Letterboxd — Your life in film

mystery of the wax museum is pretty much this movie exactly, but really feels like a slight step down for the zaniness of doctor xavier and his cohorts. pure technicolor mad science mania; replete with boiling concoctions in giant flasks filling up labyrinthine art deco laboratories, pages of meaningless sci jargon, and the denouement of an insane science experiment to prove the guilt of one of the potentially murderous doctors, which involves a series of whirly and whistly machines connected…

you, a phillisinte: have you seen bone tomahawk? like, woah dude!

me, a kinographer: scalps better

is it fucked up to have watched this on thanksgiving? ehh, probably. laughably racist movie but its so obscure, absurd, and relatively unimportant that it almost feels like it dilutes the term to lump it in with stuff like birth of a nation. incredibly droney very low budget blend of just about every horror movie of the late 70s and early 80s. the kind…

mostly notable for its striking colors provided by early technicolor, this film is a dreamy haze of reds and greens, certainly a little uncanny but giving the film a very unique stylization. this makes the film feel spooky but also almost whimsical. (its an interesting contrast to the blue orange that would become stock for many films of the burgeoning digital era several decades later) i honestly dont remember the collet sera version that much, aside from generally liking it,…

the final friday that i had yet to view, in fear of its loathsome reputation. and… it isnt half bad? sure, it feels like it was made in 1988 and released in 1993, and has only the barest and most bankrupt connection to the friday the 13th franchise, very obviously a script that couldnt get sold any other way than being frankensteined into the ninth entry of a franchise/the second of which in said franchise to claim finality, almost a…

“What is it, Moreau?”

“The stubborn beastflesh creeping back. It’s no use, Montgomery, I might as well quit. Day by day, it creeps back. It creeps back…”

one thing i love most about these old horror movies is the way that the protagonists will witness the most diabolical shit done by the villain and just write it off because the villain was charming and observed the various cultural niceties of the 1930s, such as giving one room and board. it…

while the raven remains the most front-to-back outrageous and entertaining one, the black cat stands out as the most stylish and haunting of the lugosi/karloff pre code horrors. an obelisk to a world of atrocity, of war and cowardice, where men must grapple with the deep trauma of abject destruction or become destruction themselves. dripping in atmosphere, lugosi/karloff as two very different men affected by the same manmade horrors duke it out in an existential battle for sanctity and justice…

a greatest hits of edgar allen poe stories serve as the backdrop for the delightfully diabolical entanglement of an incredibly creepy and cartoonishly villainous lugosi manipulating fugitive bank robber and murderer karloff to entrap the object of his affection and her father in a bunch of poe-inspired torture devices after his unwanted love is rejected. i miss the days in film where "adaptation" could just mean directly quoting and stealing images from other things but otherwise doing something totally unrelated…

backed by some truly loony and esoteric lore that receives no exposition, a truckload of cameos, courageous little cats, madchen amick, and oedipal psychic catbeast vampires which could've only come from stephen king's coke addled head. probably in my top 5 stephen king movies. though it is both genuinely funny at times and also very disturbing in concept, it has an overall goofy tone that i wish it didn't go for. it could really be a serious horror movie, but…

an overwhelming and immersive sensory overload. every frame of this movie is so jampacked with textural details that you will start to quickly become disoriented, with characters constantly moving in and out of the frame doing god knows what, crowding the tight close ups with spears, slimy fish, random bits of trash and shit, eyeballs, and their own leering gazes. the camera is very concretely its own character in this movie, being regularly acknowledged as characters look into it as…