My 2025 Watchlist Frenzy!

I run at about half the speed these days as I did when I started making these watchlist threads last year, mainly because I have so much movie-watching to do outside of my watchlist films, and I'm making a concerted effort to squeeze everything in. So, my movie-count for the first two months of 2025 is what used to make a respectable single month last year : 25. It's a number that usually gives me the best mix of classics and great movies, and as usual I managed to see some pretty astounding works of cinematic art that I won't be forgetting any time in a hurry. Looking forward, there's a lot of great stuff to come - I always get excited when I peruse the next 50 or so titles up for watching and reviewing, because they all look so good.


I have to add some honorable mentions here - Falcon Lake, The Seventh Continent, Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle, Black Book, Empire of Passion and Heroes For Sale were great - so much so that it's really striking to me that I can only give them this quick mention. All are recommended for those who haven't seen them.

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I was smiling while watching this movie careen through it's final act - there are some situations where a descent into absolute insanity works in a film's favour, and this is definitely one of those occasions. Evil Dead Trap is a horror film from Japan, but throughout most of it's runtime those familiar with the genre will easily identify how inspired this was by Italian giallo movies, and more specifically those of Dario Argento. The manner in which characters die, and the copycat giallo-inspired score from Tomohiko Kira, are only two of many factors that confirm this. The movie starts with a videotape being sent to TV show host Nami Tsuchiya (Miyuki Ono) - a gruesome snuff film in which the murder takes place at an identifiable location. Nami and a team from the television station go to investigate the area, which happens to be an abandoned military base. As the title of the film clues us in on, this is an obvious trap and soon enough our characters searching around the joint are picked off and killed in various brutal ways. Almost immediately, Nami encounters a mysterious stranger, Daisuke Muraki (Yuji Honma), whose cryptic comments hint at a deeper understanding of the situation. Will this be a career saver, or life ender for our intrepid TV host?

I haven't been watching many of these movies in recent years - a change from my teenage years, where I was constantly on the lookout for horror movies like this. I still love horror, but my taste has swayed from slasher to supernatural and/or psychological-type fare. Out went gory killing in favour of mystery, folk tales, ghosts, demons and madness. Evil Dead Trap did have a surprise in store for me though, as it pivots at a certain stage from straightforward murder to something far more crazy and certainly off the beaten track. I still like to judge death scenes in movies like this though - there's an art to making them scary and confronting without tipping the balance and becoming offensive, and in many giallo films a concoction that mixes cruelty, novelty and splashy garish gruesomeness make many a killing memorable. The same goes for this film for the most part - although I really could have done without the rape, which is incongruous as it is when the perpetrator's identity is fully explained. It just so happens that the snuff film at the start manages to be the most gory, and the main focus on the film as a whole is an investment in tension as characters try to make their way around their dangerous landscape, with their lives at times ending when they trigger this or that particular trap set up by an as yet unidentified killer. I did feel it was a little lacking for my taste until the final act twist brightened everything up considerably.

Popular with horror fans, Evil Dead Trap is in my Asia Shock book by Patrick Galloway and gets many glowing reviews on various websites. It's a good homage - I'll give it that - a very neat transference of the kind of stuff I've seen in the likes of Suspiria both visually and sound-wise. The use of various abandoned buildings as a location is something I've seen plenty of times before - very suited to this kind of movie, and cheap (in terms of dollars, the film's budget is around half a million.) It seems most criticism was aimed at the film's ending - but I don't really see things that way when it comes to this movie. It is a change of "complete schism" proportions as far as tone and general story is concerned, but this isn't The English Patient we're talking about here and I couldn't imagine a more fun way to end than what we got with the revelation as to who/what has been the driving force behind the death and horror at the core of the movie. If it had of been more reasonable and sane, I don't think I'd have liked the movie as much as I do, and that smile wouldn't have been there. There are plenty of little pluses - the POV, black & white tracking shots which shake us up as they play loud and run at double speed do enhance the mood, the eclectic set decoration and sudden, inexplicable explosions all add a ton of charm. I think I would have absolutely loved this when I was 15 or 16-years-old.

