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So continuing our irregular project of rewatching notable movies that I saw in the theatre back in college, but haven’t seen since, we come to this Steven Soderbergh movie. Which of course wasn’t a Soderbergh movie back when I saw it — I mean, it was, but I had never heard of the guy and had no idea who he was. This was 100% a George Clooney/Jennifer Lopez movie for me. (It also didn’t have Ving Rhames, Albert Brooks, Luis Guzmán, Don Cheadle, or Catherine Keener, as far as I knew.)

I remembered that the movie was a) good, and b) a kind of tragic, smoldering romance. Both of those things are still true, but what I’d forgotten was that it’s a funny movie, and has a lot more plot than just that romance.

Seeing it from today’s perspective, what it really seems like is a kind of Ocean’s Eleven prequel. Clooney isn’t quite playing Danny Ocean (though he’s not that far off — the movie starts with him getting out of prison, and he spends most of the movie either trying to get together with the woman he’s interested in or planning a revenge theft); but the mood is similar, the visual style is similar (though this one overuses mid-scene freeze-frame pauses), and the music is extremely similar. David Holmes is the composer on both movies, and they’re scored almost identically.

Comparing it to Ocean’s Eleven, which is one of my perfect movies, diminishes this in comparison, though, so let’s not do it. This movie is legit excellent in its own right. The Elmore Leonard story is great; Lopez’s female lead is complex and carries her half of the movie, rather than just being Clooney’s love interest; and Soderbergh is of course one of our great directors. If you missed it back then, you should make up for that now.

So this next volume of gialli gets back to the roots — they’re all Italian, and all from the ’70s. But they’re not quite all in the classic mode.

Reflections in Black, though, is. This is the most classically styled giallo of this bunch. It’s got a luridly sexual premise (various shadowy elites have a secret cabal/sex club), complete with obligatory nudity; it’s got corrupt/bumbling cops who are unwilling to go after powerful suspects; and, of course, it has the classic black-glove straight-razor killings.

It also has that classic-to-me element of having a too-large cast full of people who look far too much alike (Three red-haired women in the movie! Three!). The gigantic cast, full of twisty relationships that all matter to the plot, is probably the biggest negative of the movie — you practically need a spreadsheet to keep the characters straight even if you’re able to tell them apart on sight, and the explanation of motives ends up getting more than slightly convoluted. But if you’re willing to just kinda roll with it, you’ll get what you came for.

Rings of Fear is also classically styled, but in the more decadent, later-period mode. This is from the “girls in trouble” subgenre, and is set in a high school where one of the girls has been killed, after seemingly having been caught up in some unsavory sexual activities. The movie is not shy about giving us naked high school girls, because, well, because 1970s Italy. (Relatedly, giving away the murder weapon here would be a spoiler, but let’s just say that this is implausibly the second giallo I’ve seen to have someone die in this way, and I might have imagined going my entire life without seeing even one.)

We’ve got a bunch of other killings here, of course, including some that go beyond the standard glove-and-razor stuff — a bunch of marbles rolling down a staircase is maybe the most entertaining (if slightly absurd) one.

The main downside is that the plot is overstuffed and disjointed; there are just too many different things going on, such that solving the murder ends up being like 1/4 of the movie’s total resolution, and the multiple minor endings don’t quite add up to the dramatic impact of one major ending. Dock it a half-star for that, maybe.

The last movie of this trio, A.A.A. Masseuse, Good-Looking, Offers Her Services is the one that knocks us out of pure classicism. Oh, sure, it has a lot of the standard elements — there is a black-glove razor killing, there is a lot of sex in it — but it’s weird.

The movie starts out with a daughter leaving home to work as a masseuse. I initially took this literally, as does the client of her first job, who hired her to help his mom’s sciatica, which gets embarrassing when she comes out of the changing room naked. Oh, she’s working as that kind of masseuse, right.

So there’s a ton of family drama here, there’s the difficulties of getting established in a new career (including pimps threatening/cajoling her to come work for them), and it honestly just seems like it’s more of a sex movie or character piece, some kind of Italian Midnight Cowboy. But finally, 30 minutes into the movie, we get our first killing, and it becomes a giallo.

I thought this was going to end up as something of a dud, but by the end of the movie, it had won me over, and so I rate it all the way up at replacement level — it’s a giallo that you’ll like if you like gialli, if you give it time to get going.

So after Scream VI was disappointing, they went back to the writer of the first movie for this seventh installment. Which I mention here, because I didn’t even realize it until the end credits; there’s nothing in the movie at all that indicates it’s made by the guy who wrote that successful first movie; it felt like a phoned-in franchise installment made by the cheapest guy they could get.

The biggest problem with Scream 7 is that it’s boring. Sure, it has other problems — a lot of its plot elements don’t make sense, emotional impacts of murders are weirdly downplayed even as trauma is a major theme of the movie, motivations are kinda dodgy all around — but lots of horror movies have those problems. Like, Suspiria is maybe one of my top ten movies of all time, and I still could not actually explain its plot, which absolutely does not make logical sense. But it’s sure as hell not boring, and that’s what really matters.

My first instinct here was to say that, look, we’re on the seventh movie of a franchise, it’s just going through the familiar franchise motions, that’s why it’s boring. But after thinking about it more, the problem is actually the opposite — it’s not going through the franchise motions at all.

Like, what makes a Scream movie different from any other slasher movie? It’s that it’s snarky, self-aware, ultimately kinda meta, right? And this one makes vague gestures in that direction, like it starts out in a B&B themed around the events of the movie Stab and one character later gives a half-hearted “rules” speech. But mostly, it just plays it straight. This feels for all the world not like a meta movie playing with late-series slasher movie conventions (as Scream (2022) did), but like a straight-up late-series slasher movie. It could practically be an installment of Stab rather than of Scream.

And as a generic slasher movie minus the franchise verve, it’s just kinda nothing. The kills are unimaginative, the characters are rote, it’s all just extremely by the numbers. It’s competent enough not to be outright terrible, but somehow that just makes it even more boring — nobody will hate this movie, because hating it would require you to feel anything at all.

So this is clearly Damien Chazelle’s love letter to movie musicals, to the city of LA, and to the whole idea of doing artistic work. It starts with two failing would-be creatives — Emma Stone wants to be an actress, but is a barista whose frequent auditions keep going nowhere; Ryan Gosling wants to run a serious jazz club, but is in trouble at his restaurant piano job for freelancing on the set list — as they meet each other in romcom fashion, complete with song and dance number.

The movie, then, is a musical exploration of the progress of both their relationship and their creative ambitions, as we see them try out different endeavors with varying degrees of success, and try to figure out how to integrate the demands of their art with their feelings for each other.

It’s almost self-consciously classical in what it’s doing, both in its direct style and in its frequent references to classic Hollywood. As a result, it can feel like pastiche more than something truly original; its stars are compelling actors, but they’re put into too-familiar situations that they rarely get a chance to rise above; and Chazelle is basically competent, but his direction never exceeds competence. But the movie is elevated somewhat by its ending, which I think is more interesting than the rest of its storyline. I’m going to spoiler-protect this; don’t read it if you intend to watch the movie and haven’t.

Spoilers

So after they’ve both had some career failures and relationship troubles, Stone gets a chance for an important acting role in Paris, which will require her to part from Gosling for a year or so. He encourages her to go do it, and they profess their undying love for each other.

And then it’s five years later. We see Stone, clearly successful now, reprising an earlier celebrity-encounter coffee shop scene from the other side of the counter. And then we see her come home… to her husband, who is not Gosling, and their child.

Of course, the movie needs to bring her and Gosling together for narrative closure, and so she ends up with her husband at a jazz club — which, surprise, is using the name and logo she’d designed for Gosling earlier in the movie, because turns out he’s also been successful in achieving his artistic dreams.

But even though they’ve both been successful, this is not an uncomplicatedly happy ending. Chazelle gives us a moment when they see each other in his club, and we get a montage version of the alternate world where things went a little more smoothly for them — where their initial meeting was a bit less hostile, where some of their earlier creative efforts didn’t fail, where they made some better decisions, and where they ended up staying together and enjoying both the success they have today, but also a happy relationship with each other. It’s the happily-ever-after that’s been set up, and that a film this dedicated to romantic movie logic might have delivered; but here, it’s presented as just a wistful dream.

