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Did you watch it while eating a big bowl of chocolate ice cream?



I've watched Salo twice at home and once in a theater. And then gave a copy to my friend for Christmas.


I was also considering another rewatch just recently.


I still honestly don't know what I think about it, but I obviously find it compelling enough to repeatedly subject myself to it.



Did you watch it while eating a big bowl of chocolate ice cream?

Which movie was this a reference from again? Something, something, nurse Ethel?


I have to say, I don't think I've ever seen ice cream with that texture before.


I think.


I had to cover my eyes for the circle of shit, after a while and basically could only see the subtitles.



I've watched Salo twice at home and once in a theater. And then gave a copy to my friend for Christmas.


I was also considering another rewatch just recently.


I still honestly don't know what I think about it, but I obviously find it compelling enough to repeatedly subject myself to it.

For the first time, I have to wonder if you're unwell.


Granted, being someone who is repelled by scat might be heavily influencing my reception of this movie.



For the first time, I have to wonder if you're unwell.


Granted, being someone who is repelled by scat might be heavily influencing my reception of this movie.

What I'm fascinated by in this movie isn't so much the cruelty that it is so well known for, but the compliance to that cruelty. It's almost like the whole film sleepwalks through its atrocities. I find it almost hypnotizing. An effect that isn't helped by the fact that, if you look past the subject matter, it's a beautul looking film.


As always I am obsessed with contrasts. And while it would be impossible to say I enjoy Salo, it's mix of the sublime and the wretched, the violent and the silence surrounding the violence, gets to me.


Then there is also the fact that the end is one of the great nightmares ever put on film.


As for the scat stuff, that's what kept me away from it for so long. That is the mother of all no no's for me. But I actually found that scene almost passable since, by the time you get to it, your already so desensitized you hardly seem to notice anymore than the characters.


Merry Christmas!



I think I've seen Straight Outta Hell. A long time ago when I was working in bars I'm pretty sure I came home and watched it in the middle of the night, probably loaded to the ****, and just sitting there and hating it.


All I remember is the hate.



What I'm fascinated by in this movie isn't so much the cruelty that it is so well known for, but the compliance to that cruelty. It's almost like the whole film sleepwalks through its atrocities. I find it almost hypnotizing. An effect that isn't helped by the fact that, if you look past the subject matter, it's a beautul looking film.


As always I am obsessed with contrasts. And while it would be impossible to say I enjoy Salo, it's mix of the sublime and the wretched, the violent and the silence surrounding the violence, gets to me.


Then there is also the fact that the end is one of the great nightmares ever put on film.


As for the scat stuff, that's what kept me away from it for so long. That is the mother of all no no's for me. But I actually found that scene almost passable since, by the time you get to it, your already so desensitized you hardly seem to notice anymore than the characters.


Merry Christmas!

Unfortunately for me, I was not desensitized enough for the Circle of Shit.


I have no idea how the Circle of Blood would have played of I hadn't been broken by the Circle of Shit first.

Something about some of those things happening in a context outside of a Lucio Fulci film played a lot more rough, painful, and harrowing. I guess because of the fascist setting and the way people were carted off to this depraved hell, brought to mind, presumably some of the dynamics of the Holocaust.


Though the structure of, "let's get a prostitute telling their 'erotic' tale of some type of kink their clients loved, and then let's enact it on a mass scale with these children," didn't play narratively satisfying enough for the discomfort of watching the pain happen.


I don't know, I never denied the artistry of the film on watching it, but it was also the reward/pain ratio wasn't nearly high enough for me to ever consider the possibility of a revisit.


That said, it was a blind buy, so it's in the collection now, until I can pass it off to someone else to suffer, like The Ring.



Thanks for the TIFF reports, by the way. I don't remember if I acknowledged any of your reviews specifically but I've added a few to the watchlist based on your writeups. (I cannot confirm if Sanctuary was one of them. )
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I actually just had chocolate ice cream. Actually hazelnut flavoured gelato, but close enough. Delicious, would recommend.



I think I've seen Straight Outta Hell. A long time ago when I was working in bars I'm pretty sure I came home and watched it in the middle of the night, probably loaded to the ****, and just sitting there and hating it.


All I remember is the hate.
It annoyed me plenty while sober, so between the two of us I think we’ve given it a fair shake.



