Eye of the Beholder

The plot of The Ugly Stepsister is Cinderella as seen from the point of view of Elvira, the elder stepsister. As the film opens, Elvira's mother, Rebekka, has married Otto and moved herself and her girls into his house. At the wedding feast, however, Otto dies of apoplexy. This sends Otto's own daughter, Agnes, into a depressive spiral, and in one such mode, she tells Elvira that her father only married Rebekka for her money. "What money?" Elvira declares before storming off to tell her mother that her dead husband wasn't rich after all. The entire family is now in dire financial straits, because Rebekka is already negotiating the sale of the estate's assets to pay its debts. A glimmer of hope arrives in the form of an announcement from the palace. Prince Julian is to wed and will choose his bride from the virgins of the kingdom. Elvira adores Prince Julian. She reads his poems from a book she keeps with her all the time and aspires to marry him even before the palace announces its wedding ball. Agnes is indifferent. She's got a beau, but she's also penniless, so she plays along. Rebekka will only support Elvira's chances though, even when faced with Elvira's shortcomings. She sends her to Dr. Esthetique for a make-over--removing her braces and resculpting her nose among other things--and then packs her off to finishing lessons under the strict eye of Madame Vanya and her partner, Sophie von Kronenberg. There, she learns deportment and grace, but she's initially hopeless. She also comes into possession of the egg of a tapeworm, which she swallows in order to lose weight. The mountain seems too high to surmount, though, because Agnes is too perfect and she overhears the Prince out in the woods commenting on her appearance with the vow that he could never "fuck that!" Elvira has fortune on her side, though, and Agnes is disqualified from attending the ball when Rebekka discovers that she is not a virgin. She keeps her in the house as a scullery rather than have a scandal on the eve of the ball. She destroys Agnes's dress and leaves her at home. Agnes has help, though, when the ghost of her mother summons silkworms to weave her a new dress. At the ball, Elvira's "improvements" catch the prince's eye and he chooses her for the dance. Elvira is not well, though. The tapeworm has sapped her nutrition and there are ominous rumblings from her stomach. She holds it together long enough to see a mysterious veiled stranger enter the ballroom and sweep the prince off his feet. When the veil is momentarily lifted, only Elvira sees that it is Agnes come to thwart her. But Agnes's enchantment ends at midnight and she flees the ball, losing one of her shoes. The prince vows to marry the girl who fits the shoe. At home, Elvira wrestles the other shoe away and finds that her foot is too big for it. Drastic action is required...

A warning to the curious. I am a jaded viewer of hundreds, maybe thousands, of horror movies. There are things in this film to shock even a jaded viewer like me. The filmmakers don't pull their punches here. If you are sensitive to this...well, don't say I didn't warn you.

The Krell Laboratories Podcast: Rita (2024) and The Devil's Bath (2024)

My irregular podcast returns with conversations with friends of the blog, Kevin Matthews and Anna Maurya about two historical international horror movies from last year, Rita (2024, directed by Jayro Bustamente) and The Devil's Bath (2024, directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala). Among the best horror movies of the last few years, sez I.

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Stars in B-Movies Blogathon 2025: Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel and Eating Raoul

"I knew what was art and what was shit. But sometimes the shit was more interesting." -- Mary Woronov

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The first film I ever saw in which Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov both appear was Rock 'n' Roll High School, but I didn't start to associate them as collaborators until I saw Bartel's Eating Raoul on HBO in 1984. I had seen Death Race 2000 by then, too, but it didn't register for me that it was their first film together because Bartel, who directed the film, does not appear in it. They ultimately made 17 films together, sometimes playing husband and wife, sometimes with Bartel nowhere to be seen in front of the camera. Their best known collaborations were in films written and/or directed by Bartel himself (most famously in Eating Raoul in 1983), but they were a ubiquitous part of the company of actors who worked at Roger Corman's New World Pictures in the 1970s. I always loved it whenever they showed up in films together, and even when they showed up in films without the other.

True/False 2025: Silent Movies

I dimly remember the events at Gallaudet University covered in Deaf President Now! (2025, directed by Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim), in which the student body closed down the campus when the Board of Trustees foisted yet another hearing president on them after over a hundred years of existence. The result was a week-long stand-off in which neither side would budge and a key turning point in the struggle for disability rights. The film presents a microcosm of activism along multiple axes of oppression, and ponders questions of assimilation versus visibility, self-determination versus a permanent state of custody by an abled majority. This particular story takes place in the deaf community, but I see echoes of it running through other communities, too. The overriding message of the film and its subjects is that no one is ever going to give anyone rights; you have to take them by force.