The characters, sharing this vision in its own bit of movie logic, acknowledge with a look and a smile that this would have been a good life. And then she leaves with her husband, he goes back to his jazz band, and they continue living their actual lives. It reminds me a bit — I suspect intentionally — of a similar moment in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and works much better than a more straightforwardly happy ending could have.

So yeah, I’m a sucker for that kind of thing, and the ending got me. Even with that, the movie still doesn’t rise to greatness — you’ll notice I didn’t even mention the songs here, despite this being a musical; that’s because they’re competent but forgettable. With the exception of the ending, competent but forgettable is the register the movie works in. But I don’t want to be too critical: Competent pastiche isn’t nothing, and it’s not like the modern movie landscape is otherwise full of classical musicals, you know? Even if this is more imitative than transformative, there’s absolutely enough here for any fan of old Hollywood musicals and traditional romances to enjoy.

So I’m not a kid, and therefore never saw the YouTube videos that are the origin of this whole Backrooms thing. But I am a member of Gen X, and so I’ve played the Escape the Backrooms videogame, and it’s fucking creepy as hell. So I was prepared for a movie that was creepy as hell, but (as the game is story-light) I was unsure what the story would be.

Unfortunately, so was the guy behind this movie (who’s also the kid behind the YouTube videos). When it’s doing atmosphere, it’s on. The opening, which is a POV video camera bit from a guy in the titular backrooms (and — so I’m told — echoes the YouTube videos in style), is intense and scary and disconcerting. And when the movie leans into the setting later, it summons that creepy weirdness again.

But then it has characters, and it’s trying to do something with their personalities, and to give them an actual story to exist within. And this part, seemingly less present in the original YouTube videos, doesn’t work nearly as well. Chiwetel Ejiofor did a reasonable job with his character, but the movie never made me care either way; Renate Reinsve’s psychiatrist was less interesting, and plus had this whole personal backstory that just felt like filler.

It’s still an effectively creepy movie, which is worth a lot. I’m trying to cut down on how often I use the word “vibes” when describing horror movies (particularly gialli), but the reason I overuse it is because establishing vibes is one of the main goals of works in the genre. And I think you can make the case that this movie succeeds in its main goal.

But I was hoping that this was going to be something in the Weapons vein, where it establishes the vibes and the cool opening image but then develops that into a character and a story that genuinely work, and hell, even have some thematic depth to them. Alas, it does not. Ah well, that was a tall ask; this is still worth watching for genre fans, but not a thing I’ll push as transcending or elevating the genre.

It’s weird for me sometimes to think about the state of science fiction in movies. Back when I was a kid, making an SF movie was difficult, and mostly people didn’t bother. There was the towering achievement of 2001 from years before I was born, there was Star Wars from when I was a baby, and there was Star Trek from both before I was born (the show) and when I was a toddler (the movie), and… not a whole lot else.^[1]

Today, though, it’s all over the place, to the point that I wanted to describe this movie as amiable but undistinguished. Which, in the context of modernity, it is. It’s fine! Decent enough! Above average, even!

But… dang, if this movie had come out forty years ago, it would have been a fucking legendary movie. I mean, one of my big knocks on old-timey science fiction movies is that they were mostly just action movies with a science fiction theme — that certainly describes Star Wars, and it even describes Wrath of Khan (one of my least favorite Star Trek movies). Part of what made 2001 such a big deal is that it was a real science fiction movie, based on a story by a real science fiction writer.

And so is this one. Andy Weir isn’t a brilliant writer, but he’s definitely writing in the classic SF mold, creating technical problems that characters need to solve by being clever and thinking hard. I’ve described the book this movie is based on as the literary equivalent of a text adventure, just a stream of puzzles to be solved; and the movie is a surprisingly faithful adaptation that improves on its source material, keeping the fun bits of the plot while sanding away the unpolished prose style and the annoying first-person narration. Getting such a faithful adaptation of a hard SF novel back forty years ago would have given me a movie I’d cherish to this day.

But alas for all concerned, Project Hail Mary came out in the present. And in the present, cinematic SF is not in short supply. Here, the faithfulness of its adaptation ends up maybe being a negative: Unlike 2001, this isn’t a movie that takes its source material and turns it into brilliant cinema; this is a movie that takes its source, and puts it onscreen in a competent but essentially straightforward way.

In fact, as I describe it that way, I realize that a movie like this did exist forty years ago: It’s not 2001 that this should be reminding me of, it’s 2010 — a perfectly competent adaptation of a pretty good SF novel that isn’t anything more than that. And sure enough, I loved 2010 back then and still quote lines from it to this day, whereas I doubt I’ll remember Project Hail Mary at all in a year.

But it really is pretty good! If you like this kind of movie — perhaps you’re a fan of The Martian, Weir’s other hard SF novel to get a competent film adaptation^[2] — it delivers what you’re looking for.

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1. Yeah, yeah, there were other things — Alien and Blade Runner and probably also movies not made by Ridley Scott. But in terms of straight non-horror outer space stuff, the pickings were a lot slimmer. ↩︎

2. So after writing this entry, I went back and read that linked review of The Martian and whoops, turned out I made all the same points there that I just made here. If I were more dedicated to these write-ups, I’d crumple up this draft and start over with a write-up framed around the idea that movie adaptations of Weir’s novels are total throwbacks and always make me think of ’80s SF, because clearly that’s true. But I’m too lazy to do that, so you’ll have to put up with this slightly repetitive entry. Look, it’s 2026, just be grateful you’re not getting a wall of Claude — even if Claude’s copy-edits are load-bearing for me. ↩︎

So this movie with the pretentious name is a meta-fictional quasi-documentary about making movies, despite which it is not terrible.

As the movie starts, we see actors (badly) performing this melodramatic scene where a couple is having this big argument. And then we see different actors performing it, and different ones. Credits roll, and now we pull back to see the director, William Greaves, explaining to his crew that a) one camera is going to be filming the actors who are performing this scene, b) one camera is going to be filming the crew filming the actors, and c) another camera is going to be filming anything that seems interesting nearby or on the set.

So that’s pretty much the thesis of the movie laid out: It’s a multi-layered thing where everything you’re watching is part of the movie in an intentional way. This particularly includes Greaves, because he is in fact playing a character, a kind of clueless director who has his crew out here filming… something, but who doesn’t seem to really know what he’s doing or why.

Apparently — or allegedly — Greaves was doing this to provoke discontent and confusion in the crew, and hoping to get some kind of dramatic reaction from them, with a plan to just capture whatever happened and then figure out how to edit it into a movie.

Well, apparently/allegedly, this worked out perfectly, because the crew ended up having a secret meeting to gripe about things. And in this secret meeting — which they film, and in which they directly address their viewer, apparently expecting it to be both Greaves and some audience — they speculate about the nature of the film, and about why he’s having them film everything, and what he’s really doing, and if his cluelessness is real or just an act. And they get extremely meta about this, and talk about how the viewer can’t even know if this meeting is real, noting that for all the viewer knows, Greaves could be standing there just off-camera directing the whole thing as just another scene.

And so reading up on this, allegedly/apparently Greaves was not there, and was not directing this; he really was play-acting at incompetence, but everything past that was real. Steven Soderbergh, quoted on Wikipedia, says “I think when he was presented with that material, he must have felt like the cinema gods were smiling on him.” And indeed he must have, because it’s perfect for what he’s doing. Arguably too perfect, which is why I keep saying “allegedly” here.

(It might seem rude to imply that Greaves is lying about his movie, but let’s be real: if you’re doing a metafictional quasi-documentary where things aren’t what they seem, you’re deliberately engaging in some lying, and I have to imagine that inspiring this kind of question is exactly what he was aiming for.)

But so if you’re reading this and haven’t seen this movie, you’re probably thinking that this all sounds deeply unpleasant. Like, yeah, okay, wow, really deconstructing shit and playing with perception and yadda yadda, I get it, can I skip watching the thing?

But the genuinely surprising twist is: It’s actually fun. Watching the actors go through this scene, clearly annoyed by having to keep performing this terrible dialogue, but trying to be professional (but also being actors, with all that entails), and watching the crew’s exasperation, and Greaves’ puckish grandiosity… it’s entertaining and good-natured.

