all the clues. 

This is kind of cheesy, kind of scary, but Washington moves through it was a level of grace and intelligence that really elevates it. His detective lives with his mentally slow adult brother and his nephew, and he shows them real love and strength. When the demon threatens them, that's when he decides to get real.

Still, I wish my last regular NEtflix DVD was more memorable.