True/False 2025: True Crime

Director Charlie Shackelton was careful to note that The Zodiac Killer Project (2025) isn't really about the Zodiac Killer when he took the stage at True/False. He's not wrong. Zodiac is a bit of a straw man here. Instead, the film takes aim at True Crime as a genre, by detailing how a film about the Zodiac Killer might have been assembled if Shackleton had managed to secure the rights to the book he wanted to use as a framework. He failed at that, and instead skirts around the copyright as he points out how true crime is constructed for an audience even without any primary footage to boost his case.

True/False 2025: Women in STEM

The annual True/False film festival has arrived in my fair city once again this past weekend, and I have once again been knee-deep in non-fiction films. As is usual for the festival, some films tended to rhyme with other films. Several films were about women in science. They weren't only about that, but the theme was consistent enough.

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Sally (2025, directed by Cristina Constantini), the last film I saw on the second day of True/False was a bog-standard biography of Astronaut Sally Ride, notable, perhaps, because it emphasized her life from the point of view of her partner of 27 years, Tam O'Shaughnessy. It was a late show and I worried that I might nod off after a long day of movies either in the theater or on the road driving home. I needn't have worried. Ride is a personal hero of mine and I was keenly interested in the life she didn't share with the public during her lifetime. I wasn't expecting to walk away from the film with an incandescent white-hot spike of rage in the center of my brain, but that's what happened anyway. The last text card in the film details NASA's first Pride event two years after Ride's death honoring her memory and her partner. This film is debuting in a month when the current US executive branch is stoking a new lavender scare and canceling anything that is "woke" or "DEI", including such observances at NASA. I have not checked to see if they have scrubbed Sally Ride from the agency's history, but it would not surprise me if they did. Ride had more personal courage and integrity than the entirety of today's current ruling party of moral cowards, tin-pot dictator wannabes, and thieves and grifters and perverts. Sally Ride was a titan in comparison.

A Monkey on Your Back

"I was in New York on business about four years ago. I was walking back to my hotel after visiting my people at New American Library when I saw a guy selling wind-up monkeys on the street. There was a platoon of them standing on a gray blanket he'd spread on the sidewalk at the corner of Fifth and Forty-fourth, all grinning and bending and clapping their cymbals. They looked really scary to me, and I spent the rest of the walk back to the hotel wondering why. I decided they reminded me of the lady with the shears . . . the one who cuts everyone's thread one day. So keeping that in mind, I wrote the story, most of it longhand, in a hotel room."
--Stephen King, "Story Note on 'The Monkey,'" Skeleton Crew, 1985

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The new film version of The Monkey (2025) is a bit of a departure for director Osgood Perkins. It has a grotesque sense of humor that I didn't know he had and an instinct for the grand guignol that is new to his films. Ordinarily, his films are mood pieces that trade on atmosphere and menace more than plot, but this one is a cartoon. It shares with the Stephen King story its central idea of a wind-up monkey that causes death when it's wound up to action. In the story, the monkey has a pair of cymbals. In the movie they've changed it to a drum for reasons of copyright (they did not want to run afoul of Disney and their army of lawyers). It's a minor change. It also takes from the story its central characters, two brothers who find the monkey in childhood and realize its power. Apart from that, this is a film that ranges far afield of King's story, which is nothing new to the author. "Based on" is too strong a credit for what this takes from King. "Suggested by" might have been more apt. That doesn't mean that it's bad. Just different.

Stupid Cupid

Christopher Landon is having a ball these days making pop horror movie mash-ups. His new film Heart Eyes (2025), which he wrote and produced for director Josh Ruben, follows the Happy Death Day movies (mashing the slasher film with Groundhog Day) and Freaky (mashing the slasher film with Freaky Friday). Heart Eyes is a slasher film for lovers, a film that eviscerates the rom com and winds up being surprisingly romantic anyway. But emphasis on the word "eviscerate," because this is a film that uses the full scope of what a hard R-Rating allows.

Horror 101: The Psycho Legacy and the Politics of Images

I was on Dr. AC's podcast again this week, talking about Psycho (1960) and its progeny. I had a particular ax to grind with the politics of the film's images, but the conversation ranged all over. I am particularly fond of Psycho III among the sequels, and do not hate the remake, even if it is pointless.

Enjoy.