I watched Robbe-Grillet's L'Immortelle.
Definitely feeling the most Marienbad DNA in that one compared to the others. Apart from a rewatch of Trans-Europ-Express (probably after October), that means I've exhausted the three films on KinoNow. I'm now ordering physical media for some of his other movies.


Eden and After currently looks the most intriguing. Or tantalizing. Or at least has "S&M" written into the plot synopsis.



Godzilla vs. Kong (Wingard, 2021)




This review contains mild spoilers.

The last time Godzilla and King Kong fought, the former was still a villain, or at least a monster of whom we should be fearful (human motivations perhaps don't apply to such creatures), having been established as a destructive force in a few prior films, and the latter was the more heroic one. (It wouldn't be for a few more films until Godzilla, like the Terminator, became a good guy, and with his belly-rubbing-and-hopping dance in Invasion of Astro Monster, achieved an official Cute designation. Membership fees are a few hundred a year, but if you're lucky, your employer foots the bill, and you get a few extra letters at the end of your name.) This time, well, we're a few entries into this new shared universe franchise, and we've spent enough time with our giant scaly and furry friends to know that neither one is bad deep down, and even though the movie sets one up as a heel to force some confrontations, astute viewers can guess that something is up.

I normally find shared universes exhausting in modern cinema (I shouldn't have to do a dozen movies' worth of homework to understand why one jag-off in pantaloons is punching out another jag-off in pantaloons). But I find them a lot more palatable with the kaiju movie, as here the plots very much don't matter so any excuse to bring together different monsters is welcome. Like with the Showa era classics, the human characters are very much secondary to the proceedings, but I think it's worth pondering the differences in worldviews between the two iterations. Matt Zoller Seitz goes into it with a lot more thoughtfulness than I can muster in this great piece for Vulture, but essentially where Ishiro Honda believed in the sanctity of institutions and that humans were capable of altruistic actions that had an actual impact, these new movies view human intervention somewhere between misguided and actively detrimental. I won't pretend I have any great insights here, but this tale of a giant lizard duking it out with a giant gorilla does hit a certain way when the tension between individual actions and institutional response to systemic problems and the Coronovirus pandemic have been on a lot of our minds.

That being said, it doesn't make the human scenes all that much more compelling, and a supposed twist involving Demian Bichir becomes as much as a surprise as the fact that can't trust the president of Cuba, a person whom Bichir once portrayed. I will say that I was more engaged when we spent time with the unexpectedly attractive smarty pants scientist types played by Rebecca Hall and Alexander Skarsgard and the unexpectedly attractive representative of the military industrial complex played by Eiza Gonzalez, and found the rapport between Hall and the deaf-mute child Kaylee Hottle fairly involving by the standards of these movies. I was much less involved when we hung out with Millie Bobby Brown, who was in one of these movies previously, her annoying friend Julian Dennison, and a conspiracy theorist played by Bryan Tyree Henry, who is very much in "Li'l Rel Howery in Get Out" mode.

I also watched this on a flight, which is perhaps not the ideal way to experience a movie of this scale. Which is to say, I found the monster carnage diverting enough and relatively colourful, but found it lacked the grandiosity of the 2014 Godzilla, the phantasmagoric qualities of King of the Monsters and the giddy textural pleasures of Kong: Skull Island. And the CGI very much felt like CGI to me, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't prefer the more concrete pleasures of people in suits knocking over cardboard sets, like in the previous confrontation between the two titular characters.



Top Gun (Scott, 1986)



I rewatched the first half of this a week ago on a flight, in a 4:3 aspect ratio, horizontally squeezed (not even cropped), and still managed to enjoy myself. (The primary advantage was that Tom Cruise looked taller with the image squeezed in, or stretched vertically.) Now, on a different flight, I've managed to rewatch the rest of the movie, in a slightly more dignified cropped presentation, making time to watch the opening with Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone" and then skipping to where I left off. This is close to an ideal way to experience the movie, as you excise much of the DOA romance between Cruise and Kelly McGillis and instead are treated to a series of flight sequences, dick swinging (not literal, although it might as well be) and pensive brooding, the movie distilled to its essence of gorgeous planes and the gorgeous men who fly them. The fighter jets glisten like the abs of the male cast in the notorious volleyball scene, always, always captured in that perfect magic hour glow.

