Avidavr: Media Reviews

Category: Movie reviews

  • Day 10: World War Z (2013)

    Goal: Find a horror movie EVERYONE has seen (except me).

    —

    What I know about it:

    I read about 100 pages of the novel about 15 years ago. It was exciting, but I stopped because it seemed to be going nowhere. It was the same thing over and over: ten pages of the first chapter of a story, then a suggestion that the narrator would probably die, followed by a new character for fifteen pages. On repeat. It felt like a book with one gimmick.

    The movie looked like a generic zombie blockbuster with little reason to exist. Why did this one get such a huge budget and a $20 million lead? The trailer showed record numbers of very CGI-looking zombies onscreen at once.

    David Fincher was attached to direct World War Z 2 for a year or two, and I thought, “That’s never going to happen.” And it didn’t. The project quietly disappeared, and Fincher made Mank instead.

    I got the sense this had almost nothing to do with the novel. That was just a recognizable name to slap on the poster. Calling this World War Z reminded me of… I can’t even think of a comparison. It’s as much an adaptation of the book as Troll 2 is a sequel to Troll. It might take place in the same outbreak, but the story itself comes from nowhere. Brad Pitt’s character doesn’t exist in the novel. Hence, I was trepidatious.

    This whole project has the aroma of a careless cash grab and I really don’t know why Brad Pitt keeps justifying the existence of these. But who knows? I actually really like Marc Forster and I still hope he directs the Red Rising trilogy, which looks less and less likely to actually be made. Why can Brad Pitt not put his name on that one? That is a book with a story that could actually be made into a movie. World War Z is just a name everybody knows slapped on something that seems carelessly made out of fumes.

    —

    After the movie:

    I’m trying to think of a zombie movie I liked less than this. Actually, I’m trying to think of any movie I liked less than this. Because I hated this movie. Hate. I hated, hated, hated, hated this movie. I hated the characters, the sound design, the dialogue… I hated the very concept it stood for. Most of all, I hated the zombies. The script has five credited writers, and it feels like no one made a final decision about how the zombies worked.

    This was PG-13. Good PG-13 zombie movies exist, but they have to be tender and romantic (Warm Bodies) or satirical (Fido). World War Z wants to be a true, gory zombie spectacle, with bites and blood everywhere—but it’s so sanitized that the viewer has no idea what’s even happening. How does the virus transfer from a zombie’s mouth into a human’s bloodstream? No clue. There isn’t a single clear shot of a zombie actually biting someone.

    If you doubt that, it’s true. The most confounding scene takes place on an airplane. A flight attendant sees a chihuahua barking and runs around the cabin, then opens a closet mid-flight. Surprise! There’s been a zombie standing there for hours. He screams like a velociraptor.

    We cut to Brad Pitt in the back of the plane. He hears faint screaming, pulls aside a curtain, and sees chaos—people flailing, shrieking, like he’s opened a portal to Hell. The zombie’s scream basically says, “I’m a zombie! You’re all zombies now!”

    The plot depends on zombies spreading the infection through bites, but if you didn’t speak English, it would be impossible to figure that out visually.

    How does the virus spread? Saliva entering the bloodstream, I think. A rabies-like infection that transforms a person in twelve seconds, instantly discoloring their skin like they’ve been dead for weeks. Or maybe it takes ten minutes—that’s what one scene suggests. But usually it’s twelve seconds. I say that because it feels like it was written by five people who stopped talking to each other months ago.

    Is this how the zombies worked in the novel? Absolutely not. Max Brooks designed his zombies to follow George Romero’s rules: the dead reanimate, and you have to die to become one. The zombies in the movie World War Z are still alive, which explains how hordes can sprint and swarm.

    Brooks’s World War Z was a collection of wartime documents and letters from the early days of the outbreak. There’s no central narrative or protagonist to adapt. So why didn’t the studio ask Brooks to write a story with one? One character to follow through his version of the apocalypse?

    Brad Pitt is the worst I’ve ever seen him here. He’s blank, mumbles through lines, and has zero presence. Never once did I think, “Okay, I get it. This is a role a great actor would want.” Pitt’s clearly transitioned into more of a producer’s role. He reportedly made about $11 million upfront but stood to make far more if it hit big—and it did. His biggest hit ever. Which makes it even harder to understand. If he was producing, why didn’t he say, “Okay, but let’s fix the script”? Did he even read it?

    Pitt isn’t a natural actor—he’s too movie-star beautiful to disappear into a role. Then again, Moneyball (2011) proved he could pull off a quieter, cerebral performance. Maybe that’s what he thought this was. Either that, or he knew the global audience just wanted money onscreen—and his face counts as part of the budget.

    I hate to spoil a movie I hated, but it’s impossible not to. After noticing earlier that the zombies avoid people who look terminally ill (the old man, the emaciated boy), Brad Pitt decides to test a theory: if he infects himself with a deadly but treatable disease, the zombies will “see” him as a bad host and ignore him. He injects himself in the WHO lab, walks out past the frozen-in-place infected, and it works. Then he strolls to a Pepsi machine, hits a button, and dozens of bottles start spilling onto the floor. The zombies look over, confused. Why is this in the movie? Because Pepsi paid for it, that’s why. It plays like a Mentos-style Super Bowl commercial stapled onto the finale. “My plan worked, guys. Let’s go home.”

