reviews

The Phantom Lady (1944)

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Civil engineer Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) finds himself alone in Anselmo’s Bar one night with two tickets to see the Broadway’s Chicka-Boom-Boom musical revue. He approaches an equally lonely woman (Fay Helm) in an extravagant hat and convinces her to accompany him, as he has been stood up. At the show, prima donna performer Estela Moneteiro (Aurora Miranda, sister of Carmen) is wearing identical head garb for her performance and grows incensed when she spots that a woman in the audience is wearing the exact same hat. The theater-going couple also get the attention of accompanying drummer Cliff Milburn (Elisha Cook, Jr.), who makes eyes at the woman. As Scott walks the mysterious woman back to the bar where they met, she refuses to give him her name, saying that “It’s better this way.” When he returns home, he finds himself greeted by Inspector Burgess (Thomas Gomez), who is curious as to why Scott’s wife is dead in the next room. Scott admits that he and his wife argued that evening, their anniversary, and that he left to let off some steam. The only person who can confirm his alibi is the woman that he was with all night. Although his presence is confirmed at the bar by the bartender (Andrew Tombes) and his delivery to the theatre is collaborated by the cab driver, both of them—rather sweatily—proclaim that he was alone and that there was no woman with him, with or without an elaborate hat. 

It’s here that the film switches gears and our true protagonist appears: Carol Richman (Ella Raines), Scott’s secretary, whom he has nicknamed “Kansas.” She knows he’s innocent, and when he’s convicted, she continues to try and find the “phantom lady” who can testify to Scott’s location. First she stakes herself out at Anselmo’s and gives the bartender the evil eye for nights on end before finally following him through the streets to confront him about why he lied about Scott being alone; when the bartender breaks free from the mitts of a group of men who intervene when he threatens Carol for following him, he winds up straight in front of an oncoming car and is killed. Things really come to a head when Carol, now assisted by a recalcitrant Inspector Burgess (who now realizes that a guilty man would never have hung onto the specific alibi that Scott did), poses as a “hep kitten” in order to go home with Cliff the drummer who, in a drunken state, admits that he was bribed to pretend he never saw Scott’s oddly-adorned companion. While Carol goes to summon Burgess, Cliff is confronted by the man who bribed him, who disposes of him before Burgess and Carol can return. The last hope is to try and get the truth from Estela Moneteiro, but the diva is so vain about her headwear that she had her own version of the hat destroyed upon seeing a copy in the audience and proclaims that she never saw the woman. But if they can find out who made the hat . . .

I’m not sure that I could name another single noir where the protagonist is a woman. Sure, there are always femmes fatale and ladies with gams that go all the way up to heaven, but it’s a rare surprise to see one leading the investigation, tracking down leads, and working tirelessly to prove the innocence of their love. That it takes so long for Carol to enter the picture is hardly worth mentioning, since the film moves at a breathless clip from the moment she appears until the film’s conclusion, and we move at a good pace since we’ve only got eighty-seven minutes to tell this tale. The only time that the film starts to feel a little slow is when Carol finally manages to track down the phantom lady, discovering that she’s named Ann Terry, and the woman is in a state of period-appropriate heartbroken mourning. Her fiance died mere days before they were to be married, and the night that she attended the theatre with Scott was apparently the only time she’s left her home since the incident. When Carol finds her, she’s only half there, behaving as if she’s been dosed with downers to keep her from hurting herself (which, given the state of medicine at the time, very well may have been the case). The conversation between the two is, then, naturally stilted, but watching Carol talk to Ann like she’s a child and only getting half answers is a bit frustrating to watch, and really throws a speed bump into the mix. The only thing that ensures that the film’s momentum continues is the knowledge that we in the audience have that the co-investigator who has joined her by this point is the murderer of the late Mrs. Henderson (and Cliff), and that keeps the suspense alive. Their final confrontation once she discovers the evidence is effectively tense, and I genuinely wasn’t sure that Carol was going to make it out alive. 

Robert Siodmak directed this picture, one year before The Spiral Staircase and two before The Dark Mirror. He partnered on this one with producer Joan Harrison, a name I’m quite familiar with from seeing it in the opening credits of every episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, as well as her screenplay credits on Foreign Correspondent, Rebecca, and Suspicion. A contemporary reviewer stated that “Miss Harrison is doing nothing that Hitchcock has not done a great deal better,” and although this film doesn’t hold a candle to the consensus classics that her longtime collaborator created, it’s quite comparable to a fair bit of it (and much better than some of his later works, or even some of his middle period clunkers). I’d like to think it’s Harrison’s involvement in this one that made it a woman-centered uniqueness, which transcends mere novelty. Of course, that same bent is likely the reason that we have the protracted sentimental scene between Ann and Carol, but that cost is well worth the reward of just how much more interesting this one is than a lot of other noirs of the period, many of which were cheap and disposable, putting it in the same category of excellent genre representatives that have withstood the test of time, like D.O.A. I’ve also found myself stumbling into a bit of a Siodmak retrospective this year, and he continues to impress. There’s visual flair here that sets this one apart from its contemporaries as well, as one would expect from a film that has an opening credit for “Phantom Hat design,” and there’s a fantastic sequence late in the film set in the apartment/studio of a sculptor, where ominous heads of various sizes oversee the events as they play out, which makes for a foreboding feeling. The sequence in which Carol poses as floozy “Jeannie” to catch the eye of Cliff and try to get more information from him includes a detour where he takes her to a cramped room that appears to be little more than a storage space where some of this other musician friends play frenzied jazz. The quick cutting of the film to match the energy of the music, combined with the isolation of the location and the buckets of sweat that everyone’s shedding, give us the sense that Carol is in real danger, even if the text contains no actual peril, just the general vibe of it. 

Like Dark Mirror, where this one falls apart a little is in its fascination with the psychology of the killer. Burgess goes on a long-winded speech about “paranoiacs,” ironically delivered to the person that the audience is now aware is the killer, and how impossible it is for them to fit into normal society and how they’re perpetually distressed. All of this happens while the killer seems to be barely able to control his hands and then faints at the end of the conversation, yet Burgess takes no note of the obvious implication that the man feels guilty about something that Burgess has said (he does seem to be a little more paranoid about this after, but not enough to warn Carol to be careful directly). The murderer spends quite a lot of time with Burgess and Carol as part of the investigation, and while there’s a lot of fun to be had as they get closer and closer to the truth while he becomes less and less able to control his obvious anxiety, it also makes them look a little stupid. I would have bought the narrative that he simply killed Scott’s wife for the reasons that he eventually gives (that he flew into a rage when she admitted that, even though she was cheating on her husband with him, she had no intention of running off together) and that the rest of his killings were to cover his tracks. I haven’t been able to find specific information about what the original intended ending for the film was, but I have found a few offhand references to changes made to the climax because of the Hays Code, and it’s possible that this psychological focus was also a result of compliance with the Code’s mandates; maybe he was just a killer in the initial text and the rest was grafted on. It feels that way, but that doesn’t make this one any less enjoyable. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

I Confess! (1953)

