Monthly Top Five

Honestly, I think most of the new stuff I've been watching has been on The Last Drive-In, at least until theaters re-open.

Don't know about a top five, but off the top of my head:
1. One Cut of the Dead
2. Maniac
3. Heathers
4. Brain Damage (didn't review because fell asleep on the second feature)
5. Dead Heat (review incoming)

I also watched Troma's War and Cannibal Holocaust. I feel comfortable leaving them off the list.

The Exorcist III was also on last month, but I've seen that before.

Top five first watches for May were probably (reviews reposts of Letterboxed reviews):

1. Les Vampires: Les Vampires has been something of a white whale for me over the years. I’ve been meaning to see it for at least a decade but watching all six and a half hours of it is a bit of a commitment. I’ve actually started watching it a few times but things have always come up which have derailed my viewing attempts but the circumstances of the pandemic have finally produced conditions which have allowed me to stick with it for the long run. The film is one of the few “serials” that have come to be thought of as a canonical work of cinema and was released in France split into ten episodes (of varying lengths) over the course of late 1915 and 1916. Despite the title this is not a horror movie but rather a crime movie with the “vampires” being a crime syndicate, some of whom are these cat burglar types who go around in these black spandex ninja like outfits to do evil stuff. The story here is pure pulp silliness and tends to go off in all kinds of crazy different directions to extend the running time, almost like a season of “24” or something. It’s very much the populist entertainment of its time but there is a degree of filler to the whole thing. I’d say you can count on their being one particularly eye catching event an episode on average but that isn’t to say that everything else is boring or bad. It’s not a movie I’d recommend watching all in one sitting and it does need to be viewed in the context of its time in the development of film and to be given some allowances for the sort of pulpy logic it operates on, but it is ultimately a rewarding watch and you can definitely see how it would go on to influence people like Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang."

2. The Court Jester: "Danny Kaye is a comedian who has not really become a generation spanning household name but he was a pretty well liked entertainer in the Bob Hope mold during the 50s and The Court Jester is probably his most famous starring vehicle. A broad, farcical musical comedy (with an emphasis on comedy), the film is essentially a send-up of the Robin Hood story and the Errol Flynn Robin Hood movie in particular. It follows a jester who assumes the identity of another jester who is about to be working for the king so that he can infiltrate the court and assist a Robin Hood-like bandit unseat an unrightful monarch. It is a very silly movie, but not to the point of being obnoxious. I wouldn’t say that I was laughing uproariously throughout the movie but there were definitely bits in it that are just really well executed bits of comedy like a situation where the hero needs to keep track of which goblet has been poisoned and the identification becomes a sort of tongue twisting game of telephone (“The pellet with the poison's in the flagon with the dragon; the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true”) and there’s a slapstick sword fight at the end which is rather delightful. Could have done without some of the songs though."

3. Street of Shame: "For the last film in the “Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women” boxed set takes us to the very end of the director’s career with his final film Street of Shame. Once again Mizoguchi looks at the plight of prostitutes, but instead of impoverished streetwalkers in bombed out streets this movie looks at “high class” hookers working at a licensed brothel in Tokyo. I was not aware that such things were legal in 1950s Japan but I know they aren’t legal now because this movie is alleged to have actually swayed public opinion on the topic and led to the formal illegalization of prostitution in the country (which was being debated for years beforehand). That is perhaps a bit of an ironic legacy because the movie offers a slightly more conflicted look at the problem than the kind of polemic that you’d expect to inspire such a response. The film certainly highlights the exploitation that goes on at these places and also the highly unhealthy relations many of these sex workers have with their various Johns, but it also acknowledges that these places essentially act as last places of refuge for women who are in some in tough spots and how shutting them down could push some of them into the streets. To explore this the film looks at five characters who are workers at a brothel whose stories are meant to represent something of a cross-section of different situations that different prostitutes might find themselves in. The film is open and frank about what’s going on at this house of ill-repute but rarely goes into any kind of graphic or exploitative detail and there’s never even a whiff of sensationalism to the whole thing. It also kind of goes without saying that Mizoguchi’s visual style is fully evolved here and also that we’re finally being given a film whose print has been correctly preserved. A lot of the rest of the movies in this boxed set are movies I would probably discourage people from seeing unless they’ve already experienced some of the director’s more refined films first but this feels like one I can recommend a lot more freely."