    Another low point: the closing montage shows a mound of zombie corpses dozens high, in the middle of a desert. It’s meant to represent the global aftermath, but…what? Why would a pile like that exist in open sand? What were the zombies doing? Where were they going? My theory: it was shot for the trailer. Someone pitched the image, and the producers demanded it be included.

    World War Z is the Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow of zombie movies, but that alone doesn’t explain why I hated it so deeply. This is the definition of a soulless cash-in—an underdog success story drained of all meaning by Hollywood’s need to turn everything into a brand. It looks expensive, but I didn’t like a single thing about it.

    1/10

  • Day 9: Eyes Without a Face (1960)

    Goal: Find the best reviewed horror movie I haven’t seen.

    What I know about it:

    I’m staying in a room with thin walls. While talking to my mom on the phone, I mentioned maybe watching a French film called Eyes Without a Face for her birthday. She seemed on the fence. After I hung up, my neighbor started playing an unfamiliar mid-tempo ’80s rock ballad. When the chorus hit, the singer kept repeating, “Eyes without a face.” He played it on repeat. A quick lyric search told me it was Billy Idol. I looked the song up on Album of the Year—it has a user score of 96 out of 100. Always a great day when I discover a truly great song I didn’t know. (Also, my neighbor listens to my conversations. Good to know.)

    Apparently the song was inspired by this movie. If that’s true, it absolutely can’t be a slasher or gore fest. Idol’s song sounds more like something by The Church or Echo and the Bunnymen. It would fit perfectly on the Donnie Darko soundtrack—melancholy, haunted, and romantic.

    That’s all I knew: a 90 on Metacritic, a French title, and a premise about a surgeon who kidnaps young women to repair his daughter’s disfigured face. I assumed the daughter’s eyes would still be intact—the eyes as self, or soul.

    —

    After the movie,:

    This movie did for the scapula what Psycho did for the shower. What a horrifying film for 1960. It’s like David Cronenberg saw James Whale’s Frankenstein and thought, “Pretty good, but what if Dr. Frankenstein were a complete a-hole?”

    I can’t find many classic movies about a daughter realizing her parents are terrible people. The only two released before Eyes Without a Face seem to be The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957) and Imitation of Life (1959). The Night of the Hunter (1955) fits somewhere between them, though that one’s about a clear villain who wants to kill the daughter.

    Why are there no parents as villains before the late 1950s? Old Hollywood probably believed in the nuclear family. And of course, there was the Hays Code—a production code that enforced certain moral standards, including:

    > “The sanctity of the home shall be upheld.”
    “Parents must not be portrayed in a way that would offend natural filial respect.”

    So you couldn’t make a movie like this. But it’s not like anyone was eager to try anyway. Villains acted alone. Showing the villain’s family might have made evil seem ordinary.

    The most brilliant thing about Eyes Without a Face is that the serial killer is a respected doctor—so esteemed he regularly gives lectures and has fans. In one scene, two middle-aged women approach Le docteur Génessier after a university lecture on skin transplantation. They shower him with effusive praise:

    > “You must feel so proud, Doctor.”
    “Such marvelous work you’re doing… your poor daughter, what a tragedy.”

    I was half right about how the movie’s title would come into play. The scariest moment isn’t something we see but something we hear: a young woman found in the harbor, her face completely torn off, leaving only the eyes. We’re to assume the entire face—muscle tissue and all—has been removed. The studio allowed this because it could technically make sense that only her skin was gone, but that wasn’t the image I saw in my head. I thought, This is some messed-up serial-killer movie. It’s like the video game Heavy Rain, but if it were filmed in 1959.

    The once-beautiful Christiane is the prototypical helicopter child. Her father, Génessier, makes all her decisions for her—including who she might marry (his assistant Jacques, who isn’t allowed to see her disfigured face). This type of father—authoritarian and controlling—was familiar to European audiences. The French would have called him père autoritaire. But to Americans used to seeing the wholesome head-of-household types from “Leave It to Beaver” or “Father Knows Best”, the idea that a father could be controlling in a bad way would have seemed radical.

    The movie I think of most when it comes to the meaning of Eyes Without a Face is Zach Braff’s Garden State. That film resonated with people who felt trapped in lives their parents designed for them—medicated, compliant, and numb. The tragedy of Christiane isn’t that her face is disfigured or that her life was ruined. The real melancholy comes with realizing you never got to live your life at all.

    9.5 / 10

  • Day 8: Friday the 13th (1980)

    Goal: Find a horror classic I have no interest in, just to cross it off my list.

    What I know about it:
    I’ve seen bits and pieces of several Friday the 13th sequels. Every October, there’s usually a marathon, and I’ll turn it on for as long as I can stand. This isn’t much. I’ve definitely seen parts of 2, 3, 5, 7, and 8, and probably 4 and 6, though I couldn’t tell you which is which.

    My favorite was Part II—the one where Jason still had a sack over his head because the hockey mask hadn’t been invented yet. I caught the last forty minutes of it once, and it was shocky but exciting, almost like John Carpenter’s Halloween. I thought maybe I was missing something by not watching these all the way through. Then Part III came on and I laughed at how bored I was. Dull. In 3D.