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It’s a dark night in Quebec City. We move in, slowly, on one building in particular, gliding in through the window to find a man dead on a carpet. The beaded curtain that hangs over the door to the room is still moving, his killer having departed mere moments earlier. On the street, a man in a cassock emerges from the dead man’s house and moves up the street, slowly, until he enters Ste. Marie’s church. The killer, Otto Keller (O. E. Hasse), begs Father Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift) to take his confession, and the young priest does so. Otto begins with an expression of his gratitude to Father Logan, who helped him and his wife Alma (Dolly Haas) find work and lodging in the rectory, before he admits that he accidentally killed local dirtbag lawyer Villette (Ovila Légaré), whom he initially only intended to rob so that Alma wouldn’t have to work so hard. Father Logan confirms that his confession is held in confidence and that he will not involve the law, but that Keller must return the money and turn himself in. The following morning, Father Logan makes his way to Villette’s house, where he meets primary investigator Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden), who tells him that Otto discovered the body. Larrue observes Father Logan speaking to a woman outside and becomes suspicious, even though he doesn’t hear her say the words “Villette is dead? Then we’re saved!” to the priest. The woman turns out to be Ruth Grandfort (Anne Baxter), the wife of local legislator Pierre Grandfort, who is close friends with Crown Prosecutor Willy Robertson (Brian Aherne), but her and Father Michael’s friendship goes back even further, and is deeper. 

I Confess! gets off to a marvelous start, but then it ends up spinning its wheels for far too long, even for a film that clocks in at a mere 95 minutes. The story feels like it’s headed toward a conclusion at about the halfway mark, and by the time we reached the final third, I kept checking the time and finding myself startled to discover that only a minute or two had passed since I had last checked. The ending is sufficiently strong that the last twelve minutes were at least engaging, but it wasn’t enough to come back from the slump. Conceptually, it’s pure Hitchcock: the wrongfully accused man who must prove his innocence but for some reason cannot, the blonde who loves him, and a crew of police investigators who are at turns both foolish and malicious. As a narrative device, having a character who can’t defend himself against false allegations because he’s bound by the sanctity of the confessional is also a fresh idea, and complicating matters further by having the victim be a blackmailer extorting the priest’s ex-girlfriend in a way that potentially implicates the priest himself is a fun place to take that concept. Unfortunately, Clift is dreadfully dull in this role, Hasse’s turn as the villainous Keller is similarly underwhelming, and the apathy that Hitchcock allegedly had for this project comes through in the workmanlike nature of the cinematography. 

When I told my mother that I had recently watched this one, she asked if it had been released before or after Montgomery Clift’s infamous car accident, noting that he might have been stiff because of the resulting physical and psychological scars (and the addictions that came in attempting to medicate the latter). That didn’t happen until 1956, and I Confess was released only a couple of years after A Place in the Sun, in which I seem to remember finding him very convincing. I don’t know where the blame for his stilted performance here comes from, and I can say the same thing about Hesse. Keller seems to reflect the era’s general antipathy to German immigrants, and taken as a sole piece of evidence in a vacuum, one would think that Hitchcock thought that all Germans who asked only for the opportunity to work and bemoaned their lot in life as “[men] without a country” were simply lying in wait for the opportunity to turn on their supposed benefactors, lie about their motives, steal, frame clergymen, and kill their own wives for trying to see justice done. He’s a factor in the plot, but he’s not a character, and the film is much worse off for letting us know who the manslaughterer is from the start but not making that person interesting. Baxter ends up the MVP here, and the best part of the film comes after Father Michael has been arrested and she decides she has to explain everything to the police at the cost of her social standing and dignity: years before, Michael went off to fight in the war and told Ruth not to wait for him; when he came back, she had already married Pierre. When their innocent reunion is interrupted by a thunderstorm, the two are forced to take shelter in a gazebo, where the blackmailer/victim discovered them the next morning and inferred they had slept together, which would be enough to ruin Ruth’s marriage, embroil her husband in a scandal, and (even though he wasn’t yet ordained) defrock Michael. When her testimony ends up doing more harm than good, as the hours she spent with Michael the night of the murder fall before the time of death but her explanation finally provides the police with a potential motive for Michael, she’s distraught, and Baxter sells it tremendously. It’s just not enough to save it. 

The film almost does something interesting near its conclusion, when the jury finds that there simply isn’t enough evidence to convict Michael and he’s released. Although he’s not culpable in the eyes of the law, his verdict in the court of public opinion is much heavier, and it would have been interesting to spend a little more time with this narrative thread. Can he return to the church? How has his downfall affected the faith of his parishioners? Will some forgive but never forget? None of these questions get the chance to be answered, or even a moment’s breathing room, as Michael barely makes it down the steps before Mrs. Keller attempts to tell Larrue that her husband was the true killer, only for Keller himself to shoot her (so much for the whole motive of his theft being to spare her a life of servitude, I suppose). Oh well. A necessity really only for Hitchcock or Clift completists, I’d say skip this one. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

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There is something both inevitable and unfathomable about there being a new I Know What You Did Last Summer legacyquel in wide theatrical release right now. Sure, the combination of Hollywood executives’ unquenchable thirst for name-brand IP and the relative dependability of horror cheapies to turn a tidy profit makes it seem like a no-brainer that this vintage 90s title would get the modern rebootquel treatment. It was pretty low on the priority list too, following a long parade of legacy horror sequels of varying quality in recent years, like Scream, Halloween, Candyman, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Final Destination: Bloodlines. Even so, the I Know What You Did Last Summer brand had already been downgraded to straight-to-streaming schlock in its little seen third & fourth entries, so it’s a little surprising to see the title claw its way back onto multiplex marquees. It’s especially surprising when you consider how little there is to the property beyond the recognizability of its title, which makes for easy, memorable parody in Scary Movie-type yuck-em-ups. The first I Know What You Did Last Summer film is a by-the-numbers teen slasher with little bloodshed and little novelty. Its setting in a North Carolina fishing village provides some nice background texture for its otherwise indisticntive murder spree, justifying its hook-handed fisherman killer’s costuming beyond its connection to a timeless urban legend. By the second film in the series, it was already apparent that those details weren’t enough to keep the party going, since I Still Know What You Did Last Summer immediately jumped the shark by sending its teens-in-peril on the kind of Bahamas beach trip that usually arrives multiple seasons into a hokey sitcom like Saved by the Bell. That tropical island locale does little to distract from the fact that the series’ killer isn’t iconic enough to have earned a recognizable moniker by his second outing. You can’t even joke about I Still Know being subtitled The Fisherman’s Tropical Vacay or The Hook Man’s Island Getaway because no one would know what you’re talking about. When the killer’s teenage victims refer to him as “The Slicker Guy” deep into the third act, you can feel the whole brand falling apart from under you . . . and yet here we are, two more sequels and a televised series later.

