Over at Alex on Film I’ve added my notes on Maxxxine, which (likely) brings to a conclusion Ti West’s X trilogy. I liked the first film, X, and really liked the second, Pearl, but Maxxxine struck me as a weak way to wrap things up. Still better than most of the new movies I see, but a disappointment all the same.

Digging deep.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve just wrapped up my notes on the Phantasm series. This was a surprisingly long-lived franchise, running from 1979 to 2016 with the same core cast (except for the recasting of Mike in Phantasm II) and the same writer-director in Don Coscarelli (who wrote and directed the first four films and co-wrote and produced the fifth). Most franchises rebooted several times over the same period, but the Phantasmverse maintained a remarkable continuity. Off the top of my head I can’t think of many franchises, horror or otherwise, that managed such a feat. And I was happy they ended on what I felt was a high note. Here’s the line-up.

Phantasm (1979)
Phantasm II (1988)
Phantasm III (1994)
Phantasm IV: Oblivion (1998)
Phantasm: Ravager (2016)

The one and only.

This is an index to my reviews of Charlie Chan films over at Alex on Film. When I review more I’ll update.

Behind That Curtain (1929)
The Black Camel (1931)
Charlie Chan in London (1934)
Charlie Chan in Paris (1935)
Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935)
Charlie Chan in Shanghai (1935)
Charlie Chan’s Secret (1936)
Charlie Chan at the Circus (1936)
Charlie Chan at the Race Track (1936)
Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936)
Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1937)
Charlie Chan on Broadway (1937)
Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo (1937)
Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1939)
Charlie Chan in Reno (1939)
Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939)
City in Darkness (1939)
Charlie Chan in Panama (1940)
Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise (1940)
Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum (1940)
Murder Over New York (1940)
Dead Men Tell (1941)
Charlie Chan in Rio (1941)
Castle in the Desert (1942)
Charlie Chan in the Secret Service (1944)
Charlie Chan in the Chinese Cat (1944)
Black Magic (1944)
The Jade Mask (1945)
The Scarlet Clue (1945)
The Shanghai Cobra (1945)
The Red Dragon (1945)
Dangerous Money (1946)
Dark Alibi (1946)
The Trap (1946)
The Chinese Ring (1947)

Over at Alex on Film you can read my year-end awards for the best (and worst) of 2023 on screen. The small screen that is, as I just watch movies on DVD.

Check with the prop department, John.

Just posted my notes on John Wick: Chapter 4 over at Alex on Film. That winds up (for now) a very expensive action series that did crazy box office. I was only really impressed by the second entry. The first movie got a shrug out of me (looking back on my notes, I guess I even thought it was crap), and the third and fourth were just banging harder on the same drum as the second. But Keanu Reeves really was the man of the moment (who saw that coming?) and comic-book action Hollywood’s sweet spot, so the films became cultural touchstones, at least for a while. I have to wonder though how long they’ll last.

John Wick (2014)
John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)
John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum (2019)
John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)
Ballerina (2025)

Another unhappy family reunion.

Being a Canadian fellow who watches a lot of horror movies I’ve seen most of the work of the Cronenbergs (father David and son Brandon) over the years. So I thought I’d provide an index here to the notes I’ve made on some of them at Alex on Film. As I (and they) go on I’ll add to the list.

David

Stereo (1969)
Crimes of the Future (1970)
They Came From Within (a.k.a. Shivers) (1975)
Rabid (1976)
The Brood (1979)
Scanners (1981)
Videodrome (1983)
The Dead Zone (1983)
The Fly (1986)
Naked Lunch (1991)
Crash (1996)
eXistenZ (1999)
Maps to the Stars (2014)
Crimes of the Future (2022)

Brandon

Antiviral (2012)
Possessor (2020)
Infinity Pool (2023)

Hunting for something good to watch.

Anyone who’s been visiting this site for a while probably knows that I’m a Luddite. I’m inclined to think that the Internet was a wrong turn, and I’m convinced social media has been a disaster. Despite still reviewing new books regularly, I don’t have an e-reader and I only buy “real” books, which not only furnish a room but fill up an entire house.

When it comes to movies I’m the same way. I watch movies on DVD. Not Blu-Ray, but DVD. And I’ve never signed up with any of the streaming platforms.

But streaming is, clearly, the way studios want to go. They’ve given up on cinemas, are grudging about DVD releases, and want to shepherd as many viewers as possible into their proprietary pens, paying monthly fees. This has led to some curious results. Like, for example, how expensive DVDs have become. I would have thought that as they became out of date they would fall in price because nobody wanted them, but instead I find most titles on Amazon (the store, not the streaming platform) now running anywhere from two to five times as much as they cost five or ten years ago. Is it because they aren’t making them anymore? Luckily, I already have a pretty good collection and get almost all the new DVDs I watch from the library. I think I’ve only bought a couple in the last few years.

But another result of the studios switching to streaming is that some movies, including major releases, aren’t coming out on DVD at all, so that I can’t see them. I’ll just take two examples from last year: Prey (a.k.a. Predator 5) and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. Both of these were what I would consider to be big titles: one the well-received latest instalment in a popular action franchise and the other a sequel to a popular star-studded hit from a few years earlier. I would like to see both, but still haven’t seen either because they haven’t been released on DVD and I’m not sure if they ever will be. Prey was released on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally. Glass Onion was a Netflix original. These companies want subscribers, they don’t want you buying DVDs. The latter is a market, and a technology, they’ve declared war on.

I don’t know how this will play out for future audiences. Effectively everything is turning into pay-per-view, and I’m not going to go there. But then I’m getting older, and I’m comfortable with what I have. There are more books and movies in my house than I’ll ever be able to re-read and re-watch. As for the new stuff, well: I didn’t give up on movies, they gave up on me.

Update, January 3 2023:

Prey finally did come out on DVD over a year later. I reviewed it here.

Nice place for a shootout.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve been watching several of the more prominent Hollywood versions of the famous gunfight at the O. K. Corral. A couple of these, My Darling Clementine (1946) and Tombstone (1993) are classic Westerns. Wyatt Earp (1994), on the other hand, tries harder to be a classic and I think largely because of that fails.

Stellan Skarsgård working overtime.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve been looking at the two attempts made at an Exorcist prequel: Paul Schrader’s Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist and Renny Harlin’s Exorcist: The Beginning. What a two-car pile-up. Schrader was first man up, but the studio hated what he did and told Harlin to fix it. He ended up making an entirely new movie, which the studio didn’t like any better so they got Schrader to rejig his version.

It’s interesting to look at the two movies side by side just to see what two very different directors did with the same basic material. Both movies are terrible, but I can’t think of any other examples of something like this happening.