    Still, there’s a weird pleasure in trying to tell the sequels apart. Turn on the Friday the 13th channel on Pluto TV and make everyone guess which entry it is. Sure, they’re all bad, but what kind of bad? Cheesy bad? Slow bad? Dialogue-from-another-planet bad? You’ll never remember the characters or even the kills, but the flavor of badness is always distinct.

    Despite all that, I’d never actually seen the original Friday the 13th. Cable marathons always started with Part II. I figured maybe the first one was too rough or too different. I’d heard The New Blood was the most entertaining, but ten minutes in, I realized there were better ways to spend an evening.

    So: my first Friday the 13th, start to finish.

    —

    After the movie

    That was… disappointing. Not because I hated it, but because I liked it at first. The first 45 minutes are immensely watchable: great introductions, fun little scenes, an effective sense of menace. At their best, Friday the 13th movies aren’t about bad dialogue—they’re about realistic bad dialogue. These kids actually sound like kids.

    Case in point: the Strip Monopoly scene. Everyone played Monopoly in 1980. Everyone had heard of stripping games. Combine the two and you get, well, this.

    > Brenda: “OK, you’re the banker. Remember what the penalty is for losing.”
    Bill: “What’s the penalty?”
    Brenda: “You lose a piece of clothing every time you lose money.”

    Girl, are you sure that makes sense? You lose money every turn in Monopoly. Are you wearing a hundred articles of clothing? Do you even own pants?

    No one ever seems to put their clothes back on, and, in true Monopoly fashion, they quit before the game even begins. One girl runs back to her cabin barefoot. They’ll finish in the morning, I guess. (Where are the camp’s kids?)

    The first half hour works because it forgets to be scary. It’s just a slice-of-life portrait of bored teenagers in 1980—hiking, joking, killing time. Honestly, if the whole movie had been that, I might’ve loved it on principle. It feels more like an art-house hangout movie than a slasher.

    Then the ideas dry up. The film turns into a faceless murder mystery where you never see the killer, just the aftermath. The deaths get bigger, the suspense smaller. The movie stops being about anything.

    The sequels fixed what didn’t work—mask, mythology, pacing—but broke what little it tried to do right. In time, Friday the 13th became the franchise that perfected its own mediocrity. Critics hated the original for being a ripoff of Halloween; Gene Siskel even spoiled it by naming the killer in his review out of spite. It has a 22 on Metacritic. But time has been kind: now it sits comfortably above 60% on Rotten Tomatoes, the horror fan’s version of “we were wrong.”

    I think people admire it now the way musicians admire the rough early versions of their genre. Fred Durst once said he liked the Beastie Boys because “it’s nice to see an early example of our style of music done right.” Friday the 13th is like that—an imperfect template everyone else copied to death. It didn’t invent the superstition, the killer, or the kids, but it invented the business model.

    In 1979, producer Sean S. Cunningham took out a full-page Variety ad for a movie that didn’t exist.

    > “FROM THE PRODUCERS OF LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT — FRIDAY THE 13TH — the most terrifying film ever made.”

    No script, no plot, just a title. He saw that Halloween proved a scary date could sell, so he picked the unluckiest one on the calendar. The ad worked, and within months he had to start filming. Victor Miller wrote a quick script about camp counselors, a drowned boy, and his vengeful mother.

    It’s not a great movie. But it is a great idea for one, or at least a great title they were determined to turn into *something* everyone would want to see eventually. It is the series that perpetually almost had an idea that really, really worked.

    *Oh well. We’ll market it anyway. *

    Maybe the purest example of a movie that exists because it sounded like one.

    5/10

  • Day 7: Heretic (2024)

    Goal: Find the most notable current sleeper horror hit.

    —

    What I know about it:

    Next to nothing. It’s got a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 71 on Metacritic. For this week’s theme, I wanted a movie that feels big but that I somehow know literally nothing about.

    It has Hugh Grant and it seems to be about Mormons. He’s some kind of weird loner with a torture house. It seems like the movie everyone will still be talking about in five years. Just a hunch. Let’s see if I’m right.

    —

    After the movie:

    Do you remember when Bend It Like Beckham came out, and at first you wondered how they got Kate Winslet to seem 18 years old? Then you realized it wasn’t Kate Winslet but her strange, skinny doppelgänger named Keira Knightley? She ended up going pretty far, mostly because a lot of screenwriters had been writing parts for Kate Winslet five years earlier — and Winslet would’ve turned them down anyway. Keira Knightley turned out to be great. But she was no Kate Winslet.

    Sophie Thatcher is the new Keira Knightley. She’s not getting cast in parts written for Kate Winslet — she looks and sounds exactly like Emma Stone. I’d wager Sophie Thatcher is actually a more natural actress. She’s great in Heretic, and even better in 2025’s sleeper hit Companion, which I actually recommend even more for this week’s theme: “the sleeper horror hit.”

    Sophie Thatcher feels so much like Emma Stone that there’s a bit of a “new Coke” imitation effect going on. In Companion, that worked perfectly because she was supposed to feel like an imitation of the real thing. But in Heretic, there’s a little whiplash when she starts talking. How did this extremely smart, modern girl get cast as a Mormon missionary?