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No Strings Attached

I've got no strings
So I have fun
I'm not tied up to anyone
They've got strings
But you can see
There are no strings on me!
--"I've Got No Strings,"
lyrics by Leigh Harline, Pinocchio (1940)

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Note: here there be spoilers. You have been warned.

One of my favorite types of movies is the sub-genre of the crime film where a bunch of characters try to pull off something shady and everything starts to unravel once some element or other goes wrong. Bonus points if the criminals involved are all dumbasses who compound every mistake with wrong decisions. These films are often hilarious. I was not expecting such a film when I sat down for Companion (2025, directed by Drew Hancock). There's a lot of noise surrounding this film about how even its poster is a spoiler, but I caught wise to the obvious spoilers early on. Any savvy viewer will recognize this film's essential nature early on. It's a variant on The Stepford Wives. What happens when a Stepford Wife wakes up to her situation? Got it. But the crime story? Oh, THAT was a surprise. And now I'm spoiling it for you. Cheers, mate.

This is also another film about the singularity along the lines of Her or Ex Machina. Like the AI protagonists in both of those movies, this film's Iris (Sophie Thatcher) has a legitimate beef with the humans who made her. If you are interested in the philosophical dimensions of AI, you are directed to those other two films, because this one is purely pulp entertainment. What philosophy there is is entirely accidental and bound up with the sub-genre rather than with any intentionality on the part of the filmmakers. Mind you, it is in the nature of genre to unconsciously marinate in what's in the culture around it and feed that culture back in the subtext, and that's what happens here. Plus, it has the vitality of pulp fiction. It's an easy watch, which is maybe the best way to smuggle ideas to an audience.

A First-Person Haunting

Director Steven Soderbergh "retired" from movies in 2013, more than a decade ago at this point. Since then, he has continued to make movies in spite of himself. Some of these he has made for streaming (Kimi, High Flying Bird) and some for theatrical release (Logan Lucky, Unsane, Magic Mike's Last Dance). What his post-retirement films have in common is a questing curiosity about the process of filmmaking and a formal daring that wouldn't fly in his more commercial films from the turn of the century. He shot Unsane on an iPhone, for example, while Kimi is an update of sorts of Rear Window for the internet age. I am pretty sure that if Soderbergh wanted to command the kinds of budgets that have funded Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg in this era, he could probably do it (particularly if the word "Ocean's" is involved), but he just hasn't wanted the bother. His films have gone back to the basics, back to the kinds of films he made at the outset of his career. No big crews. He shoots and edits them himself. In his current film, Presence (2025), he goes even further than that. The camera's point of view is an actual character in the film. The conceit here is that Presence is a ghost story shot in the first person from the point of view of the ghost. If that sounds like a variant of the so-called "found footage" film, you might be justified in thinking that, but Soderbergh is smarter than that. This is more akin to the puzzle movies that M. Night Shyamalan used to make.

The Grant Mystique: She Done Him Wrong (1933)

Mae West claimed all her life that she had discovered Cary Grant. "He had only done a few screen tests" before she plucked him from obscurity, according to her. This is untrue, of course. She Done Him Wrong (1932, directed by Lowell Sherman) was Grant's eighth feature film. Grant was second billed in She Done Him Wrong after West herself, though even that wasn't his highest billing to that date (Grant had been top billed in Hot Saturday, the film that immediately precedes She Done Him Wrong in Grant's filmography). She may not have discovered him, but West sure knew a star in the making when she saw one. A diamond in the rough, as it were, and if Mae West knew one thing, it was diamonds. She Done Him Wrong was West's own first film, but she was already notorious for her plays in New York, some of which had been shut down by the blue noses for obscenity and race mixing. She Done Him Wrong was based on West's Diamond Lil, a play so infamous that the minders of the production code insisted that the title couldn't be used or even referred to by incorporating the word "diamond." Although She Done Him Wrong is a pre-Code film, it highlights the inaccuracy of that category. There already WAS a production code, signed onto by all of the major studios, enacted in 1930, on top of a list of "dos and don'ts and be carefuls" formulated in 1927. Although the code was widely ignored by the studios from 1930 to 1934, the arbiters of the code could and did occasionally flex enough muscle to get their way. She Done Him Wrong wasn't the only film to change its title and other elements due to the strictures of the Code pre-1934. William Faulkner's novel, Sanctuary, was so notorious that film productions were barred from using that title, too, and discouraged from adapting the book at all. Hence, the 1933 film version became The Story of Temple Drake and many of the details of the story were judiciously changed as a means of filing off the serial numbers. She Done Him Wrong follows a similar strategy. "Diamond Lil" becomes "Lady Lou," but they weren't fooling anyone.