Probably the most fun bit of the thing is when Greaves has the actors perform the scene while singing, in a kind of Jacques Demy pastiche. The actors struggle with this, and the crew is just openly cracking up at how silly this is. (There’s another extended scene where a flamboyant homeless drunk talks to the cast and gives some cinematic moments; this again strikes me as a too-good-to-be-true moment, and feels like improv with an actor playing a homeless drunk. But who knows!)

This makes an interesting contrast with Out 1, because that was an explicitly fictional movie full of scenes of actors doing acting exercises, but those scenes really were actors doing acting exercises. Whereas this one is a nominally non-fictional movie full of actors doing takes of scenes that may or may not be what they seem; it’s a quasi-reversal of the reality/fiction line, and also a tonal reversal in that Rivette’s movie is desperately self-serious where this one has a mischievous energy.

Another parallel with Out 1 is that this is another movie that couldn’t really be seen until decades after its filming. It was filmed in 1968, but — like Rivette — Greaves couldn’t get distribution for his movie. So it sat in archives until a museum doing a Greaves retrospective in 1990 dug it up and showed it to positive reactions. This inspired him to take it on the festival circuit in 1992, where it attracted prominent fans, like Steve Buscemi and Soderbergh, who worked to get it broader distribution (and to get a sequel made). Not until 2005 did it finally get a limited theatrical run, and 2006 is when Criterion released it on disc for home viewers. So even though it’s a half-century old, it’s only really been available for twenty years now.

I can definitely understand why nobody was eager to distribute it back in the day — it’s genuinely weird and not especially commercial — but it’s also easy to understand how it picked up a fandom in recent decades, and why it’s on this list.

So if you know one fact about Out 1, it’s probably that it’s nearly thirteen hours long, which is a fact generally presented in a way to make it sound freakish and outlandish. Thirteen hours for a movie! It’s impossible, unheard of, absurd!

It’s also not really true. I mean, it is thirteen hours, but it’s not a movie. Out 1 was conceived by Rivette, and is presented on streaming services today, as a miniseries of eight episodes (though it was never shown on French TV as he’d hoped). And a TV miniseries of that length isn’t particularly notable at all. Twin Peaks: The Return is 17 hours; The Underground Railroad is 10 hours. This just slots neatly in the middle of those other prestige shows.

So yeah, Out 1 doesn’t deserve its reputation as being this interminable, hyper-experimental, outlandish thing… for that reason. But you might want to keep those adjectives in your back pocket for some other reasons.

I’ll warn you right now that I’m going to spoil the plot of this, to the extent that’s a thing you can do; so if you want to see it fresh, stop reading and go watch it. And if it seems weird that I’m giving spoiler warnings on a 1971 movie, turns out the release history here is really complicated^[1]: It was shown once in 1971, in an unfinished form. It was shown again in 1989, in a more finished form. But it wasn’t until 1990 that it was shown in its current “final” form at a few more theatres. Even then, it was nearly impossible to see, and it wasn’t until 2004 that it was shown more broadly, for generous definitions of “broadly.” And it only got a digital restoration that made it available on disc and streaming in 2015. So unless you’re an extremely dedicated cinephile, you’ve only actually had a decade to see this.^[2]

All right, so now that we’re in spoiler town, I’m going to give away the big secret of the film: It presents itself — very slowly, eventually; this doesn’t really start until four hours into the movie — as being about a conspiracy, this secret group called the Thirteen about whom we get mysterious hints. And over the course of the show, we learn more about the members of this group, and see them interact with each other. But all these hints never really cohere into anything; by the end, we learn that the Thirteen was just kind of this idea for a group that mostly petered out, and that all the puzzle bits that seemed to be such big clues at this grand conspiracy were just a lark by one of the more eccentric members.

The secret is that there’s no secret, and to the extent the film has a point, it’s watching people struggle to create meaning where there is none — whether it’s the characters digging into the mystery of the Thirteen, or you the viewer trying to put all these clues together. (There’s an argument to be made that this attempt at creating meaning from nothing is, in a thematic echo of the “main plot,” the goal of the two experimental acting troupes whose rehearsals we spend most of the running time actually watching, both of which break apart before they ever even get close to performing anything.)

This sounds interesting and relevant to our times — what was QAnon if not the desperate attempt to assemble conspiratorial meaning out of the meaningless, after all? And there’s definitely room for someone to make a good movie dealing with those themes (arguably the Coen Brothers have).

But Rivette’s movie is frustrating for reasons that go beyond its intentional thematic frustration. It’s not even the endless scenes of acting exercises that are the problem (though I submit those are not as interesting as Rivette seems to believe they are).

The big problem for me is that the movie is improvised, and it feels it. Rivette was interviewed in 1974, and he talks at length about how frustrating and limiting he found the traditional process of writing a script and shooting the script to be. So in order to preserve his freedom during the creation of the movie, he dispensed with all but the broad outlines of a script, and gave his actors license to create their characters and to improvise their dialogue.

I went looking for this interview because it strongly felt like this might have been the case. There’s a particular rhythm to improvised scenes, where conversation meanders formlessly, and you get emotional intensity without any real reason for it. It’s not a very satisfying feeling, and you definitely get that here: A lot of these scenes feel not dissimilar to the fictional acting rehearsals.

While the individual scenes more or less work — their improv-driven vagueness plausibly heightens the feeling that there’s a conspiracy going on — they don’t work together. It’s nearly impossible to construct an interiority for characters that will explain why they act this way in one scene, and then that way in the scene that follows. There’s no motivation that makes sense, and often no logical or emotional throughline at all. They’re just disconnected scenes. They don’t mean anything when put together.

And maybe that’s part of Rivette’s point, too, that all meaning is constructed and fiction is a lie, and you shouldn’t come to movies looking for coherence. Nothing in that interview suggests it, though, and I think at a certain point you can be too generous in treating real weaknesses as secret strengths.

So yeah, I don’t think this movie is ultimately successful. And while it is interesting in a lot of ways, is it thirteen hours’ worth of interesting? … Well, I have to admit that I initially wrote that question as a rhetorical one, and was about to give it a flat “no” answer, but I think the more honest answer is that it depends on what you’re comparing it to. Compared to the previous half dozen movies on this list all put together? Yeah, that really is an easy no. Watch six excellent two-hour movies instead! But compared to the typical streaming miniseries? I’d much rather watch this than a couple of D+ MCU shows, and it’s not close. So there’s something here.

Still, that’s a weak recommendation at best. Despite its virtues, this just doesn’t hang together fully enough to justify this kind of time investment. If you want to see Rivette’s aesthetic in a more successful instantiation, watch Céline and Julie Go Boating instead. And if you end up super-loving that movie, well, maybe come back and give this one a go despite my opinion. After all, there are 17 critics who think this is one of the ten best movies they’ve ever seen, and they’re all a lot more knowledgeable than I am.

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1. It’s actually even more complicated than that. There’s also a four-hour short version of this that was more widely available and more widely shown; but it’s known as Out 1: Spectre, and isn’t the work we’re talking about here. ↩︎

2. I think both parts of this — its 2015 restoration and wide availability, and its earlier unavailability — are key to its placement on this 2022 list. Getting a reputation as an impossible-to-see grail movie, to pique everyone’s interest and get them thinking of it as a Significant Film, and then getting wide availability so people can actually see it and vote for it, is the kind of pattern that can get you some Great Movies love. ↩︎

So in my write-up of The Road Warrior, I mentioned that the movie had a lot of propulsive energy and well-directed action scenes, but also made zero sense and had no characterization worth speaking of. This sequel betters its predecessor by keeping its strengths and improving on its weaknesses.

The strength part is obvious: Like The Road Warrior, this one has a propulsive pace throughout. We meet Max as he encounters an aerial raider, and within thirty minutes he’s having a fight inside the titular Thunderdome. The movie takes a bit of a break in the middle for him to encounter a group of kids living in an idyllic canyon paradise, but then quickly returns to the action, with a climactic desert chase scene that definitely evokes Fury Road.

And on the weakness front, it solves the “makes no sense” problem by just… not trying. Whereas that movie tried to establish its world as a post-apocalypse with some economic logic behind it, this one is set in a pure sword-and-sorcery fantasy world that also happens to be post-apocalyptic. Does this town make sense? No, but who cares, it’s the sorceress queen’s stronghold, roll with it.