The benefit of contributing to a legacy this bland is that it sets expectations low. No army of black t-shirted horror bros are going to be outraged about the blasphemous desecration of I Know What You Did Last Summer as a sacred object, not the way they were with more disastrous franchise refreshers like The Exorcist: Believer or the 2010 Nightmare on Elm Street. That gives director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson free rein to be playful & flippant with the material, even if the exercise requires her to be absurdly reverent to the fabled events of 1997. Through reluctant re-unions, nightmare visitations, and a presumptuous sequel set-up stinger, the main casts of the first two I Know What You Did features return here for unearned moments of horror-icon spotlight: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar and, briefly, Brandy. As is now legacyquel tradition, they help fill in a younger cast of imperiled teens on their initial bouts with the slicker killer, adding gravitas to previous outings by constantly referencing Trauma in therapy speak (in this case through classroom lecture and conversational references to The Body Keeps The Score). The 4th of July celebrations, fish-themed parade floats, department store mannequins, and town-hall beauty pageant stage of the original film are all treated with sacred reverence as if anyone would remember those details without having recently rewatched it as homework. Robinson undercuts that reverence with metatextual jokes about how “Nostalgia’s overrated” or how it’s not a viable plan to “fuck off to the Bahamas” to escape this particular killer, but those one-liners only go so far. Her bolder choice is to double down on the sassy, aggressive girliness of her straight-to-Netflix comedy thriller Do Revenge here, aiming her I Know What You Did sequel at teen-girl sensibilities instead of trying to please those teens’ aging Millennial parents. Considering that the first Last Summer movie excelled more as a teen melodrama than as a bodycount slasher anyway, it makes sense that this cutesy reboot would be rigorously engineered specifically “for the girlies and the gays.” What’s impressive is that it pulls off that girlish tone while still being the most violent entry in its series to date.

As with the original cast, the new I Know What You Did Last Summer crew is populated by young twentysomethings who are likely only famous to children (give or take whatever die-hard fans Chase Sui Wonders might have picked up from her turn as the least recognizable actor in Bodies Bodies Bodies). As with the original cast, they spend a reckless night partying on a public road by the fishing-village coast, leading to an anonymous stranger’s vehicular death. They do nothing to rescue or report in that moment of crisis, which seemingly leads to vengeance from beyond the grave the following summer, when a hook-handed killer in a fisherman slicker threatens them with notecards & puncture wounds. This reboot does not deviate from the narrative formula of the original, but it does deviate in tone & extremity. While the 1997 film kept most of its kills offscreen and cleanly preserved on fishing-boat ice, the new one leans into its R rating and throws in some additional fishing-themed tools of death to expand the killer’s arsenal: boning knife, anchor rope, harpoon gun, etc. Robinson also expands the horror-nostalgia scope to include allusions to other famous properties, borrowing the Jaws mayor’s refusal to postpone his town’s 4th of July celebrations, the Scream killer’s kitchen-island voyeurism, and some horror-nerd cred from references to podcasts like Colors of the Dark & This Ends at Prom. She balances out all of this genre-fan pandering by keeping the mood light, sassy, and gay. Same-sex couples, bisexual hookups, and a self-satisfied coining of the term “gentrifislaytion” align the film with other recent reclaimed-for-the-girlies horror titles like Do Revenge, Clown in a Cornfield, and 2021’s Slumber Party Massacre remake than traditionally macho horror-convention-bro fare. I don’t believe any of those titles are remarkably great films, but I also recognize that I am not their primary target audience. I was 12 years old when I watched the first I Know What You Did Last Summer in a suburban movie theater, duped into enjoying an afterschool-special melodrama about reckless driving because it was dressed up in the rain-soaked clothes of a post-Scream slasher. Today’s 12-year-olds now have a mediocre-to-everyone-else slasher of their very own here, just as lacking in distinct iconography but now doubly violent, fun, and queer-friendly. I think that’s beautiful.

-Brandon Ledet

Eddington (2025)

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I remember when the first reviews of Beau is Afraid were coming out, one of the earliest reports were of someone who stood up as the credits rolled and shouted, “I better not hear any fucking clapping!” I saw that movie by myself on a Saturday morning because I love a pre-noon matinee, but this time, I went to see Eddington with a group of friends. One friend left the theater for two extended periods of time, and I assumed that they weren’t feeling well until, standing outside after the 145-minute runtime had come to its conclusion, they expressed righteous indignation over the movie’s pace and momentum. Another friend stated that they also felt the film was overlong, especially its final act, and said he would rank it 3.5 stars. I was a little too tired to get into it that night, but I thought this one was great. It’s not as exceptional as Ari Aster’s previous work, but it’s just as confident and feels like a return to his more conceptually focused first couple of films. 

The film opens in May of 2020, and we learn a lot about Eddington, New Mexico fairly quickly. As the town’s resident vagrant (an unrecognizable Clifton Collins Jr.) approaches from the desert, we see that it’s not very large, maybe sixteen square blocks, and we learn later that a lot of what we do see is unoccupied. Just outside of town is the potential site for a new AI data center, the construction of which (and the accompanying “job creation”) are a center of the platform for Eddington mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is up for re-election. Garcia has followed gubernatorial guidelines for masking and social distancing, which has escalated what are likely long-term frictions between Garcia and Eddington’s sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), whose asthma makes him overly inclined to side with the “I can’t breathe with a mask” contingent. Cross’s home life is a nightmare; his mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) has moved into the home he shares with his wife Louise (Emma Stone), a temporary situation that has become extended, and which is further exacerbated by Dawn’s ceaseless, breathless repetition of too-online conspiracy ideas and justifications. There’s a shrine to Dawn’s late husband and Louise’s father, Joe’s predecessor as sheriff, in their already-cramped house, and Louise is clearly starting to be affected by the omnipresence of Q-addled discourse being broadcast in her home 24/7. She also makes creepy, Tim Burton-esque dolls that she sells on Etsy, unaware that all of her sales are coming from people that Joe pays back. Garcia’s house is a little more peaceful, as he parents his son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) solo while also running the town and a local bar. Without thinking it through or talking it over with his wife, he declares his own candidacy for mayor in the upcoming election, and he sets out to dethrone Garcia. 

This is not a stylish movie in the way that Beau or Midsommar were. It’s grounded, and for some, it may be too grounded. My frustrated friend grew very bored very quickly of how much of the film was taken up with people looking at their phones, which I think means that the film effectively captured the perpetual boredom (intercut with moments of intense existential dread) that came from the unfettered screentime that characterized the time period in which it’s set. Like a lot of real life conflict, many find themselves unable to invest in a film in which there are no characters to sympathize with or root for. Garcia is more than willing to sell out Eddington’s future by ensuring that the town will be rendered uninhabitable within a few decades—optimistically—by allowing its resources to be consumed by the data center, over the objections of the only person living in town who voices any dissent about what the project will mean to the town’s future. Later scenes set in his home also reveal him to be one of those toilet paper hoarders, which is a clever bit of visual storytelling in that it shows us that, for all his outward appearances of being progressive and compassionate, he’s susceptible to (and buys into) the same base panicky animal instincts shared by others. It would have been perhaps too pat a narrative if this selfishness in combination with his carelessness about the community and its environmental needs was compared to his acquiescence to COVID mandates put in place for the common good, and to have that realization of his hypocrisy be the catalyst for Joe’s mayoral campaign. Of course, that would also cause us to lend too much sympathy to Joe, and it’s important that we never think too highly of him or consider that any actions he takes could be reasonable on any level. Joe has to be detestable despite any sympathy that we may have for him as a result of what he’s dealing with at home; it’s imperative that he have no real ideals or ideology because the moment we can trace his violent impulses and their fallout to an internal ethical construction, we run into the danger of potentially empathizing with him. 