    If this movie had been made twelve years ago, Emma Stone would’ve been perfect. She had that “smart but innocent” quality — the thing that peaked with Poor Things. Sophie feels like Emma’s 12-years-younger little sister who also decided to act. Seeing this modern, post-ironic type trying to convert unsuspecting Christians to this quirky, folksy little underdog religion… I just wanted to say, “Shouldn’t you be in Brooklyn? Go home.”

    I’m stalling. What was the movie and what did I think of it? It was small and imteresting. Honestly, it feels like it could’ve been a play — maybe one converted to film at the last second. This is a horror movie tailor-made to play at sorority movie nights at Brigham Young University. Modern girls who freely explore the world, who’ve seen South Park and homemade internet porn, yet firmly believe in their mission: to tell the world about their faith. They’re believable. Exactly as good as young people who’ve never had a reason to question what they believe.

    On the other side of that coin is Hugh Grant as Mr. Reed, the titular “heretic” — every Mormon missionary’s worst nightmare. The poster has him smiling, staring at a game board with the two sisters as miniature chess pieces. Mr. Reed plays with them like a cat tossing a mouse, keeping himself amused before the kill. “You still believe that my wife is in the other room baking blueberry pie, despite all the evidence to the contrary.”

    Heretic has a handful of great ideas, and kind of a boatload of padding. Case in point: in addition to religion, Mr. Reed is obsessed with copyright disputes. He brings up two examples — Monopoly and “Creep” by Radiohead — as evidence that remakes and copies are more successful than originals.

    He’s got a point with Monopoly. I’m a board game hobbyist, and even I’d never heard of The Landlord’s Game, the 1904 prototype Monopoly ripped off almost entirely. Looking it up online made me respect it even more. One of its “Chance Cube” outcomes said, “5: Caught robbing a hen-roost: Go to jail. 10: Caught robbing the public. Take $200 from the board. The players will now call you Senator.” You can’t copyright board-game mechanics — or religious texts, for that matter. Mr. Reed makes that point too: religions are all just cover versions of each other.

    Where he loses me is with his deep affection for The Hollies’ “The Air That I Breathe.” Yes, the guitar progression is the same as “Creep,” and Thom Yorke’s phrasing is similar. But “The Air That I Breathe” has no hook. It’s a song no one under 70 cares about. The Hollies were basically the Thomas Edison of 1970s pop — taking half-forgotten ideas and dressing them up without subtlety. I’d have been way more impressed if Mr. Reed compared Joseph Smith to The Hollies directly, and left Radiohead out of it.

    Screenwriter, I see what you’re doing. But no one likes that song.

    But that last shot? Very good — it should be studied. It’s nice when little moments call back and actually have purpose. There’s a famous movie that ends with a man believing he survived a horror, cutting into a birthday cake… and we realize he’s still trapped, imagining a happy ending. Heretic’s ending is like that — but more artful. It’s not trying to scare you with a hand bursting from the ground next to a gravestone. It’s believable — truthful about what happens to the mind when coping with an actual human tragedy. A perfect little movie moment.

    Still, this is a decent movie. It feels like a filmed play — one that’s not really worth seeking out unless you’re curious. It doesn’t have much going for it other than novelty and a few twists, almost all in the first 40 minutes.

    If you see it, maybe you’ll agree.

    (That’s not a spoiler.)

    6.5/10

  • Day 6: The Witches (1990)

    Goal: Find a horror movie I wish I’d seen as a kid.

    What I know about it:

    Based on a Roald Dahl book — which I never read — though I did start the graphic novel adaptation by Pénélope Bagieu. I loved that version. It felt like the perfect bedtime story to read to all the imaginary historical figures in my head who wanted to learn about modern life. That’s probably the best way to describe both that time in my life and the tone of the story itself.

    From the marketing I remember, The Witches looked like one of those kids’ movies built around the trope of adults conspiring over a terrified child — laughing maniacally, looming above him, and plotting his doom. The trailer had shots that could’ve been outtakes from A Clockwork Orange, which was probably close enough to my recurring nightmares that I wasn’t exactly rushing to buy a ticket. For reasons unknown, my dad — who took me to almost everything — skipped this one.

    After the movie:

    “Your grandmother just has a slight case of diabetes, that’s all.”

    What an odd way to introduce kids to diabetes. The movie hints that sugar is essentially poison for Grandma, yet nothing comes of it — no payoff, no consequence. Was that just a random subplot or a witch’s failed hex? Either way, it’s bizarrely specific for something so pointless.

    The Witches starts strong but has aged unevenly. The early 1990s were the dark ages of “clever kids versus magical villains” movies. We took what we got — and we liked it.

    Anjelica Huston gives one of her best-known performances as Miss Ernst, the Grand High Witch. If you don’t love watching her tear off that mask and putting it back on, adjusting her nose with perfectionistic concern, you and I probably wouldn’t get along. The makeup effects rule the movie, but it is Huston who owns it — she’s the part everyone still remembers 35 years later.

    The film loses steam once the mouse transformation happens. By today’s standards, the “mousecapade” section feels slow and static. Director Nicolas Roeg, best known for Don’t Look Now (one of the best and dullest horror films of the 1970s), brings striking cinematography but not much momentum. Jim Henson’s studio did the effects, and it shows — the witch makeup is brilliant, but the mice barely move.

