Aaron and Pete, the good folks at the We Love To Watch podcast, once included me in their complicated love-fest for Predator 2. Like a couple of Danny Glovers, trying to give Bill Paxton the benefit of the doubt, they invited me back on to discuss Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for their 90’s nostalgia month.
A stern judge, obsessed with questions of lineage and social order, casts out his pregnant wife for supposed infidelity. A fatherless child born to the slums falls in love with a girl impossibly out of his league, only to meet her again under much different circumstances as an adult.
Ivan Reitman’s Kindergarten Cop – the 1990 comedy in which a kid-hating Arnold Schwarzenegger goes undercover as a teacher in order to catch a drug dealer, but ends up learning a thing or two himself – is a touchstone for many childhoods.
A Light Beneath Their Feet, the sophomore feature from director Valerie Weiss and first-time screenwriter Moira McMahon, could have been disastrously cliched, and at certain moments threatens to veer into Lifetime movie territory. Instead, the film proves emotionally resonant and honest, buoyed by two empathetic central performances and a nuanced approach to familiar beats.
The horrifying saga continues. October will not be denied.
Taking stock, here is where we find ourselves on October 18th: 7 films from franchises, done; 5 decades, done; 5 films from before 1970, done; 1 silent, done; 1 classic Universal horror, done; 1 film with a witch/witchcraft, done; 1 Tobe Hooper film, done.
Though not the first of his stories to appear on film, The Fall of the House of Usher is perhaps Edgar Allan Poe’s most well-known Gothic tale, and arguably the best suited for cinema. Its central themes — the embodiment of individual interiority in physical architecture, the more or less haunted house, the living grave, the unreliable narrator, the tension between what is seen and what is felt, the rampant doublings of character — all seem appropriate to an imagistic treatment.
There is, generally speaking, no more appropriate time for a zombie movie than October, and the Danish What We Become, new to Netflix this week, is a worthy genre entry.
Writer/director Bo Mikkelsen borrows liberally from sources both past and current — “The Walking Dead” is an obvious contemporary comparison, even as What We Become draws on paranoid pandemic classics from Day of the Dead to 28 Days Later — but fashions something unique.
Our month of horror staggers along, terrifyingly, into October, seeking whom it may devour.
Last week, we laid out the general rules: 7 films from franchises, 6 countries, 5 decades, 5 films from before 1970, films from Bava, Argento, Lenzi, Fulci, Henenlotter, Romero, and/or Stuart Gordon, 3 crazy animal movies, 1 silent, 1 original film and its remake, 1 classic Universal horror, 1 Stephen King adaptation, 1 film with a witch/witchcraft, 1 Tobe Hooper film.
Some films simply arrive at the exact right moment. Whether through canny decisions on distribution and release, real-world events outside the producers’ control, or some other happenstance collision of histories, a cultural product arrives that is both inevitable and sorely needed.
