How it feels to stop using Twitter...
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The Maxx 1995
pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease don't leave
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French Freud 1969
Saluteé to Melody Mercurochrome, the movie star in a black skintight suit who moonlights as a jewel thief along with her companion, an unscrupulous Freudian psychiatrist disguised as a French maid. She should have gotten her own spin-off cartoon series.
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Running Time 1997
I thought I had this pegged early as a deceptively dorky Tarantino knockoff (what a pleasure to see geek icon Bruce Campbell starring, and killing it, in a sexy hip cool movie like this), but it's actually the spitting image of one of those 70-minute Monogram B crime movies right down to the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography and the gloomy crime-does-not-pay story structure. The one-take gimmick, in addition to just being cool, keeps things moving nice and fast but its real…
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The Wolverine 2013
Touches of body horror and the Japanese setting don't quite rescue this from its late franchise doldrums, if anything it's more of a slog than I remembered. Revisited because I somehow only just read the Chris Claremont/Frank Miller Wolverine miniseries on which this is based, funny that the 80s and 90s had this wave of more realistic/cinematic comic book superhero adventures that decades later needed to be made more comic booky for the big screen. James Mangold, and I say this with no disrespect, is a drama director.
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Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins 2021
They could have saved a fortune on licensing fees and let Henry Golding keep his not-quite-suppressed British accent by making this a Ninjak movie instead. Samara Weaving's Scarlett even looks like Roku. Unfortunately they never asked me about it.
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Napoleon 2023
Glad I got to see those battle sequences in 70mm (by the way, shout-out to the professional film critic I saw referencing the film's "battle footage," like Ridley Scott just hit the streets and captured the French royalist uprising of 1795), but this never really got anywhere above its own baseline watchability with me. Even the sexily mean wife angle felt uneven and undercooked. Annoying that given Ridley's track record I am going to feel at least mild obligation to sit through the director's cut.
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The Dungeonmaster 1984
('Ragewar' cut)
This was one of the first Terror Tuesdays I remember really blowing me away back in the day and by some weird coincidence I started thinking about it again just a week or two before Richard Moll died. He's great in this, nothing he says makes any sense whatsoever and it's so cool, I especially love every time he says "Excalibrate." Trades even momentary narrative coherence for the real sense that anything could happen, and for me anyway…
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Cellar Dweller 1988
Almost comically thin on dramatic incident, a horror movie about a cursed manuscript that somehow causes comic book art to come to life but which only features a single monster, albeit a pretty cool-looking one. With a little bit more imagination (or perhaps just money) this could have been beautiful, I would have loved to see Debrah Mullowney drawing herself inside a giant robotic exoskeleton dispatching the Cellar Dweller with some laser-guided rockets or something like that. Featuring Yvonne De Carlo, Jeffrey Combs, and Brian Robbins, the director of Good Burger!
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I, the Jury 1953
One of those 50s noirs that almost feels like self-parody, the 3D cinematography only amplifying that effect, turning its lurid plot into a visual theme park ride. The whole thing is justified by the smoke rising up in the foreground after those climactic gunshots. It was neat seeing both I, the Jury movies in one day, Armand Assante delivers the final line like, "it was easy," while Biff Elliot is more like, "it was easy."