Every Aster protagonist prior to Joe is someone with whom we empathize, in part because their behavior stems from traumas that are completely external. In Hereditary, Toni Collette’s Annie has been driven to the point of madness by a lifetime of being gaslit by her cultist mother and the death of her daughter, so while her downfall is inevitable, it’s also relatable and understandable. In Midsommar, Florence Pugh’s Dani can come across as needy and difficult, but she’s dealing with the reality of her family’s tragic, horrifying death and the unspoken-but-not-unknown reality that her boyfriend is staying with her out of pity rather than compassion, duty rather than love. The title character in Beau is Afraid is impotent and pathetic, but his entire life is an endless nightmare constructed and architected by his mother in order to make him that way. Joe’s tragic flaw is entirely a matter of his pride. To the extent that his actions are affected by external circumstances, his acting out could be traced to the pandemic, but he’s not alone in dealing with that; literally everyone on Earth is dealing with the same problem. Beau’s world is designed to isolate and emotionally destroy him in a kind of actualization of the paranoid idea that “The world is out to get you,” while Joe is reacting to the events of very real time and place that we all experienced, but he (like many psychopathically individualistic people at that time) falls into the same paranoid trap. Beau was right; the world was out to get him. Joe, on the other hand, is very, very wrong. There’s not a single thing that Joe touches that isn’t worse for having come into contact with him, and every action that he takes results in making Eddington worse, less safe, and more fractured, and the events that spill out of Eddington into the rest of the world (notably the escalation of a Kyle Rittenhouse-esque figure to the national stage) also make everything worse. There’s no one to root for here, and that in combination with the laser-focus on a shaky, unsteady period of recent history makes for a movie that’s bound to alienate audiences despite its verisimilitude in comparison to the more surreal films in Aster’s C.V. I’ve loved all of his movies, but just as much as I wouldn’t blame someone for not enjoying Midsommar or Beau, I wouldn’t argue with someone who hated this movie because this is not a movie that’s meant to please. It’s doing something else. 

Not to keep putting this movie in conversation with all of Aster’s other work, but each of his movies have been about people on the verge, dealing with madness that works its way out of them. In this film, the madness is in everyone. Louise is a particularly pitiable figure, trapped in a place that she hates and surrounded by reminders of the past. Her father was sheriff before Joe, and her mother’s reverence for him seems to be a point of contention, with implication that he was abusive and that this abuse left Louise open to manipulation by Q-esque radical Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler). Peak is a curious figure here, as he had little real effect on the plot or on Eddington. Dawn, deep into her conspiracy rabbit hole, takes Louise to one of Peak’s meetings, where his improbable tale of childhood trafficking (which bears all the markings of false memory syndrome, if Peak even believes what he’s saying at all and isn’t merely being used to generate a cult of personality around himself) moves Louise to abandon her family and join him. Narratively, he simply removes Louise from the story, but on a more holistic level, he epitomizes the kinds of dangerous grifters who can emerge from times of social upheaval, and a demonstration of just how far-reaching their influence can be due to the rise of social media and larger communication infrastructure. He’s there for the same reason that goofy Sarah, the wannabe social justice influencer is: because Eddington is trying (and mostly succeeding) to create a panoramic externalization of the general American circumstances of 2020. And it works! For me, at least. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Play It as It Lays (1972)

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Eight summers ago, I attended nearly every screening of the Alamo Drafthouse’s summer series in my favorite genre, “Women on the Verge.” Two of those films, An Unmarried Woman and Puzzle of a Downfall Child, were such instant favorites of mine that they ended up as Movies of the Month the following year. I missed a screening of the difficult-to-find Joan Didion adaptation Play It as It Lays and have spent the intervening years cursing myself for the loss of this opportunity and eagerly anticipating another chance to check it out. Maybe it’s all that self-hype that left me cold upon finally getting the opportunity, or maybe it’s really not that great of a film, but I was not as captivated by this one as I was by the films alongside which it was initially brought to my attention. 

The film version of Play It as It Lays was directed by Frank Perry, who also helmed a couple of previous Movies of the Month, having directed 1968’s The Swimmer (a Brandon pick) and Britnee’s pick Hello Again (1987), and the film’s failures may have something to do with his vision, but not with his style. Play It as It Lays is a film that can charitably be described as incoherent, and while that incoherence is, as it was in the aforementioned Puzzle, a filmic tool used to demonstrate the internal life and fractured psyche of the film’s point of view character, it ends up making the film a bit too messy to fully understand. When reading the film’s summary on its Wikipedia page, the plot seems relatively straightforward, but it also seems like it’s relying on extratextual information (in this case, the plot of the novel on which it is based) to contextualize the narrative into something comprehensible; that’s cheating a bit, in my opinion. 

Tuesday Weld plays Maria Lang (nee Wyeth), an actress in her early thirties who narrates the film while walking the gardens of the institution in which she currently resides. In the flashbacks, she describes her early life, in which her parents moved from Las Vegas to a former mining town in rural Nevada that her father had won via gambling, a tiny nothing with a population of 28 which, by the time of the present narrative, no longer exists. She fell in love with and married Carter Lang (Adam Roarke), a respected independent director who cast her in his first film; he’s described as “a cult director with an eye for commerce” by one of his peers, and by the time the film’s proper narrative begins in the flashback, he and Maria are separated. There’s some implication that their falling out revolved around the decision to institutionalize their young daughter Kate, whose behavioral issues are on display when Maria visits her boarding school and witnesses her attack another child, which appears to be habitual. Maria’s only real friend is B.Z. Mendenhall (Anthony Perkins), a film industry friend of her husband’s with a family history of suicide and mental illness. Even if he weren’t already predisposed toward depression, his life situation, which sees him forced into a beard marriage to Helene (Tammy Grimes) at the behest of his controlling mother Carlotta (Ruth Ford), would make him miserable. Maria, who hasn’t acted in a while after damaging her career by walking off of a set a few years earlier, is convinced that Carter is having an affair with his new actress muse, Susannah (Diana Ewing), and she pursues a few lovers of her own, including a long term fling with widowed actor Les Goodwin (Richard Anderson) that results in a pregnancy, a brief affair with mob lawyer Larry Kulik (Paul Lambert) that ends unceremoniously, and an afternoon hook-up with TV actor Johnny Waters (Tony Young) that highlights just how self-destructive her behavior has become. 

