Dracula Presents: The Sixteenth Annual Golden Stake Awards

For all the shit it got, Doctor Strange ended up being the 4th highest grossing film of 2022, surpassed only by the juggernauts of Avatar and Top Gun and the cultural relevance of Black Panther.




Considering how much Dracula hates the Daniel Craig ones, he would have detested the Timothy Dalton ones. License to Kill is basically an episode of Miami Vice. We only tolerate it now cause it was followed by Pierce Brosnan’s tenure. But at the time this was seen as a franchise killer.

Yes, 2023 Dracula likes License to Kill, but does 1989 Dracula like License to Kill?

Besides, we all know Dracula would have nominated Road House instead.

License to Kill wouldn't have angered me because it wasn't a reboot and was still basically adhering to the series' traditions.

Didn't see Violent Night (way too busy seeing Oscar stuff in December).  Unbearable Weight was neat but I wouldn't say it had me rolling in the aisle laughing.  

Best Horror Film
This was a strange year for horror. The trends of the last couple of years seemed to be well on the wane but it wasn’t clear at all what, if anything, would replace them. In terms of sheer quantity there was a whole lot to choose from given that Hollywood seemed to put out a new fright flick every single week but in terms of quality, I don’t know, it feels like almost nothing really broke that three-to-three and half star barrier. As for classification, there were some borderline pics I considered but qualified like Nope, The Menu, Mad God, and Bodies Bodies Bodies which were certainly dark and/or violent but weren’t really trying to scare their audience so I opted not to declare them true horror flicks.

Barbarian: It’s a little hard to determine what niche Zach Cregger’s Barbarian fits into. There’s some social commentary to be found in it, but it’s not really driven by that and I wouldn’t call it “elevated” exactly, and it also doesn’t really conform to any one easily named horror sub-genre. It’s also sits somewhere between being a horror movie made for the mainstream (it is technically a product of the Disney corporation after all) and something made more for the hardcore horror community given its relatively extreme content. It’s also a movie that’s in some ways defined by its plot twists so it’s never been the easiest movie to talk about in general, but it’s one that leaves very few horror fans dissatisfied so there’s that.

Hellraiser: The “slasher movie remake” is a horror trend I usually frown on but this is one I’ve been eagerly anticipating, in no small part because the franchise it was rebooting was in a rut that it really needed to snap out of. The final movie, directed by The Night House’s David Bruckner, did not disappoint. I wouldn’t say that the take on Clive Barker’s story and movie featured here is particularly novel but the execution was good enough that this didn’t matter too much. The film is appropriately grizzly, has a compelling lead protagonist, and sports one of the more understandable and coherent versions of this mythology we’ve seen. Shame it got relegated to a streaming service and sort of dumped there instead of getting any real promotion.

Men: Men was kind of the lone movie really holding it down for “elevated horror” as we once used to know it and it’s polarizing reception was not really the best advertisement for that movement’s (such as there even was one) continued relevance. However, I actually rather dug the movie and thought it was doing some smart things with the form. Like a lot of “elevated horror” Alex Garland’s movie is using horror tropes to explore themes of trauma and also larger societal issues (namely misogyny, obviously) and the film incorporates some really out there visuals towards the end that are not going to be for everyone.

Pearl: Ti West put out two movies this year, a slasher movie called X and a prequel to that movie called Pearl set something like fifty years earlier at the same farm and to my eyes that prequel was the much more interesting project than the original. The film, set in the late 1910s, looks at the origins of this rather psychotic woman who’s dealing with a toxic cocktail of sexual repression, fame obsession, and just plain old psychopathic tendencies leading her to become a serial killer. It’s a story steeped in the horror gene but the movie’s filmmaking evokes old Hollywood melodrama and Mia Goth’s performance evokes Judy Garland, albeit a deranged version of that icon, and that’s a pretty clever thing to do with a horror flick.

Smile: Smile is not a movie that’s doing anything particularly bold or original, in fact in many ways it’s just a retread of the jump scare mainstream horror movies of the 2010s, but there’s a place for movies like that and this one does it well. In fact this is kind of a study in how you can really build one of these movies off of one good idea, and in this case that one good idea is this idea of making the tell-tale sign of this central curse a Cheshire smile that seems to almost be forced on people’s faces right before terrible violence occurs. It would be easy to do a movie like this lazily but director Parker Finn made some canny decisions with this thing and ended up delivering one of the year’s biggest surprise hits.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Pearl for me. Really liked that one.

Deserved.

Best Documentary
Last year I watched as many as 45 documentaries and kind of burned myself out on the form by the end of it. So this year I decided to cut down my viewing a bit and ended up watching a mere 43 documentaries… yeah, really change of pace. I didn’t get as burned out though and was a bit more in line with popular opinion about this year’s crop of docs than I was last year.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is almost like two documentaries in one in certain ways as it depicts both the life and times of art photographer Nan Goldin while simultaneously looking at her current campaign to remove the names of Sackler family members from museums through elaborate protests and the various issues around the opioid epidemic. Each of these are interesting unto themselves but the movie also does an amazing job of merging these two stories and making it clear that they actually sprout from the same themes and are in many ways one and the same.

Downfall: The Case Against Boeing: Downfall: The Case Against Boeing is far from the most eloquent film nominated here. Its base level filmmaking style is… average and functional at best. Instead this is nominated here more because it feels like a great example of a film that uses the documentary format to put together a solid argument in a way that’s clearly trying to be kind of inflammatory but in a way that also feel fair and earned. The film lays out in detail exactly how the Boeing company prioritized shareholders over quality and safety, with deadly results, and frankly it makes me wonder why people aren’t more outraged at them than they are.

The Janes: Like with the movie Happening, I’m kind of surprised that the documentary The Janes didn’t become more widely seen and talked about than it was given how relevant it is in the wake of the Dobbs decision. The documentary looks back at recent history, specifically a ring of women in Chicago who helped facilitate then-illegal abortions for desperate women during the pre-Roe days. This is mostly told through talking head interviews with several of the involved women, but they’re shot and presented particularly well here and paint a very interesting picture of an under discussed reality of the recent past.

Fire of Love: Fire of Love is a documentary that’s built almost entirely of archival footage shot by Katia and Maurice Krafft, a married couple who were both volcanologists who traveled the world observing volcanic eruptions and videotaping them. The footage they shot is, in and of itself fascinating to look at with lava doing all sorts of outlandish stuff, so there is a nature documentary to be found here that’s works in its own right. However, the film is equally interested in the unique and somewhat mysterious romance between the two and the dedication to their work which would ultimately lead them to their deaths at the hands of an eruption in Japan in the early 90s. In putting this all together the filmmakers find just the right tone to pitch this all at to really make it feel like an existential memorial to these two.

The Territory: Another film from National Geographic that functions as both a nature film and something more is The Territory, a film which looks at an indigenous tribe and their fight to protect their land from encroaching settlers in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil. There is of course something of a naturalist message to be found in all this as it is at least nominally a story about saving the rainforest, but the heart of the drama is a very human conflict in which a certain group feels it’s their right to take what the native tribe currently holds and the native tribe’s various efforts to defend their territory without resorting to violence. The documentary lays out the tensions involved in this conflict very well and really gets you interested in its outcome.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Top Ten

10.

New reveal every half hour