Glad to catch this one - there are a couple of sequels out there, or at least, there's one which actually follows the first (Evil Dead Trap 2 : Hideki) and one which has nothing to do with either film (Evil Dead Trap 3 : Broken Love Killer).




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch Evil Dead Trap

I've seen a couple people give high praise to that one here. Maybe I'll get to it someday.

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As I said in the other thread, EDT is one I was kinda disappointed with when I saw it as it was quite hyped and perhaps mis-described to me so my expectations were in a different pace than the reality of the film. And then the film itself seems like maybe it's not totally sure what it is until almost the third act. And then all that happens.
As I also said in the other thread, thanks to it playing constantly on ShudderTV, I've had the chance to revisit it a good bit and it has really grown on me.

Eyes Of Fire is great, though.

This is a little folk horror film that's kind of approaching cult status - one that manages to really whip itself into a frenzy, buttressed by dream-like ghostly imagery that flashes before our eyes and fades like phosphenes do. It takes place in pre-revolutionary America, 1750 - a time when superstition and folklore was carried like baggage from distant lands and became part of a cultural mix that had to contend with Native American beliefs and new horizons. Preacher Will Smythe (Dennis Lipscomb) has taken up residence with Eloise Dalton (Rebecca Stanley) and another woman, raising the ire of the local townsfolk who try to hang him. Surviving the process, Smythe takes Eloise and others (including the Buchanan family) on a trip into the wilderness - and he's followed by Eloise's husband, Marion (Guy Boyd), who hopes to win back the favour of his wife and protect a family that includes his daughter Fanny (Sally Klein). Smythe ends up leading the party to an abandoned homestead, and despite evidence that the previous occupants were killed by an unknown force in the area he insists they stay and build a life there. What he doesn't know is that there may be a dark magic surrounding the place - one so powerful that even the Shawnee dare not go near the area.

The lynchpin to the story is Leah (Karlene Crockett) who, if you were being unkind, you'd probably call a witch. Fanny calls Leah an Irish Fairy, and throughout much of the film she behaves in a relatively crazy fashion - at one stage I think she even eats dirt, but perhaps that's my mistake. It's via her supernatural intervention that Smythe manages to beat the hangman's noose, and it's Leah who reads the lay of the land - and she'd be the shaman of this group if they had a better understand of who she really is. I think they're mostly of Irish descent. The film's score belies it's grimness really - plenty of Irish pipes bed down the movie and give it the aura of that place's folkloric culture. That's not to say there aren't cues and sounds that accentuate moments of horror and mystery. Visually, Avery Crounse brings us an eclectic mix of make-up effects and distortion in bringing his supernatural elements to life, and there are a plethora of little shocks and unearthly moments. It tends more towards weirdness than it does blood-curdling or horrific, not that it doesn't have it's truly frightening moments. I did get a fright or two. This is also a movie that likes to have plenty of flashbacks and flashforwards, at times without fully making this clear - but I'm not at all averse to this. It often helps foster an eerie atmosphere if the narrative is purposely made a little foggy.

I've ordered the Severin DVD of this just so I can see the previous edit of the movie, which was called Crying Blue Sky, and which runs for an extra 22 minutes - with Crounse himself admitting that the subsequent recut chopped the movie up into something that "didn't make much sense". I'm just curious - like I've already said, perhaps the less sense this movie makes the better it is. When you have something that gifts you with such dreamlike visuals, it probably makes sense to have a dreamlike narrative, and that's something I really appreciate with a folk horror film like this. It doesn't at all depend on it's performances (probably just as well), and could do without those bookends which set up Fanny's narration, but that's all easy to push aside because this is all about just enjoying the surreal, hallucinogenic magic these poor people have stumbled across during Will Smythe's search for his specific version of paradise. This isn't about gee-wizz CGI effects, or even Industrial Light & Magic practical effects - it's all about atmosphere and context, with the true boogeyman really being isolation and the power of folklore. It's sometimes explosive, and always just a little weird - in just the right way.

