A boorish, awful couple bring their shit marriage and casual cruelty out into nature, which then takes its revenge on them.
Or do the woods and the sea merely reflect and magnify their bad vibes back at them through a prism of tangled tree limbs, gnashing fangs and a bloated, deathless corpse?
Long Weekend entertainingly posits itself in the eco horror/animal attack genres with its animal fury visited on two littering, pesticide dousing, sport shooting assholes- I love when the…
Anyone convinced that our current zeitgeist is the nadir of bleak desperation should take a swig of this vintage 70s battery acid, served cold in a plain coffee mug.
Hal Holbrook plays Paul Steward as a Travis Bickle of autumnal Connecticut; instead of lurking the mean streets of a concrete jungle, Paul haunts his farmhouse home and his train commute like a pensive ghost. His neighbors could be The Hood and Williams families of The Ice Storm.
Like Travis, Paul…
I'm a lover of modern ruins. I've watched endless videos on the ghostly wreckage of Detroit and collect books on abandoned Soviet Brutalist architecture. There's a bittersweet quality to massive structures, recently or semi-recently vibrant, that sit neglected and forgotten; they shift my brain to a strangely addicting, haunted liminal space.
I love dead malls most of all. I will lurk any weird, empty, half-dark mall I come across.
However, a dead mall isn't merely an avenue for oneiric bullshit…
“I look right in your eyes and all I see are a bunch of trashy daydreams”.
Smooth Talk has great mall scenes.
Stores like Tinder Box and Things Remembered, packs of soda-guzzling teens roaming the thoroughfares or perching like leering crows over mezzanine guardrails, incidental passing phrases like “nice buns” or “pop his bone”, the neon Penney’s logo hovering over a dark parking lot; the malls of my youth were exactly like this, and for extended moments I travelled back…