Every image in this movie is framed and lit so immaculately that they can't help but feel loaded with meaning. And that meaning is "USA! USA!" I'm not going to wring my hands too much over the movie's politics (it's so obviously propagandistic that it seems like a waste of time to get worked up over it), but will note as I've probably done previously and certainly others have over the years, that the fact that it limits itself mostly to training sequences and refuses to clearly define the enemy means that it's more effective in that respect. One, it's a movie you feel, rather than think about, and it's easier to be moved by pure vibes than clearly articulated geopolitics. Two, the climax gets a lot less cool when you realize that it was inspired by the 1981 Gulf of Sidra incident, in which American F-14s were fired on by Su-22 Fitters belonging to Libya, a significantly less intimidating enemy than the euphemistic Soviet presence implied in this movie.

This is a problem that didn't bother Iron Eagle, released in the same year, which features an opening confrontation also inspired by the incident and later has its Gaddafi stand-in get in a fighter jet to go after the heroes. ("I am coming for you, Iron Eagle.") That movie also takes a much more hardline political stance. For all its jingoism, Top Gun concedes that naval pilots don't make geopolitical decisions. ("Now, we don't make policy here, gentlemen. Elected officials, civilians, do that. We are the instruments of that policy.") Iron Eagle explicitly decries the Reagan administration's attempt to negotiate with its enemies (full disclosure: I've paraphrased the line about holding aces and twos during work discussions) despite having praised it earlier, and insists that the only solution to such problems is to bomb our enemies back to the stone age. Diplomacy is for pussies.

I chased this with a rewatch of the sequel, and while I very much enjoy both movies, it is worth noting the differences between the two. The original was still establishing Cruise as a star, does it's darnedest to make him look as cool as possible. The sequel, well, it still makes him look pretty cool, but gives him a few self-deprecating moments and pointedly frames him against much taller actors. It also gains quite a bit of mileage from the distinct way in which Cruise has aged, as if he tried to resist wrinkles out of sheer willpower, (I'm sure there are less impressive and possibly sinister reasons for his appearance), especially compared to someone like Val Kilmer, whose appearance is a lot more frail in comparison. In the original, the bulk of the male cast had an almost uniformly sleek and handsome look, so that anyone who didn't fit into that mould, like Tom Skerritt, Michael Ironside and James Tolkan, automatically had some texture added to their performances. I think Anthony Edwards benefits a bit from that contrast as well, and this is one area where I think the sequel suffers. Edwards is almost effortlessly likable, to the point that we would be tempted to root for him even if his character were, I dunno, perpetrating sex crimes like in Revenge of the Nerds. In contrast, Miles Teller, who plays his son in the sequel, is anything but, and resembles Sean Penn more than Edwards, and the movie has to cheat to have us sympathize with him by placing Glen Powell in a heel turn. One wonders if Powell might have made a better foil for Cruise in the sequel, he's prickly in a way that brings to mind Kilmer in the original. (Really, I would have liked to see them shoehorn Edwards back, perhaps in a different role, but I'm pretty sure audiences wouldn't go for it.) I think the original has a more memorable cast on average, although I confess I still couldn't tell the difference between Hollywood and Slider and am not convinced they're not actually the same person.

The sequel is also more of a "real" movie, in that it builds its plot around a clear climactic mission and spends most of its runtime building up to it. It certainly traffics in cliches, but puts in the work to pull them off for the most part. The original's cliches are more in the form of ready made "iconic" moments, that I suppose have managed to become iconic, thanks to the forcefulness of Tony Scott's style. But it's relative inattention to plotting means that the climax is more impressive in that it manages to be visually coherent without the mission parameters having been hammered into our head or even clear geographic signifiers to orient us. But who am I to complain. They're both great action sequences, and in both cases, I was internally hooting and hollering and shedding a tear or two when the good guy planes were blowing up the bad guy planes.