Glad to catch this one - it was apparently David Cameron's (former British Prime Minister) favourite film from the 1980s.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch Eyes of Fire

Eyes of Fire didn't do much for me. And probably the most damning thing I can say about it is that I don't remember hardly anything from it. Someone on a raft in a river? Maybe?

I watched an Australian film which you've neither logged nor watchlisted on Letterboxd. Figured I'd give it a shout out here.

I've never heard of High Tide, and that feels wrong on so many different levels. I've put it in my watchlist. If you've unearthed a really good Australian film that I was completely unaware of you certainly deserve special praise from me!

There was a raft on a river at one stage (with people on it) so a tick there - the movie has been pretty brutally chopped up by writer/director Avery Crounse himself, and I hear that the Crying Blue Sky version is better, but by the sound of what you just said, that might not be enough to save Eyes of Fire for you personally.

Eyes of Fire isn't an easy sell because all of the characters and the plot are blurry and feel distant and there isn't really anything to hold onto as this group of people you don't really know anything about wander deeper and deeper into the woods and have weirder and weirder things happen to them. But--you know where I'm going with this--that's what makes it good.

The setting is important in this psychological horror film - Prano Bailey-Bond's debut feature. It's 1985, Margaret Thatcher's Britain, and the Video Nasty controversy is in full swing. Enid Baines (Niamh Algar) is a film censor working for the British Board of Film Classification, and she takes her job very seriously. She's a little 'above and beyond' in what she wants cut from films, but in step with the times. Outside of work, Enid lives with the painful knowledge that as a child she lived through an incident which led to her sister going missing, and that because of amnesia she suffers she was and is unable to remember what happened. Trouble manifests when Enid reviews a film which stirs some kind of memory regarding that incident, and a sensationalist murder occurs which seems to be inspired by one of the films Enid classified. After meeting the producer of the former film, Doug Smart (Michael Smiley), she embarks on an investigation in the hopes that she'll prove that her sister is alive and well - perhaps an actress in one of these videos, Alice Lee (Sophia La Porta). With the media crowing for blood and Enid's parents insisting her sister be declared dead, this film censor's psychological state starts to crumble.

The Video Nasty blow-up in Britain had the feel of a full-blown witch-hunt - blaming videos for violent crime is objectionable to me because of all the societal and economic factors it conveniently ignores. The madness of such hysteria is evidenced in this film by the way Enid becomes the focus of media and community anger just because she signed off on a film which happens to feature a moment of horror that goes on to resemble a crime which was committed. How can she possibly be in any way to blame? This is all just the backdrop to this movie though, although the key theme relates to the central story in regards to self-censorship and what we choose to look away from when it is too painful for us to consider. Enid obviously went through something that was so horrific her mind won't even let her remember it - and unfortunately reviewing horror films is key to her falling down a rabbit hole because of the connection she makes between movie violence and what probably happened to her in real life. At the time, a whole society was having trouble distinguishing between real horror and what people were watching on video, and what is good about the movie is how it integrates that with it's main character's situation. There is a blurring of the lines because the focus on this or that video nasty was relentless, and Enid eventually sees her own story play out in a film.

The pacing in Censor is a little slow, and this is only an 84-minute movie - but perhaps it was down to me expecting the narrative to go places it wasn't intending to go. Almost from the very get-go, this film has an eerie kind of Berberian Sound Studio atmosphere and as such you're never fully sure how weird this in-movie world is and what can happen in it. The problem might be the fact that we experience it through Enid's eyes, and we watch her nightmares and memories - it's an Argento horror movie vibe that permeates where she works and wherever she goes. It's dark, and it's cold - visually, sound-wise and character-wise. When possible answers to the central mystery that eats away at her presents itself, we're as eager as she is to see where the trails lead because anything seems viable. Bailey-Bond successfully puts us inside Enid's head, and as such you'll be asking yourself what's real and what's not as she deteriorates. Points to the movie though, for it actually being about something that's worth exploring regarding the video nasty period in Britain. My brain is screaming now because it so wants to just blurt out which film the ending completely rips off - but that might give away too much as to where it finishes, so I'll include that in spoiler tags.