Again, this all probably sounds fairly coherent, and not all that dissimilar from movies like Puzzle and other “Women on the Verge” pictures. Like those, where this does succeed most is in the strong performances from its leads. Maria isn’t inherently unlikable, but her generally nihilistic outlook makes it hard to root for her, since it’s all but impossible to imagine a better world or life for her; even her dream of living somewhere quiet and pastoral with Kate is clearly delusional. That Weld is able to imbue Maria with a sense of the personality-that-was when current Maria is disempowered and passive to the point of lethargy is a testament to the malleability of her talent, and when this film works it’s because she and Perkins make their characters feel like real, tangible people. Perkins’s B.Z. is an even more tragic figure than Maria, even if the film spends less time on his personal life. Of all of the men on screen, only B.Z. sees Maria for who she really is and the situation in which she finds herself because their dual alienation makes them kindred spirits. For Carter, Maria is a burden; for Kulik she’s just some good-looking company while he spreads money around Las Vegas; for Goodwin she’s the stand-in for the wife who committed suicide; for Johnny Waters she’s just a receptacle for his expression of sexual egotism. B.Z.’s relationship with her could be seen as just as selfish, as he sees her as a mirror for his own demons, but that projection isn’t incorrect and they really are birds of a feather. When he finally decides to end his life, as his father and grandfather did before him, he offers Maria the chance to follow him into the dark, holding out the pills he intends to consume to share with her, and although she declines, she holds his hand as he slips away. This the final straw that ends with her being institutionalized by Helene and Carter, but it’s also the purest expression of love that any two people show each other here. 

I have little love for the late film critic John Simon (to quote Roger Ebert, “I feel repugnance for [him]”), but he wasn’t wrong when he called Play It “a very bad movie.” Ebert himself gave the film his highest possible rating, but even he criticized the film’s material as thin in comparison to its smart direction and entrancing performances. That seems to be the consistent criticism of the film in reviews that I have found: praise for Weld and Perkins as performers and Perry for his directorial eye, with failures across every other metric. I won’t be breaking free of that paradigm, personally, since I feel the same way. This one might pair well with any of other films mentioned above as a foil or a conversation piece, but its narrative scaffolding wouldn’t hold up to a breeze, and it won’t stand up on its own. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

A History of Violence (2005)

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Last month, The New York Times published a list of what their contributors deemed to be the best films of the 21st century. I don’t subscribe to the NYT (their contribution to the regression of the Overton Window on the issue of trans rights is morally and ethically reprehensible), so I’ve only seen it in bits and pieces as screenshots and commentary made their way onto other platforms. A friend who’s more interested in the discourse than I am mentioned that the 2005 film A History of Violence was garnering a lot of late-blooming praise, and I said that I hadn’t really been all that interested in director David Cronenberg’s mid-career pivot from body horror to drama, but that I was willing to check it out (despite my overall apathy for The Shrouds, Crimes of the Future was excellent enough that I’m very pleased he’s returned to his roots). This particular friend and I do not always align on our feelings about films (he was the one who really hated Roger Corman’s The Raven), but by the time the credits rolled on this one, we were united in our bafflement over A History of Violence’s critical acclaim. 

Small town diner owner Tom Stall (Viggo Mortenson) has a peaceful life with his lawyer wife Edie (Maria Bello) and their two children, teenaged Jack (Ashton Holmes) and young Sarah (Heidi Haynes). In the film’s prologue, two hardened spree killers, Leland and Billy (Stephen McHattie and Greg Bryk), murder everyone they encounter at a rural hotel; when they make their way to Millbrook, Indiana, where the Stalls live, they make the mistake of attempting to rob Stall’s Diner and learn the hard way that Tom Stall is more than capable of defending himself and his customers. Tom’s heroic defense of his staff garners national media attention, prompting the arrival of mobster Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) in Millbrook, claiming that he recognizes Tom as low-level Philadelphia thug Joey Cusack, with whom he shares a violent history (naturally). Tom holds to his declaration that he has no idea what Fogarty’s talking about for as long as he can as he finds his life closing in around him: the revelation of his capacity for violence has led his bullied son to fight back against his tormentors, placing them in the hospital; his daughter is threatened by Fogarty and his men; the friendly local sheriff he’s known for decades no longer trusts him; Edie doesn’t even know who he is anymore and is shattered that her life, up to and including the name she took from her husband, is a lie. As “Tom Stall” begins to fade while “Joey” reasserts himself, the loving husband and father begins to be subsumed by the hair-trigger, foul-tempered thug, who finds himself on a headlong collision course with his brother, mafioso Richie Cusack (William Hurt). 

When this movie came to an end, my friend turned to me and asked why it was that so many film critics were taken with what he characterized as a “RedBox movie,” and I can’t say that I disagree. Although this film predates No Country for Old Men by a couple of years, its opening scene reflects an attempt by Cronenberg to echo the Coen Brothers’ western/neo-noir fusion as exemplified in 1984’s Blood Simple. This was happening at the nadir of the Coens’ career, in the wake of 2003’s fine-but-unremarkable Intolerable Cruelty and 2004’s atrocious The Ladykillers, and it almost feels like the Coens saw Cronenberg’s movie and were inspired to create a better version of this, spawning their resurgence that began with No Country. Additionally, while this film’s opening felt very much like “Cronenberg makes a Coen Bros movie,” the rest of the film settled into a “Cronenberg does Clint Eastwood” feeling. There’s a part of me that wants to give the very Canadian Cronenberg credit for attempting to tackle an inherently American genre and do so through an imitation of the viewpoint/lens of one of the most outspokenly “American” filmmakers, and while I think that’s at play here, that context doesn’t materially improve the film itself. I’ve never thought of Mortensen as being a good or bad actor, really, as I (like most people) think of him as Aragorn first and foremost, and he’s neither the strongest or weakest part of the Lord of the Rings films; at his worst, he’s still serviceable, and his very brief appearance as Lucifer in 1995’s The Prophecy is one of that film’s strongest parts. As much as I love large portions of Cronenberg’s CV, he’s never been an actor’s director, and the performances that he elicits from his actors has never been any of his films’ most interesting elements. No one is surprised by the depth of Stephen Lack’s characterization in Scanners or Oliver Reed’s in The Brood, and as he moved into the eighties the audience’s investment in Johnny in The Dead Zone and Brendel in The Fly comes from the natural charisma of Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum, respectively. If we’re being charitable, we could say that Mortensen’s portrayal of Tom/Joey here improves as he moves from one persona to the other, but he’s not the only person here giving a performance that doesn’t measure up to what we as an audience know these actors are capable of. Harris and Bello are the only people who seem to understand what the film requires of them, while Hurt is playing his role like he’s in a MadTV sketch mocking The Sopranos. 