Demonoid (Zacarias, 1981)



The fact is, people going into an R-rated ‘80s horror movie can expect two things with reasonable certainty: blood and gore, and T&A. Okay, that was four things. Violence and sex. That’s two things. Unless you’re keeping a running count, in which it’s six. But those are things that the opening scene of Demonoid delivers. We see a bunch of people in yellow hooded robes fighting each other. (The costumes look like if the KKK had a mishap on laundry day.) Turns out one of them is a lady, so the other two tear her robe open to reveal her breasts, and then lop off her hand and put it in a fancy hand-shaped box. (It’s not clear why they tore her robe open if they were just gonna lop off her hand, but whatever, I’m not complaining.) Now, I hope you got your fill of violence and sex with that one scene, because those are two things the movie never delivers on again. Okay, there’s a bit of blood here and there, but nowhere in the quantities the opening scene might have primed you for. As you can guess from the description, that opening scene is metal as ****. The flashes of (presumably) the titular demonoid, seen in silhouette against a foggy background that the movie throws in during choice moments? Pretty metal too. The rest of the movie? About as metal as, I dunno, Air Supply? Seals and Crofts? Not very, is what I’m saying.

Now, after that opening scene, we flash forward to present day, when a husband and wife explorer team find that hand-shaped box in a mine and foolishly unleash its reign of terror into the world. The husband is played by Roy Jenson, who looks like he could play Jess Franco in a TV biopic, likely one without any nudity, so we’d get lots of scenes of him adjusting his zoom lens and maybe a few where he hugs the Lina Romay lookalike they hired. The wife is played by Samantha Eggar, who most will recognize as the stand-in for David Cronenberg’s crazy ex-wife in The Brood. Here she is not so crazy, but is certainly a welcome presence as she brings a certain level of class and poise to a movie about a killer hand. She’s also a welcome presence because she has nice marble-shaped eyes which come in handy during her many reaction shots, and sports terrific hats in a couple of scenes. Jenson doesn’t stick around too long in the movie (although not before he runs into Haji of Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! fame), so Eggar enlists the help of a priest played by Stuart Whitman, who brings an off-brand Father Karras energy to the role. (I know of Whitman because of his role in Guyana: Cult of the Damned, a movie I haven’t seen but is cited as the premier dictatorsploitation movie in Bill Landis’ Sleazoid Express. The only movie in the genre I’ve seen is Amin: The Rise and Fall, which is very boring but has a convincing Idi Amin in Joseph Olita. The most memorable scene has him boasting of his romantic prowess. "Let me tell you, I'm the world's greatest lover. They all want Amin! Right, baby?") It’s mentioned that the hand is trying to make it’s way to Eggar, but the decisions it makes don’t line up too clearly with that objective.

As I mentioned earlier, this is a movie about a killer hand, or rather, a series of killer hands as the spirit of the hand jumps from one host to the next. What this means is that we get a lot of hand-centric scenes of horror, like characters tearing off their hands with a car door or demanding emergency surgery at gunpoint to have their hand sliced off. (I assume the latter scene takes place at a clinic that specializes in hand surgery.) A lot of this is directed with the lowest energy imaginable, giving such scenes an amusing deadpan quality. There is however a car chase that the movie commits wholeheartedly to, blaring dramatic chase music (the wah wah pedal gets plenty of use), and the climax, set in a church with the lights turned down and a bit of a breeze coming in, is not without atmosphere. And it must be said that the hand effects look nicer than one might expect.

Listen, this is eighty minutes long and available in a nice transfer on Tubi. If you can get on its low wattage wavelength, you won’t miss those eighty minutes.




Inferno (Argento, 1980)




I last watched this around eight years ago, and at the time found it to be one of my least favourite Argentos. I must have been in a bad mood at the time, because revisiting it now, it’s gone up significantly in my esteem. So naturally I went back to my old review and tried to unpack, at least for my own benefit, what my issues were at the time and why it worked better for me this time around. I think the most obvious one is a change in perspective. At the time I’d only seen a handful of Argento’s work, and when you compare something something that might not be the absolute best thing a director has done to a bunch of movies that are considered some of the best horror movies ever made, it’s expected that the comparison might not be entirely flattering to the former. But when you’ve seen a bunch more movies from the man, including something like The Card Player with its interminable scenes of characters staring at screens while sluggish video poker animations play out in real time, a movie where more interesting things happen onscreen goes down a whole lot better.

