Featured image from 10 to Midnight.
Amazon Prime
Amazon Prime continues to overflow with riches. This time I have an impressive batch of 70’s and 80’s exploitation movies to recommend along with some very nice odds and ends.
The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)
Featuring a memorable lead performance from Millie Perkins, this slow burn is at the far “arthouse-feminist” end of the exploitation spectrum. It’s got buckets of grime, but it’s also a potent dramatic portrayal of trauma and mental illness. Essential 70’s horror.
10 to Midnight (1983)
Wall-to-wall sleaze. A repulsive incel serial killer runs afoul of Charles Bronson, a Dirty Harry type. Directed by J. Lee Thompson, who also made the original Cape Fear and The Guns of Navarone.
Blood Rage (1987)
Bonkers! Blood Rage is top tier 80’s horror. Terry and Todd are identical twins. Todd has been locked up for a decade for a grisly childhood murder at a drive-in theater but has now escaped, Michael Myers style. But has Terry been the real psychopath all along?? Absolutely incredible Louise Lasser performance as the mom.
Night Train Murders (1975)
Heading over to Italy, this Aldo Lado jam is a particularly depraved riff on Last House on the Left (which in turn is a riff on The Virgin Spring). A couple of girls headed home to visit family end up on a train with a trio of violent sadists. Every content warning certainly applies. Lado’s stylistic chops are on full display and Ennio Morricone contributes a sparse and unnerving score.
Under the Silver Lake (2019)
This is from David Robert Mitchell, who also made The Myth of the American Sleepover and It Follows. After the success of the latter, he got a pretty nice budget for this one, and what he ended up doing is deeply weird. So much so that A24 dumped it to VOD just three days after its theatrical release. I was *definitely* vibing on this. It’s a 2 hour and 20 minute stoner Philip Marlowe odyssey into the surreal underbelly of LA’s Silver Lake neighborhood. It’s in the tradition of The Long Goodbye, The Big Lebowski, and Inherent Vice, but it’s very much its own thing. One of my favorite new releases of the year.
Peterloo (2019)
A powerful, richly detailed study of a clash between activism and tyranny, vitally relevant to today’s world. Worthwhile political films are in short supply nowadays and I wish everyone would watch this.
Lord of Illusions (1995)
Clive Barker made three movies and they are all horror masterpieces. This one was severely underappreciated when it came out, partly because the theatrical cut was butchered. It has since been rehabilitated on home video and taken its rightful place in the canon. A cult of magicians is led by Swann, a popular illusionist who is in fact performing real magic on stage. Swann’s wife (Famke Janssen) hires private detective Harry D’Amour (Scott Bakula) when she fears that other cult members are conspiring against her husband. Madness ensues.
Serenity (2019)
My favorite good-bad movie of 2019. I admit I had started to become a little bit of a Matthew McConaughey detractor. I very strongly disliked him in Dallas Buyer’s Club and let myself get carried away. Between this and The Beach Bum (see below), I stand corrected. I am ashamed of myself: Matthew McConaughey is a gift to be cherished. In this GLORIOUS movie, he plays a salty charter boat captain who pleasures Diane Lane for rent money and spends his days on a quest to catch one specific fish (the fish’s name is Justice). The plot thickens when his ex-wife (Anne Hathaway) pays him to take her abusive husband (peak Jason Clarke!) out on a day trip. I love this movie from the bottom of my heart.
Belladonna of Sadness (1973)
Someone pointed out to me recently that I don’t spend much time on Strohltopia talking about animated movies and asked whether I’m partial to anything in particular. I thought for a minute and said “well I love Belladonna of Sadness!” 86 minutes of insane phantasmagoria, witchcraft, and vengeance.
Millennium Actress (2003)
Another animated favorite. This is Satoshi Kon’s journey through the memories of an aging actress. It’s a sister film to Perfect Blue, offering a more positive variation on similar material.