I realize that this sounds a bit Homer Simpson (“You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.”), but the thing is, Miller isn’t really interested in making a realistic movie about the construction of post-apocalyptic society. He wants to make a movie about a lone warrior and his adventures in the wasteland. The setting is post-apocalyptic because it looks cool that way and enables the car-centric action scenes Miller wants; fundamentally, it’s just set dressing — every minute trying to make sense of the setting is a minute not doing the things the movie actually cares about.

As for characterization… well, it’s maybe generous to say that we get a lot of it here, but Tina Turner’s character is much richer and more interesting than the villain of The Road Warrior (or of Fury Road, for that matter). And Max himself is still something of an enigma, but at least here, he has some clear heroism to his character, and his relationship to the kids he’s trying to save isn’t totally flat.

But for all that, this still ends up being a basically mid movie, because Miller got trapped in an ’80s fantasy aesthetic. I don’t know why, but nearly every fantasy adventure of the era ends up having a bunch of kids in it, and this one is no exception. And at its worst, as they’re re-infiltrating the city, it falls into The Goonies-style slapstick. I don’t like Fury Road as much as its enthusiastic fans do, but it has a coherency to its aesthetic that this lacks, torn between Miller’s vision and the demands of commercial ’80s fantasy.

I said of The Road Warrior that “it’s just an okay movie with some good action scenes” and honestly, that’s a pretty good description of this one, too, albeit for different reasons. There, the science fiction genre trappings worked against the movie Miller actually wanted to make; here, it’s the ’80s PG-13 family adventure genre trappings that undermine his vision. Fortunately for him and his fans, he did get another try, decades later, where he finally got to make the movie that was the purest expression of his vision.

So when this movie came out, it was received as the Wachowskis’ version of Peter Jackson’s King Kong — a remake of an original most people didn’t care about at all. In both cases, the assumption was that the director was just cashing the blank check their absurdly successful trilogy had gotten them to fund a personal passion project; and the reviews of both movies indicated that most people could continue not caring about these franchises, because the movies weren’t very good.

But over time, reactions to the two movies have diverged. Nobody still cares about Jackson’s monkey movie, but this one’s gotten a critical reappraisal. This article from former AV Club reviewer Scott Tobias goes so far as to say that his original negative review was just wrong. This video essay argues for the movie’s greatness (and mentions Tobias’s reappraisal in the course of that argument).

And so of course, this made me curious to see it, even though a) as aforementioned, I did not care even slightly about the original Speed Racer, and b) when the movie came out, I definitely remember thinking that it looked terrible.

So the good news is that the critical reappraisal is right: It is in fact good. And what’s interesting about it is that I can so easily see why it didn’t hit with critics (or audiences) back then.

Because what it’s doing is working in this hyper-stylized, hyper-saturated, hyper-kinetic, over-the-top gonzo mode that you simply didn’t see back then. As the video essay notes, this was released the same year as Iron Man and The Dark Knight. After two decades of superhero movies, it’s hard to remember how those hit at the time, but the big thing about both of them is that they were realistic. The MCU was born in a movie that seemed to be set in the real world, only with some tech that’s cooler-than-real; and Nolan pushed Batman back from Burton’s gothic styling or Schumacher’s camp into a similarly realistic mode.

One of the wonderful things about having a long history of write-ups behind me is that I can illustrate this in the first person — if you go read my contemporary write-up of Thor you’ll see that in 2011, I referred to “the relentless mundanity of Hollywood superhero movies,” and contrasted that to Branagh’s “over-the-top” “ultra-cosmic insanity.” By the standards of modernity, that first Thor movie is sedate, conventional, maybe even a little stiff. But by the standards of 2011… well, I wasn’t using those descriptors in some kind of contrarian sense.

And if you’re in a world where Kenneth fucking Branagh might seem like a paragon of over-the-top insanity, a movie like Speed Racer is difficult to even parse. It’s just too new, too different, too shocking — especially when it’s in the guise of a safe family movie rather than an arthouse experiment. These days, we’ve had the MCU build us up to things like Thor: Ragnarok that are a lot closer to Speed Racer’s aesthetics; we’ve got Everything Everywhere All at Once, with its varied styles; we’ve got Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things; and maybe most directly, we have the neon pink hyper-saturated world of Barbie.

I remarked, when talking about The Color of Pomegranates, that sometimes a movie can be so foreign you can’t even understand it. In 2008, I think the visual language of Speed Racer genuinely crossed that threshold for a lot of viewers, in a way that it doesn’t today.

It’s easy for a modern to look at this movie and understand it — but also, critically, even from a perspective of 2026, to see what it’s doing that no other movie has done: Combining grounded human acting with anime stylings and a visual language that’s not like anything else out there. The opening race sequence alone is this structurally intense series of flashbacks where, mid-race, we’re cutting back and forth to the past in this almost seamless way, somehow without ever slowing the momentum of the race down, ultimately blending past and present together in a way that borders on magical realism as filtered through a videogame. Obviously Speed Racer can see his brother’s ghost car on the course!

Also, though: I don’t think technological advances are the primary reason for this movie’s reconsideration, but they sure don’t hurt. I watched this on a 4K disc, and it might be the single movie I’ve seen that most benefits from HDR and a wide color gamut — its aesthetic practically begs for that level of saturation and contrast, given how thoroughly it rejects realism. In SDR it would honestly look a little flat.

I’m talking about the visual styling here, because that’s the biggest strength of the movie. This looks like nothing else out there even today, and obviously it was too original back in 2008. But it’s worth saying that the movie is also weird at a story level. Like, its protagonist is named Speed Racer, and that’s his government name — his dad is Pops Racer, his brother is Rex Racer, and his parents just named him “Speed.” Oh, and his little brother has a pet chimp, because of course he does.

But for all this weirdness, it’s dripping with sincerity in a way that was also unusual in the age of a wisecracking Tony Stark and a stoic Bruce Wayne. It’s a movie about family and love and pursuing your art — multiple people refer to racing as Speed’s art in the film — in a way that can get past the corruption inherent in the system. It doesn’t take too much extrapolation to see this as a movie about movies. This all presumably helps its critical reclamation in two ways: The first is that sincerity and emotional vulnerability are a register that audiences are a lot more comfortable with now than they were in the attitude-era aughts; the second is simply that critics love movies about movies.

If you’ve appreciated what the Wachowskis did with The Matrix, you owe it to yourself to see what they did here. It wasn’t as obviously influential on day one, but in a very real way, it pointed toward the future of movies just as strongly.

This movie is everything I hate about modern Hollywood.

To begin with, it’s yet another IP adaptation. Worse, the IP is a toy, as Mattel’s looking to hit Barbie gold again. Oh, and it’s from the ’80s, the most nostalgia-mined decade in possibly all of history.

And then the movie is in that Four-Quadrant Blockbuster tone where seemingly every major movie lives now. All the dialogue is quippy when it’s not trying to be sentimental. The comedy goes broad at times, with Skeletor reprising a Dr. Evil joke and lots of “fisting” comments for Fisto. It’s full of I-know-that-thing reference, the movie constantly nudging you in the ribs and asking, hey, remember that?

And what’s more, there was already a revival of He-Man just a few years ago, Kevin Smith’s Masters of the Universe: Revelation, which was about a thousand times better, and actually had a reason to exist.

So yeah. I should have just fucking loathed this movie.

But somehow, I didn’t. I really can’t explain this one. The best I can say is that the movie just had a kind of breezy affability to it — it didn’t feel cynical and factory-made, it felt like a silly little bagatelle that everyone was having fun with.

In the light of day, I’m sure that’s not true, and that it’s every bit the cynical, soulless corporate product that every similar movie is. But while the movie’s playing, they manage to preserve the illusion, so I guess I have to give them that.

All that said: This movie is two hours and twenty-one minutes. This is legitimately indefensible. There is no way such a piece of fluff should be that long. Ninety minutes would be ideal, two hours could be forgiven, but coming up on two and a half hours is just flatly unacceptable.

I can’t recommend the movie — especially not with that length — but, annoyingly, I don’t regret watching it. I feel like I’ve disappointed myself, somehow.

So another Joe Bob special with two movies. The theme of this one was “transgressive” movies.

