Scarecrow's Blog From the Darkside

 Just a few episodes before a family get together on New Year's Eve. While I personally dread the election season, I love looking forward to Day One of the New Year so I can enjoy one final day of Twilight Zone marathon season. With just a few episodes like Little Girl Lost, The Little People, and The Dummy before breaking from TZ for the Eve day, it's a great close to the year when Syfy opted to kick off their marathon a day early.

 I almost got an entire day in. I woke up at 2 pm after a nice sleep, having missed the entire morning block. That's okay, because I just reached the 6:30 pm (Central Time), prime-time block (I did watch "King Nine Will Not Return" at 8 pm out of order, but that was it). Watching "The After Hours" at 11:30 pm instead when it came on at 6:30 pm still felt right. I am glad "The After Hours" made the prime time lineup this year, even if it was on the Eve to New Year's Eve. I hate that "The Hitch-Hiker" was in the morning, though. I still believe it belongs in prime-time, but it always seems to get lost in a forgotten morning lineup when everyone's asleep or buried in an early afternoon. One year, maybe SYFY will give "The Hitch-Hiker" its rightful place in the prime real estate when most TZ fans will be watching. Or maybe when it was shown is prime real estate. I watched it some time Saturday afternoon, but "The Fever"

 There is always a discussion on what season is the best in regards to Twilight Zone. I still think the first season has the most memorable, classic episodes. Of course, I've well documented my rationale on the blog as to why countless times. I mentioned "The Lonely" in my previous post, so that is left back there, but Twilight Zone sure had its share of assholes. in "Time Enough at Last", Henry Beamis just wants to read. Let the guy read, for goodness sake. The wife sure cucks oh Henry. ordering him around, discarding his poetry, disregarding his affinity for words. The bank boss sure smiles at the thought of Henry being deprived of his books, "the print". In "What You Need", Mr. Renard (I laughed at Serling's narration regarding his "carrying a chip on his shoulder the side of the national debt...imagine the chip he would have in 2023!!!) cannot be content that his life was saved by Pedott, the "peddlar" thanks to the sci

 YouTube TV isn't quite as good with their up-to-date timestamp regarding DVR as DirecTV. I set up recording the marathon on YouTube TV and The Lonely, the very first episode of the 2023 marathon, is an episode recorded back five months ago! Like, what?! Why would it not be this morning? Sigh. At any rate, interesting kickoff choice, The Lonely. Where Is Everybody? and One for the Angels pop up New Year's morning. I don't know why I continue to intellectualize and analyze how these marathons are put together. I'm sure they are low effort affairs now. I guess as I have written time after time in the past, Syfy still showing Twilight Zone is some small miracle. I just wish I was watching the episodes as they were recorded this morning. No big deal because I'm racing through these commercials anyway. Syfy decided to show a bunch of Twilight Zone this year, 140!!! So that's cool. What else can I say about The Twilight Zone episodes that I haven't year after year

 Going through the Letterboxed reviews, what you see a lot of are "Christmas movie, it is!" I'll tell ya, the Christmas tree and lights are all over the place. But that is aesthetic, wallpaper backdrop while sex, sex, sex takes center stage.  I did ask myself, considering the tormented auteur perfectionist Kubrick was, how many times did he shoot Kidman's lovely naked body from behind as she snapped her bra on. Or her fantasies through Cruise's mind with sailor stud...these are Kidman fully committed to very intimate scenes. So how many times did she have to do those scenes?! I have to say, Kidman naked in front of the mirror as "You did a bad bad thing" kicks up...pure fire. Can we not see why Cruise wouldn't want to take his hands and lips off if her? The iconic look to the mirror as the film's poster image. It sets the underlying sexual tensions. I'm sure they will have a good fuck after the final scene. I just wonder if she'll want hi

 I posted this in its full form on Letterboxd but decided to shorten that and add it here in its entirety instead: Maisie and the guys wanting to impress her decide to follow a demon rite found in the basement of an old Catholic school, returning to it December in 1971. A wintry atmosphere, the snowfall accumulating, a supper cooking by remaining adult, Rosie, with gifts even to unwrap, Jimmy eventually returning to pop the question. Clara and Samantha, two remaining students unfortunately left behind with no other place to go. Will the cult killers shed the blood of all innocents at the school and summon a demon to do their will like some djinn, or does a demon have plans for them? I have to be honest: Jude annoyed the fuck out of me. He was really laying it on thick. A bit too overripe. Jude really wants to be *the vessel* and tries to convince his “friends” of it. Clara, I think it’s safe to say, was far more convincing that she’s the one to give orders and hopefully leave the “pris

  It's that time of year again! Having a Gizmo was obviously a goal since I grew up with him. I told my daughter that I believe I had the Gizmo in the pink car toy growing up.

