The Devil in the Details

Well, after watching The Parallax View for the first time recently, I immediately became hungry for any and all paranoid thrillers, especially those from the seventies. Naturally, my first step was to check out the other two titles in Alan J. Pakula’s so-called ‘paranoia trilogy.’ Enter today's film: Klute. It had never drawn my attention before, but after discovering the pedigree behind it and the fact that it was a murder-mystery-thriller, I decided to finally pull the trigger and order myself a copy.  To my surprise, despite this being considered part of a piece with The Parallax View, Klute really could not be any more different than it as a film. It’s a character study for one thing; far more concerned with the psychology and humanity of prostitutes, addicts, and those who control them - dealers, pimps, or bullying police - than it is playing spinning a complex web of murky conspiracy. It even prominently features a romantic subplot, just when you’d think the murder mystery s...

My, how time flies. I pre-ordered this film, and watched it a week or so after its late December release, and I’m just  now getting around to covering it. It’s been so long since I covered the first two titles in the venerable Terrifier franchise that I can just about guarantee that no one who might stumble across this page will either remember them or be able to dig through my posts and find them. Furthermore, the fervor that surrounded this film upon its release during the ’22 Halloween season has now officially died down, and so I feel the time is right to take it to task: is Terrifier 2 the return to vintage horror glory that it's being touted as, or is this yet another case of “You had to be there?” Generally, I start with a synopsis, but in the case of Terrifier 2,  there honestly isn’t much to summarize. Our story picks up the very instant the previous film ended, with Art the Clown freshly resurrected by a mysterious supernatural entity and the poor coroner on the sce...

Many of you may not know this about me, but I’m a very flighty person, taste-wise. I often become obsessed with an idea or subgenre or even a specific creator and voraciously devour anything related to it, no matter the medium. The unfortunate flip side of this is that when I get burnt out on something, I really get burnt out, but that's beside the point. Well, lately I’ve been pining for a distinct type of film that has become one of my favorites over the years: namely, the bleak seventies film. There's a reason this decade saw the release of many of my all-time favorite horror films. For one thing, it was a time before Hollywood became more about making money than art and the rules and regulations of modern films had not yet been codified. Most importantly, however, the world was in something of a paranoid, nihilistic funk at the time which resulted in such masterpieces as Chinatown, Coma, The Conversation, the incredible remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The P...

A rewatch I’ve been looking forward to for a while at this point, I was inspired to write this film up after my viewing of Black Christmas last December, another horror film it sort of shares a premise with. All I remembered about The Blackcoat's Daughter was that it had an interesting twist, lots of disturbing violence, and a surprising amount of humanity and maturity for a film that is - in essence - a classic possession film, complete with a short exorcism scene and everything! With this in mind, I had my expectations high and was eager to dive in, which is probably the worst possible place for a piece of entertainment to have you; you’re practically guaranteeing yourself disappointment, and even if it doesn’t let you down, the actual merits of whatever it is you’re dealing with can become easily distorted by mental gymnastics and identity politics in the wake of. Sure, I’d seen this particular film once before, but that doesn’t mean much. Sometimes the mood of the room or even...

You know, Eyes Wide Shut is a classic example of the kind of film that you grow into. I watched it many years ago at a very different time in my life, and while I enjoyed it, it was something of an enigma. I imagine my first experience was the same as a lot of people’s; I was sold a conspiracy horror film and ended up with something more akin to a psychosexual noir film, one with very little actual sex depicted despite its reputation, then and now. An early edited version of the film claims to insert extra CG people into shots to “cover genitalia” but this is a lie: there is no genitalia shown in any version of the film. You can see pubic hair a few times, but nothing beyond that. So the near-pornographic qualities the film is often associated with are bogus, and really, so is the whole conspiracy plot (if that’s all you’re here for, at any rate) So, what exactly does that leave us with? Well, what we do get is a Kafka-esque noir that examines a number of very adult themes in strange...

Welcome back! In the last part of this analysis, we finally got around to discussing my overall feeling toward the game in terms of narrative, gameplay, presentation, and spooks. Now, it’s time to finish summarizing and bring this series to a close... for now. *start of spoilers* Last time around, we left Ruka finally managing to make it down into the moonlit basement of the hospital, only to find it empty. Now, we’re in control of Detective Choushiro once more and, strangely, despite the fact that he’s in exactly the same place as Ruka, neither of the two sees the other. Choushiro even remarks at one point that he hears someone approaching, but no one ever shows… Oh well! If you’ll remember back to our earlier discussion of the Ceremony of Passage and its being practiced in secret by Shigeto Haibara as a way of attempting to cure Moonlight Syndrome, it’s time for more clarification: while the phony ceremony was practiced in plain view with the entire island in attendance, the real c...