What this film meant for Grant was a high profile role in a film that would be talked about by everyone. Indeed, the film was a gigantic hit and was nominated for the "Best Production" Oscar (aka: Best Picture), which it lost to Cavalcade, a film you've probably never seen if you've heard of it at all. It was Grant's first brush with the kind of success that would become customary for productions in which he starred. Although he would labor in thankless roles for Paramount for another three years, this film undoubtedly gave him a leg up for when he decided to forge his own path to stardom. It was a hint that he might be bankable, though no one should mistake this movie as a "Cary Grant" movie. West brooked no rivals for the spotlight.

The Tameness of a Wolf

"He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf,
a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath."
--William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act III, Scene VI,

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Leigh Whannell's new re-imagining of The Wolf Man loses the definite article at the start and a lot more besides as Wolf Man (2025), a film that has good ideas that it fails to execute to the best of its ability. It's a film that looks at the elements of the werewolf myth and ditches most of the mythology. It drops the silver bullet and the moon and the invulnerability. It keeps the transformation and the contagion at its core, though, things that could be explained away as disease.  In doing so, it discovers the kernel of a body horror movie on the Cronenberg model. It bears more than a passing resemblance to The Fly, with a salting of the generational trauma of The Brood, but with neither of those films' instinct for violating taboos. The most galling thing about it is that Whannell is certainly capable of rising to the challenge. His version of The Invisible Man can stand in the company of Cronenberg's best horror movies unashamed. But this? This is the kind of film that Blumhouse releases in January (Blumhouse is this film's production company). It's not as bad as something like Night Swim, but it's nothing you'll remember once it's out of theaters.

Said the Spider to the Fly...

The prologue of Sting (2024, directed by Kiah Roche-Turner) is a concise and entirely satisfying little short story in which a woman suffering from dementia hears alarming things from her air vents and calls an exterminator. When the exterminator arrives, he's pissed to discover another exterminator's truck parked in front of the woman's building. He reads the woman the riot act when she answers the door. Then he gets to work, only to discover that he's not at all prepared for what he finds in her vents. The end of the story has a wicked whip of the tale. It reminds me a bit of short stories by Robert Bloch or John Collier or Ray Bradbury, or of E. C. Comics (who tended to loot their stories from writers like Bloch or Collier or Bradbury). It's a poisoned bon bon, a cookie full of cyanide. A tasty warm-up act, if you will. The rest of Sting isn't up to the level of its prologue, alas, but the prologue provides enough good will to carry an audience through the film. Or, at least, it carried me through to the end.

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

The Damned (2024, directed by Thordur Palsson) is a film that shows the widening influence of Robert Eggers on cinema. Elements of all of Eggers's films can be spotted in this film, including the visual design of his recent version of Nosferatu. This is a film that dwells in cold and shadow, making extensive use of its bleak Iceland-in-winter location. One could see Anya Taylor-Joy in the lead in this film rather than Odessa Young, but Young is fine in the part of a woman running a remote fishing station in the 19th century. The screenplay is less disciplined than Eggers, though, including an ending that leaves the audience with questions. The rest? Claustrophobic and chilly, a crucible where close company in isolation fails to prevent anyone from going mad. Superstition runs roughshod over otherwise rational people.

Needles and Pins

The Girl with the Needle (2024, directed by Magnus von Horn) is a film so relentlessly grim that a home viewer might opt out of it before it is too far done. Indeed, the crux of its true crime origins doesn't even come into the picture until the film is half over. An interested audience should seek it out in theaters if it opens nearby, if only to concentrate their attention. I had no such luck. Given the state of the world at this moment in time, I considered whether or not I wanted to see things through to the bitter end. I stuck it out. The film has a point. It has several, in fact. It's a meditation on the precarious lot of women in societies past and present. True. And as such it is very much a film for this moment in time. It's also an interrogation into what true monstrosity entails. It could be mistaken for social realism in its early going before it veers into a full blown Gothic. But then an alert viewer may remember that it gives the audience a warning of its true intentions before the credits even appear, when it projects faces on top of faces in shifting distortions that make monsters of ordinary humans.

Revisiting Horror 101: Onibaba and Kwaidan

My friend Aaron Christensen had me on his vid cast again this month to talk about two landmarks of Japanese horror cinema, Onibaba and Kwaidan. I've written about Onibaba before, as Aaron mentions on the show. It's a pretty good episode, if I do say so myself.

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