What a theatrical experience. Fifteen million dollars. This cost less than Marvel and Lucasfilm shows. And this film looks and feels just as grand and epic as the films touted so by Hollywood. Godzilla's rampage through Ginza after it's initial massacre of Odo Island mechanics while pilot, Shikishima, is so traumatized by war he is frozen in fear and unable to use his kamikazi plane is next level impressive. I kept thinking, 15 million dollars. Astonishing use of resources for such an accomplishment. The human drama, the message on what war can do and cause, and the effects and impact on the survivors trying to eke out some sort of rebound from the rubble through primarily the perspective of shellshocked Shikishima and another survivor, Noriko, looking after a child, Akiko, just built this inspired take on Godzilla that was taken very seriously and sincerely, while the fantastic director, Yamazaki, did not forget to remind us just how ferocious, devastating, and immense this mo

I had to shorten this on my Letterboxd, so this is the full unedited review for the Blog which I now often neglect quite a bit. Gosh, this was either a Movie Gallery or Blockbuster rental, while also a film I can recall showing up often around 1 when I would fall asleep on any myriad of Showtime channels.  But since then, "Dead End" has sort of joined the annals of the ad-based streaming era. It popped up on Shudder so that was where I noticed it, but I bet Tubi will recommend it to you at some point if you have similar tastes to mine. If you tell me Wise and Shaye are husband and wife on a car ride to hell while witnessing a second car carrying off members of the family until they are later found dead, I would, of course, grab the popcorn and be giddy with excitement.  This is right up my alley. I live for this kind of plot. Does it sort of end predictably? Yeah, it does sort of give obvious clues.  Ray falling asleep at the wheel and the same road sort of give you that. But

Just a fun little idea. A few keepsakes of the past.

 I hope everyone had a great Friday the 13th today. My daughter wanted us to watch all of them, but I was able to talk her down to 1-4 and 6-7. Anymore than that would have been a bit too much after many marathons in the past.

 

Leave it to me to throw together a whole list of films that would typically take me two months with the expectation of filling like a week and a half. I don't know why I do this to myself. It's that odd 🤯 challenge I know I will fail.  

 A rainy night in NYC, Joan Severance,  a fashion designer, is offered a ride in a taxi cab by fellow occupant, Stephen Bauer, who flirts with her, even providing his coat to "keep her warm" since her dress was damp and the night cold. Eventually the cab stops at Bauer's apartment complex, and he convinces Severance to come up to his flat. Eventually Bauer is seducing Severance, unable to resist her innermost desires and ready to just take him up on Tuesday and Thursday hookups, agreeing to nothing serious.  But can these "meetups and fuck" with no relationship talks continue or will real feelings and want for something more develop? When Severance's brother dies and she happens to spend the night, Bauer reiterates his displeasure in breaking the arrangement set up by them both. Zalman King's Red Shoe Diaries was, to me, a rather corny exercise in why so serious? softer-than-softcore Showtime Channel "entertainment". Rarely was I ever actuall

 In preparation for watching the 1998 X-Files film (I missed out on watching it in June for the film's 25th Anniversary), I decided to check out The End and will watch the sixth season opener, The Beginning accordingly. While I won't write on the Pilot, I will be celebrating the series opener's 30th anniversary in September. I do admit, though, I'm not all that crazy about The End . William Davis' Cigarette-Smoking Man is back at it again as the Syndicate needs him to do whatever it takes to nab a young boy, a chess wunderkind later determined by Mulder and Scully to possibly be the key to answers of The X Files due to a brain "mode" allowing him possible access to a "human gift" few have ever been able to utilize. Later Mulder learns that all humans likely have it but never knew how to access that lobe of the brain. A Syndicate assassin (Martin Ferrero) almost shoots the boy, Gibson Praise (Gulka) at a chess game with a Russian genius, hitting