The first certainly counts. I Spit on Your Grave is an infamous rape-revenge movie, with an infamous extended rape scene. What’s weird about it, though, is that it’s not the kind of exploitation movie you’d think it would be… until it is.

So as the movie begins, it’s in this realistic horror register. Our protagonist is this woman who’s leaving her home in NYC to spend some time at a country house. And it’s doing the thing that horror movies do, of having everything seem idyllic at first. The leafy green of the forest, the peaceful country house where she’s all by herself, the river that she takes a nude swim in.

“Wait,” I hear you say, “didn’t you say that it didn’t start off as exploitation?” Right, and here’s the thing: That scene is filmed from a long shot, not the leering camera panning down over her body that you would expect. And what it’s doing is showing us the perspective of the not-all-there delivery guy who’s spying on her.

The movie continues to work in that realistic mode, with a group of local hick guys who are getting together and talking shit in the way that hick guys do — making fun of each other while fishing, and engaging in lightly misogynistic talk about women from New York and the like. Because we know what this movie is, this scene reads as chilling — these guys aren’t horror movie villains, they’re just kinda shitty guys, and yet.

As the movie goes on, these guys on their boat encounter this woman out canoeing on the river, and they start messing around, circling her and trying to upset her canoe with the waves. They’re a notch shittier than before, but this is still just basic bored hick bullshit.

And then it escalates quickly. And the way the rape is filmed is both brutal and uncomfortable. It’s focused on her perspective, and her emotions drive the scene. (Even to the point of unnerving her attackers at first — as it starts, it’s really only one of the guys who is assaulting her, and the others are visibly uncomfortable; the film shows how the group dynamics break down whatever initial humanity these guys had and make them all participants in the crime.)

And so up through here, you’d say that the movie is incredibly unpleasant to watch, but the charge at the time that it “glorifies rape” is just obviously not true. It’s fucking harrowing, and the rapists are terrible! My take at this point was that the movie had been badly misread historically.

(As a tangent, one worry I had was about whether this was one of those situations where the actress was treated badly, so it was useful that she actually appeared as a guest on Joe Bob, and talked about how filming the movie was a really good experience, everyone was kind and respectful on the set, etc.)

And then we get into the revenge part of the movie, and things get weird. Because, okay, she wants to kill these guys. That’s the premise, fine. And so given that we’re in the horror genre, presumably she’s going to want to murder them viciously and bloodily and what-not, okay.

But what she actually does is murder them sexually. The first guy, she lures into having sex with her, and then while he’s doing that, she gets a noose around his neck and hangs him. The second guy, she talks to and gets him to take a bath with her, once again getting naked with him before she cuts off his dick and leaves him to bleed to death. (The last two guys just get normal axe/motorboat kills.)

And like… even granting that the movie wants to do a kind of dramatic reversal, it just doesn’t seem like something the character would do, and doesn’t tonally fit the realism of the first half at all. And what’s more, this part is exploitative, this part is using sexuality in a prurient way.

On its own, it’s fine; the revenge kills fit into genre norms. But when you combine that silly, salacious second half with the brutal, realistic first half — and especially given the weight of the subject matter — it just doesn’t work. There’s no way you can sensibly make a movie like this. Either half could be part of a movie that works, but not together.

And after all that, Joe Bob moves along to the second movie in this special, Tokyo Gore Police, which gives some real tonal whiplash. Honestly, I’m not even sure what’s transgressive about this one?

I mean, sure, there’s fountains of blood. Sure, it’s full of body horror (as the bad guys are “engineers,” aka mutants who can’t easily be killed, and if you chop off part of their body, it grows back as a weapon). Sure, it has a guy who gets his dick cut off and it grows back as a gun.

But it’s not taking itself seriously; it’s embracing the silliness, and it fully expects the audience to as well. There’s an element of satire to it — there’s a throughline about corrupt police forces and totalitarianism, and fake commercials full of hyper-violence, like it’s a Paul Verhoeven movie — but I don’t think even that can be taken very seriously.

It’s really just a fun movie with a novel premise, a unique (albeit extreme) visual language, and enough creativity and craft to elevate it above the splatterpunk norm, even while its virtues are mostly very splattery. Good solid entertainment for the whole family.

But, uh, keep the family away from I Spit on Your Grave.

So the next set of gialli are all from the ’80s, which means that they’re not really gialli.

Because the thing is, being a giallo is more about a kind of vibe than anything else, and that vibe is inextricably linked to the ’70s (which plausibly extends into the late ‘60s and early ‘80s). It’s not just the style of the clothing and the house decoration — though there is some of that — it’s also about the people’s attitudes and what the moviemakers are interested in. And while these movies are clearly giallo influenced, they’re also clearly doing their own things.

Take Mystère. The movie starts with a killing, in true giallo style, sure… but the killing is a political assassination. And someone is killing prostitutes, sure… but it’s because one of them has an object that can shed light on who was behind the assassination and they don’t want it to get out. There are twists and turns a-plenty in the plot, but they’re all spy thriller twists, not giallo twists: It’s about cold betrayals and the like. And the plot even involves train rides and visits to Hong Kong. If what you want is a kinda meh James Bond installment with a giallo flavor, here you are. But did anyone want that? If this were better, maybe it’d work; but as it is, not really recommended. It’d be a perfect movie for MST3K to riff on, though.

Or look at Obsession: A Taste for Fear. Here we’ve got a woman who photographs (frequently nude) men and women in elaborate and artistic situations for… ad campaigns? Art? It’s not fully clear, but she’s obviously successful at it, because she’s rich and fancy, even though she’s also part of a deviant, libertine underground — a milieu she shares with her ex-husband (also a photographer, apparently focusing on bondage fetish photos, somehow also rich). And so eventually one of her models is murdered, and then more people are murdered, and hey, this seems very giallo, right?

Sort of, but no, because the vibes are wrong. Part of this is just the style of the thing: Her photography is extremely eighties, as are her models. Part of it is the aesthetic of the movie, which is somewhere between a music video and David Lynch. Part of it is that it seems to be set in a lightly science-fictional future for no reason — people have bizarre future cars, there are video discs (which obviously do exist in the real world, but probably didn’t in 1988), and oh yeah at one point a cop shoots his gun and it’s a laser pistol.

Even the horniness of the movie isn’t giallo-style horniness, but is the more underground gbltq-adjacent “perversion” that you’d see from transgressive stuff in the ’80s. What I’ll say in this movie’s favor is that while it’s not a giallo, it’s arguably what a giallo in the ‘80s could have looked like, if the genre had fully evolved into that decade. Also, giallo or no, the movie is stylish as fuck, and gets some real points for that. This is one of the most interesting giallo-adjacent films I’ve seen, and is an easy recommend.

And then last up is Sweets from a Stranger, which has a very traditional giallo premise — a black-gloved killer is using their razor blade to slit the throats of prostitutes (uh, and then mutilating their bodies with a bolt gun, which is a little weird). But the treatment of it is extremely non-giallo: The prostitutes all team up together to solve the mystery. There are multiple scenes of the Council of Prostitutes making plans about how they’re going to work together and change their practices to make themselves safer, they go to the police as a group to push for cooperation with law enforcement, etc. It’s very socially conscious.

But the result of all that is that you end up with something that feels more like one of those family movies where everyone has to come together and solve a problem, except that it happens to be set in a giallo universe. It’s a weird vibe, and only partially successful. I’ve given a lot of gialli three stars on Letterboxd, but usually it’s because they’re just basically-competent by-the-numbers movies. This one got three stars for being continually surprising, but maybe not fully good. I can’t quite recommend it, but it’s an interesting twist on the genre.

Not a bad batch of movies overall, but when I pull out a “giallo” disc, I kinda just want it to be a giallo, you know? So I confess that I’m glad that the next batch of movies were all made in the ’70s.

So as I go through these Great Movies lists, there are three kinds of movies: 1) movies that are obviously great, where it’s just immediately clear why people would love them; 2) movies whose charms are lost on me^[1]; and then 3) the secret third thing, movies where I genuinely don’t know what I think.

This is the last, and I’ve let it sit for a few weeks to give my opinion more time to cohere, but it stubbornly refuses to.

Superficially, it’s got a lot in common with Resnais’ own Hiroshima Mon Amour. It’s about two lovers(?) meeting up, and it’s about memory and its fallibility. But it’s not really like that at all.

