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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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