Netflix
I resent Netflix for cancelling their best show (The OA!) but I can’t stay mad at them long when they deliver stuff like Wu Assassins.
Wu Assassins (2019)
Angela and I are having a great time with this series. It’s like Iron Fist but good. It’s got all my favorite stuff: Iko Uwais (aka The Guy from The Raid), superhuman martial arts powers, food, triads and tongs. It’s a compulsively watchable delight.
The Box (2009)
This didn’t cause quite the stir of Donnie Darko or Southland Tales but it’s probably my favorite Richard Kelly movie. It begins with an ethics class thought experiment where a sublimely creepy Frank Langella gives Cameron Diaz a black box with a red button and tells her that if she presses the button she will receive a million dollars while a stranger somewhere in the world will die. Her choice begins a dark spiral into batshit sci-fi territory.
Lady in the Water (2006)
As I wrote in my Shyamalan piece, this is easily my favorite M. Night movie. I was delighted to see it featured front and center on Netflix. Often used as a punching bag by dour detractors, it deserves reappraisal. I was struck on my most recent viewing by how hilarious Cindy Cheung is.
Horns (2013)
Aja has put together a very impressive body of work. Not exactly being a Daniel Radcliffe fan, I was skeptical, but he’s good here. He stands accused of murdering his girlfriend and spontaneously sprouts horns and gains the power to compel people to confess and then act on their most depraved impulses. Aja is in fine form stylistically.
The Wandering Earth (2019)
Armageddon times a thousand. This is the first big budget sci-fi extravaganza produced in China. The entire earth has become a space vessel being propelled out of the solar system by giant thrusters. Threatened by a collision with Jupiter, a rag-tag team of misfits must save the day. I enjoyed how massive and excessive this movie is, and I also enjoyed the way that it packs in the “collective before individual!” themes wherever it can.
Hulu
Hulu was starting to wear out its welcome with me but they’ve done a lot to redeem themselves by bringing us a fourth season of Veronica Mars. They’ve added a few notable movies as well.
Veronica Mars (2019)
Yeehaw! I devoured S4 like the delicious meal that it is. It feels like home. I love how seamlessly it connects to the previous seasons and the movie. If you’re into the show, a great delight awaits. If you’ve never gotten into it, Hulu also has seasons 1-3. Certainly this is one of my favorite TV shows of all time.
If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)
My opinion of Moonlight is that the first act is transcendently gorgeous but that the second and third acts let it down. Jenkins’ follow up lives up to the promise of that first act. A period piece set in 70’s Harlem, this is a superlatively sumptuous, sensual piece of film-making. The acting is so expressive that this could have worked as a silent film. Curl up on the couch with your beloved and/or your cat or your dog or your favorite stuffed animal– someone or something to snuggle– and be ready to cry your eyes out.
Joe (2013)
Arguably David Gordon Green’s best movie, featuring an exceptionally great serious dramatic performance from Nic Cage as an ex con with a soft spot for a hard luck kid working on his crew.
The Beach Bum (2019)
A gentler, sweeter side of Harmony Korine. Featuring one of two great salty wharf rat performances this year from McConaughey (see Serenity above), this is a loving and unapologetic ode to the life of a stoner degenerate. It warmed my heart.
Final Destination 1-3 (2000, 2003, 2006)
I love these movies. The formula is simple: several individuals are saved from a disaster when one of them has a prophetic vision, but then death comes to claim them anyways and they die one by one in elaborate freak accidents. Each film is a collection of grisly, imaginative set pieces. The fourth one is also on Hulu but it’s not very good (it was the first 3D entry, and it substitutes 3D for creativity), but the fifth one (not on Hulu) is amazing and completists may just want to watch them all.
Shivers (1975)
This might be my favorite early Cronenberg. There’s a sexually transmitted parasite that turns the people it infests into sex-crazed maniacs. Mayhem ensues. Works great on the “zombie orgy of gore” level but also gets into Cronenberg’s abiding interest in the relationship between the body and technology.
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