It’s perhaps not altogether fair to compare this film to others that followed it in this genre. The easiest points of comparison would be films like John Wick and Nobody, which also see a man who’s buried his assassin past (or his history of violence, if you will) beneath a new life and is drawn back into it when his old life reasserts itself. Those films are more concerned with their action elements than with emotional resonance or the effect on the protagonists’ family life (the Wick films circumvent this almost completely by having John’s wife already having died before the first movie opens) so it may not be a very fair comparison, but that’s all that this film has going for it when held up alongside other films of equivalent narrative shape, and it’s not a very strong argument in favor of History. It’s a pale preamble to the more emotionally effective neo-westerns that followed shortly on its heels like No Country and There Will Be Blood, a weaker film when compared to the director’s previous works as it forsakes his strengths as a director (eliciting fascination and disgust in equal measure) and highlights his weaknesses (a lack of character depth), and is ultimately an unsatisfying experience. I’m not sure what it is that I’m missing that others are seeing as so praiseworthy. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Topaz (1969)

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Topaz is the answer to the question, “What if Alfred Hitchcock made a James Bond movie?” Admittedly, Hitchcock had already been making spy movies for literal decades at this point, with this one premiering nearly thirty years after Foreign Correspondent. One of Topaz’s detractors, Pauline Kael, went so far as to write that the film was “the same damned spy picture he’s been making since the thirties, and it’s getting longer, slower, and duller.” I don’t know that I agree with her about the first part, as this one feels quite different in approach to his other spy films that I’ve seen, but it certainly feels longer, moves more slowly, and doesn’t have the same panache. I watched it just a couple of days after seeing Foreign Correspondent at The Prytania, and although that film had a few moments where it started to slow down a little, it was also enlivened by the excellent mid-film car chase and windmill infiltration as well as ending on a high note with the spectacular climax in which a commercial airliner is shot down by German U-boats. In comparison, there’s nary a moment of spectacle in Topaz, with the suspense arising from the tension of international conflict and potential violence. On a more granular level, both films feature a scene in which someone is killed via being thrown out of a window and the audience is kept in suspense about the identity of the victim. In Correspondent, we watch the body being flung from a cathedral and it’s possible that our protagonist may be the one in danger, while in Topaz the body is merely found after the fact by the main character, and we’re initially led to believe it may be his son in law. It’s still excellently filmed and aesthetically pleasing, but it’s also not very special. 

The film is based on a novel by Leon Uris that was inspired by a real French-Soviet conspiracy that Uris’s friend had helped to foil, although the book took many liberties from reality and the film takes many from the novel. After an opening sequence in which a defecting KGB Colonel and his wife and daughter evade recapture by his countrymen in Amsterdam, he’s escorted to the U.S. in care of American secret agent Michael Nordstrom (John Forsythe). None of these people are our main character, however. That’s André Devereaux (Frederick Stafford), a French intelligence officer who operates under the guise of civilian business ventures. Before we even meet him, his colleagues confirm that they agree he is too close to the Americans, and he proves them right almost immediately by agreeing to help Nordstrom get pictures of a secret agreement between the Soviet Union and Cuba on behalf of the U.S., without looping in his own government. He hires a fellow French expat named Philippe (Rosco Lee Browne) to bribe the secretary of General Rico Parra (John Vernon) of Cuba to get this access, and he immediately sets out to Cuba himself following this, much to the chagrin of his long-suffering wife Nicole (Dany Robin). Nicole has heard gossip that Devereaux’s frequent trips to Cuba may have more to do with an affair he’s having with a woman named Juanita de Cordoba than with his duties to France and the free world, and although Devereaux denies it, we see that he goes straight to Juanita (Karin Dor)’s house the moment his plane lands. Some subterfuge happens on the island and Devereaux returns to the states to learn that his wife has left him and returned to Paris, that “Topaz” is the codename of a secret cabal of Soviet sympathizers within the French government, and that he’s being recalled to France to stand before a council regarding his extracurricular activities. With Nordstrom’s intelligence, he has to figure out who the leader of Topaz is before he’s called to stand trial. 

Does that seem like it should take nearly two and a half hours? I’m not sure. Just two years prior, 1967 saw the release of You Only Live Twice (my personal favorite Bond, albeit one of the more problematic ones), which clocked in at 106 minutes, and it certainly seems like a lot more happened in that film than in Topaz. And if that comparison seems like I’m leaping, bear in mind that one of the Bond girls in You Only Live Twice is Karin Dor, who’s one of the best parts of this film as Juanita. There’s a very clear attempt to ape the Bond house style here, with Devereaux having two love interests in the film, the focus on infiltration via impersonation, and most clearly in the prevalence of the gadgetry of spycraft, which the film spends a decent amount of time focusing on. When Devereaux arrives in Cuba, he brings along some cutting-edge photographic equipment along with long distance lenses and remote-control cameras with a range of half a mile. When he gets the information that he needs, information gets stored in a microdot disguised as a period on one of the keys of his typewriter, negatives are stored in the disposable razor blade cartridges, and film is hidden inside the spool of his typewriter ribbon. None of it is as outlandish as some of Q’s later gadgets, but it’s still neat to me, although I could imagine this kind of detail being tedious to others. Again, Kael wasn’t wrong when she said that Hitch’s spy flicks were getting slower. 

That’s not the real weak element here, however, as the major problem is just how uninteresting Devereaux is. One of the more exciting sequences in the whole film happens as he literally watches from across the street, as Philippe poses as a reporter for Ebony (he would prefer to pretend to be from Playboy, and when Devereaux refuses, Philippe teases him for his lack of imagination) and infiltrates the hotel where Rico Parra is staying in Harlem as a show of solidarity with the Black community in America. Philippe lures Parra out onto the balcony to take photos of him waving to the throng that has gathered below so that Parra’s secretary can slink away with the case containing the Cuba-Russia memo. There are several tense moments in which it seems like Parra is going to notice the missing briefcase, and he always seems just on the verge of discovery, until Philippe has just enough time to get the information and deliver it to Devereaux. It’s fantastically tense and the performance from Browne is terrific, and it’s made all the better as this may be the only time I’ve ever seen a Hitchcock film in which a Black actor has been given so much to do. Vernon’s Parra is also an incredibly sympathetic character, all things considered, as Vernon very effectively conveys the internal turmoil that Parra feels when he realizes that Juanita, whom he considers above reproach as she is a “widow of a hero of the revolution,” has been involved with Devereaux’s activities. There’s an entire world happening behind his eyes when he kills her upon discovery of her assistance in Devereaux’s espionage, ensuring that she will not be forced to undergo the same tortures that he has overseen enacted on others. In short, despite this being a cast of less well-known actors than the caliber usually on display in a Hitchcock film, everyone is doing excellent work except for the lead, who’s about as interesting as a block of wood.

If you can get past that protagonist-shaped void of charisma, there’s still a lot to enjoy here. The conspiracy itself is effectively convoluted, and there are a lot of individual moments that stand out. Juanita’s death scene, shot from above as her purple dress spreads around her like a flower or a pool of blood as she falls to the floor, is beautiful. There’s actual archival footage of both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in a sequence in which Devereaux attends a rally in Cuba, and that’s a lot of fun. The opening sequence, featuring Colonel Kusenov’s flight from the KGB, is marvelously tense, and although it doesn’t live up to the spectacle that we may have come to expect from the master of suspense, it certainly measures up in the suspense department. It seems that the presence of Devereaux’s daughter Michele (Claude Jade) and her husband Francois (Michel Subor) early on is merely incidental, only for them to come back in a major way in the film’s finale, with Francois’s remarkable skill at sketching portraits playing a huge role in the revelation of the identity of Topaz’s ringleader, “Columbine.” As a spy thriller, it’s constructed well, it just lacks the overall oomph that one expects from the director.

(Note: this review is of the 143 minute version of the film widely available in the U.S. and the U.K., rather than the 127-minute theatrical edition which doesn’t seem to have seen home video release in English-speaking markets since the 1987 laserdisc.)