 I was messaging with a friend on Telegram while watching the first episode, the Pilot for the Showtime series starring Duchovny as a novelist in Hollywood suffering writer's block after somewhat recent breakup with his ex, Karen (Natascha McElhone). She was cheating on him with her current fiance while the two share a daughter, Becca (Madeleine Martin). Becca is aware and a bit insecure as a teen with attention from boys says her school counselor while Hank and Karen are given this new information. Hank and Karen just have this palpable chemistry together, an electric sexual energy that is clear. And yet Karen has to be the realist that they could never function as a legit couple. Hank's having fantasies about nun blowjobs, for crissakes, so he's got a lot of existential, Freudian mental unrest to work out. Hank's sex life certainly has no issues. I think I counted three naked women he fucks during the 25 minute running time of the first episode, including Karen's

 Seen on Shudder. Recently released by Vinegar Syndrome I have the double disc of this film and the infamous sequel (never watched the sequel) for years and haven’t watched them. I do remember being in love with the craziness of this back in the mid aughts when it caught my attention after the Ebert disgust towards the trailer was a part of his Siskel & Ebert review program and I rented it on DVD from Netflix. The use of a screwdriver on the guy in his Mustang and how the invisible mirror spirit pantyhose killer uses the open door to cause the victim’s girlfriend to give him a “stab kiss” never fails to crack me up. It is just so bizarre and hilarious. Their friends just getting tired of their smooching, deciding to hit the bricks while the two faces were joined at the mouth (by force through screwdriver!) also just made me laugh. I’m guessing Lommel meant for that reaction, but I can’t be sure. Lommel’s direction is so straight without a hint of tongue-in-cheek in tone that it mak

Werewolvery gets its due on Shudder in June, and how could I not want to get a little wolfy in the early summer? I have come to the conclusion that The Howling (1981) has so many goodies that tickle my fancy. *Joe Dante almost kills Brenda Balaski as much as Stuart Gordon did his wife in their movies! Her torn apart torso laid bare inside the Colony’s barn worship chamber (where Doctor Waggner encourages her lycan tribe to “go and unwind”, having encouraged them to channel their violent impulses and resist the urges to kill and feed from humans) is just a gruesome sight, with her chest cavity displayed, her flesh torn away. *Revisiting this after watching the Dee Wallace segment on In Search of Darkness III really added an exclamation point on her reaction to her husband’s complaint towards her sex scene in Shadow Play (1986) considering his erotic, very naked sexual encounter with actress Elisabeth Brooks’ Marsha Quist. I had forgotten just how long and into it Christopher Stone and B

 So I took mostly a break from the blog for a year, focused on my Letterboxd account ( https://letterboxd.com/scarecrow88/  ), and since I put so much effort over such a prolonged length of time, I felt it was time to just get a breather. But I'm hoping to start releasing reviews in full form on this blog and a short form for Letterboxd going forward since that account seems to function better in smaller scale writing style many others favor. And, honestly, I would prefer to use this blog for all my thoughts and Letterboxd more for brief snippets of them. Attention spans and all that. And even if I'm followed or follow over 600+, I understand that during a day, it can be a job, a real chore, to read long form reviews from everybody. I use this blog, oftentimes in the past, to get all my thoughts out, more or less because it is like some compulsion, some urge to do so. It doesn't go away, haha.

Burt is in a precarious situation ***½ / ***** My daughter was excited about watching the entire Tremors franchise, and some of the films I haven't watched in a while. I mentioned in my Letterboxd review that this was the first time I've watched Aftershocks since 1996. I was fed up with my brother, tired of his shit, and left home at 18 to get an apartment. As a teenager, when the woman renting the apartment to me mentioned HBO had never been turned off, I was giddy so say the least. And Aftershocks was regularly on HBO at the time. I mentioned in a previous review for the first Tremors on my Letterboxd account that it was a mainstay throughout my teenage years of the 90s, always on in some format or available to me. This sequel, though, is actually quite a lot of fun if unnecessary. With Bacon and McEntire otherwise occupied (the former in another film production and the latter on a music tour), the sequel feels "less than" but has plenty going for it. The last ti

*** / **** In 1958 Sacramento, Blue (Siemaszko) loses her horn playing jazz musician father (Tom Skerritt, taking some cash for little screen time) to heroin overdose/car crash and has no future or home, lured into call girl brothel life by a persuasive (in more ways than one) madam, Elle (Wendy Hughes), capitalizing on her poverty and desperation. But this life just isn’t for Blue, even as she tries to adapt and survive, eventually receiving help from Elle’s bodyguard and groundskeeper, Sully (Davi, in one of his nicest and surprisingly warm performances/roles) when a terrible senator (Christopher McDonald; who else?!) wants to abuse her in a stag film. Can Blue truly get away from Elle, who is quite invested in her ability to bring a lot of clients and profit? Will Sully even be capable of stopping her? The film includes Josh (Brent Fraser), the high school quarterback, as Blue’s love interest, and bar owner, Jules (Warhol alum, Dallesandro), who is so contemptible and sleazy he agre