The entire movie seemingly takes place in a grand old hotel. Much of it is told in voiceover narration, often over static shots of the hotel, or of people standing with unnatural stillness. A man is talking to a woman, relaying a story of how they met a year ago, which she claims not to remember.

Is he lying? Is she? What is the movie doing with time? Is this a ghost story? Is it a love story?

I’m writing an entry with a lot of question marks, because I don’t have any actual answers. And according to this Ebert review, maybe there aren’t answers.

This is the kind of meaninglessness that sometimes drives me nuts (see my review of Mulholland Drive, for instance), but here it doesn’t. It really does seem to work as a movie that just hints at a story, rather than revealing it. And as Ebert notes, Resnais has absolute mastery of the movie’s tone — when I’ve forgotten everything else, I’ll remember how it feels.

But is that enough for me to love it unreservedly? I’m not sure. I think probably not, but… honestly, check back in a few years. This one’s gonna need some time to digest. It’s probably a good sign that even as I’m sitting here writing this up, I’m thinking that I should rewatch it.

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1. I used to react with some contempt to these, but after my opinion shifted on a bunch of them, I tend these days to assume it’s more of a me thing than the movie actually being terrible. I don’t think there are many legitimately awful movies that are actually super-beloved by knowledgeable critics. (Except for the Marx Brothers.) ↩︎

All right, let’s go through our next box set of forgotten gialli.

First up, Death Carries a Cane. The first thing I want to say about this movie is that if you translate the Italian title literally, it’s “Dance Steps on the Edge of a Razor.” I understand why you might want to switch titles between regions, but why would you go from such a cool title to such a boring-sounding one?

In this case, perhaps it’s to make the excitement level of the title match up better with the actual boring content of the movie. The opening premise here is that a woman is looking through one of those little pay-a-quarter tourist telescopes, and while looking in the window of a random house^[1], sees a murder.

She goes to the cops with this, and if you have ever seen a giallo, you will not be surprised when the cops basically blow off her murder report. Ladies, always getting hysterical and saying they saw a murder, amirite. After they find a woman’s dead body, they get more interested, and come back with more questions. They then do the second most characteristic giallo cop thing: Suspect the first guy they happen to see, in this case her boyfriend. He has no connection at all to the dead woman, and it would be an incredible coincidence if a woman randomly saw a murder and then it turned out to be committed by her boyfriend, but hey, you want to arrest someone, gotta solve these crimes.

But the absolute best Italian cop thing happens later in the movie, when they’re doing a sting to catch the killer by having the protagonist dress up and pose as a prostitute. When a guy finally pulls her into his car, they move in to arrest him… and then are embarrassed when it turns out he’s the head of the police, and was just out picking up hookers, I guess.

Anyway, the mystery is eventually solved, thanks as usual to civilians, and it’s extremely undermotivated; the whole plot feels like it falls apart near the end, and it wasn’t doing so great before that. Below-average giallo.

Next up is Naked You Die. This sounds like a salacious title, so you’d expect it to be a very typical giallo, maybe on the sleazier side. But no: It’s actually this kind of borderline wholesome proto-giallo. It takes place at a girls’ school, but (despite the title!) there is zero nudity and zero bloody kills — when people get murdered, it’s via strangulation or offscreen happenings.

The vibe of it is also weirdly peppy. The protagonist is one of the teen girls, who’s a bubbly Nancy Drew figure; the main musical theme is reminiscent of the Batman TV show’s; they do a James Bond joke at one point; it’s all just borderline silly.

Here, I think it’s important to know what you’re getting. I was annoyed at first because it wasn’t delivering giallo realness; but turns out (as a little special feature on the disc explained) that this is from early enough in cinematic history — 1968, a few years before Argento’s Bird with the Crystal Plumage — that it isn’t so much part of the giallo genre, as part of the vague cloud of horror/mystery-adjacent stuff that would eventually cohere into the genre. And if I forgive it for the impossible sin of not following the genre tropes that hadn’t yet calcified, it’s a mildly entertaining little romp. Even with that generosity, though, it’s not more than that.

Last up is The Bloodstained Shadow. The plot of this one is convoluted enough that I’ll not even attempt to outline it, other than to say that the Wikipedia rundown talks about “a gambler, a pedophilic count, a fake medium, and an illegal abortionist,” and if that group of characters walks into a bar, you’ve got an amazing joke setup.

Anyway, bunch of murders, bunch of suspects (though fewer suspects as the murders continue), and a total rando who has to investigate because the police are useless. It’s a classic giallo in a lot of ways, though it’s on the slower and more sedate side for the genre — it’s nearly two hours long, where most of these are a brisk ninety minutes, and it does not earn that extra runtime. But overall, it’s a basically fine replacement-level giallo.

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1. On the one hand, feels weird to have a little tourist voyeur telescope; on the other hand… it’s Italy in the ’70s, sure, why not. ↩︎

This is an extremely aughts movie, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. It’s this terrible combination of post-Scream irony, second-gen affection for deep franchise backstory, and turn-of-the-century hemispherical fake boobs.

The basic concept of it is… well, let’s be honest: The basic concept is studio executives jamming two franchises together like a toddler with toy trucks. The execution of this concept is that Freddy wants to make everyone remember him again, and he manipulates Jason into going to Elm Street and doing some vaguely Freddy-style murders so that the adults who tried to suppress the memory of him will end up speculating about whether he’s back, and by doing so, summon him back.

This is silly (like, it involves a drug called Hypnocil^[1] that keeps people from dreaming, just as a background setup fact), and is also slooooow, as the action is interrupted with scene after scene of tedious infodump.

But it gets even worse later, when Jason turns on Freddy and they fight. Because both franchises need their full complement of touchstones, this means that they go to Crystal Lake for the big climactic showdown, which of course makes no real sense, but hey, gotta check the boxes. So this showdown is what the movie’s been building to, and… it’s just kinda dumb. The fundamental problem is that Freddy is a magical dreamlord and Jason is a big lug, and the filmmakers need to figure out how that fight makes sense. It’s basically the same problem they had with Godzilla vs. Kong, except that here they didn’t have the luxury of retconning Jason (more than the Friday the 13th movies already do) to make him more powerful, like they did there.

If you love both Jason and Freddy, you’re gonna watch this no matter what. (Well, given how old it is, you’ve probably already seen it, perhaps decades ago.) But if you are a normal person, it is thoroughly skippable, even if you do want to watch the more essential installments of these franchises.

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1. There’s no “I” in Hypnocil, at least not where you’d think ↩︎

So this is actually not a giallo, even though it is an Italian horror movie by Andrea Bianchi, who you will of course remember from Strip Nude for Your Killer. This is mostly because it’s from 1989, well after the heyday of giallo, but also because it’s actually got a supernatural element to it.

The premise is that we’ve got a killer who’s murdering prostitutes, and meanwhile we also have a crew making a horror movie. (Given that Strip Nude for Your Killer was on the Criterion Channel, and that cinephiles looooooove movies about movies, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this on there as well at some point, except for how it’s not very good.)

And so the director of our movie within a movie decides that he wants to do a seance for reasons that I forget; the seance seems to go badly, with the spirit of Jack the Ripper, that famous Italian killer, being summoned up inadvertently.

The problem for the movie is that the way it handles this scene makes it extremely clear that this is what happened, as well as who Jack possesses. It’s like, okay, so this guy is now possessed by a Bob and will be doing the killings from here on out, got it.

And if the movie were committed to being a slasher, that’d be fine. We’d now watch this guy make his inexorable kills until we get down to the final girl. But no: The movie is still influenced by its giallo heritage, and it wants to remain a mystery, so we keep following people around as they try to solve the puzzle of the killer’s identity.

And it’s so obviously this guy that you’re like… well, maybe it’s a mislead. Maybe there’s something else going on, and the supernatural element was fake all along, and this is a twisty-plotted giallo? But no. The killer is exactly who it seemed to be, and he is in fact possessed by Jack the Ripper just like we thought. The movie gives this to us as a big reveal, but it’s a reveal that we saw coming the whole time.

Part of me thinks they could have fixed this problem by just filming that seance scene differently, so that what happened was less obvious. But then, if we got to the end of a giallo-esque movie and the big shocking reveal was that actually Jack the Ripper had possessed this guy and he was the killer, that’d be infuriating too. So I think the movie ultimately just has some structural problems that would need a whole rewrite to fix.