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Foreign Correspondent (1940)

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I was recently in New Orleans for GalaxyCon 2025, so Brandon and I took advantage of being in the same place to go see the new James Gunn Superman and recorded a podcast about both it and M3GAN 2.0. Before we parted ways, he asked if I would be interested in joining him for The Prytania’s Sunday morning screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 classic Foreign Correspondent, and I’m glad that I was able to check it out. This isn’t the Master of Suspense at the very top of his game, but it’s damn near it. 

It’s 1939, the final days before WWII, and crime reporter John Jones (Joel McCrea) has been rechristened as “Huntley Haverstock” by the editor of the New York Morning Globe and sent to Europe to report on conditions there as well as interview a Dutch diplomat named Van Meer (Albert Basserman). Upon arrival, Jones/Haverstock immediately becomes smitten with the beautiful Carol (Laraine Day), but not before accidentally insulting her and her father Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall), the leader of the Universal Peace Party. Carol ultimately steps in as a speaker at the event where Jones planned to interview Van Meer, as the statesman is stated to have taken ill. When Jones meets him again in Amsterdam at the next stop on his tour, Van Meer seems not to recognize him and is gunned down by an assassin posing as a photographer moments later. A chase ensues as the car Jones commandeers to pursue the killer is driven by British reporter Scott ffolliott (George Sanders, of All About Eve) and he is accompanied by none other than Carol Fisher. The car bearing the murderer away seems to suddenly disappear when the group enters a stretch of road that crosses a vast field, unoccupied save for abandoned windmills. Jones decides to search about on foot while Scott and Carol attempt to catch up to the police, and although he discovers the hidden car and that Van Meer has actually been spirited away for interrogation while a duplicate was killed in his stead, by the time the police arrive, all evidence is gone. 

After recently watching the rather dour Frenzy (and following up this screening with a viewing of another dry Hitch picture, Topaz), the comedy in this one is refreshing. There’s a lot of hay made about the spelling of Scott’s last name, which is deliberately left un-capitalized. This is apparently a real English gentry practice, as the lack of consistent usage of capital letters across large swathes of British history meant that some documents utilized a double letter at the beginning of a name to indicate that it was a proper noun. When a more standardized capitalization scheme came about, some families worried that if their names were updated they might lose some deed or other if they were named “Folliott” and not “ffolliott.” Sanders is playing a wonderfully unconcerned dandy of a man who’s having a lot of fun with all of this espionage rigamarole, and although he’s serious when the moment demands it, he brings a light energy to the proceedings that is much appreciated given the subject matter. There’s also a delightful appearance from Edmund Gwenn (who would appear as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street seven years later) as a babbling, inept would-be assassin who’s sicced on Jones by the film’s twist villain. Rowley is theoretically supposed to act as Jones’s bodyguard but instead plans to lead him to his death, in a sequence that culminates in the steeple of a towering church, where Rowley’s attempts to push Jones to his doom are repeatedly interrupted by other sightseers and tourists. Jones and Carol are also quite charming together, even if it takes a while to move them past her initial antipathy toward him and their courtship, once this is surmounted, moves a bit too fast. 

The tension here is excellently done as well. The scene in which Jones sneaks around in the windmill and discovers the real Van Meer is very tautly directed, as is the scene in which Jones must sneak from one upper-story hotel room on an elevated floor to another in order to escape being silenced. Both are spectacular, but nothing can top the film’s climax, when Carol, Scott, Jones, and the apprehended antagonist/instigator are en route back to the United States just as WWII breaks out in Europe. Their commercial airliner is almost immediately shot at by a German U-boat and goes down, and the sequence is utterly marvelous, like something out of Final Destination. One unfortunate woman stands to voice her distress at the situation and her intent to contact the British consulate as soon as the plane lands, only to be shot to death by bullets that pierce the fuselage mid-sentence. Aside from a potentially improbable number of survivors, the plane crash is frighteningly realistic, and it put me slightly on edge given that I had a flight out of MSY that same day. At the film’s climax, Jones delivers an impassioned plea over the radio that resonates just as much now as it did then, even if no one ever uses the word “fascism” outright. 

The romance in this one is decent. It lacks the passion of Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief or the slow smolder between Kelly and Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. There are elements of Notorious here in the parallels between Carol here and Ingmar Bergman’s Alicia in that film, but to say more would spoil a major plot point. This one is pretty close in the Hitchcock timeline to his 1938 picture The Lady Vanishes, and the romance here plays out at the same accelerated pace as Lady, with the major difference being that the romantic couple in that film spent most of their screentime together investigating and their natural chemistry was a strong factor in selling the breakneck romance. McCrea is fantastic as a leading man, even if he was Hitchcock’s second choice (after Gary Cooper), and he’s great in all of his scenes, while Laraine Day is absolutely delightful as Carol Fisher, but the two spend just a touch too little time together on screen to sell it completely, and as such they never quite mesh despite each individual actor’s excellence. Sanders’s ffolliott is also very fun here, and is the perfect comedic relief that the film occasionally needs, when that role isn’t being fulfilled by Rowley falling out of a steeple. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

M3GAN 2.0 (2025)

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I was absolutely, utterly, desperately sick of seeing trailers for M3GAN 2.0 — months ago. I couldn’t wait for the movie to hit theaters not because I had any real interest in it, but because that would mean that I would finally be able to go to the theater safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t have to see that ad again. No more audio clips from Boyz II Men or Brittney Spears, no more “Hold on to your vaginas,” no more M3GAN in a wingsuit, no more “You threatened to pull out my tongue and put me in a wheelchair,” “I was upset!”, no more “She’s a smoking hot warrior princess.” The trailer is imprinted into my brain now to the point where I feel like I could quote it in the same vein as Jenny Nicholson’s full cover of the China Beach season one Time Warner DVD set. But after returning from a nice international holiday, despite nearly a full day of flight, I was too wired to sleep, and I happened to get back on a $5 Tuesday, so … why not? 

Since we’re already on the subject of the film’s marketing, it’s worth noting up top that the trailer for M3GAN 2.0 is very misleading. The “smoking hot warrior princess” line and all of the attendant implications thereof—that M3GAN has fans, that there’s a culture of weird online creeps who fetishize her, etc.—are completely absent here. M3GAN never offers Gemma (Allison Williams) up as a sacrifice in order to save Cady (Violet McGraw), and other lines that do appear in the film occur in completely different contexts. I’ve known people in the past who would consider this kind of trailer-to-film discrepancy to be a form of false advertising, and to whom no amount of explanation that trailers are often created months in advance of a movie’s final cut will mollify them. This instance, however, is a clear case of that misdirection working in the film’s favor, as the advertising undersold the final product, which itself overdelivered. The only real plot point that appears in the trailer that’s accurate to the film is that the sequel is going the Terminator 2 route by making the first film’s villain a protagonist in the second, defending the previous film’s survivors against a more advanced version of themself. It’s not at all what one would expect in a sequel to the unexpectedly successful first film, but I would argue that it manages to find its footing, at least insofar as a film this campy and over-the-top can. 

