Category: movies!

We drank perfect manhattans with bourbon and sazeracs with rye, and watched Farsi-language vampire movie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.

I enjoyed this one a lot. At first I thought it was going to be a gloomy, stately, minimalist affair – the long shots of ruined buildings, the fact that it’s shot in black and white – but there is a ton of quirky humor in this film. (When you have a vampire woman skateboarding down the street of a desert town wearing a hijab – the filmmakers are having fun.) I loved the vampire’s preferred method of stalking, mirroring the movements of her intended victims, matching her pace to theirs – it was creepy, and funny, and maybe also suggested an attempt to better mimic humans.

The villain in the first third of the film is ridiculously over-the-top, a complete caricature of a sleazeball drug dealer and loan shark and pimp – he has neck and face tattoos and smacks around a prostitute and has fish tanks and animal heads and blankets with pictures of tigers on them in his apartment – but I stopped rolling my eyes after a while and just rolled with it instead. He’s supposed to be irredeemably awful; that’s why it’s fun to see him get eaten… and it makes some of the vampires later (and less morally defensible) attacks more disturbing by contrast.

The film *is* minimalist in a lot of ways. The James-Dean-esque male lead and the vampire fall in love without a lot of talk, and the most erotic scene they share involves him piercing her ears. We don’t get much in the way of backstory for the vampire (or anyone, but especially her), and there are a lot of moments when affectless characters gaze affectlessly into the distance… but it works, especially when there’s a very expressive cat sitting between them, calling attention to their blankness in an amusing way.

There’s also a whole lot of effective acting, too, with gazes and body language over words. I’d argue that the climactic moment of the film comes late, when the hero paces back and forth on the side of the road, struggling with a moral choice, and then making a decision – his entire struggle takes place silently, with no discussion or verbal agonizing before or after; it’s all in the way he moves.

The movie was filmed in Kern Country CA, not in the Middle East, but that area has a lot of empty places and dilapidated things and also palm trees anyway, so it works well as the setting for the nowhere-town of Bad City.

And it’s the first ever Farsi vampire Western! I’ll be watching director Ana Lily Amirpour with interest.

There have been two WhiskeyHorrors since my last report: one last Saturday, and one on Tuesday night. So much horror. So much whiskey. (Well, the usual amount of whiskey.)

Both times we mostly drank the 10-year-old Bulleit reserve, which is delicious. Also a bit of Monkey Shoulder blended Scotch, which I hear is hit-or-miss depending on which batch you happen to get, but our bottle is very good with soda and even tasty by itself over ice.

Saturday we watched Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead, which was an improvement in pretty much every way over the first one — funnier, more lively, equally gruesome with better effects. It picks up immediately after the end of the first film… except all the Norwegian people now inexplicably speak English. (Guess it was a condition of giving the director actual money.) Martin Starr was amusing as the leader of an American “Zombie Squad” (though I wish the two women on the squad had been better written and fleshed-out) and the business with the tank was great. Recommended if you like funny zombie stuff and dead Russians hitting dead Nazis with shovels and, uh, generally enjoy films that involve snow.

Tuesday was rather more serious: we saw The Woman in Black, with Daniel Radcliffe being pale and sad in the English countryside as blank-faced children committed suicide all around him and in the past also. As the father of an adorable blond moppet myself, the film certainly gave me some terrible twinges. Stately and deliberate without being dull, with a good mix of jump scares and tension-building-dread stretches. At one point when Radcliffe’s character was Making A Plan to deal with the supernatural menace I complained that in many old ghost stories there’s not a damn thing you can do; the ghosts are just there, and will remain there, and there’s not a ritual you can conduct to put them to rest. I suppose I’ll adhere to local norms and avoid spoilers but suffice to say, I was pleased with how Radcliffe’s plan turned out. The ending is an utterly bleak downer — and yet because it’s not as bad as it could have been, it actually manages to feel weirdly hopeful!

We’ve also been watching the From Dusk Till Dawn TV series, which is total gonzo fun, very cinematic, well directed, engagingly acted, gross, grotesque, funny, smart, pulpy, and narratively complex. We’re four episodes in, and I can’t wait to watch more. (Note: not for ophidiophobes.)

Haven’t done a WhiskeyHorror report in a while, because we’ve been watching episodes of American Horror Story, and the last actual movie we watched was my old favorite Trick ‘r Treat, and rewatches don’t inspire much in the way of musing for me.

But, hey, Halloween. Horror movie time. While my wife was out dancing last night, I decided to watch a couple of movies in my lonesome living room, even in the absence of whiskey, in the spirit of the holiday.

I finally watched Kevin Smith’s very odd Red State, which is less a horror movie (despite its initial premise) and more an oddball thriller. I liked John Goodman’s performance as an ATF agent, and Michael Parks was mesmerizing as the evil but charismatic preacher, but mostly the thing was a mess of endless noisy gunfire. I had some faint hope when they hinted at a weird twist ending, which wouldn’t have redeemed it but would have at least been interestingly strange, but they didn’t go that way. Alas.

After that I gave You’re Next a try. I’d ignored it in the past because it looked like a standard home-invasion thriller, and I figured it would just be gore and jump scares, but Netflix assured me it had a high user rating, so it seemed likely to have more going on than I thought. And while it does have gore and jump scares galore, it’s much funnier and more odd than I’d anticipated, a dysfunctional family drama/black comedy mingled with home invasion thriller, with some nice twists and ways to change things up and increase the tension as it goes on. Plus a smart, interesting, badass female protagonist, which is always a delight. Recommended, but maybe don’t watch it alone if you live in a big empty house that could possibly be full of hidden murderers in animal masks.