Still, even if it falls short of the satisfying trash baseline that I look for in obscure horror, it’s not a terrible movie. It is lurid and Italian, and it has some absolutely bonkers musical choices — these bright, cheery, bouncy videogame-style themes at completely inappropriate times — and it’s interesting enough that I don’t regret watching it. But there are at least twenty Italian horror movies I’d recommend above it, so not really recommended.

An attentive reader will have noticed that I’ve watched a few gialli here and there. But it all started when I watched Suspiria in 2021, and the first handful of gialli I watched were all Argento’s.

It’s surprising in a sense that I’ve never watched this movie before, but the explanation here is simple: I totally thought I had. We bought it on disc at the same time as the others, and up until I built this site to be searchable and indexable by director/country/etc., I would have sworn that I’d watched it. Whoops!

So the fun thing is coming back to Argento after spending years watching gialli from lesser talents. Because immediately it is clear that this dude is just working at a whole other level. The imagery is amazing, the Goblin soundtrack is great, the camerawork is dynamic, the locations perfect. You can just sit back and appreciate watching a master do his thing.

But it’s also clear that this master is maybe not entirely right in the head, because what this shares with these lesser gialli (and also Argento’s other work) is that the plot is completely bonkers, the character motivations absurd, and the twists and turns incredible. I say all of that as praise, to be clear. It’s a giallo! This is what a giallo should be. If I were looking for low-key realism, I’d watch some other movie, you know?

I actually think this might be a good movie to watch as your intro to giallo. I like Suspiria better, but it’s less of a classic giallo; Tenebrae is in the quality ballpark, but I think this one is just a little more over-the-top fun. Either way, it’s an easy recommend to anyone who isn’t allergic to the genre — this is one of the best working at the peak of his powers.

So Robert Bresson is one of those directors who I just kinda don’t get. Intellectually, I can read about how he wanted his actors to be emotionless and act mechanically, and think it’s a neat idea; intellectually, I can see that his movies about terrible people acting terribly and then achieving a kind of grace tie into his religious worldview. But emotionally, it just leaves me cold.

But… this movie is something of an exception to that. So either it’s his objectively best movie or else I’m starting to vibe with him a bit more.

The setup in this one is that a teenager begs his dad for an advance on his allowance to pay back some money he owes. The dad refuses, so the kid goes to a friend of his, who’s all “oh man, I’ve got some counterfeit money here, we just need to pass this off and get some change, and we’re set.” So they go to a photography store and buy a frame with a big bill. The clerk is suspicious, but can’t prove that the bill is fake, so gives them the frame and their change.

When the owner is going through the money later, he realizes instantly that it’s a fake bill, and is upset that the clerk took it. But rather than go to the cops, he uses it to pay a delivery guy. The delivery guy then uses it to pay at a restaurant; the restaurant accuses him of counterfeiting and keeps his fake bill. He’s outraged, and gets into a fight.

From here — and really, even before here — the movie is about what people do when put into a situation that challenges their morality. When the delivery guy goes back to the photography store, will they admit that they passed on a fake bill? How is this delivery guy going to deal with being in the criminal justice system (as no matter what happens with this bill, he did start an altercation at that cafe)? What about that shit-ass kid who started all this mess?

It’s Bresson, so you should not expect it to go well. This is the dude who made a movie about torturing a donkey, after all. But watching it spiral out is absorbing, and Bresson’s characteristic coldness works well here. I walk away not only liking this movie, but thinking that there’s a reasonable chance this isn’t his objectively best movie, and that maybe I was unfair to his other movies.

As a nerd of a certain age, I am of course familiar with all the nerd icons of the ’80s, and when it comes to cartoons, this is probably the big one. But unlike most nerds my age, I actually hated most of the ’80s nerd movies. I can’t stand Spaceballs, I dislike all the Muppet fantasy movies, and I’d never seen this. But some time ago, there was a sale on 4K discs that made this like $5 or something, and okay, I guess at some point I owe it to myself to watch it just for cultural literacy, if nothing else.

So expectations going in weren’t high, but I came out of it impressed.

The opening of the movie is the strongest part. It starts off in the ’70s with some kind of apparent nuclear explosion before jumping to the impossibly remote future of, uh, 2019. We’re in Neo-Tokyo, which is of course a cyberpunk world full of drugs and cool biker gangs and whatnot. It is such a retro-future, and I love it. We get to see our bunch of loser street punk kids get mixed up with some army stuff that’s really above their pay grade, complete with zombie kids with superpowers.

This takes us into a surprisingly nuanced (and unsurprisingly complex) political plot, with a military coup that plays out as more genuinely ambiguous than storybook good/evil — the colonel staging this coup isn’t a straight-up bad guy, and his reasons aren’t completely wrong… but it is a military coup, you know? This also all ties in to some light mysticism around how those kids got their superpowers, and a forbidden military research project. The political stuff works better than I expected it to; the mystical stuff works rather less well.

And that’s ultimately the part where the movie goes from potentially great to merely pretty good: The movie ends up devolving into some kind of Dragonball-ass fight that then segues into grandiose philosophizing. The pretentiousness is basically the failure mode of this kind of content — stuff aimed at teens who imagine that this is what Serious Literary Fiction is like (there are also some random cartoon boobs in there, presumably meant to similarly make the movie feel more adult).

Still, if the ending lets it down, there’s a lot of good stuff along the way; I can easily see why this was a major cultural touchstone for a generation of nerds.

So whereas Blow Out was Brian De Palma’s remake of Blow-Up, this is his remake of… well, it’s not really a strict remake of anything, but if you could somehow remake Rear Window and Vertigo at the same time, this is basically what you’d get. Or at least, it’s what you’d get if you also did it in a sleazy De Palma register, which he does.

We start off with a down-on-his-luck guy who’s been given a house-sitting job at this really cool UFO-looking house on top of a hill. Which also has a peeping-tom telescope that he uses to watch this one lady strip and do a dance every night. Which means that he’s also watching when he sees a crime happen over at her place, which gets him mixed up in the middle of things.

And I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that everything is not what it seems at first — what he’s mixed up in is more complicated and weirder than he first imagined, which is where the Vertigo part comes into play. He ends up following people all over town, to beaches and shopping malls and seedy porn shoots (where the movie briefly turns into a literal Frankie Goes to Hollywood music video).

The movie isn’t fully successful. The plot is nonsense, the characters are implausible, and the vibe really is genuinely sleazy. But it’s unabashedly itself, and it’s not afraid to go over the top, and that has to count for something.

Two more Joe Bobs, from one of the last(?) quarterly specials.

The first is Rawhead Rex. It’s an English countryside folkloric monster movie — some guys in a field move a stone, unleashing an ancient evil, which then goes around killing people. Meanwhile, there’s a church that seems to have some clues for how to defeat the monster, because sure, why not put your opaque monster-killing clues into a stained-glass window. Does the monster get defeated in the end? Does it kill a lot of people along the way? You know the answers to these questions.

There’s nothing especially good about this movie, but also nothing particularly bad about it. It does what it sets out to do in a basically competent way.

More impressive is Oddity. So this movie starts out with a woman home alone at night in a big rural house that she and her husband are renovating. It’s unfinished and dark, and she’s been staying in a tent on the vast first floor. At some point, she goes out to her car to get something; after she returns to the house, there’s a knock on the door. Through the peephole^[1], she sees a crazy-looking guy, who — it transpires — has escaped from the insane asylum her husband runs. So, y’know, that’s creepy. But then the really creepy thing is that he warns her that a guy snuck inside the house while she was getting stuff from the car, and he’s in there with her right now.

I’m going into such detail here because this is the point at which we stopped the movie not once, but twice. It’s fucking creepy as hell! I mean, it’s a horror movie and setting up a mood of dread is clearly what it’s trying to do, so mission accomplished. But this actually made me realize how little I want actual scariness from horror movies. And so yeah, it was just too intense and not at all the mood that I was looking for on a Friday night, and so we almost just gave up after two attempts at the movie, but gave it a third shot.

And here’s the irony: Like 30 seconds later, that scene ends, and we cut to the credits and a totally different, much less intense, vibe. (It’s reminiscent of a particular moment in Barbarian, actually; if you’ve seen that movie, you know what I’m talking about — just as it’s getting too tense to be borne, suddenly we’re in a very different mood.)