It’s been a couple of years since young Cady came to live with her Aunt Gemma following the death of her parents, and Gemma’s creation of a robotic “friend” for her troubled niece as a prototype for a toy line ending in disaster when M3GAN turned homicidal and killed four people. In the interim, Gemma has served a brief stint in prison and emerged from the other side as a passionate advocate for oversight in the tech industry, delivering (similar to but legally distinct) TED Talks, releasing a book about the dangers of AI, and partnering (perhaps even romantically) with a former cyber security guru named Christian Bradley (Aristotle Athari) to work on potential legal regulation. In all of this, she also seeks to highlight that what M3GAN represented: a potential opportunity for guardians to outsource many of the duties of parenting to technology as part of a greater social movement toward automating and alienating the things that make us human. Ironically, throwing herself into this new passion project with such fervor causes her to be less present for Cady in exactly the same way that her robotics work did in the first film. On a greater scope, Colonel Tim Sattler (Timm Sharp) has loaned out an android soldier based on M3GAN’s original specs to a foreign government to demonstrate its proficiency, only for AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) to go rogue almost immediately. After killing the hostage that she was supposed to liberate, she begins systematically tracking down and killing everyone involved with her creation, including the arms dealer who brokered her sale to the government and the technocrat Alton Appleton (Jemaine Clement) whose shady activities related to his products means that he is the only one who could shut her down remotely. When armed men show up in the middle of the night, M3GAN reveals that she’s actually been staying close in a technologically ethereal form this whole time, and offers to help stop AMELIA, in exchange for a new body. 

I saw this in an empty theater. Sure, it was a 10:15 PM screening, but it was also $5 movie night, which is usually packed. As I waited to buy my ticket, I watched as a couple of families with elementary aged children brought in blankets and other cozy accoutrement to settle in for a late screening of the new Jurassic Park World movie. No one was there for M3GAN 2.0 but me. One of my quirks is that I rarely laugh out loud when I’m watching a movie by myself. It’s not because I feel the need to perform enjoyment in the presence of others so much as it is that I think there’s an element to comedy that’s social. It might just have been the travel exhaustion, but I found myself laughing aloud at multiple points in this film, especially in the back half. Of all the horror flick classic killers the easiest comparison would be to compare M3GAN to Chucky, since they’re both killer dolls, but when it comes to character, M3GAN has a bit of the Freddy Krueger about her. She’s sarcastic, quippy, and often just plain mean, with only one overriding and eternal imperative: protect Cady. What doesn’t take the edge off of her character is the character growth she’s undergone between the first two films as a result of watching Gemma and Cady as a kind of techno omniscience, to the point that her Cady-based directives have evolved into genuine affection and care, or she’s gotten quite good at pretending this is the case. She’s still M3GAN, and I still enjoyed her presence, even if she’s in a completely different movie. What’s not to love? 

(Listen to me and Brandon discuss M3GAN 2.0 more here.)

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Son of Godzilla (1967)

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Godzilla’s titular offspring in the 1967 kaiju comedy Son of Godzilla doesn’t officially have a name, or at least he didn’t yet. Between the film’s release and the character’s return in the following year’s Destroy All Monsters, Toho held a contest for Godzilla fans to name the reptilian tyke, and the world settled on the name “Minilla,” a portmanteau of “Mini” and “Godzilla”. In his initial appearance, however, he’s only referred to as “Baby Godzilla” by the humans on the ground gazing up at his towering, toddling glory. Minilla has gone on to become a viciously hated name within the larger, ongoing Godzilla fandom. He’s cited in online sources as Godzilla’s “adopted son,” but I’m not sure that his initial appearance backs that detail up either. In Son of Godzilla, Baby Godzilla is prematurely hatched from a mysterious egg when his nest is discovered by gigantic mantises (Kamakuras) looking for an easy meal. Before he can gather the strength to flee, he is immediately rescued by Godzilla, who is summoned by his pathetic cries for help. There is no appearance or mention of a mother figure who might have laid that egg, but the scientists & freelance reporter watching from the ground all immediately refer to Godzilla as the pitiful creature’s father. The King of Monsters takes on that responsibility with enough gusto that the question of their biological relation is beside the point. Godzilla teaches Baby Godzilla how to breathe fire and how to rule over the giant bugs that infest the small island where he hatched, like a dad teaching his son how to play catch or how to change a car’s engine oil. It’s all very cute, assuming that you can stand looking directly at the mini-Godzilla’s craggly face.

Baby Godzilla is cute in the exact way that a pathetically ugly rescue dog is cute. Every bumbling minute spent with him is a gift, since it’s a miracle he wasn’t immediately put down. When the giant mantises poke at his freshly hatched body, all he can do is roll around in the dirt like a waterlogged roast turkey that fell off the kitchen table. Minilla has neither a name nor a neck in his first appearance, the latter of which presumably develops during puberty for his species. He falls down constantly, he squawks like an injured donkey, and his every movement is scored as if he were an overweight clown trying to squeeze himself into an impossibly tiny car. I love him. The great thing about Godzilla movies is that they are, at their very least, 2-for-1 creature features that double the number of rubber-suited monsters you’d expect to see in an equivalent Roger Corman cheapie. Whether Godzilla’s fighting a three-headed hell beast, a giant crawfish, or a sentient pile of trash, you’re getting at least two monsters for the price of one. For its part, Son of Godzilla offers you four giant beasts: Godzilla himself (who graciously appears less than a minute into the opening scene), the aforementioned glowing-eyed Kamakura mantises, a giant spider named Kumonga and, the most unholy abomination of all, Baby Godzilla. That’s a lot of bang for your buck, so it’s a little silly that dedicated fans of the series waste so much energy complaining about this outing just because they have to babysit Godzilla’s uggo offspring to get to the good stuff. Not even Godzilla bodyslamming Kamakuras to death and then lighting their mantis corpses on fire is enough to overcome the film’s reputation as Kiddie Junk, à la Godzilla vs Megalon. Pity.

As always, the human drama in the periphery of these kaiju battles is mostly an afterthought. Director Jun Fukuda continues the fun island hangout vibe he previously established in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, putting in a bare-minimum effort to connect the kaiju shenanigans to an obligatory environmental message. A secret collective of environmental scientists has taken over a small island off the Japanese coast to conduct experiments in controlling the weather, in preparation for future climate change & overpopulation crises. Mysterious machines whir in the background while the scientists float balloons full of experimental chemical compounds into the atmosphere that can adjust the local temperature on demand. A freelance journalist crashes the party but ultimately doesn’t find these experiments nefarious, so he casually joins the crew as a cook (and a potential lover for the island’s sole resident, who lurks in the nearby jungle). The weather machine business does eventually come in handy in two ways, though. It offers Godzilla some miniature structures to knock down, as is his wont, and it sets up a graphically beautiful conclusion in which the scientists trigger a snowstorm that freezes Godzilla & Baby Godzilla into forced hibernation. The final image is of the parent & child huddling for warmth as they’re buried alive in snow, while the scientists escape the island via raft and congratulate themselves on a humane resolution to the monster attacks. Admittedly, they do find a way to escape without killing Godzilla’s baby, but I still found the image to be hauntingly sad. Baby Godzilla has a fucked up little face that only a parent could love, and Son of Godzilla vividly illustrates that cold isolation from an otherwise unkind world in its final minute. It’s almost enough to make you cry.

-Brandon Ledet