Sober Horror Fan

Day 174 of Sobriety.     So, this one really has me scratching my head—I just don’t know what to make of Twixt at all. It's a 2011 film written, directed, and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. It features a few big names, notably (for me) Val Kilmer in the lead role and Tom Waits providing some voice-over narration. But, confoundingly, given its credentials, it’s pretty damned awful.     Its Stephen King-esque plot revolves around a struggling (alcoholic) horror writer who visits a small US town on a book signing tour and discovers that the town has a strange dark secret involving child murderers and ghosts.     On paper, this should have been great, but watching it, it's actually hard to believe that it was really made by the director responsible for towering classics like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. It seems to have been shot very cheaply on video. It looks completely flat, the music is uninspired, the frequent dream sequences look like a self-pro...

Day 168 of Sobriety.     Lake Mungo is a 2008 film by director Joel Anderson, who seems to have made this one feature and then vanished with scarcely a trace, which is a great shame because Lake Mungo is very good. It tells the extremely sad story of a family who lose their teenage daughter in a tragic drowning accident, and the uncanny events that follow in its wake. It is presented as a faux documentary—a “mockumentary”—and I think it is one of the best examples of that style that I have seen.     The acting is absolutely convincing throughout. I found it very easy to “buy into” the mockumentary conceit and allow myself to be convinced that I was watching something real. Apparently, the actors were given scenarios, but no actual script, and so the dialogue (or more often than not monologue) is all improvised.    Like several more recent films, such as Hereditary (2018), Midosommar (2019) and Talk to Me (2022), the exploration of bereavement and grief...

Day 161 of Sobriety.  What could I possibly say about Dario Argento’s Suspiria that hasn’t been said already? Not much I don’t think. I’ve seen it several times before, but this re-viewing was prompted by wanting to watch it with my wife, because we recently watched (and enjoyed) Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho (2021) together, and I was keen to show her where a good deal of that film’s visual style originated. We also watched the 2018 remake of Suspiria a while back, and I think she liked it (I do). While I now consider the 1977 Suspiria to be a classic, I remember being underwhelmed when I first saw it in my late teens or early twenties—thinking it was OK, but being bewildered as to why it was held in such high acclaim. I think my only exposure to Dario Argento prior to that was via his involvement in Lamberto Bava’s Demons (1985), which was much more up my teenage alley. Although I am certain that the impression Suspiria made on me back then was greatly impaired by watchin...