But to be clear: While the movie does relieve that tension, it also sets up plenty of later tension. This is a movie with jump scares and a frequent sense of creeping dread. It’s effective at being scary because it’s just generally a well-done movie all around. The plot is complex, but makes sense, and the characters work well enough. Particularly recommended to those who like their horror on the scary side.

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1. Not sure if “peephole” is really the right word: It’s like a sliding bar that covers up a hole in the door, like they use to give food to prisoners in movies. ↩︎

All right, three more gialli!

A weirdly common way for gialli to begin is for some complete rando to get killed by some other complete rando, right before we jump to our main cast of characters. And every time this happens, I end up forgetting about it — I didn’t have any connection to those people, I don’t care that some rando died — until later in the movie, it turns out to be totally significant, at which point I’m like oh right, that first murder, got it.

And so A White Dress for Marialé starts off exactly like that, with a double-murder/suicide (as a guy kills his wife and her lover in flagrante delicto), at which point we now cut to this castle, where a bunch of people start arriving for the world’s most suspicious dinner party. Every single person involved in this party is deeply weird and is obviously concealing some secret, and they’re all behaving in bizarre, borderline insane ways. You will be shocked to learn that the party devolves into murder and sex, and that psychosexual trauma underlies characters’ actions. I hope I didn’t spoil it too hard.

As gialli go, it’s… fine, I guess, but the part where it’s set in a weird isolated castle makes it feel not quite right, almost more gothic than giallo.

Nine Guests for a Crime also starts with a murder; a couple in flagrante delicto is interrupted for the dude to be brutally killed. But only one death here, so it’s comparatively a very gentle and mild giallo, right.

We then cut to a boat taking a family of terrible, terrible people to an island. They’re a rich family, and so help me god, all I could think about for this whole movie was the Bluths, because they give extremely Arrested Development vibes. But with a giallo twist, which means that most of them are sleeping with each other’s wives, they all have terrible secrets, and oh yeah, there are about to be some killings.

So this whole movie is also set in a single isolated setting — early on, the killer kills the yacht crew and sends it away, stranding everyone on the island — but it doesn’t feel as gothic, because it’s a very stylish midcentury house (with so very many Sharper Image executive desk toys), not an ancient castle. I can’t say this is an especially above-average giallo, but it’s a good solid one, and the ending has some fun energy.

And finally, there’s Tropic of Cancer, an Italian movie about Haiti, with all the cultural sensitivity that you’d expect from a giallo. (But honestly, it’s not bad! I mean, they go hard at voodoo, but that’s almost just baseline Haiti horror content.)

The setting does make it feel unique, with fun tropical vibes, despite the horrific giant spiders. The plot is absolute nonsense, centered around a scientist who invented some kind of aphrodisiac that is tempting everyone to murder; but a bit of light nonsensicality is pretty much the giallo price of admission, so. I think that, like the other two, this one lands at good but not great.

Ultimately all of these are mostly recommended for giallo fans, but considering that they came from volume five of the Forgotten Gialli series of Blu-ray box sets, you’ll forgive me for imagining that giallo fans are pretty much the only likely audience anyway.

Next up on the S&S 2022 list is this Jonathan Glazer quasi-SF quasi-horror film.

So when I first saw this on the list, I was surprised, because I thought it was like… idk, a slightly upscale Species — a movie where Scarlett Johansson is an alien who goes around seducing men and then stealing their precious bodily fluids or whatever. A sort of light-feminist SF horror thing.

And that’s not completely wrong, but after seeing the movie, it’s also not entirely right; and now that I know what this actually is, I get why it’s on the list. This isn’t really a horror movie in any conventional sense — it’s slow and ambiguous in that arthouse style, and what’s going on is never really spelled out by the movie.

I’m going to talk about this more concretely behind the spoiler cut.

Spoilers

So what we’ve got is a very alien, very cold Scarlett cruising Scotland and looking for men to pick up. (Many of the men speak in accents that are incomprehensible to me; I’m never sure with things like that if the incomprehensibility is intentional, if this is supposed to be a heavy accent that disorients the viewer and keeps them a little unsure what’s being said… or if I’m just bad at understanding Scottish people.)

When she picks them up, she brings them into a building, to allegedly have sex with them. They undress (and to my surprise, at least one was sporting a boner; I didn’t think movies could do that, but apparently they can), and then… sink into the floor as they walk, to be trapped in a… um, metaphorical fluid space? See above re “ambiguous.”

But so the real core of the movie is that as Scarlett picks up these men, she becomes more human, eventually seeming to feel emotions and to be more aware of her body and to feel like something’s wrong. Is this some kind of absorbed humanity overlaying her actual alien being? Is it the personality of the human she’s been possessing? Is it the point of her activities? Is it an error in them?

The movie could be setting that up as a mystery, but it’s not. It’s never going to tell you, and it arguably doesn’t care. The point is simply that it’s happening, for whatever reason.

What it will do, though, is use this inversion as a source of pointed commentary. Because as Scarlett becomes more human, she suddenly goes from predator to prey: A dude who she meets on a trail doubles back to assault her, and for the first time in the movie she’s vulnerable.

But this tbh felt a little weird as some kind of feminist statement, because… okay, yes, I get what you’re going for here, movie, but at the same time, this guy is fighting against an alien that has been killing a bunch of people. Yes, he’s also terrible, but it’s hard to read this situation cleanly. But maybe that’s the point, too?

Ultimately, for all that the story and its character progression do matter, for me what stands out is the atmosphere of the thing, the mood it evokes. It’s about the solitude of this person, sometimes set against the loneliness and desperation of other people, sometimes contrasting with the vibrancy and life of a party, and sometimes just existing in an inhuman liminal space.

For my part, there’s not quite enough substance in the movie to even consider it for a top ten all-time list. But it is absorbing, and I see why it made some people’s lists.

Two more gialli, and they’re both weird in different ways.

The Killer Is Still Among Us starts off with a very non-giallo killing: People are murdered with guns. It’s almost shocking to see a murder weapon so callous and modern and impersonal. Whatever happened to tradition, to the black gloves and the straight razor? Truly tragic.

But so our hero for this movie is a criminology student, who is studying… this serial killer, I guess? Feels a little weird. Anyway, she starts investigating, and this investigation gets her following a gynecologist who is also a voyeur (which is probably just a whole thing for male gynecologists in Italy at this time, tbh); she follows him to a “voyeur bar,” which sure, that’s a thing. This leads her to the local lover’s lane, where roving gangs of voyeurs are spying on couples banging in their cars. Yadda yadda, there’s a murder, and then there’s a psychic who prophesies more graphic murders, which then occur (with some more traditional knife stuff going on, including cutting off a nipple because why not).

But the really wild part is the ending. This is, I guess, a spoiler, but c’mon: They do not catch the killer. Instead, she goes into a movie theater at the end, and watches what turns out to be this very movie. The End. It is bizarre and meta and it would be kinda arthouse-y if I thought the filmmakers had any real intention behind it other than trying to be surprising. (It then ends with a public service announcement about helping the police find killers, because turns out this is based on real-life serial killings that had happened recently when this was made, and they thought they should be tasteful about it. I mean, other than the nipple slicing, I guess.)

Arabella: Black Angel, meanwhile, is probably the giallo that gets closest to being actually porn. And that’s counting The Sister of Ursula, the previous most-porny giallo I’d seen.

As the movie starts, a woman goes to a sex party at what seems to be an abandoned building outside of town. Sex party-style activities ensue, up until the cops come. The cops break things up, but also engage in a little light rape, because I guess Italy. Later, a cop goes to this woman’s home to a) apologize for raping her, and b) blackmail her for more sex, activities which seem a little at odds with each other. When he ends up dead, it’s hard to really be broken up about it.

And this is all the normal part of the movie, before the really weird shit with her paralyzed husband, tragic family murders in the backstory, near-fatal blowjobs, and a bunch of castration.

The whole point of gialli is to abandon good taste and give in to absurd excess, so it feels a little hypocritical to criticize these two movies for absurd excess. And ultimately they’re not bad, they do in fact deliver weird giallo vibes, for the most part. But they’re also just a little bit off, and I think would be better if they dialed it back to 11.