amado1

June 6: I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
June 7: Street Trash (1987)
June 10: Gaga Chromatica Ball (2024)
June 25: The First Omen (2024)
June 26: Rope (1948)
June 26: Saint Maud (2019)
June 27: There's Something Wrong With Aunt Diane (2011)
June 27: The Deer Hunter (1978)
June 28: Crimes of the Future (2022)
June 29: The Deer Hunter (again)

I Saw the TV Glow: Fantastic. When we first got out of the theater, most of my friends disliked it; they felt it was a 2-star, maybe 3-star movie -- too cynical, too depressing, too hopeless. One friend said it was like watching someone commit an act of self-harm for the entire runtime. I think it's an honest, moving portrayal of the internal struggle of figuring out your gender identity. The entire message is that transition is scary and it DOES kill your old life, but you HAVE to go for it... I found it a devastating but hopeful film.

Street Trash: I usually love campy 80s gore but this one was wearying. It's hard to explain how a movie where people play football with a severed penis and citizens melting goopily into toilets can be boring, but it was! This movie seriously dragged.

Gaga Chromatica Ball: I love herrrr.

The First Omen: Beautifully shot. The gifsets on tumblr convinced me to watch it and visually, I wasn't disappointed. But everything else...? The writing was painfully reminiscent of Marvel movies.

Rope: I had a Hitchcock boxset as a kid and watched every movie obsessively, but I don't think it included any of his famous hits. So I watched Rope for the first time. It was nowhere near as gay as everyone hypes it up to be, but the suspense was masterful (of course!) and Jimmy Stewart's character as the skeptical, maybe-ally maybe-enemy old schoolteacher had me captivated. Excellent, short movie, definitely worth the watch.

Saint Maud: This is an A24 film I've been aching to watch since it first released, knowing it would be up my alley. It's an almost perfect film marred by the ending, imo. It follows a personal caregiver named Maud, a very religious young Welsh lady, who cares for an aging bisexual dancer with lymphona. Maud makes it her life mission to convert the dancer; over the course of the movie her mental health unravels, culminating in an unfortunately cheesy end scene.

There's Something Wrong With Aunt Diane: This documentary explores the 2009 Tacoma Parkway crash. If you weren't around at the time, this was a three-car crash where Diane Schuler drove a van crowded with kids for two miles the wrong way down the Tacoma Parkway. Eight people died, most of them Schuler's kids and nieces. The autopsy concluded Schuler had dangerous levels of alcohol and THC in her system, but her family was shocked and loudly protested, insisting the autopsy must be wrong. The doc follows her family as they hire private investigators and search for an alternate explanation. It's a fantastic exploration of trauma, grief, and denial, and it walks as through their emotions as they slowly come to terms with the fact that Diane was most likely a closet alcoholic, and while a medical event MIGHT have compounded things that day, we'll never know. It's also an excellent exploration of how people who make bad choices aren't bad people, and shouldn't be villainized.

There's a chilling moment toward the end where one of Diane's biggest champions, her sister-in-law Jay, sneaks a cigarette while talking to a producer. She's just learned that the expert she hired concurs with the original autopsy, and she's shaky, close to tears. She smiles self-deprecatingly and waves her cigarette at the camera, confessing that her family has no idea she smokes and will be shocked when they see this footage. It's a gut-sinking revelation; if Jay has been hiding her smoking habit for years, how can she convince herself that Diane WASN'T hiding her alcoholism? But the documentary is marred intensely by its decision to show uncensored crime scene photos of Diane's body. I can't think of ANY reason why that was necessary, and it affected my rating of the documentary a LOT.

The Deer Hunter: Y'all saw my essay! This is one of my new favorite movies. If the essay was too damn long for you (trust me I get it lmfao), it's a 1978 Vietnam War film starring Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken. The film follows three friends from a small steelworking town who voluntarily enlist to fight. Their scenes overseas are very brief, making up only a tiny portion of the film. For the most part, the film explores who they were before the war and what happens to them and their community after.