I do think I had a point with my narrative criticisms. Probably the most jarring thing about Inferno is that it essentially resets a few times. We first follow Irene Miracle as she searches for some sort of key hinted at by the cryptic book she reads. Then we follow Eleonora Giorgi, who finds herself tangled in the same mystery. Without spoiling the movie too much, things don’t end terribly well for either of them. Then we switch to Leigh McCloskey, who plays Miracle’s brother and tries to find out what happened to her. You can compare this to Suspiria, to which this is a sequel of sorts, and note the differences in approach. Neither movie is terribly concerned with tying out the details of plot and character, but in the earlier movie, we mostly stick with our heroine played by Jessica Harper for most of the movie, so that we navigate through the proceedings along with her. In both movies, the protagonists are essentially audience surrogates, but in Suspiria, you can see Harper inject a degree of her personality into the movie. She arguably doesn’t need to do a lot of serious acting, given the forceful presence of the director’s hand in moving us along the story, but the mixture of inquisitiveness and trepidation she brings to the role make her character feel recognizably human and sympathetic. She is very much someone I found myself rooting for to make it through the movie.

Here, the performance of McCloskey especially can be described as Bressonian, his expressions pared down to the barest minimum so that he becomes purely a means of navigating the story. Arguably this makes him a more efficient audience surrogate, in that he doesn’t have a whole lot of personality of his own and we can project ourselves more directly onto him. In that sense the movie has a certain video game quality to its storytelling, with McCloskey, Giorgi and Miracle as player characters fully taking on the personality of the player/viewer. The resetting quality of the narrative and the shifts between the protagonists line up with this as well. Lose a life. Repeat the level. The expendability of the protagonists manifests in another, more physical kind of tension. These movies are essentially about seeing graphic violence happen towards characters we identify with or are supposed to care about. I think of a few shots of Irene Miracle’s exposed neck and Daria Nicolodi’s bare feet, where the characters feel almost poignantly vulnerable. (I think Nicolodi is probably the warmest character in the movie, in that her presence manages to come through despite the movie downplaying human emotions as aggressively as it does.) Flesh is fallible, the blade is not.

As for my other criticism of the film’s technical aspects, I’m trying to figure out what the hell I might have been on at the time because on a rewatch, I think this very obviously looks great. Very few directors know how to frame, light and cut an image like Argento, and at least one of the few who operate on that level, Mario Bava, worked as an assistant director on this movie (doing second unit work while Argento was sick with hepatitis), so you know you’re in good hands. The building in which the bulk of this is set is stylized so aggressively that it can’t help but feel inviting despite being undeniably sinister. Wouldn’t you like to spend a little time walking around in this movie? That being said, I’ll go easy on myself and note that no, this doesn’t look exactly like Suspiria. The change in aspect ratios means that this doesn’t feel as grandiose as the 2:35 images of the earlier movie. And the lighting scheme here feels even more artificial and insular. Whatever traces of natural light can be glimpsed in the other movie have been almost completely eliminated here. Characters speak multiple times of a strange odour, and I imagine if I stepped into this movie, it would feel like I was hit with a wall of perfume applied too liberally, suffocating in its strength. Suspiria breathes and moves in a certain way. Inferno kind of sits there and lingers. There’s also the Keith Emerson score, which I found myself warming up to this time around. It compares unfavourably to the Goblin and Morricone scores that other Argentos have benefited from, but as a relatively traditional score, I think it’s reasonably effective (even if it switches to Verdi during one of the movie’s more boisterous highlights). And the fact is, I listen to “Mater Tenebrarum” with some frequency.

And of course, this is an Argento movie, meaning that we have a number of great murder scenes, where flesh and blood are just more colours in the movie’s stylized palette. It also means there are a number of endearingly goofy moments, most notably a scene where Nicolodi has a bunch of cats thrown onto her (which Argento still directs the shit out of, bless his heart) and another where an old man tries to drown a bunch of cats, falls into a bunch of rats, cries for help, only for his supposed saviour to stab the bejesus out of him. (Again, Argento does his darnedest to direct this with style and force some tension into the happenings.) If the movie truly challenges one’s suspension of disbelief, it’s in an early scene where Ania Pieroni pets a cat while glaring at McCloskey during a lecture. One, it’s very unlikely that Pieroni would have been able to bring a cat into class. Two, if she did, it’s unlikely that the other students would have maintained decorum and wouldn’t instead have lined up to also pet the cat. But then you remember that this is a supernatural horror, and that Pieroni’s magic powers might circumvent the realities of such a situation. What do I know. Pieroni’s eyes are supernaturally striking. The cat is supernaturally fluffy.