Glad to catch this one - nominated for 9 British Independent Film Awards, and won the Méliès d'Or for Best European Fantastic Film at the Imagine Film Festival.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch Censor

That reminds me of the film I just posted about in the Rate The Last Movie You Saw thread.

Yeah, there was some lack of immersion or connection that, for me, is what I need for a film to settle in my brain.

One of the best things about Eyes Of Fire is that it gets better on re-watch.
The first time I watched it I didn't get the hype and I'm not even totally sure I finished it (I think I did). But the second time it was like the whole thing was unlocked and it seemed like a better movie. Maybe because the first time I was expecting something more straightforward, especially with the opening scene being just very 80s-Witchcraft-Movie, and it seemed like it was gonna be generic filler. But once you really get into its vibe, which happens much quicker on the second viewing (not just in my opinion, multiple people around here have said it), the movie really cooks with its dream-like vibe and very slowly-building sense of doom.
I really like this movie. Which is funny because I didn't at first.

Watch it again.

Sounds like it.

Yeah, really your experience sounds like mine, I could not connect with the film the first time.
The second time I really enjoyed it. YMMV, of course, but if you do I hope you also get what I did out of it.

It would be easy to treat Lucio Fulci's A Cat in the Brain with pure cynicism. It must have been an exceedingly cheap movie to produce, with all of it's horror and gore being culled from other films - either Fulci's own Sodoma's Ghost and Touch of Death (both recent releases) or Leandro Lucchetti's Bloody Psycho, Giovanni Simonelli's Hansel e Gretel, Andrea Bianchi's Massacre and Mario Bianchi's The Murder Secret. Fulci plays himself in this meta comment on the genre and it's supposed psychological effects, so all that was left to film was Lucio walking around various places in Rome (I'd hazard to guess at or around his home) and on his yacht, which has the provocative name Perversion. The story revolves around Fulci starting to experience visions of the horror he constructs coming to life in the real world - and thus he visits a psychotherapist, Professor Egon Schwarz (David L. Thompson). Unbeknownst to Fulci, this therapist is in fact a serial killer who goes on to hypnotise the film director for his own evil ends. By and large the film consists of Lucio Fulci watching in horror as this or that gory incident takes place before his eyes before coming to the realisation that it was all in his mind. It's a seemingly never-ending parade of eyeballs, bone, brains, blood and goo.

Yes, a lot of the time it's Italian filmmakers who prove themselves the most cynical, but being a very self-referential movie, this one manages to be both exceedingly funny and savage in it's satire - enough so for me to give it a complete free pass as to how it was made. Much of it is pure delirium. At one stage Fulci himself starts chasing down a tramp with his car (for no particular reason other than the fact he's losing his mind and has been hypnotised) - and as this filthy tramp runs for his life (he tries to outrun the car by running along the road of course, and not throwing himself to the left or right) he starts shouting "What's the matter with you Fulci!!??" It's the fact that this random person who is about to be run over knows who the driver is - that it's this film director trying to kill him - that really got me. Fulci being offered steak tartare at a restaurant is a moment in and of itself as well. ("Doesn't it look appetizing?" - to be fair, steak tartare never does.) Fulci simply gasps "Steak tartare? No. No steak tartare." He's just had a flashback to a person's body being fed through a mincer. Here, the diminutive director fits the bill because of the contrast between his soft-spoken discomfort and the horror that spews forth from his mind.

For horror fans (the ones who aren't well versed with the horror movies this film uses) there is a cavalcade of gore, beheadings, eye-popping, cutting, stabbing and squishing. That makes sense when you consider that you're getting six films worth. The violence in these Italian movies can get a little uncomfortably misogynistic, and there's often a regrettable confluence of sex and violence when women are being abused - and that's the biggest snag there is here. When you take these horror scenes out of context it seems all the more unnecessarily random, but if you know this or that murderer is a serial killer, then it seems less like misogyny is simply being thrown in for it's own sake. That's why it stood out to me so much here. Luckily, I haven't seen any of the films used, and I haven't been watching as many gory films lately, so it was fun making a rare venture into giallo/Italian horror territory. Their effects might be less realistic, but they're much more grand than lavish as if to make up for it. I have the feeling that Lucio Fulci had his critics in mind while making A Cat in the Brain, and it makes for a frenzied parting shot as he sails off into the sunset, so I salute him for managing to make me smile while doing it and at the same time, saving all the money he could for all involved.