4. When We Were Kings: "When We Were Kings is a little bit of an odd thing if you think about it. It’s a look at a sporting even that occurred just twenty year’s previously and focuses on details that would have mostly been public knowledge at the time. It would be like someone today making a documentary about Michael Jordan and the 1998 Bulls… actually maybe it does make sense. However, sports documentaries were not quite the institution in the 90s that they were today so this was probably a little more special. The film looks at the famous Rumble in the Jungle fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, but only the last twenty minutes or so are focused on the action in the ring and most of the rest of the doc isn’t wildly interested in the sporting details in general. Instead this is a documentary about what made the fight such a landmark event (one that is said to have been watched by over a billion people at the time) both in America and in the DRC. Interestingly, despite the first person title, the film does not feature interviews by either of the fighters (despite both being alive at the time and seemingly supportive of the film) and we instead hear about it from the perspective of various outside observers who are as in awe of these people as everyone else. ESPN makes docs like this all the time now, but this sort of set the template and is a pretty solid watch to be sure."

5. Tunnel: "Thank you IanTheCool . I didn’t really have much in terms of preconceptions about Tunnel going into it. I don’t remember it ever getting American distribution and the reason it probably never did was because it was a little too conventional and straightforward to really make sense in arthouses but was also a little too not in the English language to get very far with more “basic” audiences. That is unfortunate because it is a very solidly made disaster movie that’s one part Buried, one part The Martian, and one part Ace in the Hole. It concerns a regular guy who was driving through a longish tunnel through a mountain when the whole thing collapsed trapping him inside. We then cut between him trying to find water and food and surviving in the cave-like ruble pile he’s stuck in and people on the outside trying to do the rescue operation while struggling with all the obstacles and bullshit that that effort entailed. I was kind of expecting the movie to draw a bit on the 2014 sinking of the MV Sewol and the political discontent that was caused by that, and there are hints of that, but it wasn’t as major of a theme as I was hoping. For the most part this doesn’t reinvent the wheel or give us much we haven’t seen before but it is pretty well made and has nicely large Hollywood style production values."

I'm a pretty big fan of Heathers. And is this Brain Dead as in the Peter Jackson film?



All great picks. I watched The Man who Fell to Earth for the first time recently and it's definitely a unique one. Cool mix of weird art-house filmmaking and sci-fi. Also nice to see Fail Safe's reputation growing.



I saw this for the first time this year and quite liked it. Not Ugetsu or Sansho the Bailiff levels of great, but good cinema all the same.

Braindead rules. I think you'd really like it.

Jay and silent bob strike back reboot whatever the fuck - I guess its a movie. 2/10

Tall tale - Disney plus burning a hole in your pocket? Remember the code (and maybe the worst Paul Bunyan portrayal in pop culture). 6/10

Pirates of the Caribbean dead man's chest - still solid. 8/10

John Henry - (watch this before tall tale) hooo boy first hour is trash but there's about 4 scenes that are actually shot all pretty like. 4/10

Lockout - don't be fooled by certain people calling this a gem. It's garbage, and not even terribly entertaining garbage (that early cgi chase scene is something to see tho) 3/10


Who needs old movies when these gems are readily available?

I hope beers were drank.

Check out Mr. Disney over here, watching Amy Adams movies that haven’t been released yet. Do you think you’re SnoBorderZero? Who invited you to the executive screening room?

You realise you must complete the series now.

Ignore me, I had a senior moment and thought that was the 1st one.

1. Ouija Shark
2. Trolls: World Tour
3. Max Winslow and the House of Secrets
4. Scare Package
5. Hogzilla

I think that's all I watched this month.