    Realizing Henson’s studio was involved gives The Witches some weight in cinematic history. It’s often described as “intensely frightening,” though today’s kids — raised on Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings — would find it pretty tame. What ultimately holds it back is its small scale.

    There was a 2020 remake directed by Robert Zemeckis, starring Anne Hathaway as the Grand High Witch. It’s technically longer but adds no substance. IMDb reviewers called it “needless” and existing for “no good reason.” Hathaway’s wandering accent doesn’t help — part Russian, part Scottish, part… something.

    The acting in the 1990 version is otherwise strong, except for Jasen Fisher as the boy. He has that vague, untrained-kid energy common in early ’90s movies. My friend Josh pointed out he looks just like Macaulay Culkin, which only made me wonder why Culkin wasn’t cast instead. He would’ve worked great. Roeg probably just said, “Can you read these lines without tripping? Great — you’re a mouse!” Everyone else, though, is Harry Potter-level casting.

    So, who should watch The Witches in 2025?

    I go by the Goosebumps rule: those books were perfect for my inner eleven-year-old, but by twelve I’d already outgrown them. No respectable parent should show The Witches to a child under nine — but that’s exactly who will love it most. They’ll be just traumatized enough to think it’s great.

    A pretty good movie, but its usefulness today is limited.

    7/10

  • Day 5: 28 Years Later (2025)

    Goal: Find a movie that everyone will watch for Halloween this year.

    28 Years Later (2025)

    What I know about it:

    I saw 28 Days Later twice, 22 years ago. There was nothing else like it at the time, and it was great. I was a big George Romero fan at that age, and I even made a short zombie movie as part of my senior project in college. It was called Oh, No! Zombies!!! and was 45 minutes long. I kind of resented 28 Days Later because there were absolutely no zombie movies coming out at that time, and I felt very protective of my own private toy.

    I finally watched 28 Weeks Later (2006) back in March and had a revelation: fast zombies seem very weird in 2025. We now know what zombies are like — they’ve been around in everything from The Walking Dead to Game of Thrones. We’re used to zombie tropes, and it just seems strange now that there is exactly one zombie franchise that thinks it makes sense for zombies to move faster in decay.

    28 Weeks Later arguably did not work. It has more great ideas than any zombie movie since George Romero first injected new life into the genre 50 years ago. But the internal logic was borderline nonsensical, and characters trended toward making inexplicable decisions. It’s the kind of movie that will be great once properly remade (and perhaps remade again).

    The pictures from 28 Years Later look phenomenal. 28 Weeks Later seemed kind of like a throwaway movie that somehow got people to really like it. 28 Years Later seems like a very important movie to Danny Boyle. He stepped in to direct this himself. He’s tried to make Oscar-caliber movies for years, with nothing panning out for a while. I believe he saw this as something that had true potential if it was done the right way — and he didn’t want to leave that to anyone else. (I think the flaws of 28 Weeks Later are easy to see, even if you really like the movie.)

    —

    After the movie:

    Bra. Vo.

    If you’re looking for a movie that’s a visceral artistic experience — every sound and visual image contributing to an intense wave of beauty — this is the kind of movie you’re looking for.

    Watching 28 Years Later reminds me of watching hanabi taikai, Japanese firework shows. I once watched the Katakai Fireworks Festival (on YouTube) during a down period in my life. The experience — seeing one 15-minute firework show curated like a living garden, set to music — created this splash of joy that made me feel artistically satisfied. One 15-minute show after another, lasting over two hours. There was no plot, but artistically it could not have made any more sense. 28 Years Later is akin to that, with artfully considered zombie splatter gore.

    This is a child-on-an-Odyssey movie, a strangely under-seen genre in cinema. It has infinite potential, and when done well, it produces many people’s favorite films (The Wizard of Oz, E.T., The NeverEnding Story, Spirited Away, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Iron Giant). Pixar, strangely, rarely makes a true child-on-an-Odyssey movie, other than Coco, which I hate.

    The story is about 90% unintelligible to Americans — which I think is a point of British pride to Boyle and many others who live in that tiny segment of the world. I watched this movie with tiny subtitles, which I couldn’t read quickly, so they were of little use. The brilliance here is that you don’t need to understand the words or sentences to follow the plot. At a certain point, Ralph Fiennes enters the movie, saving the day for most Americans who will finally understand a bloody thing one character is saying.

    This is bravura direction. Every moment is beautifully realized, and the actors inhabit their roles with confidence, understanding what truly matters. The world is shit, but twelve-year-old Spike has nothing to compare it to. The world is full of the diseased, but the only ones who matter to him are his family.

    The movie begins with a room full of little children watching Teletubbies, likely in 2002 — when the world first forever changed. Seeing the world kept to that blueprint, one that knew progress only up to the year when DVD players were all the rage and smartphones had not yet been realized — the world saw very little progress to be undone compared to what we know now. I’m actually a little jealous of the inhabitants of 28 Years Later. If I didn’t have an Android phone in my hand 18 hours a day, I would not know how to do anything.