Crimes of the Future: One of Cronenberg's latest, and a return to body horror. In the future, infectious disease has been eliminated and humankind has gotten a lot dirtier. Most people no longer feel pain. Some people spontaneously grow extraneous organs, so a new art craze has blossomed: public surgery to remove the organs and display them in jars. It's an incredibly trans, very horny movie, definitely recommend.

Movies:

— Bride of Reanimator (1990), April 01
— Frightmare (1981), April 02
— Beyond Reanimator (2003), April 03
— Poor Things (2023), April 07
— Lurking Fear (1994), April 13
— The Lair of the White Worm (1988), April 15
— Coonskin (1975), April 16
— Abigail (2024), April 20
— Terror Train (1980), April 23
— Young Törless (1966), April 24
— House of 1000 Corpses (2003), April 29
— Lady in White (1988), April 30.

Also rewatched From Beyond and Re-Animator a few times, and started rewatches of Child's Play and Ghostbusters that I didn't bother finishing because I've seen them both so many times.

Notes on the movies:

Bride of Reanimator: A campy, hilarious sequel to the original with just as much queer/trans coding. Definitely a worthy successor imo, although it doesn't take itself as seriously.

Frightmare: Jeffrey Combs plays a twink in a drama club. When a murderous horror-movie star (think Christopher Lee or Vincent Price) dies, the drama club steals his body and does a photo shoot in their frat house. But the movie star comes back from the dead and kills them off one by one. Honestly a really great horror-comedy and slasher. I ended up rewatching just the latter half in late April so I could appreciate the death scenes better.

Beyond Reanimator: God I can't imagine how disappointing this must have been to fans when it came out. Luckily Reanimator was nowhere near my radar at the time, so I was spared. Looking back on it now, this movie is 20 years old and it's accumulated its own special kind of camp. It's bad, but it's fun.

Poor Things: Absolutely loved it, especially the ending.

Lurking Fear: This movie is a trashfire. But the lesbian vibes are exquisite.

The Lair of the White Worm: A hermaphroditic snake-entity stalks a small rural town, killing its residents in the sexiest possible ways. Peter Capaldi and Hugh Grant star in this, but the real sensation is the lady who plays the White Worm.

Coonskin: No notes! Amazing movie. I did a full write-up earlier this month.

Abigail: A pleasant surprise. Campy, humorous, fast-paced, with likable characters -- it's a very loose remake of Dracula's Daughter without the lesbian vibes (a bit of a drawback), but it features Matthew Goode as Dracula (a plus).

Terror Train: Sometimes tedious, but mostly fun, this slasher is essentially Prom Night, but it takes place on a train. Jamie Lee Curtis plays a brilliant med student who is troubled by an incident in her freshman year, when she partook in a sexually traumatizing hazing ritual that sent a young man to the asylum. Now that young man is out, and he's among the masked partiers on the train, but who is he? My favorite elements of this: the surprise genderbender twist and David Copperfield as the magician.

Young Törless: While it's an excellent film, I can't help but feel like other films have done the same themes much better.

House of 1000 Corpses: American horror loves to make rednecks the villains. For a capitalist society there's something primal and terrifying about inbred, deformed, deranged hillbillies trapping you in their desolate rural town and chopping you to bits. But in this movie, the trope is played with -- the victims are condescending yuppies looking to write a book about the quaint country folk and their funny ways, and the hillbillies get their revenge. As a hillbilly born and raised I found it very satisfying and fun.

Lady in White: a too-long, over-indulgent mystery/horror film that I couldn't give more than two stars to. I really wanted to like it, but from the opening scene I knew it wasn't meant to be XD This movie couldn't decide if it wanted to be Radio Flyer or To Kill a Mockingbird, and it veered between saccharine Norman Rockwell scenes to extreme racism and lynching to child murder back to Norman Rockwell. The Letterboxd reviews are concerningly high.