Glad to catch this one - apparently, many events in the film are based on Lucio Fulci's experiences as a filmmaker.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch A Cat in the Brain

Criminally ignored upon it's release, profoundly disturbing and yet alluringly beautiful, The Reflecting Skin gives it's viewers a vision of childhood as precarious and surrounded by horror and monsters both real and imagined - one young boy's place in the world mystified when a series of murders visit his strange country home town. Eight-year-old Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper) enjoys playing cruel pranks with his two boyhood friends upon local young widow Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan) - a lady whose eccentric strangeness soon convinces young Seth that she's a vampire. The young boy's upbringing is rendered especially difficult by his cruel, abusive mother Ruth (Sheila Moore) who domineers Seth's father, Luke (Duncan Fraser) - a man once caught kissing a teenage boy in the barn, attracting the ire of Sheriff Ticker (Robert Koons). When compounded tragedy strikes, Seth's older brother Cameron (Viggo Mortensen) returns from active duty in the Pacific, but much to the boy's horror he soon falls in love with Dolphin Blue. His world in disarray, Seth consults a grotesque keepsake he found in a barn as to what he might do to save his beloved brother from the clutches of this supposed vampire.

The golden glowing wheat fields of the Idaho prairie, wonderfully rendered by Dick Pope's luscious cinematography, look deceptively beautiful and in our best frame of mind we'd relate them to the best of what childhood can be. Even Seth, Eben (Codie Lucas Wilbee) and Kim (Evan Hall) inflating a frog and blowing it up couldn't prepare me for how dark, disturbing and strange this coming of age horror film would get, because the bright country aura really instilled in me a false sense of wholesomeness. I shudder now to think of what hides underneath the surface - and this is certainly a movie where a second viewing would fill me with contrary vibes at the start. It's striking, when you look at Seth, how heady and intoxicating innocence can be, but also how dangerous it's close companion ignorance proves - all the more when real monsters lurk not in the shadows, but in broad daylight. To make sense of the extremely weird way adults behave, fantasy becomes a powerful ally to Seth - because who can really make sense of the grotesquerie and madness infecting his parents, Dolphin, and the police who ask him all manner of seemingly senseless questions? I think as a kid, most adults do look quite mad.

This is one movie that's really going to stand out to me at the end of the year, because it hit me pretty hard and made a great impression. It had just the right balance between feeling like it takes place in the real world, but also in a dream-like, weird, hallucinatory nightmare land. The visceral horror remains offscreen for the most part, and that works because what's hidden in the shadows ends up being a thousand times more scary in my mind than what might have been simply played out in front of my eyes. For it all to have come from an original story and screenplay from Philip Ridley is extremely impressive, and that makes it all the more disappointing that it wasn't seen when it came out. That's despite it making a big splash at Cannes in 1990, and being lauded by critics. Seems it may have been a problematic one for Miramax, who probably didn't know how to sell it to a marketplace more in the mood for romantic comedies and action films - so it was given a very limited release. If you're up for something dark and disturbing and haven't seen this, then I highly recommend it. It's quite an amazing work of imagination, and a fantastic film.

Glad to catch this one - it won various international awards and was described as "one of the essential art film/horror hybrids from the past few decades" due to recent reappraisals.




Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch The Reflecting Skin

I see that your theme for this week is "upsetting!".

And I think that's at the root of why Reflecting Skin didn't get as wide a release or as much attention. It's deeply upsetting, but in ways that I think would make a typical audience uncomfortable. The relatively innocent victims are a weirdo loner woman, a closeted gay man, and a man wrestling with guilt around his military service.

I think that Seth's selfishness and cruelty are mostly age-appropriate and believable, but it's hard hanging in there with a protagonist who---often intentionally---makes life worse for other people.