    The cinematography is as good as you’ll see in a motion picture this year. The editing is extremely strong, stylized in a way that makes sense alongside Danny Boyle’s earlier work. But the MVP here has to be the score, written by the band Young Fathers — a Scottish experimental hip-hop group that’s largely unheard of in the Western Hemisphere. I know of them but never connected with their music in a way that made me want to return to it. I now feel like I was mistaken. The sound of 28 Years Later feels timeless and universal. It sounds equally like the year 2025 and like there is no time at all. This is how gods would likely score a story — with drama and ephemeral curiosity.

    28 Years Later is about accepting true death. The sadness isn’t losing everyone you know to a zombie apocalypse; it’s losing someone you love to one of the stupidest, most mundane ways to go. Cancer. The Big C is alive and well in a world that makes becoming doomed by the rage virus seem merciful.

    This is as good a zombie movie as you could possibly make. Whether you’ll like it is another matter. This is museum-quality art, which means it doesn’t care what you think of it. I loved it, but I am weird.

    Like the best hanabi taikai, it flares, fades, and leaves you staring at the afterimage — in awe and grateful that something so immediate could feel so eternal.

    9/10

  • Day 4: Eraserhead (1977)

    Goal: Find a horror movie I am embarrassed to have never seen.


    Eraserhead (1977)

    What I know about it:
    A black and white horror movie from the same guy that did Twin Peaks and Mulholland Dr. RIP. This has a very strange trailer that I can’t remember, and I saw it last week. Long static shots of a guy with a high-cut hairstyle looking blankly at the camera. Ok, now I’ll read the premise on IMDb.

    So this is a survival movie. “Henry Spencer tries to survive the screams of his newborn mutant child.” Shouldn’t those adjectives be in reverse order? Does Henry have a mutant newborn child, or does he have a newborn mutant child? Describing the child like that makes it sound like some sort of irregular baseball card, or like he came with a set of superhero clothes. “Mutant Child here! Now with a detachable umbilical cord and noise chip!”

    As someone who regularly saw the grosses for midnight movies nationwide, this was one of the standards, particularly in New York and California. If you specifically like watching cult or midnight films, you have already knocked this off your list long ago. I don’t know what it is, but it’s the type of movie that I want to know as little about as possible.


    —

    After the movie:
    Hair in the 1970s. You couldn’t mess with it. Today, if someone looked in the mirror and said, “You know, my hair kind of looks like a pencil eraser,” they would then get clippers and a pair of scissors and cut it down until it seems like the average length trending right now. But in 1976, that length was inches, which equated to a white man afro on some unlucky men. So all you could do was look out the bedroom window from the fetal position and sulk.


    The terminology “newborn mutant baby” is definitely accurate. It isn’t a mutated normal baby. It is a normal mutant baby, with a head that looks curiously like a human elbow. David Lynch deserves some sort of medal for comedy for playing such a long game for such a minor joke. Blink and you’ll miss it.

    I watched this with Josh, who seemed to mostly agree with me on Dead Calm. With Eraserhead, he realized it was boring and considered leaving 30 minutes in. “This movie is just *dull*. People in 1977 watched this because there wasn’t anything else to do.” He never left the room and watched the screen the entire time. He said he kept waiting for it to get better, although I think just enough new things happened to—not keep him interested, maybe—but to keep him from becoming bored out of his mind.

    I realized while watching this: mostly, this was an extremely influential movie for certain directors. It is clear that Barton Fink, which won the Palme d’Or in 1991, was about 70% Eraserhead when the Coen Brothers thought out what to do for their fourth feature film. Is it a drama? Thriller? Comedy? The decision to give it the biggest award was unanimous, which is as if they were saying, “Bravo. We saw Eraserhead, too.”


    This was pre–the mutated creature film boom of the late 70s and 80s, from directors David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Joe Dante, Ridley Scott, et al. The stop-motion and practical effects were influential on many 1980s films. David Lynch figured out how to take the effects used in Jason and the Argonauts and claymation movies and do them on a next-to-nothing budget. The sequences don’t last long, but the effect feels straight out of Beetlejuice a decade later. The body imagery, which includes a rib cage split open, feels right out of John Carpenter’s The Thing.

    If the film is about anything, it is the crushing routine and existence of working-class, industrialized city life. Henry Spencer lies down and looks out his bedroom window, and then we cut to his perspective and see what it is he sees. When someone’s bedroom has a contender for “world’s worst view,” I always think, “How did he get stuck here? Henry must be the worst person alive at finding a job. Or the worst at finding an apartment.”


    I always assumed Angelo Badalamenti specialized in 1950s jukebox-style music, which is where the strange lounge act aesthetic came from in Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, et al. But no. That seems to mostly be Lynch’s idea as the origin point. The song here, “In Heaven,” was mostly written by the man himself. I like to think he started with this idea just to find something absurd to be “the mutant squish-y” song, and then he just decided to keep that style and really commit. The Twin Peaks aesthetic started here, in this bizarre, dark horror movie that no one was supposed to see.

    Because Eraserhead is must-see cinema. For anyone who grew to love David Lynch for Twin Peaks or Mulholland Dr., this is where a surprising amount of his craft was first seen. I could name 30 movies now considered classics released in the next 20 years that were directly indebted to Eraserhead. The entire 1980s cult movie genre was trying to be the next Eraserhead!