This gem is endowed with evil powers. The force that has seized your daughter’s mind is now using her as a medium for its own dark and wicked malefactions.  What do you mean? The power within this gem can open the infernal gate of time and space and work miracles of evil beyond all arcane dimensions. That’s impossible. Is it really? This dialogue is just…to me, it’s pure gold. To others, pure cheese. Pure camp. == This is just one of those divisive films for Fulci fans. Most feel it is clueless, dull, and perplexing. But you do have those like me who find all of this fascinating. Do I understand any of this? Mostly, no. There’s a blue-jeweled amulet given to the daughter of a Manhattan archeologist unwisely descending into bowels of a cursed Egyptian pyramid who is blinded by blue lasers fired out of a jewel he eyes after falling down a trap shaft that leaves his assistant impaled on a bed of spikes (of course, this poor guy’s eyeballs stab the spikes in gory fashion). This jewel is pa

I LOVE how ugly this film is. Cohen just cuts out any fat. He wasn't looking to give you stylistic craft or wow you with epic grandeur. Cohen knew exactly the kind of film he was making. I am just captivated with 70s and 80s New York City, and Cohen was very similar to Ferrera to me in capturing it in all different ways. Cohen's style, how his films are edited, and the zig-zag scene to scene transitions are going to be jarring for some folks. I envision lots of potshots and heckling at the claymation stop motion effects. When claymation police victims are chomped or captured and thrown to their doom from the Chrysler Building while firing off their machine guns at Quetzalcoatl, it's obvious, and I JUST DO NOT CARE. But that's because Harryhausen is a legend to me, and we got some cool animation effects artists (among others) inspired by him. There are some gem scenes that really hit a homerun with me that others might be like: yeah, so what? Like when Jimmy Quinn lets t

This is the full review cut into parts on my Letterboxd account. The butler actually did it! That alone popped me. A button pulled from a coat, caught in the death grip of a victim strangled via barbwire garrotte…this, you just know, will be the gotcha to call out the killer. Naschy sort takes a “stepdown” role as the driver of the widow (Patty Shepard) gathering thirteen “associates of or adjacently associated with” at a vast idyllic Spanish estate she believes could have tied (or actually responsible) to her husband’s plane crash into the English Channel while on his way to London. If you are someone reluctant to watch a film flagged with giallo as a tag, this particular film does have some violence but no nudity. While watching this, I did feel this has been edited and whatever was cut out is no longer available. There were sharp cuts as nudity was about to happen (stripping) and the gore (ax to the head, knife stab to the torso, needle stab to the torso, aforementioned wire garrott

The Fear  I do admit that I did a little cheating on this particular batch of episodes. I woke up to the end of A World of Own on New Year's Day, 2023, so I needed to finish it at 2:20 in the morning on the 2nd, Monday. I was able to soldier through From Agnes With Love , slept through Queen of the Nile and Come Wander With Me , and woke up to the end of The Fear , watching Death Ship and The Little People before I started up New Year's Eve episodes posted earlier on the blog. 11:30am – A World of His Own Gregory West keeps bringing back Mary while dealing with Victoria, ready to send her husband off to the mental hospital so she can get the money and property. All Victoria wants to do is get the key out of his study so she can send him away. Gregory kept trying to deal with Victoria, but with Mary conjured time and again, and his attempts to persuade her to stay (and stop threatening to have him committed) failing, the playwright "finds no other alternative" than

Meredith and Weaver in The Obsolete Man New Year's Day, January 1st, 2023 4:00am – An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge I typically don't include this in with my Twilight Zone list of overall episodes, but every year Syfy includes it, I find myself mesmerized by this Cannes winner in short film 1962. It deserves an official review someday. An execution that seems to be rescued by rope break might or might not be an illusion. Does the swim and run to his wife exist in his own mind as a fantasy or will he make it home? Shot to make the wildlife and environment so inviting and worthy of awe as guns go off and the snap of the rope, not to mention, the procedure before the execution horrifying...this is really special and I see why Serling was find of it. 4:30am – What’s in the Box I just find this more and more appalling with each and every viewing. Demarest and Blondell as bickering married couple right before they have this astonishingly violent confrontation at the end where a punc