    9/10

  • Day 3: Paranormal Activity (2007)

    Goal: Find a horror movie that everybody loves.

    Paranormal Activity (2007)

    What I know about it:
    I just watched five seconds of the trailer. Oh no. This seems like a movie I tried to watch a couple of years ago called Amityville in Space (2022). I tried to watch along with the podcasters at The Flop House—fellow Earlham grads—who pick bad movies and talk about them. Amityville in Space was the lowest-budgeted movie they ever did. It was filmed entirely in the director’s house, with some incredibly cheap, brief special effects slipped in.

    I also know Paranormal Activity is the most profitable movie of all time—making $193 million on the budget of a used Honda Civic with 90,000 miles on it. I’m a big fan of movies by first-timers working without a budget, but I suspected I might hate this. It came out a little too close to “Ghost Hunters*, the most boring show of all time (to me). Those shows were about as scary as an improv comedy performance without jokes. The only thing scary was their acting.

    —

    Shortly after I started this:
    Maybe I overestimated how much people loved this movie. It’s always mentioned on “most important horror movies” lists, but its audience ratings are kind of low compared to The Conjuring, which I also never saw until this year. Five minutes in, and I regretted my decision?

    —

    After the movie:
    I’m surprised because I really liked this—almost. It isn’t worth talking about the ending, because the entire movie was building to something… and I don’t think the filmmakers quite knew what that was.

    Still, it was extremely watchable for a no-budget production. Like some friends converted their grandparents’ house into a creep-a-thon haunted house that’s invite-only. It isn’t high art, but it’s thrilling and captivating. You keep wondering: What is that strange sound? Did they hear that? What’s going to show up on the time-lapse footage? Is this a haunting or something psychological? What’s going to happen with that dust they spread everywhere? A Ouija board?

    The movie succeeds mostly because it feels like every relationship between a young heterosexual couple in 2007. Back before iPhones, when FireWire was king, and the 62-inch TV in the living room weighed 150 pounds and displayed color only if you sat at the right angle. Camera tech had finally made it possible to film everything in your house, and that novelty gives the movie its weird realism.

    One genuinely real-couple moment: even though the husband has just spent several months’ salary on camera equipment—and even though Katie is the kind of freak who does things that are illegal in half a dozen states—they decide to keep the cameras off during their alone time. I think they’ll one day regret that decision.

    At its core, Paranormal Activity is about having a romantic partner who doesn’t tell you everything. No matter how sweet they are or how in love you’ve been, what if there’s something truly wrong with this person that they never told you about?

    “You didn’t say it on the first date. But it’s something you could’ve brought up on the fifteenth date. Or the thirtieth date.”

    How much baggage can the nice guy carry? Is it ever acceptable just to leave?

    Paranormal Activity is a novelty that has aged much better than it probably should have. It captures a moment in time that could only have existed within a two-year window. It shows a couple’s struggle so universal and normal that it’s easy to ask, “What would I do if this were us?”

    This isn’t a true story—and I’m not sure anyone ever believed it was—but it feels real. You know where a story like this is heading, and some things are inevitable.

    6.5/10

  • One Battle After Another (2025)

    Modern day America set in a slightly dystopian alternate reality? Could it work?



    When I first heard about this, I thought it had potential to be a disaster. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a down-on-his-luck American revolutionary whose daughter is kidnapped, so he must use the revolutionary system to get her back. What?! The American Revolution? 1776? No — this takes place in modern day.

    The world needs a revolution because the American government has been overtaken by a party of white supremacists. The president is part of an organization known as the Christmas Adventurers Club. “Hail Saint Nick!” is their salute and greeting. We never hear the name of the actual political party in power or whether they’re openly racist.

    I was cautiously excited: can this premise possibly work? Do we really want to see an Oscar-contending film that shows America in such an absurdly negative light? Will this movie seem to have anything to do with the real world at all?

    > “I don’t want you. I just want your money. Your money paid for my artillery, my supplies, my transportation, my dynamite, my message. I am what black power looks like.”




    By the time the movie got to this speech, I knew I loved it. Sure, you could try to read political relevance into it — something about the state of the world right now — but I think that would be reaching. At worst, the movie is a far-fetched suggestion for black power: if the world ever does turn to ****, this is what you can do about it.

    The speech above is given by a character named Junglep****, played by an actress who performs under the same name when she raps. So Paul Thomas Anderson is letting real life filter into his movie, even when the context seems to relate to nothing. This world, with its crass language and pseudonyms, feels influenced by what happens when the 21st century’s hacking and hip-hop communities are pushed to a breaking point.

    The language is actually very restrained compared to what it could have been. The p-word for female anatomy seems to be the dirtiest word in the world of One Battle After Another, but compared to the kinds of usernames used on the dark web by hackers, it’s remarkably tasteful. Quaint, even.

    I had read that the first hour of One Battle After Another was constant action, which isn’t actually true. What it is is exciting. New ideas are constantly being introduced — every scene, every cutaway. There are brief action scenes, but only about a minute’s worth in any one sequence. Then it cuts, and suddenly we’re months or years later. There are no extended battle or chase sequences. Those are saved for the very end.



    This is being touted as a Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle since it’s only the fourth movie he’s made since winning the Oscar in 2015 (The Revenant). However, Sean Penn is the one getting all the awards buzz, with him being the odds-on favorite to win Best Supporting Actor — which would give him Academy Award number three. It feels like forever since Sean Penn mattered in Hollywood, and the industry seems to be realizing, “Oh yeah. There is sort of a second Daniel Day-Lewis in the world.”

    Penn plays Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, who appears to be in the U.S. military (implying that in this dystopia, even military leaders are expected to have pseudonyms). Lockjaw isn’t a true white supremacist, though he goes through the motions — fetishizing the taboo of lusting after what he can’t have. The movie has a lot to say about the mindset of white supremacy: how much of their hogwash do they actually believe, and how much are they willing to tolerate?

    There is no calm before the storm. Every scene is filled with tension, and the script follows the “two things at once” rule, meaning nothing is ever written that isn’t also saying something about something else. Being a revolutionary in the 21st century is about the hardest job there is, so it makes sense that the characters wrestle with occupational substance use and post-partum jealousy. The intensity of trying to do the right thing only appeals to people who are likely borderline addicts — to sex, to drugs, or both. One likely intensifies the other. This phenomenon carries over into the real world too: righteous, highly demanding jobs — emergency medicine professionals, public defenders, war journalists — are likely to have a Bon Ferguson in their midst.



    I suspect Paul Thomas wrote One Battle as a world that could have franchise potential. The movie is definitely complete, which is a relief. I thought the only problem Anora had was that it didn’t really feel satisfying as the last time we’d ever see its characters. One Battle has no such issue. The world is so well thought out that it would be a shame if it weren’t mined for more stories. If PT is done with this world, expect a TV series remake within ten years.

    In the Magnolia DVD documentary, Paul Thomas Anderson screened a movie every day during pre-production — Short Cuts, Nashville, Melvin and Howard. One of those movies was Network, which he prefaced with a warning: “I will not make a movie as good as Network. You won’t see a movie as good as Network.”

    I disagree with PT. He managed to one-up it. He’s created a setting that’s an upside-down version of the real world and proven: this isn’t real, and it probably won’t be — but it still has plenty to say about where we’re going, and where we are right now.

    One Battle After Another is a Chuck Palahniuk novel done right.

    10/10

  • Day 2: Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

    Goal: Find a classic monster movie.

    I’m using “classic monster” loosely. Last year I saw Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Invisible Man. This year I considered Cat People and Them! — not traditional monsters, but they’d fit the idea.

    Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

    What I know about it:

    When I was at Earlham College in the 2000s, I was in movie club. We screened The Return of the Creature in a room that doubled as a physics lecture hall and a weekend theater. It had a real projection booth and 16mm equipment.

    We showed it in 3D — the red-and-blue kind. Technically, it worked, but with a nauseating color filter. You’d want to take the glasses off after thirty minutes, try watching without them, then say, “Dear Lord. Guess I gotta put these back on.” Nauseating either way.

    The plot? Something about a swamp creature in a rubber suit carefully picking up women who faint — one arm under the knees, the other behind the neck. No strong character work. Cheesy but nostalgic. I hoped the original Creature would make the sequel feel more complete. I gave Return a 7.

    Shortly after starting it:

    Wow — this score! The music in these old Universal horror films makes or breaks them, and Creature succeeds. It was shot in 1.37:1 but composed to be cropped to 1.85 (widescreen). It looks forward-thinking — similar to Touch of Evil, though that one was cropped more seamlessly.

    After the movie:

    This movie is quite a spectacle for 1954. Every shot has layered detail. It’s a “made-for-the-trailer” film in the best sense. Much of it takes place underwater — the Avatar: The Way of Water of its day. Tarzan and His Mate (1934) had six minutes of underwater footage; Creature has about fifteen, using new camera tech that would soon be used in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. For 1954, that was groundbreaking.

    Thematically, I admire it. It’s about scientists exploring a fossil discovery and realizing they’ve found a living species worth protecting — years before “endangered species” became a household term. The script feels philosophically progressive for its time: pro-science, anti-hunting, closer to King Kong than most monster pictures of the era, or since. (Them!, Jaws)

    Problems: It wears out its welcome around the halfway mark. Once the underwater cinematography and creature design are established, there’s not much left. It has that “good enough” B-movie philosophy — great setup, undercooked follow-through. The dialogue is utilitarian, often missing chances for real thought or character. “Hi Jim.” “Did you check the meters?” “They’re fine.” That’s not an actual quote, but it captures the vibe. Very quick dialogue that doesn’t even need to be there. This was not written by a poet laureate.

    What elevates it is the score — some of the best classical writing in any monster movie. The dissonant brass motif (DUH-duh-DUUUH!) is iconic, with strings rippling like water. Composers Hans J. Salter, Herman Stein, and a young Henry Mancini stitched together a Frankenstein’s-monster of a score that somehow actually succeeds in sounding like a single piece of music. It’s beautiful and should be adapted into a drum and bugle corps or high school marching-band show.

    Watching it reminded me of The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, one of my favorite B-movie spoofs. This is where all those tropes were born — and it’s easy to love Creature sincerely while still thinking, “man, this is silly. I have got to tell the world about this ”

    8/10